This week: • Iran • Moon • Artic •
• Spinoza • Weapons • Stuff •

 

It’s the economy, stupid

A crashing dollar, hyperinflation, followed by a depression that would make the early 1930s look opulent in comparison. This is the real threat facing the US, not nuclear shenanigans, from the proposed establishment of an Iranian oil bourse, likely to open this March.

In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced that his country would begin pricing its oil in euros. Less than three years later, Iraq was invaded under the fictitious pretext it had an ongoing nuclear weapons programme and an arsenal of chemical and biological materials.

In March 2006, Iran is scheduled to open its own oil bourse that will trade in euros. And would you Adam-and-Eve it, Iran stands accused of harbouring WMD too!

First up, to be 100% clear, Iran is not guilty of reneging on its obligations as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Under the terms of that treaty Iran has an “inalienable right” to “develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination”.

The claim that Iran is developing nuclear weapons is a mere pretext for war. The NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) predicts that Iran will not be able to produce nukes for perhaps a decade. So too, IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei has said repeatedly that his watchdog agency has found “no evidence” of a nuclear weapons program. You don’t see Israel, India and Pakistan being hauled in front of the Security Council for their far more developed nuclear programmes. Why Iran, and why now so urgently?

A growing number of experts believe Iran’s new oil bourse is more of a threat to US interests than nuclear missiles.

Krassimir Petrov, who teaches international finance in Bulgaria’s American University, warns “should the Iranian Oil Bourse gain momentum, it will be eagerly embraced by major economic powers and will precipitate the demise of the dollar.”

Editor and analyst Ryan McGreal points out that America’s greatest export is currently the dollar and when “the balance of reserve holdings starts to shift from dollars to euros, that’s very bad news for America’s system of dollar hegemony.”

William R. Clark, author of Petrodollar Warfare: Oil, Iraq and the Future of the Dollar writes, “the proposed Iranian oil bourse signifies that without some sort of US intervention, the euro is going to establish a firm foothold in the international oil trade. Given US debt levels and the stated neoconservative project of US global domination, Tehran’s objective constitutes an obvious encroachment on the dollar’s supremacy in the crucial international oil market.”

Over time, Iran could take some business away from the two incumbent energy exchanges, the International Petroleum Exchange and the New York Mercantile Exchange who both invoice sales solely in dollars.

A move away from invoicing oil in dollars to euros will undoubtedly have a negative effect on the US economy.

Fewer nations would be willing to hold the dollar in reserve which would cause a significant devaluation and result in the loss seigniorage revenues. In addition, US energy-related companies stand to lose out as they will be unable to participate in the bourse due to the longstanding American trade embargo on Iran.

In the 1970s, not long after the collapse of the gold standard, the US agreed with Saudi Arabia that Opec oil should be traded in dollars in effect replacing the gold standard with the oil standard.

Since then, consecutive US governments have been able to print dollar bills and treasury bonds in order to paper over huge current account and budgetary deficits, last year’s US current account deficit was $646 billion.

In terms of its own oil imports, the US can print dollar bills without exporting commodities or manufactured goods as these can be paid for by issuing yet more dollars and T-bills.

The Bush administration will never allow the Iranian government to open an oil exchange that trades petroleum in euros. If that were to happen, hundreds of billions of dollars would come flooding back to the United States crushing the greenback and destroying the economy. This is why Bush and Co are planning to lead the nation to war against Iran. It is straightforward defence of the current global system and the continuing dominance of the reserve currency, the dollar.

As long as nations are forced to buy oil in dollars, the United States can continue its profligate spending with impunity. (The dollar now accounts for 68% of global currency reserves up from 51% just a decade ago).

The effort to keep information about Iran’s oil exchange out of the headlines has been extremely successful. A simple Google search shows that NONE of the major newspapers or networks has referred to the upcoming bourse.

The preservation of the dollar supersedes every other priority for any president even if Armageddon is needed to save it as is threatened in Iran.

 

 

Loonie lunar looting

Prepare for plenty more craters on the moon. The space race is back on as the raw material rush heads into the stratosphere. Not content with raping our own planet the Russians have announced plans to start mining on the moon as soon as 2020, with a permanent base set up there by 2015.

Watch out for a carve-up of the satellite in the coming years as the true wealth of its resources comes under scrutiny. The Russians are specifically after helium 3, a much sought after isotope which could be used to power thermo-nuclear power stations.

The Russian way of accessing this space material will scar the planet irreversibly, using “lunar bulldozers” to heat the Moon’s surface in order to get at the resource

“The Earth’s known hydrocarbon reserves will last mankind 50 to 100 years at the present rate of consumption. There are practically no reserves of helium 3 on Earth. On the Moon, there are between one million and 500 million tons, according to estimates,” an executive at a leading Russian space agency said last week. Much of those reserves are reported to be in the Sea of Tranquillity.

One ton of the isotope would generate as much energy as 14 million tons of oil.

“Ten tons of helium 3 would be enough to meet the yearly energy needs of Russia,” the executive claimed.

Russia is by no means alone in wanting this non-radioactive material — the Americans, Chinese, Europeans, Indians and Japanese have all made plans to go after helium 3.

In January 2004, George Bush outlined a plan for NASA to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020 and then on to Mars and beyond.

India has proposed an unmanned scientific mission to the moon (Chandrayaan-I) in early 2008, in a Rs 380 core project, while the European Space Agency has plans to launch probes to explore the Moon in the near future, too. Likewise the People’s Republic of China has expressed ambitious plans for exploring the Moon and is investigating the prospect of lunar mining. Japan has two planned lunar missions, LUNAR-A and Selene; even a manned lunar base is planned by the Japanese Space Agency.

From the mid-1960’s to the mid-1970’s there were 65 moon landings (with 10 in 1971 alone), but after Luna 24 in 1976 it suddenly stopped. The Soviet Union started focusing on Venus and space stations and the US on Mars and beyond. In 1990 Japan visited the moon with the Hiten spacecraft, becoming the third country to orbit the moon. The spacecraft released the Hagormo probe into lunar orbit, but the transmitter failed rendering the mission scientifically useless.

Though several flags of the Soviet Union and the United States have been symbolically planted on the moon, the Russian and US governments make no claims to any part of the Moon’s surface. Russia and the US are party to the Outer Space Treaty, which places the Moon under the same jurisdiction as international waters. This treaty also restricts use of the Moon to peaceful purposes, explicitly banning weapons of mass destruction (including nuclear weapons) and military installations of any kind. A second treaty, the Moon Treaty, was proposed to restrict the exploitation of the Moon’s resources by any single nation, but it has not been signed by any of the space-faring nations. As raw materials dwindle the Moon could become the focus of heated rivalry in the coming decades, perhaps creating the first Star War.

 

• News of the Moon’s rich resources could be good news for all those who have bought plots of land if the contracts they forked out were actually legal. The folk at LunarEmbassy and MoonEstates.com truly cashed in with this outlandish concept.

 

• Finally, head on over to our very own Moon Landings section of the website, to see for yourself the truth behind Messers Armstrong, Aldrin and Co’s historic trip.

 

 

Artic next on everyone’s ‘to screw’ list

Nearer to home, there is another inhospitable area increasingly causing diplomatic tussles as it opens up. The fight for the resources of the melting Arctic has been heating up. As global warming continues to melt the ice pack, huge tracts, full of oil and gas reserves, fishing grounds and shipping routes are opening up but who actually controls these areas remains highly contentious.

Eight countries — the US, Russia, Canada, Denmark (which owns Greenland), Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland — have claims to the Arctic, while resource-hungry China has also started showing interest. Mounting tension over the opening up of the high north boiled over last week when Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister, hit back at criticism from the US over his plans to spend $5.3 billion developing his country’s forbidding Arctic coast, increasing its military presence and buying three new icebreakers.

“I’ve been very clear that we have significant plans for national defence and for defence of our sovereignty, including Arctic sovereignty,” he said.

George Newton, the chairman of the US Arctic Research Commission, told delegates at the conference of business leaders in Davos, Switzerland, that temperatures in the Arctic were expected to rise 5.5C (41.9F) in the next 100 years, and that last year the Arctic ice sheet was smaller than ever.

Rather than bemoan the tragedy that this represents for the Earth’s biodiversity, Mr Newton, clearly from the oil school of Bush, said: “When we’ve been talking about climate change it’s with concern, but we’re talking about opportunity.”

He is not alone in eyeing the desecration of one of the last pristine places on Earth.

Helge Lund, the president of Statoil, Norway’s state oil company, said that a quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves, 375 billion barrels, lies under the Arctic Ocean. “It will never replace the Middle East but it has the potential to be a good supplement,” he said.

Polar bears and seals will have more to worry than simply retreating ice packs and encroaching oil rigs in the form of commercial cargo vessels plying this previously unchartered area soon. With the ice receding so fast it is only a matter of time before the fabled North West passage opens allowing quick transit to either coast of North America as well as from Siberia to northeast Asia.

Under the Law of the Sea, countries can claim up to 200 miles of sea from their coasts, as well as resources below the coastal continental shelf. However, the US has not yet signed the Law and its application is hampered by border disputes.

It has particular eyes on Canadian territory. The Canadian leader’s defence investments are wise if he wants to keep the Yankees at bay as the Arctic transforms from barren iciness to oil central.

 

 

Spinoza asks What Would Willie Do?

After a month to cool off from his debut rant, Comrade Spinoza is back with a bang, asking what if Slick Willie was still the Prez?

Let’s see. We have an unemployed llama herder as the new president of Bolivia declaring his independence from Yanqui yoke, a victim of the CIA-sponsored 1973 coup in charge in Chile, and good old Hugoista still in charge up Venezuela way (couldn’t overthrow the bastid in 2002, could we?: where is the like of Kermit Roosevelt and Allen Dulles when you need them?). We are on the verge of “losing” Latin America.

It’s not ours to lose, but the Republicans think so.

Also, we kinda sorta never found Osama bin Laden.

And, the economy is in the Toilet. We have a “recovery” in which a significant part of the country is homeless, or leveraged beyond reason in a mortgage guaranteed to go South if interest rates increase. The “homeowners” in prime real estate markets appear to this correspondent during his Stateside visits to be thugs, gangstas, and kept women, as they were in the 1930s. Honest folk are still begging for a job.

But the question is... What if Clinton were prez?

Obviously, the Republicans would be having a grand time, attacking Clinton for not capturing the bad guy, losing Latin America, and selling the economy to China.

Bush has so personalized “conservatism”, and made it so faith-based, that you don’t have to read the newspaper, just pull to the right. As a result, the Republic is going tits up even on its own thug terms.

The perspective is to say the least skewed. Google has recently agreed to be Evil and to prevent mainland Chinese users from going to www.playboy.com but at least Google will tell users what is blocked and why.

Whereas entire tracts of knowledge, and knowing-that-you-don’t-have-a-clue, have been blasted out of the minds of Americans by a far more insidious form of epistemological censorship: that questions the ability to know.

Consider Haiti. Remember Haiti? An Internet poster recently said Kofi Annan was from Haiti, because, I guess, Haiti is one of dem African countries where the Hateys live, who Hate our way of life. Of course, Kofi Annan is from Ghana.

Haiti is the Caribbean country wherein Jean-Baptiste Aristide, a turbulent priest, a felonious monk, made US companies engaged in exploiting its infrastructure nervous because he called for people power. The US saw to it that Aristide was duly overthrown with the result that today, the US clients being buffoons, there is chaos in Haiti, with underfunded UN peacekeepers taking increasing casualties.

Also, a search for the exact phrase “Nigerian Yellowcake” yields more than 500 hits.

Many of the posters know that the story was a lie, others persist in theorizing its truth in a way that would shame the most rabid post-modernist.

The trouble is that it’s NOT “Nigerian”, it’s “Nigerien”. Basically, it’s a safe bet that 99.999% of Americans do not know the difference, and, for Bush’s purposes, it was enough that the implication was made: the black men (eek!) were in cahoots with Saddam Hussein.

This isn’t a matter of ignorant rednecks at all. It is the fashion to dismiss the non-white and non-European as marginal in a US whose culture is not only European but also in large measure Afro-Carib; if you doubt this, imagine what US music would be like without Elvis.

In my experience, it’s the tenured thugs and respectable homeowners who say “show me the literature of Burkina Faso”. Indeed, to the extent that labour is mobile while tenured thugs and homeowners stay home, it’s possibly the same situation as obtained in Plato’s time.

Back then Greek traders busy at their end of the Silk Road knew all about China whereas for Plato, China did not exist. Likewise, there is many a US Marine who after three tours of duty knows far more about Iraq than the Prez.

Rather than peering into the gathering gloom, it appears to me that many upper middle class and elite Americans are, perhaps more than Chinese mainlanders, living in a fantasy world.

Of course, Romantics, who like to make their own reality, might challenge my “reality”, saying, hey man, like it’s all a big toke, it’s all a big joke. What am I, some sort of pompous alles-weisen Mr. Know it All.

Well, yes, and that gives me the willies. If Clinton, myself, or a couple of pissed-off, well educated oysters on the half shell could have done better than Bush on the thug terms which guide American polity, I KNOW the Republic totters.

If an ordinary citizen can sit on his ass and access the CIA World Factbook (learning the difference between Niger and Nigeria), watch CSpan, access UN documents which showed (in March 2003!) no evidence of Iraqi WMDs after 1991, perhaps it’s time to wikify and Open Source foreign policy.

Indeed, this occurred in March 2003, when the Internet spoke with one voice, overwhelming older nut-right forces on the old American internet, saying, no war. In domestic American politics, the Internet has already rejected Hilary Clinton (who is calling for the war option in Iran like the Goldwater nutbar she was in 1964) and respects people who didn’t have a following at all before 2000.

I don’t want to join the Army
I don’t want to go to War
I just wants to live in London
On the earnings of an whore
[To the tune of “What a Friend we have in Jesus”, this was a British song of WWI revived for the 1969 antiwar musical Oh! What a Lovely War.]

Whereas the elite depends, as much as any Russian Tsar, on our capacity for suffering, and even for mounting “revolutions” in favour of a return to our chains.

Turns out, however, that many of the crazy kids that got on TV during the “orange” counter-revolution in Ukraine did so in order to later appear in videos and still photos that they could then download...and append to their applications to US colleges.

Perhaps they DIDN’T want a lifetime of serving monied Americans in Kiev as waitstaff?

I suppose I could wind up by saying a spectre haunts the world, but that would be hackneyed and swiping Marx’s thunder. The fact is that the Internet, while it can create virtual fantasy worlds (retail in the US where Hannity heads and followers of Anne Coulter follow their *guru*: wholesale in mainland China), can also contain the simple truth.

If Clinton were Prez, he would probably follow the same course overall as Bush because Lenin was in one respect right. Societies unwilling to resolve real contradictions do go to war on colonial peoples. But Slick Willie would do a better job. The problem is that this would be on the selfish terms set by the US.

 

 

Ad spoofs spiralling arms trade

“ I would have prefered to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work — for example a lawnmower”
— Mikhail Kalashnikov, 2002

Cinema goers last week were introduced to a highly novel, shocking advert — created by Amnesty International. The ad spoofs the idea of a shopping company from the fake Teleshop company. Creative components include a models posing with machine guns and automatic pistols in a glossy mail order “small arms catalogue”, an online component at ProtectTheHuman.com, a shopping channel spoof cinema advert and a guerilla marketing effort at shopping centres around the UK where fake salespeople will demonstrate the ease with which an AK47 machine gun can be assembled and fired.

It is part of an initiave set up along with Oxfam called Control Arms that looks to force the world’s governments to regulate an international arms trade treaty when the topic comes up for discussion in June at the UN.

“Lack of controls on the arms trade is fuelling conflict, poverty and human rights abuses worldwide,” Amnesty notes. One person dies every minute — half a million a year — because of armed violence. For such an enormous and deadly industry as the arms business there is an amazing lack of controls to ensure the weapons do not go to people who will abuse them.

Conflict fuels poverty as vital resources are wasted on expensive military hardware; and at a local level terrified people are unable to go about their ordinary, working lives.

Yet conversely some people are making big money from the spiraling violence. The global arms trade is enormous, with about $21billionn of authorized exports every year. Most of the sales are from the richest and most powerful nations. From 1998 to 2001 the US, Britain and France earned more from arms sales to the developing world than they gave in aid. For much more information on the perils of the arms trade, check out www.controlarms.org.

 

• What can you do? The ‘Million Faces’ is a visual petition — a way for you to show your concern about the spread of arms. The aim is to collect one million photos and self-portraits of people from around the world and to deliver them to world leaders in June. Click here to lend your face to this worthy campaign.

 

 

Stuff we like

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

Video: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
According to John Perkins since world war two they’ve managed to create history’s first truly global empire. This has been done by the corporatocracy, which are a few men and women who run our major corporations and in doing so also run the US government and many other governments around the world.

 

iRepress
Mark Fiore’s latest animation “iRepress” takes a look at the new technologies sweeping through communist China.

 

Video: Fallujah
“Fallujah: The Real Story” is a documentary by an Iraqi journalist showing the horrors of the US siege and attack of this city, Democracy Now! shows an excerpt from it.

 

Video: Exposed: The Carlyle Group
Exposed: The Carlyle Group is a shocking documentary uncovering the subversion of US democracy by a shady group of characters.

 

Osama the zombie
Just how did that tape emerge, given Osama died of kidney failure four years ago? That’s what the people at What Really Happened want to know.

 

Overpopulation not a problem in 2200 AD
200 years from now there’ll only be 2.3 billion on the planet tops as global warming will have ravaged Earth, so says a leading British scientist here.

 

Video: Suburbia set to be the slums of the future
With peak oil already here and global warming, Suburbia is unsustainable. In the coming crisis, the 50’s American Dream will die. The End of Suburbia explains why.

 

Thatcher authorised Nessie hunt
We knew she was barking but it emerges Mrs T was a tad of a conspiracy theorist, calling for a team to trawl Loch Ness for the mythical creature early on in her tenure as reported here in the Times.

 

Never mind the WMDs, where’s the money?
According to the LA Times, of $120 million of Iraqi oil money earmarked for reconstruction projects in Southern Iraq, $97 million cannot be accounted for. And that may well be just the tip of the iceberg, as the rest of the country still has not been audited fully yet. Auditors asked no less than the US ambassador to recover a total of $571,823 in overpaid funds. Two of the US occupation regime’s “field agents” left without accounting for a cool $700,000 each. Other firms were paid top dollar for shoddy work, incomplete work or even no work.

 

Outlandish conspiracy theory of the week:
Is Al Jazeera actually a Mossad front? The folks at conspiracy planet say: could be!

 

Less is more
This adbust is almost zen-like in its beautifully simple twist of the original message.

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report
This week, we ask: if the “there’s no global warming honest, no, really, we might be funded by big energy, but trust us” brigade are right, then how come the north of Canada is changing so dramatically as this interactive map available at CBC’s website illustrates?