|
| Will the Dollar get an “Arab oil shock”? |
| 07.10.09 14:27 |
Economics |
| Arab oil producing nations and the some world’s largest oil consumers including China and Japan are reliably reported to be secretly planning a long-term exit from pricing their oil trade in dollars. If true, it would spell the death knell for the dollar as world reserve currency and for the USA as global economic power. |
| F. William Engdahl |
| |
|
|
| The Chinese conquer Africa |
| 21.08.09 10:17 |
Asia rising |
| The Chinese are massively expanding their involvement in Africa. They position themselves not as brazen colonizers or debt collectors. They are doing business that the Europeans think is too insignificant. Andthat is why with each passing day their presence grows stronger. |
| Matthias Korfmann, Der Westen |
| |
|
|
| An interview with William Engdahl |
| 04.07.09 23:15 |
Economics |
| Since the end of the Cold War some 18 years ago it has been the prime Washington goal to make Russia and the CIS countries vassal states of a global Dollar Imperium. This is the real significance of the IMF as the agency for Russian and CIS "reform" after 1990. To my mind it was and is a very foolish and very short-sighted policy even from a standpoint of USA best interest. It has backfired badly and at a huge cost in lives and health of hundreds of millions across the world, in Russia, East Europe and including in the United States. Sadly President Obam,a represents no change to this agenda. That can be seen in his choice of Defense and National Security and Intelligence cabinet as well as his economic team. It is all the old guard in new clothes. Given the US economic and financial crisis, the US "Emperor" has no clothes. It like Great Britain after 1914 is an empire in terminal decline, but American elites are in psychological "denial" state. |
| WarAndPeace |
| |
|
|
| Ankara Moscow and Washington in the Eurasian Pipeline Calculus |
| 18.06.09 09:53 |
Economics |
| Calculus has two main variants—derivative and integral. The Eurasian energy pipeline geopolitics between Turkey Washington and Moscow today has elements of both. It is highly derivative in that the major actors across Central Asia from China, Russia to Turkey are very engaged in a derived power game which has less to do with any specific state and more to do with maintaining Superpower hegemony for Washington. Integral as the de facto motion of various pipeline projects now underway or in discussion across Eurasia hold the potential to integrate the economic space of Eurasia in a way that poses a fundamental challenge to Washington’s projection of Full Spectrum Dominance over the greatest land mass on earth. |
| F. William Engdahl |
| |
|
|
| A Tale of Two Diverging Economic Worlds |
| 11.06.09 01:42 |
Economics |
| Increasingly a deep divide within the world of globalization is emerging which will have the most profound significance for the future of G7 nations’ economic and political stability. The divide is between those nations which are still embedded within the dollar system, including countries in the Eurozone, versus those emerging economies—especially the BRIC—Brazil, Russia, India, China—where new economic markets and regions are rapidly replacing their over-dependence on the United States as prime export market and prime source for investment finance. The long-term consequences will be an aggravation of the trend of the United States as a political and economic superpower in terminal decline, while dynamic new economic zones, initially mainly of regional importance, will arise. |
| F. William Engdahl |
| |
|
|
| US Doctors’ association calls for Moratorium on GMO Foods |
| 22.05.09 00:27 |
Americas on the move |
| The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) has just issued a call for an immediate moratorium on Genetically Manipulated (GMO) Foods. In a just-released position paper on GMO foods, the AAEM states that ‘GM foods pose a serious health risk’ and calls for a moratorium on GMO foods. Citing several animal studies, the AAEM concludes ‘there is more than a casual association between GMO foods and adverse health effects’ and that ‘GM foods pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health.’ The report is a devastating blow to the multibillion dollar international agribusiness industry, most especially to Monsanto Corporation, the world’s leading purveyor of GMO seeds and related herbicides. |
| F. William Engdahl |
| |
|
|
| Turkey: Washington’s Geopolitical Pivot |
| 15.04.09 13:13 |
Asia rising |
| The recent visit of US President Obama to Turkey was far more significant than the President’s speech would suggest. For Washington Turkey today has become a geopolitical “pivot state” which is in the position to tilt the Eurasian power equation towards Washington or significantly away from it depending on how Turkey develops its ties with Moscow and its role regarding key energy pipelines. |
| F. William Engdahl |
| |
|
|
| AIG Larry Summers and the Politics of Deflection |
| 18.03.09 16:48 |
Economics |
| Finally US authorities have gotten ‘tough’ with the predator financial institutions. The world has been waiting for such decisive intervention since an unending series of Government bailouts of financial institutions began early in 2008 amounting to now trillions of taxpayer dollars. Now, with the world’s largest insurance giant, AIG, the White House Economic Council chairman, Larry Summers has expressed ‘outrage.’ President Obama himself has entered the fray to promise ‘justice.’ US Senators have threatened a law to change the injustice. The only problem is they are all exercising ‘politics of deflection,’ taking attention away from the real problem, the fraudulent bailout. |
| F. William Engdahl |
| |
|
|
| Is Obama Ready to Drop Missile Defense? |
| 04.03.09 15:06 |
Global Security |
| US President Obama has sent a secret letter to Russia’s president Medvedev, suggesting that he would back down from deploying the controversial US missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help stop Iran from developing long-range weapons, according to White House spokesmen. The New York Times reports that the letter to Medvedev was hand-delivered in Moscow by Under Secretary of State William J. Burns three weeks ago. It reportedly said the United States would not need to proceed with its missile interceptor system, which has been vehemently opposed by Russia since it was proposed by the Bush administration, if Iran halted any efforts to build nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles. |
| F. William Engdahl |
| |
|
|
| Next Wave of Banking Crisis to come from Eastern Europe |
| 20.02.09 18:23 |
Economics |
| European banks face an entirely new wave of losses in coming months not yet calculated in any government bank rescue aid to date. Unlike the losses of US banks which derive initially from their exposures to low-quality sub-prime real estate and other securitized lending, the problems of western European banks, most especially in Austria, Sweden and perhaps Switzerland arise from the massive volumes of loans they made during the 2002-2007 period of extreme low international interest rates to clients in eastern European countries. |
| F. William Engdahl |
| |
|
|
| We are in the midst of the ‘death of neoliberal ideology’ |
| 12.02.09 16:16 |
Americas on the move |
| Not only we are in the midst of the ‘death of neoliberal ideology’. We are seeing the death of the post-1944 Bretton Woods Dollar System, one of the most effective vehicles of economic imperialism ever devised. The US elites made a conscious decision during World War II to cleverly portray themselves as the ‘Good Guys’ in the world, and deny their actual imperial agenda. Their propaganda machine proclaimed America as the ‘defender of freedom, liberty, colonial liberation, free market.’ It was a brilliantly successful strategy until the foundations of the US economy, as a result of their expansion policies globally, began to rot from neglect, as US corporations sought increased profits from cheap labor plants abroad beginning the 1980’s. |
| Interview by Leonid Savin |
| |
|
|
| Ukraine and Georgia: Entry into NATO Put Off Indefinitely |
| 04.12.08 22:07 |
f.USSR |
| NATO ministers in Brussels have decided to ignore US wishes and to delay the admission of Ukraine and of Georgia in effect indefinitely in what the Washington Administration is sheepishly trying to claim is a positive ‘compromise.’ The decision, following EU member state alarm last August over the prospect of European states having to go to war at some point against Russia over an incalculable despot in the Caucasus or in Kiev who decided to provoke Moscow to react, was simply too much. |
| F. William Engdahl |
| |
|
|
| Paulson Panics as UK, Germany find own solution |
| 18.10.08 17:06 |
Americas on the move |
| America’s de facto Finance Czar, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has reached for the panic button and made a dramatic 180-degree reversal of his financial bailout plan passed only days before. On September 23 in testimony before the US Congress, Paulson, former CEO of the politically influential Wall Street investment firm, Goldman Sachs, declared his adamant opposition to the idea of the US Government taking equity stakes in troubled major banks in order to provide them capital and stabilize the frozen interbank trading market. On October 13, that opposition to ‘nationalization’ collapsed. What happened to cause that sudden reverse is what interests us here. It shows the utter lack of coherency in the US financial elites over how to deal with their home-grown securitization of risk fiasco. |
| F. William Engdahl |
| |
|
|
