The End Is Near

Chris Hedges' - The American Empire Is Bankrupt

HEDGES: There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”

It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.

I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony.” “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.”

“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia.

---- In 2005 the US, along with Pakistan, India, Iran, and Mongolia, asked for "observer status" - the US was denied. If I didn't know better I would have thought the US asked to attend this year's party but was "denied admittance." SCO membership: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, or basically the same ol' cold war Russia/China alliance.

Another noteworthy event to be held in Yekaterinburg, is the first BRIC meeting (Britain-Russia-India-China), June 16, and to cover issues including the world situation, a global financial system, the financial crisis, energy cooperation and environmental protection. Or ... how world leaders will transition to a global system where a tiny, tiny fraction of the human population will rule over the remaining 6 billion or so little people, and we will call it global cooperation. SCO is merely one bloc of the kumbayah campfire club. I call it the Rodney King Globalization/Can We All Git Along. And those who cannot git along will git their butts kicked.

Hedges believes the US will resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe - both suffered hyperinflation, one of course gave rise to Hitler. That's clever of Hedges, evoking Hitler without actually using the name Hitler.

This bankruptcy in turn will trigger "rage, hate crimes" and "engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class" who apparently Hedges believes are quite an ignorant class for they will act out, demand "vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal" which will be imposed by the likes of Bible bangers and Fox News.

There's the subtle hint that these bewildered lower class folks will turn on one another with a vengeance - "hate crimes". Race-based. Obviously Hedges has no idea that down here in the 'hood, the trailers, the projects, the shanties, the blue collar tracts, and even the mostly white suburbs - there be a lot of race mixin'. Guys like the 88-year-old thug who gunned down a guard at the museum are few and far between, and even his family disown him.

I've disliked Hedges since his asinine article in 2007, Accustomed to Their Own Atrocities in Iraq, U.S. Soldiers Have Become Murderers. All his work is asinine though.

Hedges also states in the article above : The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency.

Ummmm, suggesting the use of IMF SDR? Would that be the same IMF that Barry O. wants to give a $100+ billion bailout? So ... lemme see ... we are going to fund our own dollar demise?

China "frantically spending its dollar reserves around the world" to unload US currency? Got a link? Because to my non-expert mindset, and reading, China itself has dropped from double digit growth to single digit in the last couple of years, even while spending massive amounts internally on factories and property, etc. According to Gordon Chang's book The Coming Collapse of China ... "There will be a time when China runs out of money to pump into the system."

Beijing spending those dollars to keep China afloat?

Chang also argues that "... the Chinese people are tired of their overtly regulated lives, dictated by a microscopic minority and enforced by crude coercion..."

Running out of money, regulated lives enforced by crude coercion - which is quite similar to where most of the world stands today.

But it makes me wonder, why do writers like Hedges directly or indirectly suggest the US is the world's problem child, when frankly all world powers have built their strength on the backs of their own and other nation's people. Why do these writers push the warm-fuzzy notion of a "multipolar" world where, if the US would just get out of the way, we could all get along.

The ruling class are not suggesting anything new with multipolarity - they want one umbrella to cover several centers of power dictated to by a few acronyms - the "all git along" policy, until the next butt kicking. Nothing new or unique; it's been used by kingdoms and empires since day 1.