tom moody
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From
Paul Craig Roberts, a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury (under Reagan):
Readers keep asking if Bush is attacking Iran because it plans to open an oil bourse that would permit oil to trade in Euros. A number of readers mistakenly believe that this would wreck the dollar's value.
The answer is no.
The neocons' plans for the Middle East predate any notion of an Iranian oil bourse.
Will an Iranian oil bourse hurt the dollar? Not really.
The dollar's value depends on the world's willingness to hold dollar denominated assets, not on the currency used to pay oil bills. If payments were not made in dollars, there could be a slight negative impact on the dollar from countries reducing their dollar cash balances and from the psychological shock of pricing oil in Euros (or some other currency). However, what really counts is what do the oil producers, for example, do with the currency that they are paid. If they are paid in dollars, but exchange the dollars for Euros or Yen and purchase equities or bonds or real estate in Europe and Japan, it doesn't help that oil is billed in dollars. Or if they are paid in Euros but exchange the Euros for dollars and purchase US assets, it doesn't hurt that the oil is billed in Euros.
The negative impact on the dollar will be far greater from the additional red ink necessary to finance an attack on Iran than from an oil bourse. Today, US war-making capability is dependent on the rest of the world to finance it.
Oil is billed in dollars because the dollar is the world reserve currency. The dollar is not the reserve currency because oil is billed in dollars. The US is abusing the dollar's role as reserve currency. When a trusted alternative appears, the dollar is likely to lose its reserve currency role. Iran, however, cannot cause that transition.
Not sure I agree with all of that, but wanted to post it since I've been following this story. When you see scare stories about Iran, though, please do disregard them as neocon propaganda. We really don't need another losing war from those creeps.
This is from
Salon. Ex-FEMA head Michael Brown is a whiner, but his Senate testimony certainly lends credibility to the idea that "strong leader" George Bush left a major American city to drown:
Brownie turns the tables
George W. Bush and his homeland security chief are learning one of life's little lessons today: Hell hath no fury like a FEMA director scorned.
In testimony before the Senate today, Michael Brown said that he has been made a "scapegoat" for the federal government's flawed response to Katrina -- and that the real culprits are Michael Chertoff, the Department of Homeland Security and the White House itself. Brown said that "policies implemented by the DHS put FEMA on a path to failure" long before Katrina struck New Orleans. Once the storm hit and the levees failed, Brown said, Chertoff's DHS "saw an opportunity to assert itself, as it always tried to do in FEMA operations, which slowed things down."
Brown said that he called the Bush compound in Crawford, Texas, on the night that Katrina struck to inform the White House that levees had broken and water was flooding into New Orleans. He said he spoke with Deputy White House Chief of Staff Joseph Hagin and that he told him that "our worst nightmares" seemed to be coming true. The next morning, Bush left Crawford for San Diego, where he made brief comments about Katrina before delivering prepared remarks in which he compared the war in Iraq to World War II.
Brown says that White House Chief of Staff Andy Card rebuffed his efforts to solicit more help from the White House, ordering him to work through the "chain of command" instead. That chain ran through Chertoff and the DHS bureaucracy, Brown said. "We've done a great job as Republicans of establishing more and more bureaucracy," Brown told Maine Sen. Susan Collins.
Brown said that he cried in his hotel room during the early days of Katrina, frustrated by the failure of the federal government to deliver the help he knew it was capable of providing. Asked whether the Bush administration was making him the fall guy for Katrina, Brown said, "I certainly feel abandoned." As for the president, Brown said: "Unfortunately, he called me 'Brownie' at the wrong time. Thanks a lot, sir."
