- 1-9-7The US dollar is still officially the world's reserve
currency, but it cannot purchase the services of Brazilian super model
Gisele Bundchen. Gisele required the $30 million she earned during the
first half of this year to be paid in euros.
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- Gisele is not alone in her forecast of the dollar's fate.
The First Post (UK) reports that Jim Rogers, a former partner of billionaire
George Soros, is selling his home and all possessions in order to convert
all his wealth into Chinese yuan.
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- Meanwhile, American economists continue to preach that
offshoring is good for the US economy and that Bush's war spending is keeping
the economy going. The practitioners of supply and demand have yet to figure
out that the dollar's supply is sinking the dollar's price and along with
it American power.
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- The macho super patriots who support the Bush regime
still haven't caught on that US superpower status rests on the dollar being
the reserve currency, not on a military unable to occupy Baghdad.
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- If the dollar were not the world currency, the US would
have to earn enough foreign currencies to pay for its 737 oversees bases,
an impossibility considering America's $800 billion trade deficit.
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- When the dollar ceases to be the reserve currency, foreigners
will cease to finance the US trade and budget deficits, and the American
Empire along with its wars will disappear overnight.
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- Perhaps Bush will be able to get a World Bank loan, or
maybe one from the "Chavez bank", to bring the troops home from
Iraq and Afghanistan.
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- Foreign leaders, observing that offshoring and war are
accelerating America's relative economic decline, no longer treat the US
with the deference to which Washington is accustomed. Ecuador's president,
Rafael Correa, recently refused Washington's demand to renew the lease
on the Manta air base in Ecuador. He told Washington that the US could
have a base in Ecuador if Ecuador could have a military base in the US.
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- When Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez addressed the UN,
he crossed himself as he stood at the podium. Referring to President Bush,
Chavez said, "Yesterday the devil came here, and it smells of sulfur
still today." Bush, said Chavez, was standing "right here,
talking as if he owned the world."
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- In his state of the nation message last year, Russian
president Vladimir Putin said that Bush's blathering about democracy was
nothing but a cloak for the pursuit of American self-interests at the expense
of other peoples: "We are aware what is going on in the world.
Comrade Wolf knows whom to eat, and he eats without listening, and he's
clearly not going to listen to anyone." In May 2007, Putin criticized
the neocon regime in Washington for "disrespect for human life"
and "claims to global exclusiveness, just as it was in the time of
the Third Reich."
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- Even America's British allies regard President Bush as
a threat to world peace and the second most dangerous man alive. Bush
is edged out in polls by Osama bin Laden, but is regarded as more dangerous
than Iran's demonized president and North Korea's Kim Jong-il.
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- President Bush has achieved his dismal world standing
despite spending $1.6 billion of hard-pressed Americans' tax money on public
relations between 2003 and 2006.
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- Clearly, America's leader and America's currency are
poorly regarded. Is there a solution?
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- Perhaps the answer lies in those 737 overseas bases.
If those bases were brought home and shared among the 50 states, each
state would gain 15 new military bases.
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- Imagine what this would mean: The end of the housing
slump. A reduction in the trade deficit. And the end of the war on terror.
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- Who would dare attack a country with 15 new military
bases in every state in addition to the existing ones? Wherever a terrorist
turned, he would find himself surrounded by soldiers.
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- All of the dollars currently spent abroad to support
737 overseas bases would be spent at home. Income for foreigners would
become income for Americans, and the trade deficit would shrink.
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- The impact of the 737 military base payrolls on the US
economy would end the housing crisis and bring back the 140,000 highly
paid financial services jobs, the loss of which this year has cost the
US $42 billion in consumer income. Foreclosures and bankruptcies would
plummet.
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- If this isn't enough to turn the dollar around, President
Bush's pledge not to appoint an Attorney General if Michael Mukasey is
not confirmed offers more promise. If the Democrats will defeat Mukasey's
nomination, there are other superfluous cabinet departments that can be
closed down in addition to the US Department of Torture and Indefinite
Detention.
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- The American empire is being unwound on the battlefields
of Iraq and Afghanistan. The year is two months from being over, but already
in 2007, despite the touted "surge," deaths of US soldiers are
the highest of any year of the war.
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- The Taliban are the ones who are surging. They have taken
control of a third district in Western Afghanistan. Turkey and the Kurds
are on the verge of turning northern Iraq into a new war zone, another
demonstration of American impotence.
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- Bush's wars have endangered America's puppet regimes.
Bush's Pakistani puppet, Musharraf, is fighting for his life. By resorting
to "emergency rule" and oppressive measures, Musharraf has intensified
his opposition. When Musharraf falls, thanks to Bush, the Islamists will
have nukes.
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- American generals used to say that the wars Bush started
in the Middle East would take 10 years to win. On Oct. 31 General John
Abizaid, former commander of US forces in the Middle East, put paid to
that optimistic forecast. Speaking at Carnegie Mellon University, Gen.
Abizaid said it would be 50 years before US troops can leave the Middle
East.
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- There is no possibility of the US remaining the Middle
East for a half century. The dollar and US power are already on their
last legs, unbeknownst to Democratic leaders Pelosi and Reid who are preparing
yet another blank check for Bush's latest request for $200 billion in supplementary
war funding.
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- There isn't any money with which to fund Bush's lost
war. It will have to be borrowed from China.
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- The Romans brought on their own demise, but it took them
centuries. Bush has finished America in a mere 7 years.
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- Even as Gisele throws off the dollar's hegemony, Brazil,
Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Columbia
are declaring independence of the IMF and World Bank, instruments of US
financial hegemony, by creating their own development bank, thus bringing
to an end US suzerainty over South America.
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- An empire that has lost its backyard is finished.
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- c. 2007 Creators Syndicate, Inc
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- Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side
Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation
and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is
the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions
: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the
Name of Justice.
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