The character of US media that annoys me most is while so many parade their opinion so few peer over the shoulders of the sources. The web helps, making it possible to discover more than the rank of toothless populism.
New Zealand’s Toni Solo noticed that for every cent the dollar has fallen against the Euro, the cost of oil increased $2. In fact, there’s that word, this correlation is managed policy. Why? It pays for war.
Western Bloc central banks and financial and investment corporations are locked into an inflationary dynamic in order to sustain their system’s militarist imperialism. The Bloc’s European and Pacific components offer supportive economic collaboration. In exchange, the US serves as the Bloc’s global enforcer.
The US Treasury, Federal Reserve and corporate financial houses work together boosting dollar zone money supply, devaluing the dollar. Their partners take compensatory steps, intervening in G7 financial markets. They seek to keep their currencies in some kind of sustainable relationship for purposes of mutual trade and finance equilibrium so as to support US budget and current account deficits.
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The US Federal Reserve and the US Treasury will carry on increasing the money supply, devaluing the dollar. They do so to fund US government military spending, other components of the US budget deficit and to prevent insolvent banks and financial corporations from going under. The European Central Bank will continue to set its money supply and accompanying policies to sustain recent trends in the Euro’s relationship to the US dollar and bolster its own shaky corporate financial markets.
John Barrie of Ann Arbor brings it to ‘the citizen’ in us:
We can do incredible things with fossil fuels. Just a handful of people can grind mountains down to nothing in the Canadian north with just a few of the right tools and enough diesel fuel. We can move entire cities halfway around the globe and keep them humming along as long as we can input billions of BTUs of heavy fuel every day. We build sky scrapers, take the kids to soccer games and drive through our favorite fast food joints all by burning dead dinosaurs. It’s really a miracle, too bad there has to be a downside.
And the downside is this: (ok these) pollution, global warming, increasingly scarce resources, oil spills, acid rain, water pollution, thermal pollution… What most of us don’t consider is the cost of securing our oil supply from the Persian Gulf. A quick look at US Energy Information Agency data on oil output from the Gulf, about 23 million barrels per day, and the cost of maintaining our military presence in the area, estimated to be from 40- 50 billion per year, plus adding the cost of our wars in the area, 61 billion for Desert Storm and 3 trillion total for the current Iraq war, plus add in the cost of health claims for Gulf War Syndrome at 263,000 claims as of 2000, and 20,000 severely wounded in battle who will need care and prosthetics and it looks like we spend about $20 to $40 per barrel just for providing “security”.
So, when oil prices go above $120.00 per barrel, remember that doesn’t include an additional $20 – $40 security tax, and this still doesn’t account for the human cost taken in people’s lives. The human cost is in my mind the greatest of all and I can’t begin to express it in any terms that could possibly make sense.
While ‘wingers’ on the left or the right wail about American values, is our leadership doing something tremendously different? Are we at war not only for oil, but for mere business too?
Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a set of thinly veiled warnings to China on Saturday, cautioning that it could risk its share of further gains in Asia’s economic prosperity if it bullied its neighbors over natural resources in contested areas like the South China Sea.
“We should not forget that globalization has permitted our shared rise in wealth over recent decades,” he said. “This achievement rests above all on openness: openness of trade, openness of ideas, and openness of what I would call the ‘common areas,’ whether in the maritime, space or cyber domains.” [story]
“The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America”
The Pornography of Power—why pornography?
Because it’s not the real thing. It’s a trick. It’s like—I liken it to a lap dance. You know, you’re promising something that doesn’t exist. They’re promising security. These defense contractors, lobbyists, politicians, they pretend they’re dealing with real issues in the world, and they’re not. They’re just getting your money, and they’re deceiving you. And at the end of the day, you wonder, how did I end up in this grimy, dangerous place, and forking over ever more money, and it has nothing to do with making me happy. So I use the pornography symbol as example of what they’re doing.
And that’s really what this hijacking of 9/11 is all about. These guys who did the hijacking, what we do know about it is they used $3 implements that you could buy at Home Depot. They didn’t use F-22s, F-35s. They didn’t use subs or anything else. So there’s no enemy in sight. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about was in big trouble. George Bush’s father had cut the defense budget by 30 percent. It was going way down. We were finally going to get a peace dividend. And then they jumped over 9/11. They said, “Wow! This is our new opportunity. Let’s dust off all the ships and planes that are no longer needed, and we’ll build them now.” And we are going deeply into debt to building these things that have absolutely no use.