https://www.globalresearch.ca/de-dollarization-accelerates-beginning-end-us-dollar-hegemony-southeast-asia/5804315
De-Dollarization Accelerates: The Beginning of the End for US Dollar Hegemony in Southeast Asia?
The US is facing major moves by the global community to de-dollarize their economies. The reserve status of the US dollar will eventually come to an end, maybe not anytime soon, but sometime in the future as it is facing numerous challenges not only from major powers such as Russia and China who are actively trying to rid themselves of the toxic currency, but also countries with smaller economies who are based in the Southeast Asian region which includes Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos. The globalist think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) published an article on August 22nd, 2022, on the US dollar’s waning influence in Southeast Asia titled ‘Southeast Asia’s Growing Interest in Non-dollar Financial Channels—and the Renminbi’s Potential Role’ stated what was taking place between China and several Southeast Asian countries:
China’s central bank—announced the launch of a new emergency liquidity arrangement that can be funded using renminbi and tapped by participating central banks during times of market stress. Three of the five participating central banks are Singapore’s, Malaysia’s, and Indonesia’s, which each recently renewed agreements with the PBOC implicitly aimed at reducing dollar usage in cross-border payments. This follows policymakers in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar all announcing efforts to reduce dollar usage, as well as comments by Indonesia’s central bank head that consumers across five of Southeast Asia’s largest economies will soon be able to make intra-regional cross-border payments via linkages that avoid using the dollar as an intermediary, as is currently often the case
Interestingly, The CEIP listed several reasons why Southeast Asian countries want to dramatically reduce the use of US dollars are as follows:
Several factors are behind the various efforts aimed at reducing dollar usage in Southeast Asia. To begin with, many officials are concerned about the potential economic impacts of U.S. monetary policy tightening on the region given its high usage of the dollar; accordingly, some are seeking to reduce usage of the dollar in intra-regional trade payments as a means of curbing dollar reliance more broadly. Recent sanctions may also be spurring demand for alternative financial channels—for example, Myanmar’s military government is actively exploring how to circumvent EU and U.S. sanctions to transact with Russia
According to an article published by almayadeen.net ‘Bank Indonesia calls against payments in US Dollars’ who translated the report by an Indonesian news portal called Tempo.net on what Nugroho Joko Prastowo of the Solo Bank Indonesia Representative Office said regarding Indonesian businesses using national currencies to reduce its reliance on the US dollar:
Bank Indonesia has urged importers and exporters to use national currencies in international payments in order to reduce Indonesian financial markets’ reliance on the US dollar, according to Tempo.co, an Indonesian news portal. “About 90% of export-import payments are conducted in US dollars, while the share of Indonesian direct exports to the US is estimated at only 10%, and US imports account for 5%”
The report also mentioned that “China, Japan, Thailand, and Malaysia have already agreed to use the two-way payment mechanism, with Singapore and the Philippines planning to join the system, according to the economist.”
Another article published by the globaltimes.cn on December 15th, 2021, ‘GT Exclusive: Myanmar accepts yuan as official settlement currency for border trade with China’ said that Myanmar’s usage of Chinese yuan will help break the US dollar dominance in the long term:
The yuan was included in the list of Myanmar’s official settlement currencies in January 2019. The move at that time was more symbolic, as all contracts and trade were still not settled in the Chinese currency. Zhou said that the move, in the long term, will help break the monopoly of the US dollar in Myanmar’s foreign currency reserves. The US has been abusing the dollar’s dominant status to impose arbitrary sanctions on other countries, and the yuan’s further expansion in Myanmar’s trade settlements may provide a shield against such a potential weapon, analysts said
Cambodia is on Board Dumping US Dollars
Why Cambodia with a population of close to 17 million people and a much smaller economic impact on the world’s economy is willing to drop US dollars is an important development. The Diplomat, a current-affairs magazine based on analysis and commentaries from various authors on developments throughout Asia and the rest of the world published an article by Luke Hunt on the case of Cambodia’s attempt to stop using US dollars titled ‘Cambodia Reduces its Dependency on the US Dollar’ lays out the mood of the Cambodian government.
“Ever since United Nations peacekeepers arrived in war-torn Cambodia to oversee elections held in 1993, the U.S. dollar has been a mainstay of the local economy with a dual currency system providing steady exchange rates in a volatile place” but there is a monumental shift taking place when the National Bank of Cambodia (NBC) announced that it “would phase-out small-denominated U.S. dollar bills – $1, $2, and $5 notes – following negotiations with banks and micro-finance institutions (MFIs).” Naturally it’s a step to reduce the dependency of the US dollar according to the NBC “Cambodia has to encourage the use of its riel, more. So, allowing the circulation of small U.S. bills is an obstacle in urging the use of the riel.”
There are several reasons for Cambodia’s move, one of them is to allow the use of digital currencies to “give the central bank more control over the Cambodian economy and bolster the local riel currency, which for decades suffered from a lack of confidence due to negative sentiment stemming from a 30-year war” in addition it will allow the central bank “control over monetary policy and interest rate settings and reduced costs in handling the sheer volume of $1 dollar notes circulating through the economy.”
Hunt mentions the dark period of Cambodian history with the US-backed Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge who destroyed Cambodia and it’s traditions and started a new revolution with a new culture that would begin on Year Zero, therefore everything before would be deemed irrelevant,
“It’s a far cry from the late 1970s, when Khmer Rouge rule abandoned money, banks were abolished, and the NBC blown-up as Pol Pot tried to create a utopian, agrarian society that led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians.”
One of the darkest times in world history indeed. It is a positive development that the NBC is encouraging the use of the Cambodian Riel for its economy, so the future seems promising. NBC Governor Chea Chanto spoke at the 40th Anniversary of the re-establishment of the Riel
“he said demand for the currency had increased by an average of 16 percent a year for the last 20 years amid annual average growth rates of 7.8 percent and inflation at around 2.5 percent.”
Chanto said that “I firmly believe all ministries, institutions, companies, enterprises, and those who actively participate in the process of developing the banking system promote the use of the riel, which is our national currency.”
According to an unidentified analyst “It’s also a matter of sovereignty and pride. It’s their country and they are entitled to have their own currency like anywhere else.”
Transitioning from the US dollar to the Cambodian Riel won’t be an easy task according to Michael Finn of the Khmer Times who authored ‘De-dollarisation: Views from Asia, US and Europe’ claims that
“Any reduction in the use of the dollar needs to be handled carefully, according to foreign chambers of commerce in Cambodia. They say the central bank is unlikely to fully phase-out the US currency and any sudden moves to end reliance on the dollar would be bad for business.” European Chamber of Commerce Advocacy Manager Noe Schellinck said that “
To a certain extent, the dollarisation now can be ascribed to the success of the Cambodian economy, with a great influx of Foreign Direct Investment, compared to the historic context of when the dollarization came about.” But the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce President Dalton Wong disagrees with Schellinck’s assessment:
De-dollarisation is not a bad thing as it is a re-balancing of the fiscal and monetary policy tools. It is certainly not a complete displacement and substitution of the US dollar in favour of the Khmer Riel in trade and investment, which some observers and analysts seem to mischievously suggest, which is not so helpful. In fact, promoting a greater use of the Khmer riel will give greater monetary policy tools to the Cambodian author
The collapse of the US dollar is becoming a reality as China and Russia continue to buy gold and trade with their own currencies at an accelerated pace with many more countries around the world who are also racing to de-dollarize their economies. As we already know, several countries in Southeast Asia will soon make its move to rid itself of the toxic currency, but there are also other countries who are also making moves including India, Iran, South Africa, Syria, and Venezuela who are all motivated to drop the US dollar. One of the main reasons for these countries to move forward by eliminating the use of US dollar is because Washington uses its currency status as a weapon to impose harsh sanctions on countries they deem as enemies.
African countries are also starting to look for alternatives to the US dollar including Ghana according to a report published by Reuters on November 24th, 2022, ‘Ghana plans to buy oil with gold instead of U.S. dollars’ said that “Ghana’s government is working on a new policy to buy oil products with gold rather than U.S. dollar reserves” Ghana’s reason slightly differs from other countries since “The move is meant to tackle dwindling foreign currency reserves coupled with demand for dollars by oil importers, which is weakening the local cedi and increasing living costs.” This means that the US dollar is causing inflation. The move is expected to take place in the first quarter of 2023 as Ghana’s Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia said that the new policy “will fundamentally change our balance of payments and significantly reduce the persistent depreciation of our currency” as he explained that “using gold would prevent the exchange rate from directly impacting fuel or utility prices as domestic sellers would no longer need foreign exchange to import oil products.” Libya was one of the first countries in Africa to propose the idea of creating an alternative currency to bypass the US dollar called the African Dinar which would have been gold-backed but the Obama regime supported a violent coup to overthrow its president who suggested the idea, Muammar Ghaddafi who was tortured and then killed in the process making Libya a hotbed for terrorism and at the same time, re-creating the centuries-old industry of slavery.
The bottom line is that US dollar’s dominance in the global market will come to an end sometime in the foreseeable future. No one has a crystal ball of when it will happen, but it is certain. The world will experience an alternative economic reality that will change the dynamics of the US and its Western powers dominating the World’s economy with an outdated and flawed currency that will eventually have the same value as toilet paper.
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https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/14/patrick-lawrence-pessimism-of-the-mind-optimism-of-the-will/
‘Pessimism of the Mind, Optimism of the Will’
Some years ago now, while researching a book that eventually came out as Somebody Else’s Century, I spent time in Ahmedabad, a city in the northwest Indian state of Gujarat. Ahmedabad has a long and interesting history as a place where Hindus and Muslims lived side by side in a state of admirable co-existence. Gujarat and Ahmedabad have a shorter history as the scene of a deadly Hindu-nationalist rampage against the Muslim population in 2002, when Narendra Modi, the Hindutva ideologue now serving as India’s prime minister, was Gujarat’s chief minister.
A place, thus, to challenge one’s idea of humanity’s goodness or otherwise.
A taxi ride from Ahmedabad lies Gandhinagar, Gujarat’s administrative capital. It was there I met a noted sociologist named Shiv Visvanathan, who then professed at a research center called the Ambani Institute. In A Carnival for Science, which Oxford published in 1997, Shiv gave us the notion of cognitive justice, a critique of the hegemony of Western knowledge and a big, bright banner waved in the cause of plurality in human thought and the validity of non–Western perspectives.
I loved my afternoons with Shiv, a burly, affable man of quick intelligence and immense learning. We were in his study on the last of them, talking of all India had got right and wrong as it made itself modern, and I asked a question I had taken to posing often during my travels. “Shiv,” I said, “are you an optimist or a pessimist?”
Shiv smiled broadly, leaned across his desk, and missed not a beat. “An optimist, of course,” he said. “Why would I bother otherwise? What would be the point of critique?”
That was Shiv. That moment was his lasting gift to me.
I was prompted to summon these memories after ScheerPost published “Between Myth and History,” a speech I gave mid–December before the Committee for the Republic, a Washington group that opposes empire and the imperial presidency. Here is the text ScheerPost published, and here a video of the occasion from Empire Salons, the Committee’s archive.
It was the comment thread appended to the ScheerPost text that set me to thinking again about optimism and pessimism.
“You’re an idealist, Patrick, and your intentions are good,” a Vietnam veteran named Tom Calarco wrote. “But what you want ain’t gonna happen. The power structure is too ingrained.” Ingrained meaning entrenched, I assume.
“Patrick Lawrence is an optimist,” a reader named Robert Sinuhe noted. “The rosiness of his writing belies the fact that people have no power to change things.”
Wow. There is a lot of pessimism around, I began to conclude. Where is Shiv Visvanathan now that we really need him?
Then came Selina Sweet. “I am stirred by your vision and wisdom. Transformation depends on the death of the old,” the aptly named Ms. Sweet wrote. “Whether on the individual psycho-emotional level or on the macro nation level, I sure hope you keep on this theme because at some point, when enough people get it the pessimism expressed by commentator Robert Sinuhe (the attitude that the current state is a fait accompli lasting into eternity) will be cracked apart to allow the life force to express itself once again as evolution—in this case an evolution of consciousness.”
A kindred spirit, well-spoken at that.
But then: “We can’t because we’re a bunch of completely clueless welfare recipients. Draping ourselves in the pessimism of Benjamin Franklin just to find an excuse. But we don’t have one. It’s our fault that so many people are dying, that so many innocent people are in jail, that our living standards are plummeting.” These are the thoughts of a reader who signs as SpiritZd.
There is more of this, as readers who peruse the comments will see.
One way or another it seemed to me the optimism evident in the December speech struck a nerve among ScheerPost’s readers and probably among many others. We Americans—the question is apparently most acute among Americans—do not seem to know what to do with either our pessimism or our optimism. And it is the optimists among us, I surmise, who are furthest out to sea. Pessimists seem to possess a confidence optimists do not. Why would this be? Maybe Mencken had it right a century or so ago. “A pessimist is someone in possession of all the facts,” the great H.L. once said.
Let us investigate this question, taking as our guide an activist and political philosopher who knew in every cell of his failing body whereof he spoke.
It is Antonio Gramsci who is commonly credited with the thought, “Pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will.” But it seems Romain Rolland, the French writer who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1915, actually said it first. Gramsci went on to make it a sort of political ethos, a guide to thought, or a way to manage one’s mind and live in the world as it is. We should take note of Gramsci’s views on optimism and pessimism. He had much to say about both. Mussolini imprisoned Gramsci, a founding member of the Partito Comunista d’Italia, the PCI, in 1926, and he remained there until he died in 1937. It was in those years he wrote his celebrated Prison Notebooks—30 of them comprising 3,000 pages of reflections. Prison was a radical deprivation—he lost a public life of political participation to one of solitude and incapacitation. It was also 11 years of agony, fraught with insomnia, violent migraines, convulsions, systemic failure. But Gramsci seems to have understood from the first that his most dangerous enemy was despair—lapsing into a state of purposeless quiescence, as if falling into a deep, dark hole. Here he is in a letter to his sister-in-law, Tatiana, shortly after his arrest:
I am obsessed by the idea that I ought to do something für ewig [enduring, lasting forever]. . . I want, following a fixed plan, to devote myself intensively and systematically to some subject that will absorb me and give a focus to my inner life.
This is an early hint, in my read, of the thinking that was to come. In this letter Gramsci made deep connections—on one hand between pessimism and a state of depression and passivity, and on the other optimism and the taking of action. In the latter he saw salvation, and I could not agree more: I have long thought that a principal source of depression is the sensation of powerlessness. Whenever I have been overcome in this way I have said to myself, “Take the next step. It may be a mile, it may be six inches. Take it and you will have begun to act.”
Most of all, Gramsci seems to have concluded as his teeth fell out and he could no longer eat solids, that optimism is something one must purposefully marshal, cultivate, against all threats of dejection and hopelessness. In letters and in passages in the Notebooks he identified optimism as essential to all political action. What good would optimism be, he asked in “Against Pessimism,” published in 1924, when he was still able to place pieces in newspapers, “if we were… actively optimistic only when the cows were plump, when the situation was favorable?”
So we have this man with absolutely nothing going for him, when PCI (“Peachy,” in Italian) was reduced to a roomful of underground activists, making the case for optimism—elevating it, indeed, to a philosophic precept. Optimism as a decision one makes, optimism as a prerequisite for action and at the same time an action in itself: Maybe there is something for SpiritZd, along with the rest of us, to learn from this.
There were debates during Gramsci’s time as to what optimism actually was. No, not a philosophic concept, one critic said: Optimism and pessimism are sentiments and in this share a common origin. Then another argument: O.K., they are sentiments, but all philosophic positions are rooted in sentiment. I do not know where I come out on this question. To me, optimism and pessimism are, like anticipation and anxiety, two ways we have of looking forward—the light and dark sides of the same moon. It is ours to choose one or the other and then live out our choice.
There are perils for the optimist. One of them, as noted in that speech, is angélisme, that French term I have liked since I learned it. It means dreamy idealism, a disconnection from reality. Gramsci, who resolutely insisted on possession of all the facts, had no time for such indulgences. He considered ungrounded optimism a “vulgar liberal conception,” to borrow from two Gramsci scholars—a folly and so a destructive distraction from the work to hand.
And it is true: You find this kind of infantile optimism in the columns of Nick Kristof, the winsome Boy Scout of The New York Times opinion page. You find it in all the “progressive” magazines, with their pieces about how capitalism has been defeated and socialism in America is just around the corner, the long war won. This is mere illusion, and liberals and progressives of this kind have need of illusions because they cannot face the one confrontation that matters above all others in our time—the confrontation with power. Confront power effectively and solutions to all else, from the climate crisis to war, famine, corruption and so on, will follow.
My own navigation through this thicket comes to this: Politics as the art of the possible is a nonsense. There is no time left to play footsie with liberal gradualists. We can no longer begin with an assessment of what is possible in the present context and work toward it. We begin with what is necessary, and the work comes down to making the necessary possible. As to my own tendency in the direction of angélisme, it seems to me the enormity of the task I see as ours to undertake is not an excuse to shrink from it, as readers such as Tom Calarco and Robert Sinuhe appear to think.
Kicking the dirt, in other words, does not finally constitute an intelligent response to our circumstances. Defeatism is an illusion, too—another form of flinching. No, the enormity of the task is a measure of the urgency with which we must assume it.
Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, the Gramsci scholars just mentioned and to whom I am gratefully indebted, raise the question of optimism and its relationship to the orthodox Western belief, prevalent since the Age of Materialism took hold in the mid-19th century, in Progress. This term gets a cap “P” because it is an ideology, like Americanism or Communism. The chimera of never-ending Progress has seduced Westerners, Americans most of all, for so long we are not anymore even aware of the seduction.
The instrument of seduction, now as when we had the telegraph, the railroad, and the cotton gin, is technological advance. Today we take seriously the Steve Jobs thought that Apple will change the world. Apple has made it possible to take better pictures of our shrimp cocktails and post them on Facebook. This is a change of method, means, nothing more. Technological progress has nothing to do with true human, humane progress, because it has always served economic interests and because these interests have never allowed technology to be informed by philosophy, social relations, and other things to do with advancing the human cause and the human spirit.
No again, optimism of the kind worth cultivating and living is in no wise grounded in the orthodoxy of Progress. It is better understood as reflecting that most important of 20th century recognitions: Mankind exists in a perpetual state of becoming, meaning we are kinetic creatures ever evolving, one moment to the next, according to the social relations that define us, now this way, now that. This thought did not originate with the French Existentialists—it was around in Gramsci’s time. But the postwar French, Sartre et al., showed us that in all our becoming we find freedom, the freedom to act as we choose—true freedom, not Ronald Reagan’s kind—and that freedom assigns us responsibilities for every single thing we do.
Maybe this is the feature of the optimistic stance toward life, events, and our potential to act upon them I value most: The optimist, fully in possession of the facts and so harboring a certain pessimism of the mind, nonetheless assumes his or her responsibility for the world in which he or she lives precisely as the pessimist does not. With optimism come things to do. Why would one bother otherwise?
....
https://stephenlendman.org/2023/01/12/genocidist-bill-gates-in-action/
Genocidist Bill Gates in Action
More monster than man, Gates’ self-serving agenda threatens the vast majority of people everywhere so privileged ones like himself can benefit more than already.
His rage to mass-jab ordinary people for seasonal flu-renamed covid is all about destroying health while pretending that it’s the other way around.
Earlier he said the following:
“In January 2020, as details began emerging about the potential global threat of a novel coronavirus (sic), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pivoted its work and resources to help address what would become the biggest public health crisis in over a century (sic).”
“Since then, we spent over US$2 billion to help the world contain and defeat (flu/covid) (sic), with a particular emphasis on helping vulnerable populations (sic) (and) strengthening health systems (sic) by going all-out to destroy public health while pretending otherwise.
Expressing pride in his handiwork concealed its diabolical aim.
Despite no pandemic now or earlier, an invented one alone, Gates ranted about another one on the way, adding:
“Next time…we’ll have…factories…able to produce (kill shots) far faster, and so just in months you should be able to make enough for the world.”
“(W)e’ll have enough supply so that prioritization won’t matter because we’ll cover everyone.”
He wants cattle and other animals consumed as food rendered toxic and unsafe to eat by DNA-altering mass-jabbing.
And this Gates perversion of reality, claiming:
Ruling regimes throughout the West and elsewhere “are there to protect us (sic).”
In the absence of a real one, the invented “pandemic is a disaster” according to trampling on truth by Gates.
And saying that it’s not a “matter of if but when” another pandemic is coming failed to explain what’s invented, not real.
He’s not satisfied by results of the mother of all state-sponsored health-destroying scams.
He wants the next invented one to accomplish what the current one failed to achieve — notably because the craze to mass-jab is wearing thin.
Last month, NBC News reported the following:
“(J)ust 31%” of Americans aged-65 and older got booster jabs, while pushing the following Big Lie, saying:
Pharma-linked “disease experts say initial shots (aren’t) enough (sic),” citing new more scariant than variants and “waning protection (sic).”
And, of course, if the Pharma-controlled CDC says that boosters provide added protection, it must be true.
Right? Wrong!
And when MSM rant about alleged skyrocketing flu/covid outbreaks, hospitalizations and deaths, they fail to explain that jabbed individuals comprise the vast majority of casualties.
Yet according to fake news by Northwestern University professor James Druckman:
Two years after mass-jabbing began, “the (flu/covid) health threat remains (sic),” adding:
“(L)ack of continued (mass-jabbing) is extremely frustrating for the public health community (sic).”
Gates wants the WHO strengthened.
In cahoots with US/Western regimes and Pharma, it’s been infamous for spreading Big Lies about kill shots and all else flu/covid related.
They’re pushing unparalleled genocide to eliminate billions of unwanted people worldwide.
Aiming to control all things related to public health worldwide, the WHO — Pharma, Gates and their co-conspirators — threaten the sovereignty of nation-states and rights of ordinary people everywhere.
Separately, there’s no validity to the phony claim about 15 million global deaths and over a million deceased Americans from flu/covid.
The vast majority of these deaths were from either one or more other illness or occurred among jabbed individuals.
And this reality check from NaturalNews.com, saying:
“(W)e are witnessing and living through…the planned fall of human civilization and a planetary-scale ethnic cleansing genocide against humanity” by toxic jabs designed for this purpose.
Ruling US/Western regimes are more terrorist organizations than governments.
Nations run by them in cahoots with Pharma and other corporate predators are mortal threats to their people and all others everywhere.
And what’s going on is at a time of US/NATO war on Russia at risk of escalating to possible nuclear confrontation.
The worst of all possible worlds is today’s reality, with worse still likely ahead.
If enough billions of unwanted people aren’t eliminated by kill shots and forever wars, maybe survivors will be starved to death.
Separately according to msm.com:
The Biden regime pressured social media to censor “skeptical posts about” flu/covid jabs, “according to emails released as part of a legal case.”
The Biden regime’s White House reportedly said the following:
“We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy — period (sic).”
“We want to know that you’re trying.”
“We want to know how we can help.”
“We want to know that you’re not playing a shell game.”
“This would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”
What US dark forces call mass-jabbing misinformation is what’s vital for everyone to know.
On January 8, the WSJ called the Biden regime White House a “censorship machine,” adding:
“Newly released documents show that the White House played a major role in censoring Americans on social media.”
“Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put (flu/covid) censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House — not voluntarily.”
Biden, then-press secretary Psaki, and kill shot-pushing surgeon general Vivek Murthy “publicly vowed to hold (social media) accountable if they didn’t heighten censorship.”
“Emails made public through earlier lawsuits, (FOIA) requests and Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files already exposed a sprawling censorship regime involving the White House, the (Pharma-controlled CDC, (the DHS, FBI) and other agencies.”
The Biden regime ordered “tech companies to remove certain types of material and censor specific posts and accounts.”
Vital information censored “included truthful messages casting doubt on the efficacy of masks and challenging (flu/covid) vaccine mandates.”
Throughout the US/West, the public was lied to and mass-deceived by ruling regimes on kill shots and all else flu/covid related — aided and abetted by go-along MSM press agents in support of the most diabolical mass-extermination campaign of all-time.
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