The Buck Stop Here
    by William Thomas  as seen on Lifeboatnews.com

Is Bush trying to crash America? The Boy Wonder's latest tax dodge, gifting a further $470 billion to the richest 1%
of America's ruling elite, recently prompted publication of a full-page ad in the New York Times signed by 40 Nobel
Laureates and 400 leading U.S. economists warning of disaster. Explaining their concerns to a Canadian radio audience,
one of the ad's sponsors termed Bush's economic policies, "Fiscal madness." [CBC Feb. 11, 2003]
 
Unless you're one of the 1%.
 
Think Roman Empire. Think former Soviet Union. Like Nero and the Kremlin, the costs of the increasingly expensive
killing machines, troops and logistics needed to suppress its own citizenry while expanding and maintaining a global
empire pose a graver threat to Americans than any real, imagined or manufactured enemy. Spending more than
half-a-million dollars a minute on weapons of mass destruction means that Washington must currently borrow $2 billion
every day to keep the government going.
 
Those credit card purchases add up. When a man who wrecked every business he was ever handed "took" office
in the year 2000, the USA enjoyed a $3 trillion surplus. It's $2.6 trillion in debt today.
 
Unlike the federal government, which keeps raising the bar on legally permissible indebtedness, states and counties
must deliver balanced budgets. As federal funds dry up, and record unemployment shrivels state tax revenues,
one-quarter cuts in state revenues are being reflected in 25% less local services.
 
So much for the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, which marked 2003 as the year the fed would finally started living
within its multi-trillion dollar means. "What have we got?" exclaims Ed Henry. "We've got a federal government
that is borrowing us into oblivion – $653 billion since the start of fiscal 2002 is not chicken feed. It's the largest
debt increase this nation has ever experienced."
 
Last June, Congress raised the national debt limit from $5.95 trillion to $6.4 trillion. But on Feb. 20, 2003 Bush's
big spending hit that ceiling and were unable to borrow another dime. A new national debt limit of $7.38 trillion is
about to "solve" the problem by digging a debt hole deep enough to scuttle even a Superpower. ["Mayday, Mayday,
Mayday We Are Sinking" by Ed Henry]
 
The $80 billion spent on invading Iraq, plus another $100 billion or so in immediate reconstruction and administration costs,
far exceeds any timely compensation from that occupied country's extorted oil. As Henry explains, back in Washington,
"Almost $2 trillion a year isn't enough for the poor dears to get by on. After all, they've got empires to build, lobbyists to satisfy,
an oligarchy to support, and their own lavish retirement to consider. If you can't cough up the extra cash needed, your kids can."
 
Maybe.
 

CLIMAX CIVILIZATION
"Overreach" is what happens when a little boy stands on five precariously balanced chairs to reach the cookie jar.
Labeled "Debt", "Weapons", "Perpetual War", "Climate Change" and "International Self-Preservation" this improvised
tower is teetering toward a crash that could relegate the United States to a third-rate power overnight.
 
The Soviets have been there, done that. Russian strategic analyst Folkhogskola Vardingeby points out that the U.S. debt
is growing more than ten times faster than national income. General Leonid Ivashov believes that the U.S.A. has "come to
the climax of her military-power adventures for grabbing power over the planet. [Boudewijn Wegerif, "What Matters"
radio program 9/24/02]
 

JUST SAY EURO
For more than 150 countries calling Earth home, the need to rein in Washington's warmongers has become a self-preservation
priority. Instead of military confrontation with a nation monopolizing violence, the battle for self-determination versus U.S.
domination can be won without firing a shot by saying nope, non and nyet to the world's current controlling currency.
 
For the world's most threatening war machine runs not just on oil, but on dollars backed by oil. As international banker
Dr. Kurt Richebächer explains, U.S. financial markets have become hostage "to the willingness of foreign investors and
lenders to finance its spending excesses."
 
In the face of an out-of-control Superpower attacking countries at will – and shrinking returns on the dollars they hold
– foreign complicity in American aggression is evaporating. In the year of the Bush coup in Florida, Europeans invested
over $600 billion in the USA. Today, European purchases of U.S. businesses have plummeted to just $7 billion.
[The Looming Dollar Disaster]
 
Call it "Gotchas Economics". Since countries must acquire dollars to buy the fuel that runs their economies – and since
only the U.S. can print dollars  – Washington has retained an unearned lock on global trade. Today, fully two-thirds of
world commerce is dollar-denominated. Recycling some $2 trillion in "petrodollars" has enabled a war-obsessed
United States to run perpetual trade deficits. [The Observer 2/23/03]
 
But now just about everyone is ditching the diving dollar.
 
WHY AFGHANISTAN WAS INVADED
The Caspian Sea basin's 200 billion barrels of untapped "black gold" appeared to offer Washington a strategic counterbalance
equal to Saudi Arabia's immense oil reserves. At least those were the Central Asian oil estimates in 2001 when the Bush
administration ignored UN sanctions against the Taliban and began crude negotiations with murderous misogynist mullahs
for a pipeline deal. [The Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy, Saudi Arabia and the Failed Search for bin Laden]
 
Now, after war crimes that included the slaughter of thousands of unarmed prisoners, and cluster bomb and radioactive cruise
missile attacks against thousands more defenseless civilians, the return to rapacious rule by warlords worse than the Taliban is
being overlooked by American occupiers preoccupied with three exploratory oil wells.
 
Guess what? These new findings shrank the Caspian oil ocean to a more modest subterranean lake of just 10 to 20 billion
barrels of poor quality, high-sulphur crude. According to top oil experts interviewed by Mike Ruppert, several "majors"
have already abandoned their post-war pipeline plans.
 
Oops! With the planet's biggest polluters and oil consumers set to import 90% of their addiction by 2020, Bush and his
Enron backers quickly turned their attention to Iraq's awesomely estimated oil reserves. As Ruppert remarks, "Our greatest
nemesis, Bin Laden, was quickly replaced with our new public enemy #1, Saddam Hussein" – whose brutal regime had been
virtually ignored for decades by the government which put him in power. [From The Wilderness 10/19/02, 12/5/02]
 

WHY IRAQ WAS INVADED
Washington laughed when Saddam took the world's second biggest oilfields off the dollar standard and began demanding
payment in euros in Oct. 2000. The seemingly dimbulb dictator also converted his $10 billion UN reserve funds to euros
– just as that fledgling currency hit an historic low of 82 cents.
 
The laughter stopped abruptly when the euro's value crouched, then leaped 30%.
 
According to Aussie analyst Geoffrey Heard, the second brutal war against Iraq was intended to return Iraq's oil reserves to
the dollar, intimidate other oil producers considering passing on the buck, and sabotage other potential Middle East players.
 
Explained Michel Chossudovsky from the Centre for Research on Globalization last March: "The war is not only being
carried out with a view to taking over Iraq's oil reserves. It is intended to cancel the contracts of rival Russian and European
oil companies, as well as exclude France, Russia and China" from a Middle East-Central Asian region containing more than
70% of the world's reserves of oil and natural gas.
 

No kidding. A $40 billion Iraq-Russia contract to hunt oil in Iraq's western desert is now scrap paper. Ditto the rights of the
French oil company TotalFinaElf rights to develop the huge Majnoon field, near the Iranian border, which may contain up
to 30 billion barrels of greenhouse-goosing carbon. [Washington Post 9/15/02]
 
The only reasonable recourse left to Iraq's turfed trading partners is to dump dollars and acquire euros. Awash in 50 billion
petrodollars, Russia's parliamentary duma has discussed adopting the euro for oil sales to its main trading partners in Europe.
The Bank of China, another major European trader, and Russia's Central Bank are also set to sell dollars for the euro,
which has supplanted the dollar as the global "currency of refuge" after the invasion of a shattered country that had nothing
to do with 911 or al Qaeda derailed the dollar and sparked al Qaeda retaliation worldwide. [AP 1/24/03]
 

OPEC'S PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE
Meanwhile, increasing anti-Saudi rhetoric from Washington and the Pentagon's sudden pullout from the Kingdom have left
a despised oligarchy vulnerable to terrorism and toppling. Not to mention a U.S. takeover to "protect" the monarchy it abandoned.
 
Riyadh's reaction may be radical. Last year the former American Ambassador to Saudi Arabia reminded Congress, "One of the
major things the Saudis have historically done, in part out of friendship with the United States, is to insist that oil continues to be
priced in dollars. I wonder whether there will not again be, as there have been in the past, people in Saudi Arabia who raise the
question of why they should be so kind to the United States."
 
The instant OPEC embraces the euro, the dollar will lose up to 40% of its value, investors will jump from Wall Street windows,
U.S. money markets will collapse – and America's bid for "full spectrum dominance" of the globe will end.
 
Of course, the entire dollar-dependent world will undergo economic convulsions at the same time. So it seems prudent to
introduce such drastic currency conversion over the next five or 10 years. But inshallah, a Bushwhacked OPEC could be
driven to the euro in a bid to nuke the dollar and economically pre-empt American aggression.
 

THE ULTIMATE BOYCOTT
While worldwide revulsion against American "rubblization" and irradiation of residential neighborhoods is sparking a reflexive
shunning of "Made In America" products, the ultimate boycott is a refusal to deal in dollars.
 
Seeking profits, security and a chance to retaliate against Bush's "axis of evil" rhetoric, Tehran last year shifted most of its
central bank reserves to euros. The move to euros as Iran's oil standard is imminent. As Parliamentarian Mohammad
Abasspour put it, "the United States dominates other countries through its currency, monopolizing global trade."
 
Iran's eagerness to help "eliminate" the dollar as the main trade currency qualifies Tehran for immediate U.S. bombing
and invasion. As one senior British official put it: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."
[Iran Financial News 8/25/02]
 
Or North Korea. Last December, in response to Bush's cruel mid-winter oil embargo, that nervously nuclear "Axis of Evil"
dropped the dollar and began using euros for all foreign exchange.
 
Or Venezuela. In another tectonic shift away from the blood-soaked greenback, 13 developing countries are following
Caracas' lead and bartering services and commodities directly with each other in computerized swaps. (Look for another
CIA-sponsored coup attempt against a president who has won three popular elections soon.)
 
Or back to an Orient of high body counts and unpleasant lessons. Fast-draw cowpokes who often pull their triggers before
drawing their guns ignored the biggest Asian central banks holding most of the planet's dollar reserves, who were already
considering decreasing their Treasury holdings – before the U.S. attack on Iraq accelerated that trend. As Chossudovsky
comments, Japan, which imports over 80% of its oil from the Middle East, must consider converting many of its dollar
assets to euros. With gigantic consequences for the bankrupt Superpower it largely subsidizes.
 

WILL THE USA AND EUROPE SWITCH ROLES?
Real world power is measured not in children-maiming cluster bombs and radioactive cruise missiles, but in the currencies
valued by its holders. Commanding nearly half of world trade, the European Union represents a growing challenge to
continued U.S. dominance of a world that lies almost entirely beyond its borders.
 
At a financial summit in Spain in April 2002, the head of OPEC's Petroleum Market Analysis Department, Javad Yarjani,
wondered if "the euro will establish itself in world financial markets, thus challenging the supremacy of the U.S. dollar,
and consequently trigger a change in the dollar's dominance in oil markets."
 
It seemed a stretch. By the late '90s, Yarjani reminded his listeners, "more than four-fifths of all foreign exchange transactions,
and half of all world exports, were denominated in dollars. In addition, the US currency accounts for about two thirds of all
official exchange reserves."
 
But the dollar's 53-year advantage is ending. Last December, 10 more countries became EU members. Next year, 450
million oil-burning European consumers will enjoy combined wealth of $9.6 trillion – versus 280 million Americans and
their heavily indentured $10.5 trillion economy.
 
Go figure. Europe is the world's biggest oil importer. Its factories export nearly half of all Middle East imports. Add this up,
subtract the dollar's declining value, and it makes real "cents" for European manufacturers, oil companies, and OPEC to trade in euros.
 
Unless soon bombed into submission, OPEC's switch to the euro will happen. The big question is when? With Britain, Norway,
Denmark and Sweden set to join a single euro currency as soon as next autumn, Yarjani believes "this might create a momentum
to shift the oil pricing system to euros." [Speech on The International Role of the Euro 4/14/2002, Oviedo, Spain]

ROLLING THE WORLD CONQUESST DICE
Unless, that is, the gamble in Iraq pays off. Over the past five years, a sanctions-strangled Iraq has sold less than 1 billion barrels
of oil annually. With Halliburton already pumping oil from that country's southern oilfields and about to open the taps on its
northern reserves, experts say that Iraq's oil output could hit 2.5 billion barrels annually within a few years, flooding the market
with crude and crushing OPEC under a $15-dollar per barrel drop in oil prices.
 
Ironically, if this strategy succeeds and grateful SUV drivers re-elect a "Perpetual Petroleum President" whose family now
controls America's electronic voting machines, Washington's bid for global dominance will be brutally crushed by the runaway
global warming their petroleum policies promulgate.
 

GOING DOWN
As the dollar slides closer to reflecting its true value, the world's best chance is that debilitating debt will curtail America's
ability to wage open-ended global warfare – and motivate Americans to rejoin the village of nations.
 
Economists at the Federal Reserve say the dollar needs to fall 30% to bring U.S. imports and exports back into balance.
In today's computer-triggered markets, such a "correction" will be as gradual as  plunging off a cliff.
 
Like the spectre of catastrophic climate change now looming in tornado-clogged skies, when economic or ecologic thresholds
are crossed, the resulting reckoning always comes precipitately. From the atmosphere to economics, all complex systems
respond unpredictably and nonlinearly to negative feedback loops. Like the methane in the permafrost melting across the
far north, releasing that five-times-greater-than-carbon heat-trapping gas to liberate still more methane and further warm
the air – departing the declining dollar could further reduce its value, triggering a stampede.
 
Anyone alert to omens and portents will notice that over the past two months the dollar has fallen nearly 10% against the euro.
And that could be the just the first lapping wave of a self-induced debt tsunami that could drown America's appetite for
aggression in its own red ink.
 
With countries and corporations disdaining dollars, imports are already costing Americans much more. But bursting real estate
and stock market bubbles cannot be reinflated by the Federal Reserve, because as Chossudovsky comments, "without lots of
eager foreigners prepared to mop them up, a serious inflation would result which, in turn, would make foreigners even more
reluctant to hold the U.S. currency and thus heighten the crisis."
 
As the world's biggest oil importer, the U.S. will have to run a trade surplus to acquire euro-backed oil – at a time when its dollar,
real estate and stock market prices are collapsing. With Washington's economic response limited to overwhelming firepower,
things could get a little intense…
 

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINAR
By pushing one-fifth of the world's population into defense of their religion, culture and lives, Bush has already ensured Islam's
flight from the dollar.
 
But the euro is not the only replacement for dollars now seen as anathema in Arabia. In its commercial dealings with Islamic
countries this year, Malaysia will start replacing U.S. currency with the new Islamic gold dinar. Bahrain, Libya, Morocco and
Iran may soon follow, using gold-backed Muslim money to strengthen ties among Islamic nations and "end American hegemony".
[IslamOnline 1/8/03]
 
Culturally, the move is viewed as "A way to recall a currency related to the history of Muslims and their monetary heritage
since the time of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)", writes Khaled Hanafi. Plus "find the Islamic alternative to the
dollar at a time the calls to boycott all what is labeled as American starting from goods to currency, are intensified."
 
Valued at 4.25 grams of 22-karat gold, the gold dinar was inspired by Prof. Omar Ibrahim Fadillo, founder of an organization
that, according to IslamOnline, "believes that the unity of the Islamic world cannot be achieved except through the unification
on the economic level. It also calls for the establishment of a united Islamic market using one currency which is the gold Islamic
dinar…hoping it will replace the U.S. dollar."
 
Already, Islamic Internet brokers in an ancient trading culture are supplanting dinosaur dollars with dynamic dinars. Since its
Malaysian launch in 1997, the gold-based "e-dinar" has reached the equivalent of four tons of that precious metal measured
in ounces – while some 600,000 gold-dinar users increase their numbers by 60,000 new members every month.
 
Several countries are now using some 100,000 Islamic gold dinars and 250,000 silver dirhams in place of the U.S. dollar.
If the 1.3 billion citizens of Islamic countries opt for gold dinars and e-dinars in inter-Islamic trade, and euros for oil and
imports, greenbacks will become slightly less valuable than Kleenex. And the world's most debt-ridden nation  – owing
about $12,000 for each of its 280 million human inhabitants – will implode as suddenly and dramatically as Indonesia,
Argentina, or the ex-Soviet Union.
 

ROLLING THE DICE
On the other hand, Chossudovsky calculates, sticking up the world's last oil supplies and locking everyone back into dollar
domination through military, cultural and economic subjugation of Central Asia and the entire Middle East "would consolidate
America's current position and make it all but impregnable as the dominant world power."
 
Will the gamble by Bush and his henchman to smash OPEC and grab the leverage offered by the planet's last big oil reserves
pay off before the costs of conquest collapse their own country? Does it matter? Continued oil burning under any guise
– or guys – will hasten climatic catastrophe within a few short decades.
 
America's new oil weapon is really a fatal vulnerability. With production peaks passed, and the era of cheap oil ending
sometime this decade, European oil addicts are slashing their energy consumption and turning to wind power and hydrogen.
While the Bush oil cabal holds the U.S. hostage to a dangerous, disappearing resource, America's ability to compete or
cooperate with sustainable energy sources is being squandered – even as that nation's permanent war economy turns the
American dream into a nightmare of ruined cities and national insolvency.
 
For the rest of us, an indigent Uncle Sam too broke to deploy bombers or tanks is a recipe for hope.
For Americans, it's time for a regime change.
 

#       #       #
 

William Thomas served as a member of a three-man Gulf Environmental Emergency Response Team in Kuwait during
and immediately after Desert Storm. Producer of the award-winning documentary, “Eco War”, he is the author of
"Bringing The War Home" and "All Fall Down: The Politics of Terror and Mass Persuasion".


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