https://www.globalresearch.ca/end-american-exceptionalism/5816290
The End of American “Exceptionalism”?
Failing banks, inflation, soaring interest rates and the flight from the petrodollar could become a disaster for ordinary Americans
Watching a once great nation commit suicide is not pretty. President Joe Biden does not seem to understand that his role as elected leader of the United States is to take actions that directly or indirectly benefit the folks who voted for him as well as the other Americans who did not do so. That is how a constitutional democracy is supposed to work.
Instead, Biden and the gang of introverts and neocon war criminals that he has surrounded himself with have done everything that can to inflict fatal damage on the economy through rash initiatives both overseas and at home. A spending spree to buy support from the bizarre constituencies that make up the Democrat Party base while also fighting an undeclared war in Europe have meant that nearly two trillion dollars has been added to the national debt under Biden’s rule, a debt that was already unsustainable at nearly $30 trillion, larger than the United States’ gross national product. Plans to cancel student loan debts will add hundreds of billions of dollars more to the red ink.
And those actions undertaken overseas, to include continuing to expand the war in Ukraine against Russia, will do immeasurable more damage. Consider how the Democratic Party has long had it in for Russian Federal President Vladimir Putin, dating back to when Putin took power in 2000 and started kicking out the western scallywags who were looting his country.
Subsequently, false intelligence and other innuendoes were contrived by Hillary Clinton and her team in 2016 to implicate Donald Trump as a Russian stooge who was secretly working for Putin. When that didn’t work and Trump was elected, the Russians were accused by the media and Democrats of willy-nilly interfering in US elections more generally speaking, a much-exaggerated claim in contrast to the overwhelming silence surrounding the real electoral and policy interference, which has been coming from Israel and its fifth column inside the United States, who, not coincidentally, are the chief proponents of the war against Russia.
Placing a target on Vladimir Putin’s back appears to have an unfortunate consequence which Biden has yet to wake up to, namely the fact that the United States now has what might be described as a Ponzi scheme faux economy which is very vulnerable, particularly as much of the world has become disenchanted with the US style of global leadership. Note for example the recent state visit by French President Emmanuel Macron to Beijing, where he embraced a “global strategic partnership with China” to bring about a “multipolar” world, freed of “blocs” that is not sheltering behind “Cold War mentality.” Macron also criticized the “extraterritoriality of the US dollar.”
And threats made by the Bidens against both China and Russia have accomplished little beyond drawing the two major political and military powers closer together. Beijing and Moscow entered into a trade agreement in their own currencies in 2014 and have openly taken steps to challenge US dominance of international currency exchanges, creating instead a global multipolar trading environment. Europe aside, many nations are now eager to cut the tie that binds, which is the decades long American dominance of international financial mechanisms and also the general use of dollars to pay for oil and other energy supplies. The widespread use of petrodollars enables the buffoonish Janet Yellen at the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve banks to print unlimited unbacked fiat currency, knowing that there will always be a market for it.
Which brings us back to the Ukraine war, pursued “until we win” by Biden and his somnolent Secretary of State Antony Blinken. One of the first moves when Russia intervened in Ukraine was to block and eventually confiscate Russia’s 300 billion dollars-worth of foreign reserves in banks in the US and Europe. That sent a shock wave across currency markets all around the world. Biden and Yellen had weaponized the US’s own national currency, which hitherto had been an untouchable step in international relations for nations that were not actually at war. Countries like China and India with large economies then realized that the US Treasury Department and the dominance of the dollar as an exchange currency had now become a weapon of war and a serious threat to the economies of all other nations.
As a consequence, the US Dollar is right now being rejected by many nations as the world’s reserve currency. Some nations all over the world have agreed to use the Chinese Yuan and Indian Rupee for any-and-all international currency transactions. Saudi Arabia continues to use the petrodollar but does not demand it. Recently, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to permit the Saudis to sell oil to China in Yuan. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, is now allowing multiple currencies to be used to purchase its oil, a major attack on the primacy of the US dollar and it also has accepted Chinese mediation to mend fences with the US and Israel’s arch enemy Iran. And the Saudis have even more recently refused a Biden Administration request that it start pumping more oil to reduce energy costs, signaling that the shift is both political and economic in nature. Japan, a major economy, has also started purchasing oil and gas directly from Russia against the US imposed energy embargo while Brazil, another major economy, has agreed to use the Yuan in its increasing trade with China. As fewer nations utilize the US dollar, America’s ability to export and ignore its burgeoning domestic debt and inflation to other countries is being diminished.
This might have a decisive impact on the US currency as the drive to break with the petrodollar continues to grow and could produce something like a “perfect storm” impacting on the US economy. It threatens to drastically lower the standards of living of nearly all Americans within the next several years as the dollar loses value and purchasing power. As the US economy is heavily interconnected with many European economies, Europe is also likely to be a victim of the coming disaster.
The good news, of course, is that the United States will no longer be able to afford its endless wars and international interventions. Lacking its economic power, it will no longer be able to declare itself “exceptional” and the enforcer of a “rules based international order.” It would mean an ending of the funding of developments like the Ukraine proxy war and the troops will have to come home from places like Syria and Somalia. And it might even mark the ending of sending billions of dollars annually to a wealthy Israel.
Ending dollar supremacy would inevitably have an immediate impact on what passes for US foreign policy, making it more difficult for Washington to initiate and sustain Treasury Department sanctions on countries like Iran and North Korea. It could also create economic turmoil for many countries until the situation resolves itself by producing greater volatility in currency markets worldwide. The Federal Reserve Bank will no doubt respond to the unfolding crisis by acting as it always does by raising interest rates to astronomical levels, thereby hurting most the Americans who can least afford the shock therapy.
And it did not have to turn out this way. It could have been avoided. If the US, which had no horse in the race, had left Ukraine alone Vladimir Putin would not have become a symbol of defiance against the “Rules Based International Order” and he would not have worked with China to establish multipolarity in the way the financial world operates. Instead, we have a situation where Europe is being de-industrialized due to soaring energy prices and Washington’s destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines while the US is potentially confronting economic disaster as the dollar’s relevance to international trade sinks. The ultimate irony is that Russia, and also the US/Israeli arch enemy Iran, are by comparison doing quite well economically as they sell their oil and gas to anyone in any currency. One has to conclude that when US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently made her secret trip to Kiev to promise the despicable Volodymyr Zelensky billions of taxpayer dollars the United States might just have been better served if she had stayed in Washington and made some minimal effort to address the mounting economic problems confronting us here at home.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/18/free-those-who-expose-government-misdeeds-jail-those-who-try-to-conceal-them/
Free Those Who Expose Government Misdeeds, Jail Those Who Try To Conceal Them
The consistently insightful Branko Marcetic has a new article out with Jacobin titled “After the Ukraine Documents Leak, Mainstream Media Is Missing the Story” about the way imperial narrative managers have been manipulating the discourse about the information released in the Pentagon leaks by Jack Teixeira.
Marcetic criticizes the way mass media outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times (who actually hunted down and outed Teixeira before the FBI even brought him in) have been dragging the conversation kicking and screaming away from the contents of the leaks into discussions about how bad leaks are and what a bad, bad man Teixeira is.
“What’s more corrosive to US democracy?” asks Marcetic. “That the president secretly put US boots on the ground in an incredibly dangerous, constantly escalating war zone, explicitly breaking a promise in the process and acting against the wishes of the majority of the voting public? Or that the public was finally told about it? If we truly believe that ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness,’ then it makes little sense to vehemently oppose turning on a light.”
“It also means less time and energy spent on thinking about the years-long, bipartisan war on leaks that this young airman is the latest to be ensnared in,” Marcetic adds. “It means no one discusses the government’s now-routine practice of ruining people’s lives over even admittedly inconsequential leaks, and how the point of it is to intimidate future leakers and ensure the political and economic elite can continue to operate in secrecy.”
I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the possibility that Teixeira is an unwitting patsy and that these leaks were planted by the US intelligence cartel to help facilitate various foreign policy agendas and/or manufacture consent for the odious RESTRICT Act, and that’s possible — by far the most prolific leaker of documents from the US government is the US government itself. But whether that’s what happened or not, it seems a safe bet that this young man is going to be spending many years behind bars in one of the most draconian prison systems on this planet.
Teixeira’s life is being ruined, perhaps permanently, under the justification that he revealed true things about his government. That is the one and only crime he stands accused of.
And I don’t think people pay enough attention to how insane and outrageous it is that this happens. It’s one of those things that gets more infuriating the more deeply you contemplate it. The government has no business keeping secrets from the public about important matters that are relevant to their interests, much less about matters relating to their government’s own lies and misdeeds, and it has still less business punishing people for trying to bring that information under public scrutiny where it belongs.
When government misdeeds are exposed, the only people who should ever be punished are those who perpetrated them, and those who tried to cover them up. Teixeira, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Daniel Hale, David McBride — they should all be living free and without fear of persecution. And those who persecuted them should be imprisoned.
It’s just so crazy how it’s taken as a given that governments keep these secrets for good and noble reasons which must be protected with as much force as necessary, when we know for a fact that this is false and have known it for generations. As Julian Assange once said, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”
People shouldn’t be punished for revealing the secrets of the government, governments should be punished for keeping secrets from the people.
It shouldn’t be illegal to expose the abuses and deceptions of your government, it should be illegal for your government to abuse and deceive.
The government says it needs secrecy in order to win wars and protect freedom. History says the government needs secrecy in order to start wars and restrict freedom.
The amount of power you have should be inversely proportional to the amount of secrecy you’re allowed. Those with the most power should be a completely open book who aren’t permitted to hide anything from anyone, while those with the least power should have complete unimpeded privacy. Instead it’s the exact opposite: ordinary powerless people are getting more and more surveilled, while governments get more and more secretive and unaccountable.
Slashing government secrecy would solve so many problems — partly because malfeasance functions best in the dark, and partly because it would give democracy a fighting chance by letting the electorate make informed decisions about what’s going on in their world. You can’t claim to have democracy when you’re using government secrecy, censorship, propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the war on journalism to control what people see. People can’t use their votes to advance positive change if they can’t see what’s happening.
That’s the thing about The Washington Post’s slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness”: it’s completely true. It just happens that The Washington Post actively works to help keep things in the dark.
If I ever stumble across a magic genie’s lamp there’s a limit to the things I’d be willing to change about the world because I wouldn’t want to intervene on human sovereignty, but eliminating the ability of the powerful to obfuscate and distort the truth is something I’d happily commit to. End government secrecy, end censorship, end propaganda, end Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and end the war on journalism, so that people are free to see what’s really going on in their world and help steer things in a positive direction.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/imf-just-unveiled-new-global-currency-known-universal-monetary-unit-that-supposed-revolutionize-world-economy/5816084
The IMF Has Just Unveiled a New Global Currency Known as the “Universal Monetary Unit” That Is Supposed to Revolutionize the World Economy
A new global currency just launched, but 99 percent of the global population has no idea what just happened. The “Universal Monetary Unit”, also known as “Unicoin”, is an “international central bank digital currency” that has been designed to work in conjunction with all existing national currencies. This should set off alarm bells for all of us, because the widespread adoption of a new “global currency” would be a giant step forward for the globalist agenda. The IMF did not create this new currency, but it was unveiled at a major IMF gathering earlier this week…
Today, at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Spring Meetings 2023, the Digital Currency Monetary Authority (DCMA) announced their official launch of an international central bank digital currency (CBDC) that strengthens the monetary sovereignty of participating central banks and complies with the recent crypto assets policy recommendations proposed by the IMF.
Universal Monetary Unit (UMU), symbolized as ANSI Character, Ü, is legally a money commodity, can transact in any legal tender settlement currency, and functions like a CBDC to enforce banking regulations and to protect the financial integrity of the international banking system.
As the press release quoted above indicates, this new “Universal Monetary Unit” was created by the Digital Currency Monetary Authority.
So who in the world is the Digital Currency Monetary Authority?
Honestly, I had no idea until I started doing research for this article.
The press release says that the organization consists of “sovereign states, central banks, commercial and retail banks, and other financial institutions”…
The DCMA is a world leader in the advocacy of digital currency and monetary policy innovations for governments and central banks. Membership within the DCMA consists of sovereign states, central banks, commercial and retail banks, and other financial institutions.
Basically, it sounds like a secretive cabal of international banks and national governments is conspiring to push this new currency down our throats.
We are being told that the “Universal Monetary Unit” is “‘Crypto 2.0”, and those that created it are hoping that it will be widely adopted by “all constituencies in a global economy”…
The DCMA introduces Universal Monetary Unit as Crypto 2.0 because it innovates a new wave of cryptographic technologies for realizing a digital currency public monetary system with a widespread adoption framework encompassing use cases for all constituencies in a global economy.
I don’t know about you, but this sounds super shady to me.
Of course the Digital Currency Monetary Authority is not the only one that has been working on a new digital currency.
The UK has also been working on one.
The same is true for the European Union.
And would it surprise anyone that the Biden administration is touting the potential benefits of a “digital form of the U.S. dollar”? The following comes from the official White House website…
A United States central bank digital currency (CBDC) would be a digital form of the U.S. dollar. While the U.S. has not yet decided whether it will pursue a CBDC, the U.S. has been closely examining the implications of, and options for, issuing a CBDC. If the U.S. pursued a CBDC, there could be many possible benefits, such as facilitating efficient and low-cost transactions, fostering greater access to the financial system, boosting economic growth, and supporting the continued centrality of the U.S. within the international financial system.
I don’t think that it is a coincidence that governments all over the western world are simultaneously developing CBDCs.
And the IMF has actually already put together an extensive handbook “to assist central banks and governments throughout the world in their CBDC rollouts”…
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is putting together a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) handbook to assist central banks and governments throughout the world in their CBDC rollouts.
Published publicly on April 10, the “IMF Approach to Central Bank Digital Currency Capacity Development” report outlines the IMF’s multi-year strategy for aiding CBDC rollouts, including the development of a living “CBDC Handbook” for monetary authorities to follow.
A lot of people out there will cheer when these digital currencies are introduced.
But it is imperative to understand that once everyone is using them, your financial privacy will be almost totally gone.
Authorities will be able to track virtually everything that you buy and sell, and I am sure that they won’t hesitate to use that information against you.
Needless to say, the potential for tyranny in such a system is off the charts.
Can you imagine a world in which you are restricted from buying meat for a while because you have already used your “carbon credits” for the month?
Your “financial privileges” could potentially be restricted at any time at the whim of a government bureaucrat, and if you are a big enough troublemaker you could be “deplatformed” from the system permanently.
Of course in order for such a system to have real teeth, cash and other forms of payment will need to be phased out, and that is precisely what is happening right now in Europe. The following comes from the official website of the European Parliament…
To restrict transactions in cash and crypto assets, MEPs want to cap payments that can be accepted by persons providing goods or services. They set limits up to €7000 for cash payments and €1000 for crypto-asset transfers, where the customer cannot be identified.
Ultimately, they will just keep lowering the limits until the use of cash is almost completely eliminated.
Everyone will be slowly but surely forced on to the new digital system, and it will be a system that they control with an iron fist.
And most people will willingly go along with it. These days, most people are just scraping by from month to month and one recent survey found that 70 percent of all Americans are “financially stressed” at this point…
Inflation, economic instability and a lack of savings have an increasing number of Americans feeling financially stressed.
Some 70% of Americans admit to being stressed about their personal finances these days and a majority — 52% — of U.S. adults said their financial stress has increased since before the Covid-19 pandemic began in March 2020, according to a new CNBC Your Money Financial Confidence Survey conducted in partnership with Momentive.
Most Americans simply do not care that these new digital currencies could open a door for great tyranny.
They just want to be able to pay the bills and take care of their families, and if our politicians tell them that this new system is good for the economy they will be all for it.
But those of us that are awake know that more globalism doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Concentrating even more power in the hands of the international elite is always a bad idea, and hopefully we can start to get more people to understand this.
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