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Monday, October 08, 2007

Petrodollar warfare and the collapse of US dollar imperialism

IDP CONSULTING GROUP, INC SPECIAL REPORT, AUGUST 1, 2007

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PETRODOLLAR WARFARE & COLLAPSE OF US


DOLLAR IMPERIALISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY


BY CHARLES H. COPPES, AUTHOR OF AMERICA’S FINANCIAL RECKONING DAY


 


“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The people cannot be safe without information.”


– Thomas Jefferson


Introduction


        The term “petrodollar” is a macroeconomic term that is little understood and even less discussed in the major news media today. Exactly how a petrodollar exchange system has helped maintain the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency is a general theme in my book and will be the focus of this special report. As William Clark suggests in his book Petrodollar Warfare, the current “war on terror” has been exploited by the neocons in an effort to establish permanent US military bases in the Persian Gulf and also “dissuade” other nations from switching their crude oil contracts into an emerging euro currency. In what is now being called the first oil currency war of the 21st century, the Iraqi War in 2003 was more about protecting US dollar imperialism and preventing a “petroeuro exchange system” than the alleged threat of WMDs or terrorist links to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network. As William Clark is careful to point out, Saddam Hussein had begun to price Iraqi oil contracts in euros starting in November 2000 and the US government was determined to put a stop to this crude/euro currency peg, which they successfully did in the summer of 2003. As Clark mentions:               


Not surprisingly, the US corporate media has not run a single news story on the reconversion of Iraq’s oil exports from petroeuros to petrodollars….This hidden fact [has] helped illuminate one of the crucial, yet over-looked macroeconomic rationales for the 2003 Iraqi War. Another goal of the neoconservatives was to use the “war on terror” as the publicly expressed premise in an attempt to dissolve OPEC’s decision-making process, thus ultimately frustrating the cartel’s inevitable switch to pricing oil in euros (emphasis added).[1]


        As indicated here, the threat of a “petroeuro” pricing structure among OPEC members is noteworthy and will be addressed in a later section. The fact that only the foreign press carried this “reconversion” from petroeuros to petrodollars is both revealing and disconcerting. Since 1980 the US media industry has been deregulated and now consists of five corporate conglomerates which control about 90% of the information flow in America. There is NBC (General Electric), ABC (Disney Co.), CBS (Viacom), FOX (News Corp.), and CNN (AOL Time Warner). Is it possible that all five major networks could have missed the geostrategic importance of invoicing Iraq’s vast oil reserves back into US dollars? Or was former CIA Director William Colby right when he commented that “the CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media?”

 

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