Among all the egg cups and whisks I packed in the tea cartons to come to Colombo, I managed to sneak in a couple of books – wisely assuming that as a new housewife I would have some time on my hands to read.

And then some.

I’ve made my way through Philip Roth’s second Zuckerman trilogy (slightly ashamed that I’ve never read any Roth before), devoured Jung Chang’s book on Chairman Mao and tried to make some sense of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court Of The Red Tsar… but by chapter ten of the latter I’d had enough of dolally dictators and their awfully strange habits. I managed to sneak Robert Fisk’s 1,000-page tome, The Great War For Civilisation into one of the tea cartons but I can’t quite find the will to start it – I’m waiting for a rainy day or a bad dose of the flu (though apparently H1N1 has hit Sri Lanka, so you never know…)

Fearing that I would have to start re-reading back issues of the Husband’s Economist or – heaven forbid – the local newspapers, I stocked up on some books when I was back in the UK in October – one of which was Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. An awesomely written crime novel (though it does bang on a bit in places), it was the first in the trilogy written by the Swede Larsson, who sadly died before the books hit the big time. If you’re looking for a good present for someone this Christmas, or need something to get you through the family festivities, then this is it. (I did order the second book from the lovely Lawrence who runs one of the bookshops out here, but it’s currently stuck somewhere in India, so I’m going to have to wait until December for my next installment.)

Keeping to the Swedish theme, I managed to find Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck detective series collecting dust on a shelf in one of the bookshops out here. There was a piece in the Guardian about Sjöwall last week so I’m expecting great things. Will let you know how I get on.

Today, at Strike the Root, I posted an article by Jonathan Cook at The Electronic Intifada of an Israeli judge’s “historic ruling… when he decided that an Arab teenager needed ‘protection’ from the justice system and ordered that he not be convicted despite being found guilty of throwing stones at a police car during a protest against Israel’s attack last winter on Gaza”. Judge Yuval Shadmi wrote in the verdict: “I will say that the state is not authorized to caress with one hand the Jewish ‘ideological’ felons, and flog with its other hand the Arab ‘ideological’ felons.” Robert Fisk, in a recent lecture, discussed the propaganda efforts in the West that refute the e-mails I’ve received from those outraged by the judge’s ruling (2:13):

Robert Fisk discusses why he continues to cover the ‘great human tragedy’ of the Middle East from Beirut, the ‘irrelevance’ of Osama bin Laden, President Obama’s ‘impotence’ being worse for the Middle East than George W. Bush and his Nobel Peace Prize (5:25):

Een korte maar heldere en niet te ontkennen visie op wat oorlog in essentie is: Robert Fisk

Slechts twee quotes:

“We gift the dead with qualities they would never have wished to have like ‘they gave their lives’. Very few people give their lives. Most people desperately want to live and they pray to live and their families pray that they will live. They didn’t sacrifice themselves.”

“When you have never been in a war, you think it’s about victory or defeat. Which is the Hollywood-version: ‘We won or we lost.’ It’s actually about the total failure of the human spirit. It’s primarily about death. It’s about that, the bones underneath us now. That’s what war is about.”

Dit stukje legt de absurditeit ervan ook bloot. Wie bij de laatste seconden niet even slikt, …

Don’t send 40,000 more troops. Send 40,000 doctors and teachers

Robert Fisk, Dublin, November 5th 2009

As in Vietnam, Karzai is going to rule over an equally tiny island of corruption

Robert Fisk, The Independent/UK, November 4, 2009

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I came across the following article written by Robert Fisk on the rights of journalists and freedom of speech in Lebanon. As an aspiring journalist myself, this raises a lot of concerns. Please feel free to comment.

Robert Fisk: End of an era for Lebanon’s free press

Once a bastion of journalistic independence, Beirut’s newspapers are losing their edge

From The Independent

By Robert Fisk

For decades, Lebanese journalism has been applauded as the freest, most outspoken and most literate in the heavily censored Arab world. Alas, no more. Beirut’s best-read daily has just shed more than 50 staff and LBC, one of the country’s best-known television stations, has just fired three of its most prominent presenters. The Lebanese media are being hit – like the rest of the world – by the internet and falling advertising revenues. But this is Lebanon, where politics is always involved. Is something rotten in the state of the Lebanese press?

Is it by chance that An Nahar’s culture editor – whose supplement campaigned against assassinated prime minister Rafiq Hariri’s plans for rebuilding downtown Beirut – has been fired after the paper cosied up to the politics of Hariri’s son Saad, now the Lebanese prime minister designate? Is it a coincidence that the three senior presenters on LBC represented the last supporters of the old Lebanese Forces (of civil war infamy) still working at the channel?

Neither An Nahar nor LBC are saying anything. But the Lebanese are waiting to find out which of their more than 20 dailies will be the next to shed staff for “economic reasons”. Will the old lefty As Safir find that it has politically recalcitrant staff (unlikely) or will the lovely French-language daily L’Orient Le Jour – whose 18th century French is Royalist rather than Republican – have a battle with those writers who still love ex-General Michel Aoun, Maronite Christian ally of the Hizbollah?

The problem is not so much the politics of Lebanon but the feudal state of the press. You cannot start a newspaper in Beirut – you have to buy an existing title from someone else. This costs money. So the rich own newspapers. Not much different, you may say, from the rest of the world. But the system in Lebanon is archaic; there are families in Beirut who own newspapers but don’t publish them – they are still waiting for a buyer.

As Elias Khoury, the sacked culture editor of An Nahar, a prize-winning novelist and academic and one of 53 men and women fired by the paper, puts it: “Newspaper owners were originally journalists – and with capitalism, the system did not change. Television in this country are not the press – they are propaganda, owned by confessional groups or parties. It’s the papers that are real journalism.”

But “real” journalism is sometimes hard to come by. When the Syrian army was still in Lebanon, An Nahar was as careful as the rest of the press in making sure than no boats got rocked. Indeed, when the Syrian military first arrived in Beirut in 1976, its offices were raided – to make sure that its journalists realised that they would have to be as compliant as their colleagues on Al-Baath and Tichrin, those titans of Baathist journalism across the mountains in Damascus.

But, along with As Safir, An-Nahar had an edge about it. It poached a wonderful analyst called Jihad Zein from As Safir, and under boss Ghassan Tueni it upheld independent journalism. “Tueni offered me the cultural supplement,” Khoury says, “and if he was still in control, none of this would have happened.” It is now his granddaughter Nayla who is in charge. Along with Khoury, Edmund Saab, co-editor in chief, Saha Bahasin and Georges Nassif also lost their jobs. They were told to collect their dismissal notes from a Lebanese postal official on the pavement outside the paper’s central Beirut office.

“One journalist came to work at 6pm on a Friday – when the postman had left,” Khoury adds. “He worked the Friday night and on Saturday and Sunday – and read in our rival paper on Monday that he had been fired! This reveals things about our work and about Beirut. The formula that our supplement is independent – that we can say what we want – is no longer acceptable. I didn’t fit. My supplement campaigned against Solidere [in which Rafiq Hariri held 10 per cent of the shares] and we got journalists and architects to write about how the company was destroying Ottoman Beirut and saving only the French colonial buildings. No-one stopped us. I could play the role of a leftist intellectual.”

No more. Nayla Tueni’s involvement in the majority March 14th movement, led by Hariri’s son Saad – who himself runs a rather dull daily called Al-Mustaqbal – means An Nahar has taken on a distinctly pro-government flavour.

At the same time, LBC has dismissed three of its best-known journalists, apparently because they were the final remnant of the Lebanese Forces on the channel. Diamond Rahme Geagea, Denise Fakhry and Vera Abu Munsif were sacked along with dozens of fellow staff members, including one woman who was six months’ pregnant, a fact which would normally make her un-dismissable under Lebanese law. Even the Christian Maronite patriarch, Nasrallah Sfeir, has expressed his concern.

The Lebanese journalists’ union has no mandate to help unemployed writers. “Who protects the rights of journalists?” L’Orient Le Jour asked last week. In Lebanon, it seems, the answer is no one.

Russia’s prime minister says it and China ‘is ready to consider using the Russian and Chinese national currencies instead of the dollar in bilateral oil and gas dealings’, Ria Novosti reports.

17 Oct 09 | Washington’s Blog

After The Independent reported that Middle Eastern oil producers, plus China, Japan and France have all agreed to start trading oil using a basket of currencies—instead of the dollar—starting in 9 years, spokesmen for those governments denied it.

The Independent’s reporter explained why the governments were denying the rumor.

But now the governments themselves are starting to admit that they are switching out of the dollar.

For example, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Russia is ready to consider using the Russian and Chinese national currencies instead of the dollar in bilateral oil and gas dealings. As Russia’s newspaper RIA Novosti writes:

Russia is ready to consider using the Russian and Chinese national currencies instead of the dollar in bilateral oil and gas dealings, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday.

The premier, currently on a visit to Beijing, said a final decision on the issue can only be made after a thorough expert analysis.

“Yesterday, energy companies, in particular Gazprom, raised the question of using the national currency. We are ready to examine the possibility of selling energy resources for rubles, but our Chinese partners need rubles for that. We are also ready to sell for yuans,” Putin said.

And Iran’s Press TV reports that Iran wants to completely drop the dollar from its foreign exchange:

Since October 2007, Iran has received 85 percent of its oil revenues in currencies other than the US dollar and Tehran is determined to find a substitute for the US dollar for the rest of its 15 percent of oil revenues, the report added.

This story is confirmed by the Tehran Times, which notes:

In line with this plan, Iran has informed Japan that it should use the yen instead of dollars to pay for the oil it buys from the Islamic Republic.

In addition, Iran has decided to open a bourse for oil and gas transactions in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, especially the euro.

As I have repeatedly noted, many countries have been moving out of the dollar for years. The process is simply accelerating.

RELATED:

• Iran Replaces All Dollar Holdings With Euros
• Russian President Calls for the End of Dollar Hegemony
• Dollar Hits All-Time Low Facing Rational ‘Demise’
• Gold Hits Another Record-High, Dollar Hits New Low

This morning, gold hit a new high nearing $1,070/oz. showing the  U.S. dollar ‘reaching a breaking point’ as it hits another new 14-month low.

Reuters reports gold hit $1,069.70 per ounce, topping the record set October 8 at $1,060.60, as–Moming Zhou reports at MarketWatch–”crude climbed to a seven-week high, increasing gold’s appeal as a hedge against a weaker currency and possible inflation”. This comes a week after Robert Fisk reported at The Independent that Arab oil powers in the Gulf are conspiring “to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council (G.C.C.)”.

“Central banks flush with record reserves are increasingly snubbing dollars in favor of euros and yen, further pressuring the greenback after its biggest two- quarter rout in almost two decades,” Ye Xie and Anchalee Worrachate reported at Bloomberg in an article Monday titled, “Dollar Reaches Breaking Point as Banks Shift Reserves”:

World leaders are acting on threats to dump the dollar while the Obama administration shows a willingness to tolerate a weaker currency in an effort to boost exports and the economy as long as it doesn’t drive away the nation’s creditors. The diversification signals that the currency won’t rebound anytime soon after losing 10.3 percent on a trade-weighted basis the past six months, the biggest drop since 1991.

“Global central banks are getting more serious about diversification, whereas in the past they used to just talk about it,” said Steven Englander, a former Federal Reserve researcher who is now the chief U.S. currency strategist at Barclays in New York. “It looks like they are really backing away from the dollar.”

The dollar’s 37 percent share of new reserves fell from about a 63 percent average since 1999. Englander concluded in a report that the trend “accelerated” in the third quarter. He said in an interview that “for the next couple of months, the forces are still in place” for continued diversification.

America’s currency has been under siege as the Treasury sells a record amount of debt to finance a budget deficit that totaled $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2009 ended Sept. 30….

Foreign companies and officials are starting to say their economies are getting hurt because of the dollar’s weakness….

“The diversification out of the dollar will accelerate,” said Fabrizio Fiorini, a money manager who helps oversee $12 billion at Aletti Gestielle SGR SpA in Milan. “People are buying the euro not because they want that currency, but because they want to get rid of the dollar. In the long run, the U.S. will not be the same powerful country that it once was.”…

The dollar’s reduced share of new reserves is also a reflection of U.S. assets’ lagging performance as the country struggles to recover from the worst recession since World War II.

What’s seldom mention is that this “worst recession since World War II” was caused by the policies which continue to kill the dollar. The demise of the dollar has been underplayed in the statistics via diplomatic efforts to conspire the artificial propping up of the U.S. dollar and other fiat currencies’ near-term image:

Developing countries have likely sold about $30 billion for euros, yen and other currencies each month since March, according to strategists at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch.

That helped reduce the dollar’s weight at central banks that report currency holdings to 62.8 percent as of June 30, the lowest on record, the latest International Monetary Fund data show. The quarter’s 2.2 percentage point decline was the biggest since falling 2.5 percentage points to 69.1 percent in the period ended June 30, 2002….

Central bank diversification is helping push the relative worth of the euro and the yen above what differences in interest rates, cost of living and other data indicate they should be. The euro is 16 percent more expensive than its fair value of $1.22, according to economic models used by Credit Suisse Group AG. Morgan Stanley says the yen is 10 percent overvalued.

Low interest rates have artificially propped up demand for the U.S. dollar. “The world is currently flush with the U.S. dollar, which is available at no cost,” Christoph Kind, who helps manage $20 billion as head of asset allocation at Frankfurt Trust in Germany, told Bloomberg.

That which is free will get snatched up, but the artificial abundance–inflation–will speed up the dollar demise. An intrinsically worthless dollar is only valued by its scarcity.

UPDATE:

Gerard Lyons, chief economist and group head of global research at Standard Chartered Bank in London, called the U.S. dollar a “ticking time-bomb” in his discussing the BRIC Alliance to end dollar hegemony with RT today (3:05):

Fisk offers the most interesting reflection I’ve read this weekend on the Nobel sham:

His Middle East policy is collapsing. The Israelis have taunted him by ignoring his demand for an end to settlement-building and by continuing to build their colonies on Arab land. His special envoy is bluntly told by the Israelis that an Arab-Israel peace will take “many years”. Now he wants the Palestinians to talk peace to Israel without conditions. He put pressure on the Palestinian leader to throw away the opportunity of international scrutiny of UN Judge Goldstone’s damning indictment of Israeli war crimes in Gaza while his Assistant Secretary of State said that the Goldstone report was “seriously flawed”. After breaking his pre-election promise to call the 1915 Armenian massacres by Ottoman Turkey a genocide, he has urged the Armenians to sign a treaty with Turkey, again “without pre-conditions”. His army is still facing an insurgency in Iraq. He cannot decide how to win “his” war in Afghanistan. I shall not mention Iran.

And now President Barack Obama has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. After only eight months in office. Not bad. No wonder he said he was “humbled” when told the news. He should have felt humiliated. But perhaps weakness becomes a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Shimon Peres won it, too, and he never won an Israeli election. Yasser Arafat won it. And look what happened to him. For the first time in history, the Norwegian Nobel committee awarded its peace prize to a man who has achieved nothing – in the faint hope that he will do something good in the future. That’s how bad things are. That’s how explosive the Middle East has become.

Isn’t there anyone in the White House to remind Mr Obama that the Israelis have never obliged a US president who asked for an end to the building of colonies for Jews – and Jews only – on Arab land? Bill Clinton demanded this – it was written into the Oslo accords – and the Israelis ignored him. George W Bush demanded an end to the fighting in Jenin nine years ago. The Israelis ignored him. Mr Obama demands a total end to all settlement construction. “They just don’t get it, do they?” an Israeli minister – apparently Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – was reported to have said when the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, reiterated her president’s words. That’s what Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s crackpot foreign minister – he’s not as much a crackpot as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but he’s getting close – said again on Thursday. “Whoever says it’s possible to reach in the coming years a comprehensive agreement,” he announced before meeting Mr Obama’s benighted and elderly envoy George Mitchell, “… simply doesn’t understand the reality.”

Across Arabia, needless to say, the Arab potentates continue to shake with fear in their golden minarets. That great Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir – murdered in 2005, quite possibly by Mr Obama’s new-found Syrian chums – put it well in one of his last essays. “Undeterred by Egypt since Sadat’s peace,” he wrote, “convinced of America’s unfailing support, guaranteed moral impunity by Europe’s bad conscience, and backed by a nuclear arsenal that was acquired with the help of Western powers, and that keeps growing without exciting any comment from the international community, Israel can literally do anything it wants, or is prompted to do by its leaders’ fantasies of domination.”

So Israel is getting away with it as usual, abusing the distinguished (and Jewish) head of the UN inquiry into Gaza war crimes – which also blamed Hamas – while joining the Americans in further disgracing the craven Palestinian Authority “President” Mahmoud Abbas, who is more interested in maintaining his relations with Washington than with his own Palestinian people. He’s even gone back on his word to refuse peace talks until Israel’s colonial expansion comes to an end. In a single devastating sentence, that usually mild Jordanian commentator Rami Khouri noted last week that Mr Abbas is “a tragic shell of a man, hollow, politically impotent, backed and respected by nobody”. I put “President” Abbas into quotation marks since he now has Mr Ahmadinejad’s status in the eyes of his people. Hamas is delighted. Thanks to President Obama.

Oddly, Mr Obama is also humiliating the Armenian president, Serg Sarkisian, by insisting that he talks to his Turkish adversaries without conditions. In the West Bank, you have to forget the Jewish colonies. In Armenia, you have to forget the Turkish murder of one and a half million Armenians in 1915. Mr Obama refused to honour his pre-election promise to recognise the 20th century’s first holocaust as a genocide. But if he can’t handle the First World War, how can he handle World War Three?

Mr Obama advertised the Afghanistan conflict as the war America had to fight – not that anarchic land of Mesopotamia which Mr Bush rashly invaded. He’d forgotten that Afghanistan was another Bush war; and he even announced that Pakistan was now America’s war, too. The White House produced its “Afpak” soundbite. And the drones came in droves over the old Durand Line, to kill the Taliban and a host of innocent civilians. Should Mr Obama concentrate on al-Qa’ida? Or yield to General Stanley McChrystal’s Vietnam-style demand for 40,000 more troops? The White House shows the two of them sitting opposite each other, Mr Obama in the smoothie suite, McChrystal in his battledress. The rabbit and the hare.

No way are they going to win. The neocons say that “the graveyard of empire” is a cliché. It is. But it’s also true. The Afghan government is totally corrupted; its paid warlords – paid by Karzai and the Americans – ramp up the drugs trade and the fear of Afghan civilians. But it’s much bigger than this.

The Indian embassy was bombed again last week. Has Mr Obama any idea why? Does he realise that Washington’s decision to support India against Pakistan over Kashmir – symbolised by his appointment of Richard Holbrooke as envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan but with no remit to discuss divided Kashmir – enraged Pakistan. He may want India to balance the power of China (some hope!) but Pakistan’s military intelligence realises that the only way of persuading Mr Obama to act fairly over Kashmir – recognising Pakistan’s claims as well as India’s – is to increase their support for the Taliban. No justice in Kashmir, no security for US troops – or the Indian embassy – in Afghanistan.

Then, after stroking the Iranian pussycat at the Geneva nuclear talks, the US president discovered that the feline was showing its claws again at the end of last week. A Revolutionary Guard commander, an adviser to Supreme Leader Khamenei, warned that Iran would “blow up the heart” of Israel if Israel or the US attacked the Islamic Republic. I doubt it. Blow up Israel and you blow up “Palestine”. Iranians – who understand the West much better than we understand them – have another policy in the case of the apocalypse. If the Israelis attack, they may leave Israel alone. They have a plan, I’m told, to target instead only US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their bases in the Gulf and their warships cruising through Hormuz. They would leave Israel alone. Americans would then learn the price of kneeling before their Israeli masters.

For the Iranians know that the US has no stomach for a third war in the Middle East. Which is why Mr Obama has been sending his generals thick and fast to the defence ministry in Tel Aviv to tell the Israelis not to strike at Iran. And why Israel’s leaders – including Mr Netanyahu – were blowing the peace pipe all week about the need for international negotiations with Iran. But it raises an interesting question. Is Mr Obama more frightened of Iran’s retaliation? Or of its nuclear capabilities? Or more terrified of Israel’s possible aggression against Iran?

But, please, no attacks on 10 December. That’s when Barack Obama turns up in Oslo to pocket his peace prize – for achievements he has not yet achieved and for dreams that will turn into nightmares.

[Source: The Independent]

Another thought provoking and interesting article by  Robert Fisk. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-does-life-in-the-middle-east-remain-rooted-in-the-middle-ages-1763252.html

Secret plan to undermine US dollar by Robert Fisk

Roundup: Kerry-Boxer climate bill reactions from Grist

Roundup: Patriot Act vote reactions from EFF

Obama stalls telecom immunity lobbying records FOIA, “inter-agency” says DOJ

Wikileaks.org offers whisteblowers legal protection

Montana tribe myth-busting online from Daily Yonder

New public radio network links S. America to Africa from IPS

An open letter to Democracy Now from Mediahacker

Record labels are losing power to fans, artists from PBS Media Shift

No one home at zombie TV stations from Stop Big Media

The zombie zeitgeist by David Sirota

Print and TV exempt from new FTC free speech regulations from EFF

Over 50 percent of companies ban Facebook, Twitter at work from Wired

Obama: Afghan airstrikes killed 100+ civilians from Glenn Greenwald

Obama: Progressives are allowed to oppose the Nobel from David Sirota

Obama: Please earn your Nobel prize by Michael Moore

Michael Moore wants us to go kick ass by Matt Taibbi

Documentary: Videocracy examines fascist media under Berlusconi

NY Times: Robert Greenwald’s Rethink Afghanistan not balanced enough

Student sex columnists face censorship from The Nation

The buzz about wireless Internet from Free Press

Shrine to Tim Russert changes nature of Newseum from Slate

Shumer’s amendment denies bloggers shield law protections from EFF

The Plan to De-dollarise the Oil Markets: Its Roots and Implications

Courtesy of Jesse’s Café Américain

The breakdown of US dollar reserves being held overseas in the attached article of news is interesting, even though estimated.

I am curious to see when Kevin Phillips and Chalmers Johnson start speaking to this as this sort of historic change is in their respective ballparks.

Of course, there is always the option to listen to those in the American financial media who dismiss the internationally respected and well-connected Robert Fisk as a commie crank, a liberal web spinner, and a tinfoil conspiracty theorist.

Not all opinions are created equal, but all must be substantiated by data and sustained by confirming evidence. On the other hand, willful ignorance, prejudice, and groupthink, also known as the herd mentality, may work in the day to day amongst a select group of chums and the like-minded, but their consequences can render a thoroughly discouraging experience in the markets, where no one really cares what you think and why.

Don’t blindly feed your arms and legs to the sharks, especially out of a misplaced allegiance to a favorite theory or betting system, as it just encourages them and mucks up the water.

But do not rush out and react to this news story, because these types of adjustments take several years to occur. They are longer term macro-trends. But they do matter because they also occur slowly, not all at once at the end of a period of time.

These are lessons that every trader still standing must ultimately learn.

Here is some additional detail on this story in a video interview with Robert Fisk, in addition to the news story below.

The Independent
A financial revolution with profound political implications
By Robert Fisk
Wednesday, 7 October 2009

The plan to de-dollarise the oil market, discussed both in public and in secret for at least two years and widely denied yesterday by the usual suspects – Saudi Arabia being, as expected, the first among them – reflects a growing resentment in the Middle East, Europe and in China at America’s decades-long political as well as economic world dominance.

Nowhere has this more symbolic importance than in the Middle East, where the United Arab Emirates alone holds $900bn (£566bn) of dollar reserves and where Saudi Arabia has been quietly co-ordinating its defence, armaments and oil policies with the Russians since 2007.

This does not indicate a trade war with America – not yet – but Arab Gulf regimes have been growing increasingly restive at their economic as well as political dependence on Washington for many years. Of the $7.2 trillion in international reserves, $2.1trn is held by Arab countries – China holds about $2.3trn – and the nations interested in moving away from dollar-trading in oil are believed to hold over 80 per cent of international dollar reserves….

Read the rest here.

Photo: Getty image, in Telegraph.co.uk.

Il mio vicino americano, Mr.Jones, di solito è  ottimista. Sabato sera, Mr.Jones, mi ha avvertito che, in base all’idea che si è fatto, nel giro di sei mesi il dollaro crollerà. Non so se Mr.Jones abbia ragione. Spero che la sua visione del futuro sia falsata da qualche notizia infondata come tante  che ogni giorno vengono divulgate. So però che non solo Mr.Jones parla del dollaro USA in maniera negativa. Gli articoli che seguono ne sono una testimonianza. Prima di chiedere a Mr.Jones il caffè che ci siamo giocati  devo attendere fino al 3 aprile 2010. Per il momento me ne vado a bere uno a mie spese

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Barile: non più in dollari?
di Debora Billi

La notizia è stata segnalata dai competentissimi lettori. Non ne avrei neppure scritto, prendendola come uno dei tanti “al lupo, al lupo!” complottisti che nel corso degli anni abbiamo visto minacciare mille volte e mai realizzarsi. Sì, perché proprio di complotto si tratta: ma stavolta a riferirne è l’Independent e il giornalista nientemeno che Robert Fisk, quindi bisogna prenderlo sul serio per forza.

Dice Fisk: Gli Stati Arabi stanno inaugurando mosse segrete con Cina, Russia e Francia per smettere di usare il dollaro come moneta di riferimento per il petrolio.(…) Incontri segreti sono stati già tenuti con i ministri delle finanze e i governatori delle banche centrali di Russia, Cina, Giappone e Brasile per lavorare su uno schema secondo cui il petrolio non sarà più prezzato in dollari.

Le fonti sono quelle bancarie degli Stati coinvolti, dice Fisk. Niente a che vedere, a quanto sembra, con le solite voci delle Borse iraniane o i proclami di Chavez: stavolta si fa sul serio. E le ripetute insinuazioni da parte di Pietro Cambi su Crisis (ovvero che tutti scappino dal dollaro), che persino a me coblogger sembravano un tantino azzardate, cominciano a sapere proprio di verità. Cassandre.

Sempre secondo l’articolo, ci si muoverà verso un paniere di valute che includerà anche l’oro. Questo forse spiega il vertiginoso aumento di prezzo degli ultimi mesi, e anche che probabilmente assisteremo ad una miracolosa conversione all’euro della Gran Bretagna. La transizione dal dollaro è pianificata in nove anni, entro il 2018, e fonti cinesi confidano nell’impegno dell’Amministrazione americana con la crisi economica per garantirsi la tranquillità dell’impresa.

Non è facile immaginare le conseguenze di tutto ciò, talmente appaiono enormi e di portata epocale. Ad esempio, è possibile che il prezzo del petrolio per gli USA aumenti in modo vertiginoso. E’ probabile poi che gli stati produttori, non più inondati a forza di dollari, smettano (finalmente, dal loro punto di vista) di comprare asset finanziari americani e rivolgano altrove gli investimenti dei proventi petroliferi. La Cina probabilmente li aspetta a braccia aperte, e infatti si percepisce benissimo come la Repubblica Popolare sia in prima fila nell’operazione.

Non c’è da stupirsi che il Dalai Lama resti in anticamera.

LINK

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Sta per arrivare la morte del dollaro
Martedì, 06 ottobre 2009

DI ROBERT FISK
independent.co.uk

Quasi a simboleggiare il nuovo ordine mondiale, gli Stati arabi hanno avviato trattative segrete con Cina, Russia e Francia per smettere di usare la valuta americana per le transazioni petrolifere.

Mettendo in atto la piu’ radicale trasformazione finanziaria della recente storia del Medio Oriente gli Stati arabi stanno pensando – insieme a Cina, Russia, Giappone e Francia – di abbandonare il dollaro come valuta per il pagamento del petrolio adottando al suo posto un paniere di valute tra cui lo yen giapponese, lo yuan cinese, l’euro, l’oro e una nuova moneta unica prevista per i Paesi aderenti al Consiglio per la cooperazione del Golfo, tra cui Arabia Saudita, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait e Qatar.

Incontri segreti hanno gia’ avuto luogo tra i ministri delle finanze e i governatori delle banche centrali della Russia, della Cina, del Giappone e del Brasile per mettere a punto il progetto che avra’ come conseguenza il fatto che il prezzo del greggio non sara’ piu’ espresso in dollari.
Il progetto, confermato al nostro giornale da fonti bancarie arabe dei Paesi del Golfo Persico e cinesi di Hong Kong, potrebbe contribuire a spiegare l’improvviso rincaro del prezzo dell’oro, ma preannuncia anche nei prossimi nove anni un esodo senza precedenti dai mercati del dollaro.
Gli americani, che sono al corrente degli incontri – pur non conoscendone i dettagli – sono certi di poter sventare questo intrigo internazionale di cui fanno parte leali alleati come il Giappone e i Paesi del Golfo. Sullo sfondo di questi incontri valutari, Sun Bigan, ex inviato speciale della Cina in Medio Oriente, ha sottolineato il rischio di approfondire le divisioni tra Cina e Stati Uniti in ordine alla loro influenza politica e petrolifera in Medio Oriente. “Le dispute e gli scontri bilaterali sono inevitabili”, ha detto all’Africa and Asia Review. “Non possiamo abbassare la guardia in merito all’ostilita’ che fronteggiamo in Medio Oriente sugli interessi energetici e la sicurezza”.
Questa frase ha tutta l’aria di una previsione pericolosa su una futura guerra economica tra Stati Uniti e Cina per il petrolio mediorientale – con il pericolo di trasformare i conflitti della regione in una lotta di supremazia delle grandi potenze. L’incremento della domanda di petrolio e’ piu’ marcato in Cina che negli Stati Uniti in quanto la crescita cinese e’ meno efficiente sotto il profilo energetico. Abbandonando il dollaro i pagamenti, stando a fonti bancarie cinesi, potrebbero essere effettuati in via transitoria in oro. Una indicazione della gigantesca quantita’ di denaro di cui si parla puo’ essere desunta dalla ricchezza di Abu Dhabi, Arabia Saudita, Kuwait e Qatar che insieme hanno, stando alle stime, riserve in dollari per 2.100 miliardi.

Il declino della potenza economica americana strettamente connesso all’attuale recessione globale e’ stato riconosciuto dal presidente della Banca Mondiale Robert Zoellick. “Una delle conseguenze di questa crisi potrebbe essere l’accettazione del fatto che sono cambiati i rapporti di forza economici”, ha detto a Istanbul prima delle riunioni di questa settimana del Fondo Monetario Internazionale e della Banca Mondiale. Ma e’ stato il nuovo straordinario potere finanziario della Cina – non disgiunto dalla rabbia sia dei Paesi produttori che dei Paesi consumatori di petrolio nei confronti del potere di interferenza degli Stati Uniti nel sistema finanziario internazionale – a stimolare i recenti colloqui con i Paesi del Golfo.

Brasile e India si sono mostrati interessati a far parte di un sistema di pagamenti non piu’ basato sul dollaro. Allo stato la Cina appare la piu’ entusiasta tra le potenze finanziarie, non fosse altro che per il suo gigantesco interscambio commerciale con il Medio Oriente.

La Cina importa il 60% del petrolio che consuma, per lo piu’ dal Medio Oriente e dalla Russia. I cinesi hanno concessioni petrolifere in Iraq – bloccate fino a quest’anno dagli Stati Uniti – e dal 2008 hanno un accordo da 8 miliardi di dollari con l’Iran per lo sviluppo delle capacita’ di raffinazione e delle risorse di gas. La Cina ha contratti petroliferi in Sudan (dove ha sostituito gli Stati Uniti) e da tempo sta negoziando concessioni petrolifere in Libia dove tradizionalmente questo genere di accordi e’ del tipo joint venture.
Inoltre le esportazioni cinesi verso la regione ammontano ora a non meno del 10% delle importazioni di tutti i Paesi del Medio Oriente e includono una vasta gamma di prodotti che vanno dalle automobili agli armamenti, ai generi alimentari, al vestiario e persino alle bambole. Riconoscendo esplicitamente il crescente peso finanziario della Cina, il presidente della Banca Centrale Europea, Jean-Claude Trichet, ha chiesto l’altro ieri a Pechino di consentire alla yuan di apprezzarsi sul dollaro e, di conseguenza, di diminuire la dipendenza della Cina dalla politica monetaria americana contribuendo cosi’ a riequilibrare l’economia mondiale e ad alleggerire la pressione al rialzo sull’euro.

Dagli accordi di Bretton Woods – gli accordi conclusi dopo la seconda guerra mondiale che ci hanno tramandato l’architettura del moderno sistema finanziario internazionale – i partner commerciali degli Stati Uniti hanno dovuto affrontare le conseguenze della posizione di controllo di Washington e, negli anni piu’ recenti, dell’egemonia del dollaro in quanto principale valuta di riserva.

I cinesi credono, ad esempio, che siano stati gli americani a convincere la Gran Bretagna a non entrare nell’euro per impedire una fuga dal dollaro. Ma secondo le fonti bancarie cinesi i colloqui sono andati troppo avanti per poter essere bloccati. “Non e’ da escludere che nel paniere delle monete entri anche il rublo”, ha detto un importante broker di Hong Kong all’Indipendent. “La Gran Bretagna e’ presa in mezzo e finira’ per entrare nell’euro. Non ha scelta in quanto non potra’ piu’ usare il dollaro americano”.
Le fonti finanziarie cinesi sono convinte che il presidente Barack Obama sia troppo occupato a rimettere in piedi l’economia americana per concentrarsi sulle straordinarie implicazioni della transizione dal dollaro ad altre valute nel volgere di nove anni. Al momento la data fissata per l’abbandono del dollaro e’ il 2018.

Gli Stati Uniti hanno fatto appena cenno a questo problema in occasione del G20 di Pittsburgh. Il governatore della Banca centrale cinese e altri funzionari da anni sono preoccupati per la situazione del dollaro e non ne fanno mistero. Il loro problema e’ che gran parte della ricchezza nazionale e’ in dollari.

“Questi progetti cambieranno il volto delle transazioni finanziarie internazionali”, ha detto un banchiere cinese. “Stati Uniti e Gran Bretagna debbono essere molto preoccupati. Vi accorgerete di quanto sono preoccupati dalla pioggia di smentite che questa notizia scatenera’”.

Alla fine del mese scorso l’Iran ha annunciato che le sue riserve in valuta estera saranno in futuro in euro e non in dollari. I banchieri ricordano, naturalmente, quanto e’ capitato all’ultimo Paese produttore di petrolio del Medio Oriente che ha tentato di vendere il petrolio in euro e non in dollari. Pochi mesi dopo che Saddam Hussein aveva comunicato la sua decisione ai quattro venti, gli americani e gli inglesi hanno invaso l’Iraq.

Versione originale:
Robert Fisk
Fonte: www.independent.co.uk
Link: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-demise-of-the-dollar-1798175.html
6.10.2009

Versione italiana:
Fonte: www.unita.it/
Link: http://www.unita.it/news/il_documento/89415/sta_per_arrivare_la_morte…
6.10.2009

Traduzione a cura di Carlo Antonio Biscotto

LINK

http://wp.me/plKDA-kB

It’s the biggest mystery in global finance right now: Who conducted a sneak attack on the U.S. dollar this week?

It began with a thinly sourced but highly explosive report Monday in a British newspaper: Arab oil sheiks are conspiring with the Russians and Chinese to quit using the dollar to set the value of oil trades — a direct threat to the global supremacy of the greenback.

Is it true? Everyone from the head of the Saudi central bank to U.S. officials scrambled to undercut the story, but no matter.

With the U.S. economy on the ropes and America by far the world’s biggest debtor, investors aren’t feeling as secure about the dollar as they used to. And the notion of second-tier economies ganging up on Uncle Sam didn’t sound so far-fetched.

For American officials, the possibility of the dollar losing its long-term dominance in global commerce is a nightmare scenario because it would likely mean sharply higher interest rates at home and a declining ability to finance the U.S. debt. No one believes it could really happen right now, but stories like the British report this week make it seem incrementally more likely.

So the piece by Robert Fisk of the Independent shocked currency traders around the world and almost instantly sent the value of the U.S. dollar spiraling downward and the price of gold skyrocketing to an all-time high, as a hedge against a weakened dollar.

For the full article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20091008/pl_politico/28091

Source

Les pays Arabes du Golfe Persique planifient – avec la Chine, la Russie, le Japon et la France – de mettre fin à la facturation du pétrole en dollars, et vont utiliser à la place un panier de monnaies, dont le yen japonais et le yuan chinois, l’euro, l’or et la nouvelle devise commune que doivent adopter les nations appartenant au Conseil de Coopération du Golfe, incluant l’Arabie Saoudite, Abu Dhabi, le Koweït et le Qatar. C’est là un tournant majeur sur le plan financier pour le Moyen Orient.

Des réunions secrètes ont déjà eu lieu, auxquelles participaient les ministres des Finances et les gouverneurs des banques centrales de Russie, de Chine, du Japon et du Brésil, afin d’élaborer ce projet qui aura pour conséquence que le cours du pétrole ne sera plus exprimé en dollars.

Ces plans, confirmés à The Independent par des sources des milieux bancaires du Golfe et de Hong Kong, pourraient expliquer la hausse soudaine du cours de l’or, mais ils annoncent également une transformation en profondeur sur le marché du dollar dans les neuf ans à venir.

« Ces plans vont changer la face des transactions financières internationales », déclare un banquier chinois. « L’Amérique et la Grande-Bretagne doivent être très inquiètes. Vous comprendrez à quel point ils sont préoccupés en entendant le tonnerre de dénégations que cette information va provoquer. »

Interdiction de sourire.

Robert Fisk, seit Jahrzehnten verläßlicher Reporter in Beirut, berichtete über das geheime Abkommen diverser Staaten aus dem Dollar auszusteigen. Es gab offizielle Dementis. Robert Fisk im Video zitiert dazu einen hochrangigen Banker aus Hongkong, der ihm vorher sagte:

Diese Geschichte ist wahr. Der Wahrheitsgehalt wird erkennbar daran, daß es Dementis hageln wird.

Recently I was driving around Charlotte and decided, as I sometimes do, to check in on “the other side” via the local AM talk station.

The host that day was commenting on the discovery of two kidnapped US soldiers’ bodies that day in Iraq.

“Repeat after me,” he instructed his audience. “Especially if you write for a newspaper.”

(“Don’t believe I will,” I replied to my radio.)

“We’re the good guys,” he explained. “They’re the bad guys.”

“What I want to see,” he went on, “is for President Bush to go TV and say ‘Look: That’s it. To hell with the rules of war. To hell with the Geneva Conventions. We’re not going to investigate Abu Ghraib. We’re not going to avoid collateral damage. We’re going to start fighting this war in a way that will make sure not a single other one of our soldiers is tortured and killed. We’re going to wipe the terrorists out. Because we’re the good guys, and they’re the bad guys.’”

Good guys, bad guys. Believers, infidels. Ubermenchen, undermenschen.

“Governments,” writes veteran British journalist Robert Fisk in the preface to his new book The Great War for Civilization (Knopf, 2005), “like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, ‘them’ and ‘us’, victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.”

The Great War for Civilization is a mighty work, covering Fisk’s decades of work as a reporter in the Middle East, where he permanently resides and on the subject of which he is considered Britain’s leading journalist.

“I don’t like the definition ‘war correspondent,’” he writes. “It is history, not journalism that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think ‘war correspondent’ smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism.”

It’s a perfect hybrid of thoughtful history and sensitive journalism, world events examined through dozens of individual lives, most, given Fisk’s chosen profession, shattered or ended by violence. More than 1000 pages are filled with his first-hand reportage of the Iran-Iraq war, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Afghanistan, the Gulf War, the present US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and much, much more. It’s a long book, because it takes a long time to name the many damaged and dead, to try to understand the complicated history that hurt them and inspires some of them to hurt us.

It is a sad thing that Fisk’s sympathy for victims rather than their executioners is such a radical deviation from the “mainstream” journalism perspective. Empathy remains intolerable in the news media — or at least subordinate to the priorities of the powerful — as Fisk learned very personally:

In Pakistan in 2001, while meeting Afghans made homeless by the B-52 administered “War on Terror,” Fisk escaped death at the hands of a mob of refugees only by fighting his way out long enough that an elderly man, “perhaps a mullah in the village,” was able to lead him to the safety of a Red Cross-Red Crescent convoy.

“What had I done? I kept asking myself. I had been hurting and punching and attacking Afghan refugees, the very people I had been writing about for so long, the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my country — among others — was killing, along with this Taliban, just across the border. God spare me, I thought…. The men whose families our bombers were killing were now my enemies too…

“…the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me… should never have done so but [their] brutality was entirely the product of others — of us who had armed their struggle against the Russians, and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the War For Civilization just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them ‘collateral damage.’”

At the time, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the authoritative, untempered voice of the ruling classes, ran an article absolutely giddy with pleasure at Fisk’s misfortune. “A self-loathing multiculturalist gets his due,” the writer titled the piece, observing that “you’d have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter” at his fellow newspaper man having been almost beaten to death.

The “Fisk doctrine,” columnist Mark Steyn continued, ” taken to its logical conclusion, absolves of responsibility not only the perpetrators of Sept. 11 but also the Taliban supporters who attacked several of Mr. Fisk’s fellow journalists in Afghanistan all of whom, alas, died before being able to file a final column explaining why their murderers are blameless.”

(Soon after, the Journal requested Fisk’s assistance in petitioning for the release of kidnapped WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl. Aware that Osama bin Laden read his articles, Fisk published a personal appeal to the al-Qaida leader for Pearl’s release in The Independent.)

While rightist commentators like Steyn, Bill O’Rielly, Anne Coulter, the post-9/11 Christopher Hitchens pod person, and my local AM talk radio host celebrate organized murder and misery with the rowdy enthusiasm of a drunken Coliseum spectator, pro-war liberal talkers camouflage their death fetish (perhaps even from themselves) in more nuanced language — but their “pragmatic,” “reasonable,” and “tempered” criticisms of only the more grotesque and clumsy manifestations of empire propel the killing machine as sure as the rabid frothing of their right-wing rivals.

Those two camps are given the bulk of airtime and column inches, and, therefore, the loudest voices, in America. Not so much space left for someone like Fisk. Although he often appears on the front page of the the Independent, which has a daily circulation in the way of 250,000, as unsurpassed a media observer as Noam Chomsky has never run across him in the US press, making The Great War for Civilization all the more welcome on this side of the Atlantic.

It’s not a fun read. Often neither are the stories from our domestic journalists of quality, like Amy Goodman, Seymour Hersh, or Jim Lobe, to name a few. But enduring the discomfort of listening to what they have to say is essential if we are to reshape the world into a place reflecting the triumph — rather than the failure — of the human spirit.

July 2006