Signs of a Dying Empire

[Galen]

(10-05-2017, 10:49 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-05-2017, 05:21 AM)Galen Wrote: The petrodollar is what has been keeping the US empire going since 1973 and the middle east wars of the last sixteen years are part of an effort to keep it going.  Once the petrodollar goes down, which looks like it will happen in the next five to ten years, then the US empire goes down with it.  I suggest you read the following two articles which describe the current state fo the empire as well as anything I have seen recently.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2...in-us.html
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2...-gold.html

While the next quote from James Dale Davidson will annoy most of you hear it contains much truth and you would do well to contemplate it.  The cultural equivalence that the SJW crowd believes in is completely absurd.

To deal with the rise of oil as a commodity and the shift of the USA from an exporter of petroleum to an importer, Nixon made his deal: oil would be sold in dollars, in return for the oil-exporting states to buy their imports in dollars. Dollars would represent the wealth that oil-producing states took in and spent on everything from luxury imports to insurance to defensive weapons (the latter subsidized if the country, like the Iran of Shah Reza Pahlavi -- whoops! -- would remain friendly to American economic and political interests). Oil-rich states would buy Mercedes-Benz cars, Sony electronics, or Unilever household goods with US dollars and not Deutschmarks, yen, or pounds sterling. Even the international drug traffickers use US dollars.

You are overlooking a very important detail in all of this.  You would do well to remember that in 1971 France was about to redeem its dollars for gold.  In a very real sense this repudiation of Bretton-Woods was a default on the, by current standards tiny, debt the US government had incurred fighting the Vietnam War and the War on Poverty.  By getting Saudi Arabia to convince OPEC to only sell oil for dollars he created the mechanism by which the US has been exporting inflation to this day.

This also explains why the US government always goes so easy on Saudi Arabia no matter what they do but it also explains why Trump suddenly gives a shit about Venezuela since not long ago they decided not to accept dollars as payment for oil.  This was a reaction to US sanctions but it still represents a step on the road to the dollar not being world reserve currency.  It wouldn't be a surprise if the NSA learned of plans to take this step first and so as a result the sanctions came first as a consequence.