Using dollar to commit economic terrorism

By Basil Enwegbaram Since his ouster from the Garden of Eden ended his free lunch, man has lived and consumed the product of man’s labour. Since plundering is the shortest way to avoid the pain of labour, man has been doing everything to plunder others. In his famous book, ‘’The Law,’’ Frederic Bastiat, renowned French economist and politician, argued, ‘’Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labour, by the ceaseless application of his faculties to national resources…. But it is also true that man may live and satisfy his wants by seizing and consuming the products of the labour of others. This process is the origin of plunder.’’ I will confess here that what I have been trying to convince the reader is to agree that like precious imperial powers, the US used its power to pursue its narrow national interests. And the dollar’s de facto reserve currency power has since 1945 been used to plunder the world’s vast wealth. To continue acting as the world central bank forcing the rest of the world to accept dollar as a global legal tender without any intrinsic value, fear and intimidation have been used by the CIA and other agencies of the US government. But this bullying being exercised by Washington is synonymous with every reigning imperial power. As recent as the Rome Empire could be, it too was living off the labour of conquered territories. Britain exported crude exercise of imperial power, slaughtering any foreign leader who dared stood on London’s way. That is why we should accept that what the looting the US is doing using dollar imperium is as far as it could see, right. Like every other great power not willing to share power; since Washington noticed the growing rise of China, it has done everything possible to cut short China’s rise in fear that should China’s economy surpass America’s, the first causality should be the dollar, with the Yuan replacing it as de facto reserve currency. Series of roadblocks have been used to disrupt China’s rise. With incitement of internal political and social disorders in the late 1980s unable to stop China’s rise, the late 1990s witnessed economic blockade, including George Soros-led speculative attacks on East Asian tiger economies in 1997, which should they have brought down China’s neighbouring tiger economies, would have triggered a regional economic chaos, with China its eventual epicentre. With that too unable to stop China, oil card, the most dreadful arsenal in imperial toolkit, was fully deployed, raising global oil price to the roof. Leaving nothing to chance, this was combined with another arsenal, subprime mortgage scam with which trillions of dollars ‘legally’ dispossessed from countries, with China the main target. But why was China able to manoeuvre its way out of each roadblock? Could it be the extreme nationalism displayed by the Chinese people; or the culture of hard work? Could it be the sheer sacrifice the Chinese people have demonstrated during these years of China’s rise? The world’s oldest nation-state with five millennia nationhood, as well as the most populous nation should be the unique attributes that make China a hard nut to crack. What really has been shielding Chinese economy from all the serial financial and economic attacks is the fact that China operates socialist market economic system; a system completely alien to the west’s capitalism, which is based on blind pursuit of profit maximisation. It is the shield socialist capitalism provided that made both high oil price and subprime mortgage-induced global financial crisis in 2008 targeted at China to have little or no bad effect on Chinese economy. That the US as debtor nation should expect China, its creditor, to allow its economy to come under Wall Street receivership only showed how baseless such a strategy was, especially without taking into account what has kept Chinese economic growth unstoppable since 1980. China’s socialist capitalism being an organic economic system supported by both state and private sectors was able to neutralise the 2008 financial tremor from Wall Street. China’s socialist capitalism based on private sector-public sector collaboration meant stepping up public sector investment should private sector investment be lagging. Should the economy be booming and private companies utilising all funds for investment, the state sector immediately steps back by reducing its own investment so as to avoid an unhealthy overheating of the economy. By resorting to taking full advantage of its untapped domestic consumer market, the economy boomed rather than plunging especially because the central government, believing that it was time to allow domestic consumption replace exports, was able to put the economy on a faster gear. No wonder, while the global financial tsunami was ravaging western economies, Chinese economy stimulated by the state sector — particularly the country’s state-owned core banking system — was surprisingly jumping to the roof, driven by record investment boom. At the same time, EU economy shrank by 0.3 per cent; the US economy only struggled at 0.5 per cent. Another reason investment in China boomed rather than shrink was due to the fact that US investors had to invest overseas in order to get the kind of high returns on investment they needed, and there was nowhere to produce cheap goods to meet the kind of low priced goods American consumers were clamouring for. That post-2008 financial crisis economic policy saw massive investment in the expansion of the country’s infrastructure was because as a result, technological innovation leap-flogged the economy. In fact, with trillions of dollars being spent since 2011 on roads, rails, seaports, airports; Chinese 12th Five-year Plan between 2011 and 2015 is entirely focused on use of massive infrastructure upgrading to shorten the country’s high-tech product and service catch up with the west. Unable to bring down, the Wall Street’s 2008 global financial inferno ended up causing devastating damage to vulnerable economies around the world to the extent that these cash-strapped economies have had to contend with an army of Wall Street hedge funds speculators all over the place, buying up strategic corporate assets as well as preying on their stock markets in the false name of foreign direct investment. These they were able to accomplish thanks to the use of a national currency, without any form of intrinsic value backing it as a global currency. To understand the level of stealing the US has used the dollar to carry out, you should better to pick up any dollar note and examine it carefully. The most important inscription reads, ‘’This note is a legal tender for all debts, public and private, and is redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury or at any Federal Reserve Bank.’’ Now, if you want to take the inscription seriously, try to find yourself in either the United States Treasury or any Federal Reserve Bank to demand to redeem the dollar note you are holding. Let me tell you what to expect. They will ask you redemption of dollar to what — gold? If you say yes, expect to be told that it is illegal to demand dollar gold redemption. Case closed because since August 1971, gold redemption ceased. Since the dollar you are holding cannot be redeemed, it should be as cheap as the paper on which it was printed. Or shouldn’t you sense the amount of fraud being committed by simply calling what costs $0.04 to produce to be either $1 note, $5 note, $10 note, $20 note, $50 note, or $100 note? Fully aware that this fraud shouldn’t last forever, Wall Street Money Trust had since used their worthless dollar notes to accumulate other precious metals (including the legendary treasury of Solomon) to the tune of $400tn.