As a continuation to my comment, one should read Mike Whitney's Doomsday for the Greenback

Quote:
 America's capital is not in Washington DC. In fact, it is not geographic location at all. It is the greenback, the epicenter of the global rule. The dollar is the cornerstone upon which the mighty pillars of empire rest.

At the same time, the greenback is the greatest swindle in human history; a worthless scrap of paper buried beneath a mountain of debt.

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 At present, the greenback serves as the world's reserve currency, the main medium of exchange. This allows the US to pile up enormous debt while avoiding the pitfalls of skyrocketing interest rates or hyper-inflation. The $2 billion of borrowed wealth that props up the faltering empire every day comes primarily from the exporting powerhouses Japan and China.

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 The empire requires a steady diet of petrodollars to maintain its gluttonous appetite for debt. If the oil-producing nations switch to euros, the dollar would freefall like a wingless gull and America would be trapped in a bottomless vat of red ink.

America's prodigious debt has made the war for the world's remaining resources an existential struggle. A retreat from Iraq is no longer possible. If America's debt is not propped up with oil reserves the anemic dollar will crumble with the economy following right behind.

"We don't seek empires. We're not imperialistic. We never have been. I can't imagine why you'd even ask the question." Donald Rumsfeld, questioned by an al-Jazeera correspondent, April 29, 2003.

"No one can now doubt the word of America," George W. Bush, State of the Union, January 20, 2004.

empirenotes.com

The simpler solution, which would solve the problem, is to stop trading in US $ and trade only in the local currency.

Yes, the above is right but then that's why the US invaded, to keep the world from trading oil in anything but $'s.

See -Israel to bomb Iran before the Oil Bourse opens March 2006.

I know Robert Mabro and his is a valuable voice to listen to on Iraq, and on oil in general. He has been involved with Iraqi children's charities for many years. As a native speaker of Arabic and very well connected oil researcher, he has access to a great deal of inside information. I hope he choses to express his opinions publicly more often.

Is there ever a good time for this?  IOW, if not now, when?

Iraqis are also plagued by shortages, because the subsidized fuel is smuggled elsewhere for profit.  It's also over-used.  Just cutting those two things will eliminate the smuggling and make supplies far more reliable, eliminating a huge tax on people's time.

Maybe minor to you, but not to a lot of Iraqi people:

"Millions of other Iraqis live in poverty, relying on food handouts from the government. About a fourth of all Iraqi households subsist on less than $1 a day."

Eat this; less than $1 a day and bread is going up 15%.......

This is the way modern Empire works boys and girls.  The "jackals" (last paragraph of the quote below) failed to assassinate Saddam so they had to send in US boys and girls.  After the regime is toppled and a puppet government installed the debt austerity programs begin from the IMF.  After the new "leaders" sign the country into loans that a known in advance can never be repaid the developed countries then begin to extract all the resource wealth from the country while poverty and unemployment soars for all the Iraqis.  The money loaned never even makes it to Iraq.  It is transferred to the coffers of American contractors and engineers that win massive contracts to "rebuild" like Bechtel, Halliburton, Kellogg and Root etc etc.  It's a beautiful system of modern Empire.  To get the full scoop try reading "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" http://tinyurl.com/bothz .  It makes you feel all warm inside about what our country is involved in to preserve the "American way of life".  This includes the wholesale slaughter of millions in less developed countries (LDC) that will never be developed and never were planned to be developed no matter how much "money" the IMF loans. The arming of "freedom fighters", by the US and other DC(Developed Countries), to commit acts of genocide against indigenous populations that may try to resist the wholesale destruction of their country and its environment.   It is easy to deny it is happening even though you are watching this one in Iraq real time.  This entire fucking country is in denial...
=AC

IMF approves $685 million Iraq loan
By Robert Schroeder, MarketWatch
Last Update: 3:01 PM ET Dec. 23, 2005   http://tinyurl.com/b3uf8

=======

<<Snips From the Prologue of EHM>>
"That is what we EHMs do best: we build a global empire. We are an elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks. Like our counterparts in the Mafia, EHMs provide favors. These take the form of loans to develop infrastructure--electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industrial parks. A condition of such loans is that engineering and construction companies from our own country must build all these projects. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco.

Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest. If an EHM is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal. Of course, the debtor still owes us the money--and another country is added to our global empire."

 Outside the window of my Outback, great clouds of mist rolled in from the forests and up the Pastaza's canyons. Sweat soaked my shirt, and my stomach began to churn, but not just from the intense tropical heat and the serpentine twists in the road. Knowing the part I had played in destroying this beautiful country was once again taking its toll. Because of my fellow EHMs and me, Ecuador is in far worse shape today than she was before we introduced her to the miracles of modern economics, banking, and engineering. Since 1970, during this period known euphemistically as the Oil Boom, the official poverty level grew from 50 to 70 percent, under- or unemployment increased from 15 to 70 percent, and public debt increased from $240 million to $16 billion. Meanwhile, the share of national resources allocated to the poorest segments of the population declined from 20 to 6 percent.

Unfortunately, Ecuador is not the exception. Nearly every country we EHMs have brought under the global empire's umbrella has suffered a similar fate. Third world debt has grown to more than $2.5 trillion, and the cost of servicing it--over $375 billion per year as of 2004--is more than all third world spending on health and education, and twenty times what developing countries receive annually in foreign aid. Over half the people in the world survive on less than two dollars per day, which is roughly the same amount they received in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent of third world households accounts for 70 to 90 percent of all private financial wealth and real estate ownership in their country; the actual percentage depends on the specific country.

Ecuador is typical of countries around the world that EHMs have brought into the economic-political fold. For every $100 of crude taken out of the Ecuadorian rain forests, the oil companies receive $75. Of the remaining $25, three-quarters must go to paying off the foreign debt. Most of the remainder covers military and other government expenses--which leaves about $2.50 for health, education, and programs aimed at helping the poor. Thus, out of every $100 worth of oil torn from the Amazon, less than $3 goes to the people who need the money most, those whose lives have been so adversely impacted by the dams, the drilling, and the pipelines, and who are dying from lack of edible food and potable water.

The subtlety of this modern empire building puts the Roman centurions, the Spanish conquistadors, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonial powers to shame. We EHMs are crafty; we learned from history. Today we do not carry swords. We do not wear armor or clothes that set us apart. In countries like Ecuador, Nigeria, and Indonesia, we dress like local schoolteachers and shop owners. In Washington and Paris, we look like government bureaucrats and bankers. We appear humble, normal. We visit project sites and stroll through impoverished villages. We profess altruism, talk with local papers about the wonderful humanitarian things we are doing. We cover the conference tables of government committees with our spreadsheets and financial projections, and we lecture at the Harvard Business School about the miracles of macroeconomics. We are on the record, in the open. Or so we portray ourselves and so are we accepted. It is how the system works. We seldom resort to anything illegal because the system itself is built on subterfuge, and the system is by definition legitimate.

However--and this is a very large caveat--if we fail, an even more sinister breed steps in, ones we EHMs refer to as the jackals, men who trace their heritage directly to those earlier empires. The jackals are always there, lurking in the shadows. When they emerge, heads of state are overthrown or die in violent "accidents." And if by chance the jackals fail, as they failed in Afghanistan and Iraq, then the old models resurface. When the jackals fail, young Americans are sent in to kill and to die."
http://tinyurl.com/a3l5s

I would be watching for the leading clerics of those two districts to be gunned down or mysteriously die in car bombings...

==AC

"And of course, there is nothing to prevent TPTB from doing to the American people what they have done to the rest of the world, should the opportunity arrise."

No doubt there Twilight!!  This country is being dismantled and shipped away piece by piece.  When the debt bubble goes and the global economy deflates the US will amount to nothing more than one of the third world countries that it helped to create.  Except the US will have little of its own energy resources to build upon.  Just another cheap labor pool for TPTB to exploit...

==AC