Sunday, March 18, 2012

Oil and Financial Warfare

Flashback to a couple of weeks ago on Cryptogon:
If SWIFT actually pulls the plug, I’d consider the fuse to be lit. Also, if SWIFT does it before 20 March, this is probably the real reason:
Last week, the Tehran Times noted that the Iranian oil bourse will start trading oil in currencies other than the dollar from March 20. This long-planned move is part of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vision of economic war with the west.
“The dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme is nothing more than a convenient excuse for the US to use threats to protect the ‘reserve currency’ status of the dollar,” the newspaper, which calls itself the voice of the Islamic Revolution, said.SWIFT is going to pull the plug on Iran on 17 March, three days before the opening of the oil bourse.
Via: BBC:Swift, the body that handles global banking transactions, says it will cut Iran’s banks out of the system on Saturday to enforce sanctions.
The move will isolate Iran financially by making it almost impossible for money to flow in and out of the country via official banking channels.
Read it al Peak Oil
Iran Oil Bourse To Open Next Week?
by admin

The US and Western powers can likely win this one, but that only makes the commitment of non-Western powers to escaping the financial stranglehold of the West even stronger. Just as other countries realize that they need a credible (nuclear) deterrent to compete, so too, they need a non-Western reserve currency. This is going to be become an increasingly big push among emerging nations chafing under the Western neoliberal yoke that is the successor to imperialism and colonialism. They see neoliberalism as neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism.

The prevailing view now is that capitalism has won the day. However, there are many forms of capitalism, for example Chinese market socialism is "capitalism with Asian characteristics" Neoliberals insist to the contrary that there is only one capitalism and it is neoliberalism.

This is an emerging trend to watch. it is likely to stand in the way of global cooperation and coordination just when the world most needs recognition of interdependence, shared interests, and an increasingly common future.


7 comments:

Ryan Harris said...

The international banks that own SWIFT are concerned about helping the US administration maintain the dollar as a reserve currency? And fight a bourse in Iran under the guise of stopping nuclear weapons? Yeah, that is WAY MORE LIKELY than an international consensus that Iran is developing nuclear weapons to change the balance of power with Israel, China, Russia, Europe, and the Arab countries.

Tom Hickey said...

What I am reading is that there is no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons, and no actual indication that Iran intends to build them when the head Ayatollah whose interpretation is the final say on Islamic law in Iran says they are prohibited by Islam. And when we have a history of the US using the "mushroom cloud" pretext to launch a war that all about oil, I am suspicious of claims to the contrary. BTW, I was not one of those fooled the first time. This is a manufactured crisis that suits US ruling elite and crony interests.

Matt Franko said...

"the Iranian oil bourse will start trading oil in currencies other than the dollar"

If the Iranians are so advanced, then why dont they just use their oil to run their own economy and the heck with the rest of the world.... why dont they just price the oil in dinars or whatever the state currency of Iran is and make it the ROWs problem to come up with these dinars if they want to buy Iranian oil...

sort of "put your money where your mouth is"... I'm afraid these Iranians are just more zombie western wannabes who cannot operate without using the western model.

Resp,

Ryan Harris said...

Iran may not be assembling a nuclear weapon. They have however admitted to enriching uranium to a level beyond what is needed to generate power; the only reason to do that is to be prepared to make a bomb. It is soft power. When this highly enriched uranium capability is combined with their highly publicized missile program, the only missing component is the detonator. For better or worse the plans for a detonator have been publicly available on the internet for decades. The enrichment is supposed to be the difficult part of making the bomb. The balance of power will shift between China, Russia, Europe, Persia and the rest of The Middle East when Iran can threaten to assemble a bomb.

Tom Hickey said...

Ryan, what has been going on geo-strategically for some time, essentially since the collapse of the USSR, is a focus of the Great Game onto Central Asia and MENA. The focus has been on oil since WWI. The US has to maintain control of global energy to maintain hegemony economically, politically and militarily, which is US national policy. Since the collapse of the USSR both the players and the terrain have shifted somewhat.

The dynamic in MENA and Central Asia is a power struggle within the Islamic world over who represents Islamic interests. Opposition to the US and Western power with a history of imperialism in MENA is essential to this, as well as opposition to Israel as a Western puppet and the Islamic rulers that are Western cronies, especially the House of Saud.

The nuclear issue is all about manipulating public opinion in the US and West to get the people behind the hidden agenda without explaining to them what it is. This is pure propaganda cynically deployed.

Tom Hickey said...

Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, at least he was honest in saying, "Let's just take the oil."

David said...

If captitalism won the cold war it was with Keynesian capitalism not Chicago School monetarism. After the cold war was won the MOTU's said there is no competing system so we can now impose the system we want. Now that the horses are starting to buck we'll see how well they can stay in the saddle.

Back when Bush made a mess of Mesopotamia there was talk that the "real" reason for the war was Saddam's switching from the dollar to the Euro. People were worried that the Euro would replace the dollar as "reserve currency." We don't hear much of that kind of talk now. Ahmadinijad is a fool if he thinks the U.S. would be hurt by such a move. Tom may be right, though, that it could be used as a convenient pretext if they still think they need one.