The Euro currency: 'Weapon of Mass Destruction' for US economic hegemony?
conjectures, observations, and ruminations by me...an American...

I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about the foreign policy actions that our country (the US) is undertaking, and looking for information. It is increasingly clear that 'weapons of mass destruction' and 'terrorism' are mainly propaganda and control tools employed against those who are suspectable, and there is a lot more going on. Eventually, I ran across this essay; it seems to have more explainitory power than anything else I've seen to date and has better references than most.

There are several places on the web where this document can be found, and I've taken the liberty to both keep a copy locally, and convert it to several different formats. It's fairly long, and covers global macro-economic principles.

Local copy (html): RRiraqWar.html
Local copy (pdf): RRiraqWar.pdf
Local copy (ps): RRiraqWar.ps

'indymedia' link: rticle_id=4710
'ratical' link: RRiraqWar.html

The basic thesis of the essay as I see it is as follows:

• The US enjoys a significant economic advantage over the rest of the world by virtue of the US dollar being the international reserve currency.
• This advantage allows the US to operate economically under relaxed structural constriants which other nations cannot (but would like to.)
• The 'Euro' has the potential to replace the US $dollar in it's role as the primary international reserve currency.
• The advantages affored by this unique construct ($US backing international trade) is important enough to the US that we would participate in wars which are quite difficult to compare with any other recent non-covert actions.

OK. I see nothing difficult to believe here, and alot to think about. The following ruminations are strictly my own, and I'm not an expert in any of the fields.

Follow-up related to the above article...

One of the questions that the above article leaves open, and that has me scratching my head is the support of Britian in our action against Iraq. Various research that I have done seems to indicate that Britian, and especially Blair, are fairly hot for the idea of going to the Euro, which doesn't jive with his slavish support for our little control-Iraq adventure. Thinking back, I seem to remeber that the country which hold more equity in the US than any other is Britian. Perhaps they just need to buy some time to pull out before we collapse. As I recal, the Dutch are in a similar situation with respect to holdings in the US, and I've yet to hear a peep out of them regarding this whole mess. I could be wrong about this...I have no expertise and no way to monitor these types of things, but would note that the dollar being down 17% against the Euro over th last few years - much faster than was estimated - does seem to indicate that someone's pulling out.

'War'?, Really?...

But on to the more interesting stuff...Europe wants a piece of the action, believes that they are entitled, and probably are. (Not that they probably wish to share with the Chinese or Russians or anyone else...good old human nature...) What this means to me is that we are basically on, if not slightly over, the threashold of an economic 'war' with Europe and whatever other powers that see Europe and the Euro as a more compelling combination than the US and the US $dollar. China and Russia primarily, since Japan is perhaps too weak to even consider defection and would probably follow the currents like a piece of driftwood.

Domestic considerations...

What does the economic advantage yield us? Well, as I see it, we seem to be able do run the same type of distribution of wealth that is typically seen in third-world countries, but with the difference that our 'poor' people can afford enough food to make them obese, and our 'middle class' can afford several SUV's per family. This is very cool since it means that it is not nessessary to maintain the status quo via death squads and the like.

Without the artifical boost we get from the above mentioned economic advantage we could probably leverage the strengths of our country (natural resources, superiour higher education system, legacy industrial strength, etc) to carve out a compfortable subsistance for our people. What would probably have to be sacrificed would be support of a class of people are more wealthy by orders of magnitude than the average Joe. Maybe a handfull to serve as a token reminder of our glory days could be supported, but probably not the volume that we see at this point.
Let me be straight-up here; I'm a Liberal and, aurguably, a Socialist, so I like this option.

The other option would be to allow the living standard for Mr. A.V. Joe to fall dramatically. The problem here is that he may yearn for his old SUV, and vote the bums out of office. There are ways of dealing with problems of this nature, and there is a pretty stout foundation for them being put in place (Diebold , the new Ministry of Homeland Security, etc), but I, for one, am not anxious to be anywhere near them.

Back to the war...

Assuming that it is true that we in the opening phase of a war with Europe over economic control of the worlds capital basis, the obvious question is 'who will win?' I gotta be honest here...it's really difficult to have alot of faith in the Bush regime. The seem totally disorganized, arrogant/ignorant, and reckless both in foriegn and domestic issues, and they are clearly attempting a very tricky and perhaps impossible manuvour. Their main strength seems to be that they operate so rashly that they take the opposition by surprise. I do not think that such a strategy is viable in the long term.

They will probably win in Iraq, and succeed either in driving OPEC out of business, or cooperate with them and enjoy the benefit of optimally priced petrolium. No doubt that it will be back in it's 'proper' $US/barrel denomination, but for how long? There can be little doubt that after the events leading up to the Iraq conquest left little by the way of benevolent goodwill toward the US in anyone's tummy. Our fall will be eagerly anticipated, and probably actively engineered should the opertunity present itself. The last tool we have at our disposal to stave off eventual collapse is our military superiority..."Acting like a Superpower" to quote Rumsfeld. When the end finally does come, I think we will be damned lucky to end up with a 'trading band' arrangement (as described in the above document) if our former allies can aviod it.
Thanks, Bush Regime...thanks for nothing.

My biggest fear...

Unless we 'act like the world's last and only Superpower' in the manner perscriped by the 'Project for the New American Century' ('PNAC' who's members and signitories include Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfewitz and interestingly _Jeb_ Bush) in their seminal 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' manifesto, I should think that our new-found enemies will probably bury us deeper then Kruschev had in mind; and I hate to say it, but I wouldn't blame them for such a desire, but do note that they tend to be more or less as scummy as we are in when they have a chance to be.

Amoung the many avenue of failure of the 'use military to prop up economic hegemony' stragety would be for the neo-conservatives to lose political power domestically and allow the plans (however hastily concieved and impromptu) to come under control of those who may accept different endgoals (i.e., Democrats or worse for them, traditional Republicans.) I can't believe that the Bush junta would accept the possibility of such a failure. I do not expect them to step aside simply because the ignorant majority of voters fail to grasp their fantasies which, I admit, are somewhat complicated (and shocking) to the average person with average life goals ...like raising a family safely, for instance. Amoung other things, they and their industrialist supporters would loose whatever assets they had not gotten safely off-shore.

The big question in my mind is will they bother with the pretense of elections at all, or simply go into a state of emergency, which is becoming rapidly more legally defensible via changes to both the laws and those who interpret them. I supect that it would depend on whether they can get to a certain threshold over which another vote theft isn't utterly blatent.

- Tom Huppi - 2/15/03

Another piece worth reading that I spotted on the usenet: 'Hienberg's "museletter" article.'