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The American Empire Is Bankrupt | CommonDreams.org

This week marks the end of the dollar's reign as the world's reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That's over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.

Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America's imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.

There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, "the most important meeting of the 21st century so far."

by Fran (fran at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Jun 17th, 2009 at 02:12:36 PM EST
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Emerging Economies Meet in Russia - NYTimes.com
YEKATERINBURG, Russia -- Leaders of the four largest emerging market economies discussed ways to reduce their reliance on the United States at their first formal summit meeting on Tuesday. But they concluded with only a cautious statement suggesting a move away from the dollar's role in global commerce and a call for greater representation of developing countries in global financial institutions.

By some predictions, the four nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China, a group referred to as the BRIC group, will surpass the current leading economies by the middle of this century, a tectonic shift that by this reckoning will eventually nudge the United States and Western Europe away from the center of world productivity and power.

Russia's president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said the main point of the meeting was to show that "the BRIC should create conditions for a more just world order."

The four countries produce about 15 percent of the world's gross domestic product and hold about 40 percent of the gold and hard currency reserves, but they are not a unified bloc and do not do enough business among themselves to justify a trade alliance.

by Fran (fran at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Jun 17th, 2009 at 02:28:12 PM EST
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This week marks the end of the dollar's reign as the world's reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That's over. It is not coming back.

Good.  Long overdue.

In the end, might makes right. Nothing has changed since the caveman.

by THE Twank (yatta blah blah @ blah.com) on Wed Jun 17th, 2009 at 05:28:53 PM EST
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I think it's over-optimistic. too many of these countries have large dollar reserves they do not wish to see disappear in a petulant chauvinist fit. Especially china which is pretty keen to keep the dollar afloat whilst it works out how to extract value from its holdings.

keep to the Fen Causeway
by Helen (lareinagal at yahoo dot co dot uk) on Wed Jun 17th, 2009 at 05:59:00 PM EST
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I still say the Chinese should exchange a lot of that worthless paper for US real estate.  Their "operatives" could settle into neighborhoods across the US and the Cold War of the '60s is won without a shot being fired.  What a sight!  Chinese home owners with Mexican lawn mowers.  And unemployed Anglos living in Tent Cities, feeding out of dumpsters.  Hell of a plot for a movie, don't you think?  A quasi Soylent Green.

In the end, might makes right. Nothing has changed since the caveman.
by THE Twank (yatta blah blah @ blah.com) on Thu Jun 18th, 2009 at 06:09:56 AM EST
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the same people who are dismissive of the EU, despite its very real regulatory powers, economic size and the euro, see the Shangai Cooperation Organisation, amere talking shop, as a world-changing entity.

This is silly. worse, it's stupid.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Thu Jun 18th, 2009 at 04:54:49 AM EST
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