Truth About Middle East is Spreading

Anthony Wile

Zero Hedge has published an article, “Are The Middle East Wars Really About Forcing the World Into Dollars and Private Central Banking?” that mentions my theory that Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown because he wanted to set up a private gold-currency in Africa. You can see my article here: Gaddafi Planned Gold Dinar, Now Under Attack.

I don’t want to give the idea, however, that Western powers-that-be were galvanized into action ONLY because of Gaddafi’s gold currency idea. Here at DB, we regularly discuss a wide range of strategic plans that the elites seem to be putting into place in order to advance what is commonly known as a New World Order. In this article, I want to touch on some of these again.

Certainly, Gaddafi’s idea probably provoked anger in the halls of Western power. As I wrote previously, the idea, according to Gaddafi, was that African and Muslim nations would join together to create this new currency and would use it to purchase oil and other resources in exclusion of the dollar and other currencies.

I was interviewed by the news service RT, and they called it “an idea that would shift the economic balance of the world.” You can see my interview here: Real Cause for Gaddafi’s Expulsion: Wanted Gold Currency?

It was a feasible plan, in my view. Gaddafi held some 144 tons of gold that he could have used to back a gold dinar, at least partially. Currently, I know of NO “mainstream” currency in the world that is backed by metals, either silver or gold. Less than 150 years ago money was considered to be gold or silver so we can see how quickly things change.

Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, too, may have incurred the wrath of the Anglosphere power elite that is evidently and obviously behind the world’s current financial system. Once he announced Iraqi oil would be traded in euros, not dollars, his fate was sealed, according to many alternative news sources.

In order to grant credibility to the above theories one needs to believe that the Anglosphere power elite is dedicated to defending the dollar’s dominance. In fact, the world remains dollar driven and the dollar remains a fount of Western power. So the idea that Western powers-that-be would defend the dollar is not a far-fetched scenario.

The dollar is even referred to as the world’s “reserve currency.” And this did not happen accidentally but through the most determined kind of power politics. Saudi Arabia is the key to the dollar’s pricing power. It is the famous Saud family (House of Saud) that refuses to sell their oil for anything other than dollars.

The Saud family is intimately tied into the Anglosphere power elite; the House of Saud is propped up by the West – militarily and otherwise – and in return, the world’s largest producer of oil, and the controller of its marginal price points, props up the dollar.

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via The Daily Bell – Truth About Middle East is Spreading.

Debt Slavery – Why It Destroyed Rome, Why It Will Destroy Us Unless It’s Stopped

by MICHAEL HUDSON

Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.

Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans. As James Steuart explained in 1767, royal borrowings remained private affairs rather than truly public debts. For a sovereign’s debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges.

By giving taxpayers this voice in government, the Dutch and British democracies provided creditors with much safer claims for payment than did kings and princes whose debts died with them. But the recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies. They are demanding fiscal austerity and even privatization sell-offs.

This is turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, also communal infrastructure and extract tribute. In response, democracies are demanding referendums over whether to pay creditors by selling off the public domain and raising taxes to impose unemployment, falling wages and economic depression. The alternative is to write down debts or even annul them, and to re-assert regulatory control over the financial sector.

Near Eastern rulers proclaimed clean slates for debtors to preserve economic balance

Charging interest on advances of goods or money was not originally intended to polarize economies. First administered early in the third millennium BC as a contractual arrangement by Sumer’s temples and palaces with merchants and entrepreneurs who typically worked in the royal bureaucracy, interest at 20 per cent (doubling the principal in five years) was supposed to approximate a fair share of the returns from long-distance trade or leasing land and other public assets such as workshops, boats and ale houses.

As the practice was privatized by royal collectors of user fees and rents, “divine kingship” protected agrarian debtors. Hammurabi’s laws (c. 1750 BC) cancelled their debts in times of flood or drought. All the rulers of his Babylonian dynasty began their first full year on the throne by cancelling agrarian debts so as to clear out payment arrears by proclaiming a clean slate. Bondservants, land or crop rights and other pledges were returned to the debtors to “restore order” in an idealized “original” condition of balance. This practice survived in the Jubilee Year of Mosaic Law in Leviticus 25.

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via Debt Slavery – Why It Destroyed Rome, Why It Will Destroy Us Unless It’s Stopped » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

Credit Suisse Warns of ‘Last Days’ For the Euro

By Javier E. David

The financial storm menacing the euro zone could prompt the 17 nations using the common currency to seek closer integration despite political opposition — or spell the “last days” for the common currency, Credit Suisse said Monday.

In a somber research note to clients, the bank said the debt fears of Europe’s smaller, more troubled economies are now radiating to its largest nations. As a result, Credit Suisse warned that markets may well have “entered the last days of the euro as we currently know it.”

Credit Suisse’s analysts cautioned that a nuclear scenario — a complete dissolution of monetary union — wasn’t immediate or even likely, despite the funding fears gripping both Italy and Spain.

However, the bank added that the current turmoil “does mean some extraordinary things will almost certainly need to happen — probably by mid-January — to prevent the progressive closure of all the euro-zone sovereign bond markets, potentially accompanied by escalating runs on even the strongest banks.”

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via Credit Suisse Warns of ‘Last Days’ For the Euro – MarketBeat – WSJ.