09: Libya: Swept Away by the Currency
This is chapter nine of my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, from Section THREE: World on FIRE. I read it previously to give context and honor to the 5000-10,000 victims of the floods in Libya that were billed as yet another ‘natural’ disaster. Just as the attack on Qaddafi twelve years ago was ‘humanitarian intervention’ of course.
In Jacobin magazine, Branko Marcetic makes this exact point: the 2011 assassination and coup led by NATO is responsible for the shambles left of government allowing this to happen. He finds Obama’s ‘oh dearism’ less than endearing, considering that this was done on his watch, with mega-hawk Hillary zeroing in on the kill.
Let’s start the chapter with a couple of quotes. And for those who didn’t ditch me on the last chapter when I read ‘climate change,’ I’m issuing a trigger warning on fossil fuels. Would I write the same today? I don’t know. As an aside, James Corbett re-released Remembering Fletcher Prouty from 2012. Although best known for his revelations on JFK, Prouty makes some interesting points on why the term fossil fuels is impossible and the scarcity manufactured.
I believe that we should, however, own the times that we’ve been wrong. How else to encourage others to admit that they’ve been wrong. And isn’t that the point?
Every war when it comes, or before it comes,
is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.—GEORGE ORWELL
Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial.
And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.—KURT VONNEGUT
Fossil fuels, a form of currency backed by the dinosaurs and underwritten by future generations, have become the sugar of the post-industrial world. Like sugar, they give the body politic a burst of fast, cheap energy. Like sugar, they sabotage the body’s process of deriving energy from slower sources. Like sugar, they release a slow poison while creating a visceral dependence. And also like sugar, fossil fuels have enslaved entire continents.
The communities where fossil fuels are extracted derive little to no benefit and bear the greatest burden of spills and destruction of their natural habitat and way of life. The countries where it’s discovered become the targets of foreign intervention for corporate profits. But even more of a rush than the fast energy and fast profits of the petrofuel industry is riding the currency in which oil trades. This is the whitewater of high finance and the heroin of the power junkie. This is the game of the ultimate archons, the money masters.
The monopoly money of this game is the petrodollar. In “Henry of Arabia,” an article about Kissinger’s destabilization of the Middle East, historian Greg Grandin writes:
The word “petrodollar,” according to the Los Angeles Times, was coined in late 1973, and introduced into English by New York investment bankers who were courting the oil-producing countries of the Middle East. Soon enough, as that paper wrote, the petrodollar had become part of “the world’s macroeconomic interface” and crucial to Kissinger’s developing Middle Eastern policy.
By June 1974, Treasury Secretary George Shultz was already suggesting that rising oil prices could result in a “highly advantageous mutual bargain” between the US and petroleum-producing countries in the Middle East. Such a “bargain,” as others then began to argue, might solve a number of problems, creating demand for the US dollar, injecting needed money into a flagging defense industry hard hit by the Vietnam wind-down, and using petrodollars to cover mounting trade deficits.
As it happened, petrodollars would prove anything but a quick fix.
the geopolitical puzzle
At the beginning of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, a blogger posted an answer to two puzzling questions: "Why Iraq?" and "Why now?" It was a Canadian article by Paul Richard Harris in the now-defunct Yellow Times. Unlike the US mainstream press, it didn’t talk about 9-11 or weapons of mass destruction. Nor, like the US alternative press, did it focus on the villainous personalities of Bush and Cheney or the collusion of greedy oil execs. Instead it went upstream, to see what the circumstances were that had predicated this particular dictator being targeted by the same presidential family that had put him in power and called him friend.
The focus of Harris’ story was that on November 6th, 2000, Saddam Hussein had switched the currency in which Iraq trades oil from the petrodollar to the euro. More important to US interests than the oil, he claimed, was keeping the dollar as the sole currency in which oil could trade. Confirming this view was a 2003 Counterpunch article called “Is There a Eurologist in the House?” It looked at the rise of the euro and demise of the dollar if OPEC followed Saddam’s suit. But the seminal article on the topic was written by William R. Clark and expanded into a book called Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar. Disconnected pieces of the geopolitical puzzle started falling into place.
Trading oil in euros was a shrewd economic move by Hussein. Iraq's €10 billion held in the UN's "oil for food" reserve gained 17% against the dollar by the time the Iraq war started and continued to climb thereafter. The Euro, when it was newborn, was unsullied by speculative betting and a strong contender for a global currency. Its future was looking bright while the dollar was waning.
Since 1971, when Nixon took the dollar off of the gold standard, the strength of the dollar has rested on being the only international currency accepted for oil. The term for this is "dollar hegemony.” Because of it, oil-consuming countries need to stockpile dollars, giving those nations a vested interest in keeping the dollar’s value high. Whenever the market for dollars goes soft, with less demand than supply, they buy up more dollars to protect their investment.
This has ensured the dollar's trade value and enabled the US, the leading debtor nation, to operate at a continual trade deficit without consequences. As Harris writes, "Trade between nations has become a cycle in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy.”
dollar hegemony
In Treasure Islands, Nicolas Shaxson writes:
The U.S. dollar is the world’s main reserve currency. Less privileged nations are periodically constrained from spending by shortages of foreign exchange, but the nation with the dominant currency can borrow in its own currency—and it can print money to acquire real resources and live beyond its means for a long time. ... Dollars make the world go round, and if you print the stuff, you’ve got it made.
The lens of dollar hegemony brings into sharper focus other puzzles of foreign policy. Retired General Wesley Clark, for instance, revealed that plans had already been in place to invade Iraq just ten days after the 2001 collapse of the World Trade Center. A few days later he was told that Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran had been added to the hit list. A decade after 9-11, Glenn Greenwald reported on the Pentagon’s progress:
...the governments of Iraq and Libya and Lebanon, three of those countries, have been changed, including Libya this year by military force. You then look at Somalia and Sudan, where the Obama administration in Somalia has, according to the Washington Post, just this weekend massively escalated its proxy fighting and drone attacks. We’re involved in trying to subvert and control Somalia in all sorts of ways. We have a modest deployment to the south part of Sudan. But that’s another country where we’re now militarily active and trying to control. And then the most important countries on that list, Iran and Syria, are clearly the target of all sorts of covert regime change efforts on the part of the United States and Israel.
What do all these countries have in common? In a 2011 Asia Times article, Ellen Brown pointed out that the central banks of these countries are among the small handful in the world that are not part of the Bank of International Settlements or BIS. The BIS in Switzerland is the banker-owned central bank that controls all other banker-owned central banks. It’s closely linked to the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, which controls the international currencies generated by banker-owned central banks.
over a barrel
The Central Bank of Libya was one of those national, 100% state-owned banks that was out of reach of the BIS. It generated the Libyan dinar, which was backed by 144 tons of gold and therefore unassailable by the IMF.
Libya had come a long way to build up these reserves. During the 1960’s the Seven Sisters oil companies exported up to three million barrels per day of sweet Libyan oil and paid the lowest rent per barrel on the planet. The departing wealth and the abiding poverty explains why the Libyan population was almost unanimously behind Muammar Qaddafi when he launched a coup against the corrupt regime in 1969. According to the US State Department, “It was overthrown with surprising ease and there was almost no resistance.”
In Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, Vijay Prashad writes:
That money was then diverted toward social welfare, mainly an increase in housing and health care. ... first nationalizing the oil companies, fixing a minimum wage, extending the welfare and health systems and slashing the obscene rents being charged by property owners. A limit was imposed on the rents that landlords could charge, fixing maximum rents at about one third of the pre-revolutionary level. ... When Qaddafi took power, the literacy rate in Libya was a miserable twenty percent. The consequence of the transfer payments lifted the rate to ninety percent by 1980.
the man-made money river
Qaddafi and his officers were men of the people from small desert villages and towns, and they were sympathetic to workers:
Aware of the hardships in the countryside, Qaddafi’s regime allowed farmers to settle on confiscated Italian and Sanusi land, and the government provided them with low interest loans to buy farm equipment and inputs. Land could be purchased interest free ... [and] until the farm became self-sufficient the farmer was eligible for a government salary. ... The regime constrained private enterprise and encouraged workers to take control of about two hundred firms. ... the Central Bank redistributed wealth by putting a ceiling on bank account holdings. It was a straightforward redistribution of wealth conducted as a currency exchange.
Having a currency backed by Libya’s gold enabled Qaddafi to undertake massive public works projects. Using $33 billion of the sovereign currency, he built the Great Man-Made River that brought water to 70% of the population. Even beyond Libya’s borders, Qaddafi donated $300 million to the Regional African Satellite Communications Organization or RASCOM, made up of 45 African countries. Prior to RASCOM, phone calls to and from Africa had carried the highest cost on the globe, while the whole African continent paid Europe $500 million annually to use their satellites. With a one-time investment of $400 million to build an independent satellite system, Africa was able to end its dependency.
estate of the masses
Qaddafi called his philosophy of government the Third International Theory. Libya, whose full name translates to State of the Masses, operated with tribal autonomy at the local level. But the national economy was centralized and subsidized by oil revenues according to Qaddafi’s Islamic socialism. Even among Qaddafi’s detractors it was undisputed that Libya had the highest standard of living in all of Africa.
Yet his administrative bureaucracy held onto the distribution of wealth tightly rather than backing a network of local economies— establishing a crony socialism rather than crony capitalism. Prashad writes,
Qaddafi was never keen on the full agenda of socialism. He liked the abstract idea of redistribution, but like most authoritarian populists he had not considered the mechanisms to transfer authority and decision-making to localities who might then harness their newly provided wealth for the betterment of their towns and villages. ... Qaddafi relied upon the oil revenue to pacify the population. That he and his circle did not steal from the oil profits is commendable. ... It was the oil that prolonged his revolution and allowed his central state to appear benevolent even as it monopolized decision-making in the country.
This centralization would prove to be his downfall. As currency poured in, it created disparities, resentment, and vulgar displays of petulance by Qaddafi’s grown children, one of whom immolated their Ethiopian nanny when she failed to keep the children quiet. Libya was a tinderbox and foreign bankers were just itching to provide a match.
the dutch disease
Oil revenues, to be fair, are a tricky problem. When an expensive raw material brings an abundance of foreign currency into a country, it creates a syndrome that economists call the Dutch disease, the resource curse, or the “paradox of plenty.” The added money in circulation raises the cost of living, fosters a dependence on foreign-made goods at the expense of domestic production, and makes labor too expensive to export man-made products to the international market.
The Dutch disease was named when the Netherlands discovered a large gas field in Groningen. While exports focused on gas, investment in other manufacturing ceased. The currency grew rapidly, making imports cheap and decreasing the number of jobs needed within the country. In spite of an influx of wealth, the Netherlands went into recession.
The cure for the Dutch disease is to raise tariffs on imports, subsidize manufacturing, and follow a strict petrodollar-free diet at home. Neoliberal medicine, however, dictates regular injections of debt to induce privatization and risky investments called derivatives. While acknowledging that derivatives are “a complex form of gambling” tempting dictators into corruption, a researcher for the World Bank offers an alternative:
It may, however, be possible for the World Bank to take on the management of hedging contracts—not itself entering the market, but acting on behalf of client governments, and bear- ing the risk of staff supervision. The Bank already manages the foreign exchange positions for some developing countries and so the management of commodity hedges appears to pose no issues of principle.
Or perhaps “issues of principle” just look different from the top of the pyramid.
come hell, high water or humanitarian intervention
The Benghazi rebellion started with a whimper and not a bang: a peaceful protest on February 15, 2011 to which Qaddafi reacted with force. Within a week the international press was reporting that 50,000 had been wounded and 10,000 massacred. Not one outlet—neither al-Jazeera, the BBC, nor the US media—questioned the fact that these numbers had a single source: a Libyan member of the International Criminal Court (ICC) who had defected from Libya.
The same media ignored the Human Rights Watch figure that verified only 233 dead. The number of 10,000 dead was only reached much later when those killed by Qaddafi’s troops, the rebel forces, and a seven-month NATO air assault were added together, with the latter accounting for the greatest civilian casualties.
When a Libyan ambassador to the UN also defected, he claimed that Qaddafi was conducting a genocide. He immediately called for a no-fly zone and for the ICC to investigate Qaddafi for war crimes. On March 3, 2011, the ICC lead investigator declared that Qaddafi was giving Viagra to his troops to encourage mass rape, which was repeated by Susan Rice, then US Ambassador to the United Nations. Amnesty International would later find no evidence for this.
France led the call at the UN for “humanitarian intervention,” which was echoed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Even as the vote was being cast, French mirage fighters and US ships loaded with cruise missiles began their mission to bomb Libya’s air defenses. “No fly zone” seemed to be code for NATO boots in the air and bombs on the ground.
the deep freeze
The UN resolution had ordered an immediate ceasefire from both sides. This was rendered meaningless as the emboldened rebels cheered their personal bombing squad. At the same time, the UN prevented the travel of a peace coalition that included heads of state in the African Union—even though both sides of the Libyan conflict had said that they would accept the mediation. Diplomacy was further stymied by a joint opinion essay by Sarkozy, Cameron, and Obama insisting that Qaddafi had to leave office before talks could begin. This left him with one option only: to go down fighting.
The Transitional National Council, or TNC, was the rebel group that led the uprising. According to their spokesperson, the TNC would communicate to NATO “what areas need to be bombarded.” NATO’s satellite surveillance would return the favor by informing the rebels of the exact location of the Libyan army. This collusion was not what the Arab League had intended when it agreed to UN intervention.
In April of 2011, Qaddafi’s three grandchildren were killed in a targeted drone attack on their suburban home, however, Qaddafi himself was missed. Finally in October, Qaddafi’s convoy was bombed by NATO, leaving him wounded and defenseless in the hands of a rebel mob. He was beaten, possibly sodomized with a stick or bayonet, and killed by a short-range bullet to the head by a gunman who was rumored to be French. His body was stripped and left unburied for days in an industrial freezer. Even for a dictator it was a wretched and ignoble end.
insurgents in suits
But a funny thing happened on the way to the insurrection. The guerrilla fighters paused mid-revolt to create a new privately-owned bank. On March 19th, with surprising sophistication, they set up the Central Bank of Benghazi and designated it as Libya’s monetary authority, even appointing a governor in temporary Benghazi headquarters. Before the ink was dry on the paperwork, and long before the body was in the fridge, the new bank had signed an oil deal with Qatar. Buried in their nationalist revolutionary manifesto was the curious statement, “The interests and rights of foreign nationals and companies will be protected.”
While the US-led NATO supplied the muscle, France had the most skin in the game. But why? To understand the relationship, we have to go back to 1945 when a cash-strapped post-WWII France could no longer afford to control its African “assets” through military force. It needed a method that gave the illusion of self-governance and divided the classes against each other. To accomplish this goal, in exchange for liberation, Charles de Gaulle imposed a colonial pact in which fourteen countries were forced to adopt the CFA Franc. The countries included Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Senegal, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Gabon. Nearly seventy years later the pact still holds.
Through this arrangement all countries are required to deposit up to 85% of their foreign exchange earnings in the French national treasury. The Paris Bourse invests the money at its own discretion with no obligation to reveal how much it earns. The African countries can, however, borrow back their own money at interest as long as it doesn’t exceed 20% of their public revenues. Even the exchange rate for the CFA Franc is determined by France, which keeps the value of African labor low in order to promote exports—avoiding the paradox of plenty for the betterment of the French aristocracy.
cfa francenstein
Last but not least under the agreement, France can dispatch troops into Africa at will and occupy military bases from which it keeps a close eye on rogue politics. From the 1960’s on, French covert operations instigated and controlled so-called “popular coups” in Angola, Benin, Central Africa Republic, the Congo, Gabon, Mali, and Mozambique. These led to the 1961 execution of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first Prime Minister, and the 1963 assassination of Togo’s President, dissident economist Sylvanus Olympio. In 1987, Burkino Faso’s Thomas Sankara, known as Africa’s Che Guevara, was deposed and murdered. A week earlier he foretold, “You can kill a revolutionary and an individual, but you can’t kill an idea.” It was a fitting epitaph.
But none of these revolutions held an incendiary device, or even a candle, to the plans of Muammar Qaddafi and Laurent Gbagbo, President of Cote d’Ivoire, to create a Pan-African dinar backed by the gold held by Libya. The Pan-African dinar could have been used for intra-continental trade and would have enabled Africa to control its own development. To this end, Qaddafi had created the African Investment Bank in Sirte and the African Monetary Fund in Camaroon. The AMF would have circumvented the IMF, and the AIB would have displaced the BIS.
But deprived of the profits from African oil, the franc would have sunk like a capsized Titanic. And without a monopoly as the world’s oil currency, US dollars would be flushed out into the market so fast they’d leave a vapor trail. This may explain why a NATO air strike and a French bullet conspired to end Qaddafi’s life. Both the US and France had plenty to lose, as far as the bankers were concerned.
regime change services
Even the 46 billion barrels of Libya’s oil plus 5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas weren’t enough for the victors, however. In order to unfreeze Libyan sovereign funds the new government had to pledge that Libya’s oil would only be sold in dollars—not Euros and certainly not the gold dinar, which was completely off the table. Even more shocking, there seemed to be no money at all coming in from NATO countries to pay for their own oil. When questioned about the lack of recompense, it was reported to be a payback arrangement for regime change services.
And what happened to the gold? Saman Mohammadi puts together the clues in his blog, The Excavator, starting in South America. On August 17, 2011, the Wall Street Journal published that Hugo Chavez had announced plans to nationalize Venezuela’s gold mines and repatriate the gold held in European banks—some 160 tons worth $11 billion. This would remove more gold than the banks held. While 99 tons were in the Bank of England, JP Morgan held only 10.6 tons, even as one of the five vault banks.
On August 25th, however, Reuters quoted Qaddafi’s former central bank governor, Bengdara, who said that Tripoli held $10 billion in gold reserves. As an unverified tip, he stated that Qaddafi had offered 25 tons to an undisclosed friend and he believed that Qaddafi may be absconding even now with more towards the Algerian border.
Bengdara, now aligned with the rebels and the director of an Italian bank, wanted a European loan of $5-7 billion to start a new central bank, since the $168 billion of Libya’s assets were frozen in foreign accounts. Then the timeline goes like this: on March 19th Bengdara got his wish and the rebels set up their bank. In April, Qaddafi’s grandchildren were killed in a drone strike targeting him. Finally on October 20th, NATO struck his convoy and left him to the mob and a French assassin’s bullet. Then, on November 26th, the first shipment of gold bars arrived in Venezuela, according to the BBC.
Coincidence? Mohammadi doesn’t think so.
the archeology professor vs the archons
Similar tragedies have played out across Africa, so that one story— such as Laurent Gbagbo’s, Qaddafi’s partner in developing the Pan-African dinar—can show the overall script. Tellingly, the Cote d’Ivoire or Ivory Coast was named for its primary export at the time with the elephant as irrelephant. Economists have replaced soldiers to be the instruments of extraction, while another luxury item, cocoa, replaced ivory as the primary market commodity. But from the beginning, Gbagbo was intent on making the elephant relevant again and the people visible once more.
Gbagbo was imprisoned in his twenties for opposing the President, Houphouët-Boigny, who had been installed by France when they granted the Cote d’Ivoire its “independence”. In his thirties, as the Director of History, Art, and African Archeology at the University of Abidjan, he was exiled for participating in a teacher’s strike. When multiparty elections were finally allowed in his forties, he was the only candidate willing to run against Houphouët-Boigny, who had funded counter-revolutionary coups in neighboring countries and built extravagant churches with the profits from cocoa plantations run by child labor. Although Gbagbo lost, he won a seat in the General Assembly.
Imprisoned during his first term on the charge of inciting violence, Gbagbo was still elected to a second term. When Houphouët-Boigny finally died after 33 years in office and his Vice-President was deposed in a coup, Gbagbo ran again and won the Presidency against the military general who had orchestrated the takeover. However, rebels backed the former Prime Minister, Allasane Ouattara, who hadn’t been allowed to run because he was a Burkina Faso national. His family had ruled the Ouattara Empire until the time when it was colonized by France.
Allasane Ouattara had studied in the US, obtaining a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and then going to work for the IMF. His wedding to a prominent French-Jewish businesswoman and socialite was held in the town hall of Paris’s prestigious 16th arrondissement presided over by the former mayor of Neuilly—Nicolas Sarkozy, who later became President.
Ouattara became the Governor of the Central Bank of West African States, the BCEAO, which had the exclusive right to issue the CFA franc for eight countries. He then became Director of the African Department at the IMF. When he was appointed Prime Minister of the Cote d’Ivoire, the IMF empowered him to impose their Structural Adjustment Program and slash social spending. So the opposition of Ouattara against Gbagbo's presidency was the former African ruling elite aligned with the central bankers against African sovereignty.
undermining democracy
Surviving his first term despite Ouattara's interference, Gbagbo ran for re-election against Ouattara in 2010 and was declared the winner by the Constitutional Council. But France—with the backing of the US and UN—overturned the ruling and announced Ouattara as the victor. Gbagbo refused to leave office. In the French-backed coup that followed the election, the United Nations estimates that more than 3,000 people lost their lives while thousands more were displaced. After heavy fighting, UN and French helicopters fired rockets on Gbagbo’s residence, which was then surrounded by 30 French armored vehicles.
There had been a former tunnel between the presidential palace and the French embassy, which Gbagbo had walled shut. It was once again blasted open to enable his capture: an end to his resistance and a symbolic tribute to French undermining. Gbagbo was kidnapped and taken to the Hague.
The International Criminal Court has only ever charged two other heads of state—Libya’s Qaddafi and Sudan’s Al-Bashir. In Al-Bashir’s case, after he was incapacitated, South Sudan peeled off to become the sparsely-populated, oil-rich, newest member of the World Bank. Finally, in 2014, Gbagbo was released for lack of evidence.
Meanwhile in “village after village investigated by Human Rights Watch, Republican Forces combatants [under Ouattara's prime minister] killed, raped, and pillaged the predominantly Guéré population. The Guéré are originally from western Côte d'Ivoire and largely supported Gbagbo in last year's election.”
Ten villages were burned, women were held and gang-raped for days, and thousands fled to Liberia. The elderly, who could not run, were captured to be taken out at random and killed at point-blank range. Men, old and young, were killed with machetes or guns, while boys were abducted to become child soldiers.
Of the 150 combatants charged with war crimes, none have been pro-Ouattara forces. But perhaps they should look for the real perpetrators in the Élysée Palace of France.
currency colonialism
The paradox of plenty is used to explain why resource-rich countries have such low standards of living. But Africa offers a simpler explanation for the lack of development: the money and trade goods never reach the people. Only the price tag of the inevitable war and conflict gets sent to them. It’s a different form of colonialism through control of the currency—the exploitation curse rather than the resource curse.
The World Bank shows that the risk of civil war increases exponentially with exports. When exports are 5% of GDP, the likelihood of civil war is 6%, but when exports rise to 25%, the rate of conflict goes to 33% or one in three. While World Bank analysts offer many theories for why this is, they don’t mention the funding and arming of rebels by their wealthy clientele of nations.
How could things be different? Libya’s oil wealth could back a credit held by a decentralized network of banks throughout the Mahgreb and West Africa. Each bank could be as small as one tribe or community, and would have the authority to issue a local currency or credit to stimulate goods and services. The banks could agree to put a common cap on individual bank accounts or income, as Qaddafi did, to prevent concentration of wealth. A 50% tax would be charged to exchange the local credit for an international currency backed by the oil, giving powerful protection to local industry.
Resources like oil and gas lie beneath the land shared by a continent. When oil profits go to a foreign corporation the overextraction and environmental destruction are devastating. But Libya shows that even a relatively equal distribution of unearned wealth within a single country reduces their self-reliance. It creates an entitlement to a quality of life that can only be sustained by massive imports.
If the sale of resources could result in no private profit but instead backed the currency of millions of people, it would spread a thin veneer of international trade over a wide surface. And within the continent or region, in countries like Liberia, Mali, Gabon, and the Cote d’Ivoire, it would generate a deep and fertile soil of local productivity and exchange. Without the incentive of fast money, communities may even be tempted to just leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, and the gas in the past.
CHAPTER 9 EXERCISES
Using examples from the book, or from your own research, logic, and experience, comment on the following and what it means today:
Paradigm Shift #9
The primary cause of US intervention is neither oil nor corporate profits, but the currency in which oil trades, which sets the standard for all trade.
LEXICON
Explain how the following definitions change the dialogue around social problems. Is this concept used in discussion of the examples to which it applies? If not, how does this affect the potential solutions?
petrodollar: the only reserve currency that can be used to buy oil and gas internationally. It is denominated in dollars and stored in the central banks of foreign countries or the US Treasury, as per agreement between Kissinger and the House of Saud.
petroeuro: a contender for domination as the world's reserve currency in the 1990's.
dollar hegemony: the exclusive agreement of oil-producing nations to sell their oil only in US currency, with violations enforced by military invasion, assassinations, coups, and trade embargoes. A monopoly by the US dollar as the global reserve currency, forcing oil-buying nations to stockpile dollars and keep their value high.
bank credit: an entry on a ledger, usually electronic, representing virtual units of exchange issued against the borrower's promise to repay.
banker: a private individual who has assumed the license to issue a country's debt and the credit (money) to repay it, backed by the government's complicity in accepting these units (and only these units) for taxes, by substituting bank-issued credit for government-issued credit in both electronic and paper form (i.e. Federal Reserve Notes for Treasury bills), and by using taxes (a percentage of the bank units earned by an individual in serving those who have accumulated them) to fund a police force protecting their interests at home and a military force protecting their interests abroad.
the Bank of International Settlements (BIS): the banker-owned central hub of banker-owned central banks.
the International Monetary Fund (IMF): the banker-owned body that controls the currencies issued by banker-owned central banks.
state-owned bank: a government-owned entity that issues the credit and currency of an economy, thereby organizing the labor of the community, currently only in North Dakota.
Third International Theory: the system of governance designed by Muammar Qaddafi for the State of the Masses, known as Libya.
oil bourse: a monetary exchange through which petroleum can be purchased.
the Dutch disease: when an expensive raw material brings an abundance of foreign currency into a country, raising the cost of living, making labor too expensive to produce goods, and creating a dependency on imports. Also called the paradox of plenty or the resource curse.
CFA Franc: the currency for 14 African nations whose international exchange value is set by France. Issued for eight countries through the Central Bank of West African States (the BCEAO).
Pan-African dinar: a sovereign African currency backed by Libyan gold and instigated by Muammar Qaddafi and Laurent Gbagbo of the Cote d'Ivoire. Issued by the African Investment Bank (AIB) in Sirte and controlled by the African Monetary Fund (AMF) in Camaroon. A plan killed by a French assassin's bullet.
currency colonialism: manipulation of a country's people through control of the means of exchange; another form of slavery.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
How does the image of Qaddafi presented by the media during the targeting of Libya compare to Prashad's analysis? Are there specifics that you remember about why Qaddafi was the epitome of evil at the time? Can a leader have good policies and still be a megalomaniac? What do you think about Qaddafi's method of redistributing wealth by putting a ceiling on bank accounts? Which of his accomplishments surprised you most?
How do you think the Dutch disease or "paradox of plenty" could be avoided? If you were the head of a resource-rich nation, what would your solution be? If you were the neighbor to a resource-rich nation, would your solution differ? Like Libya's gold, could the revenues from an export resource be used to back a currency for a continent, with incentives given for production and local exchange?
Here is another episode that talks about Libya:
Does Victoria Nuland's resignation and the recent deaths of Kissinger and Rothschild mean a changing of the guard or a new level of the Dark Arts? I examine five videos on the latter, and then repost my video from two years ago, when Ukraine was a neocon dream and Nuland was a cherubic devil in a blue dress-suit. It sees Nuland as the Harry Potter villainess, Dolores Umbridge, back from Azkaban where she was sent for crimes against humanity (aka Muggles). She's now wreaking havoc from NATO to Iraq, Afghanistan to Libya, Syria to the Iron Maidan of Ukraine. I examine false-flag dementor/sniper attacks, horcruxes as WMD's, and Voldemort as world death. I explain the relevance of the NATO agreement, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, and the Budapest Memorandum. I end with a lesson from a 1947 Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, Dorothy L. Sayer, on why "whole classes and nations are hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder" because we don't know how to decipher words and use logic to resist propaganda.
In this episode, I’ll be updating some of the recent revelations from Scott Ritter's Agent Zelensky, Aaron Mate on holding Crimea hostage, the NATO Vilnius Summit, and Moon of Alabama. I’ll also read the summaries of my previous ten episodes, which look at Zelensky, his sponsor Kolomoysky, Victoria Nuland, Putin, his economic advisor Sergei Glazyev, Michael Hudson on de-dollarization, and whether Ukraine and the Great Reset were coordinated by the same people, a question I still haven’t answered.
This documentary by Michael Oswald features Nicolas Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands, and is highly recommended:
B R I L L I A N T !!!
Your post is "molto coraggioso" .
Thank you so much 👍👍👍
Quote: "This centralization would prove to be his downfall."
Centralization vs. Decentralization is a main issue we need to discuss about your book.
As stated in your book, true democracy requires decentralization. Also centralization enables abuse of power and rise of empire. I agree with both.
What I question, is that democracy is the favored form of governance.
My research indicates that development necessitates centralized power. Naturally empowering the base is essential to provide guidance to national policies. This is the case in both Russia, Iran and China.