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Frank Hayden revered NZ writer, journalist, editor and columnist has finally hung up his pen. Frank is known for his brilliant one liner’s and one of my favourites is this one. “Once you start to see through bullshit then you see through all bullshit”.
Another great one liner that I don’t think can be credited to Frank, but I’m sure he has lived his whole life by is “Follow the money”. This is always the start point when you’re trying to investigate what is causing the stink in a particular story your covering.
As you have probably guessed by now I have a keen interest in; the future of oil as a fuel, the Iraq war and the real motives behind it, the health of the planet my grandchildren will inherit, and all due to our collective overuse of fossil fuels.
For three years now I have been sniffing round the Iraqi war, trying to follow the money like a bloodhound with a cold, plenty of effort but getting bloody nowhere.
The other day I called in to see a friend of mine and sitting on his desk, open in the middle and facing my side of his desk was a book that immediately grabbed my attention.
“Petrodollar Warfare” by William R Clark, wham, like a kid in a candy shop I picked it up and started to read. “I thought that would get your interest” he chuckled.
The page he had conveniently left the book open at was like a light at the end of the tunnel. The page starts like this and I quote:
“Despite months of debate in the mass media about fictitious threats from Iraq’s vast stockpiles of WMD and deceptive references suggesting Iraqi involvement in 9/11, the US corporate media completely omitted from the information flow the simple facts that, from 2001 up until the 2003 invasion, US petroleum conglomerates were paying for Iraq’s oil in Euros – not dollars.
What would be the effect if most OPEC members made a sudden (collective) switch to Euros, as opposed to a gradual transition? While highly unlikely, this would create monumental turmoil in the global financial markets.”
Instant cold cure – I had finally been shown the money trail. Just about every half intelligent person on the planet has figured out by now that it was never about WMD and most of us had concluded that it was a simple asset grab of Iraqi oil. But that never quite seemed right to me, while these assets are surely worth billions and perhaps trillions of dollars, there had to be more to it than that.
That single page concludes: “So long as OPEC oil was priced in US dollars, and so long as OPEC invested the dollars in US government instruments, the US government enjoyed a double loan. The first part of the loan was for oil. The government could print dollars to pay for oil, and the American economy did not have to produce goods and services in exchange for the oil until OPEC used the dollars for goods and services. Obviously the strategy could not work if (US) dollars were not a means of exchange for oil.
The second part of the loan was from all other economies that had to pay dollars for oil but could not print (US) currency. Those economies had to trade their goods and services for dollars in order to pay OPEC. Again, so long as OPEC held the dollars rather than spending them, the US received a loan. It was therefore important to keep OPEC oil priced in dollars at the same time that the government officials continued to recruit Arab funds.”
Now you’re talking absolutely godzillions of dollars at stake and absolutely anything will be done to protect that kind of mullah.
The minute Saddam sold oil in Euros he was gone by lunchtime; he had to be because every other oil-producing nation would have followed sooner or later if the United States had not taken him out.
If you have a highly sort after product to sell and you have to sell it in US dollars, everything is fine as long as the US dollar remains strong and worth more than most other currencies. But what if it isn’t strong, what if it’s pretty weak as it is right now and some seriously rich people (countries) around the world are losing huge amounts of money because of it, surely they are going to want to do something about that. The only thing they can do is sell oil in a currency with a greater value, but then they risk being flattened by the American military machine. Catch 22.
Literally this means that the whole world economy is at stake and balancing on a knifes edge.
This little Middle Eastern land grab has just taken on a whole new meaning.
And to quote Frank one last time, “We are deep in the shit here. It takes a lot for me to say that, but we are. The picture we have, is of the apocalypse”
But then, that is “Just an old trucker’s” point of view.
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