Skip to main content

Welcome To The Future


Our friends the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese, France and Saudi Arabia have here entered into an agreement to marginalize the dollar as a world currency, according to an important article in the The Independent.

“In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.”

Does anyone recall how Ronald Reagan of blessed memory marginalized the Soviet Union.

Here’s how: He made arrangements with our friends the Saudis to lower the price of oil. This plunged the Soviet Union into near bankruptcy. Why? Because Russia was then and is now rich in oil. Russia now controls the oil pipeline to Europe. China – drinking oil as if it were water – buys a large part of its supply from Russia and Iran; Iran gets some of it from our friends in South America, such as Hugo Chavez, who will help Iran develop its oil resources. That resource will be mostly exported.

Here is where it gets dicy: If the dollar is replaced with the so call “basket of currency” -- Chinese, Russian and Euro currency (Iran has already switched to the Euro) – then the US loses its monetary leverage and cannot do to Russia, China, Iran what formerly it did to the Soviet Union, which pulled out of an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, largely owing to its precarious monetary situation. China, Russia and Iran together now form the new axis of Anti-Americanism.

Does anyone see a pattern here?

The US is going to lose its monetary leverage in mega-foreign policy; already poor in energy, it has hobbled itself by refusing to pull oil out of the oil rich Gulf (Cuba is in the process of mining it, with some help from our pals the Russians); we are engaged in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan (just like the Russians); and we have a president whose understanding of real politic is, ahem … simplistic.

It doesn’t look good.

A day after the report had been published, denials poured in.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p