The money war

Money is the new war. That's the message of Alistair Crooke, in this interview.

We have a dollar-based financial system, and through instrumentalizing America's position as controller of all dollar transactions, the US has been able to bypass the old tools of diplomacy and the UN -- in order to further its aims.

But with Ukraine, we have entered a new era: We have a substantial, geostrategic conflict taking place, but it's effectively a geo-financial war between the US and Russia. We have the collapse in the oil prices; we have the currency wars; we have the contrived "shorting" -- selling short -- of the ruble.

Crooke says that a chief architect of these schemes was a fellow named David S. Cohen, of the Treasury Department. As Moon of Alabama notes, Cohen has moved on the CIA, where he is The New Number Two. That extraordinary piece of job-hopping tells you a lot about the world we are in.

The great worry is that Russian banks will be shut out of the SWIFT system, which is the way banks communicate with each other. That move would apply a meat cleaver chop to all financial relations between Russia and the west.

In the short and (perhaps) the medium term, a Money War will do enormous harm to Russia. But if we take a longer view, we can see that this conflict will end up destroying American power and prestige.

The BRICS countries (including Russia and China) are massive, and they are beginning to understand -- correctly -- that that they don't really need us.

Over time, there is likely to be a backlash against exercises of U.S. power, as countries which do not like them make themselves less dependent on an international financial system that is vulnerable to U.S. pressure.

Crooke made the same point, although he was far more blunt.

We have a geo-financial war, and what we are seeing as a consequence of this geo-financial war is that first of all, it has brought about a close alliance between Russia and China.

China understands that Russia constitutes the first domino; if Russia is to fall, China will be next. These two states are together moving to create a parallel financial system, disentangled from the Western financial system. It includes replicating SWIFT [Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication] and creating entities such as the Asian Development Bank.

The Asian Development Bank is meant to replace the IMF, our chief weapon for screwing over third world countries.

The engineered drop in oil prices is part of our Money War against Russia and Iran, and it is is having all sorts of unintended effects.

There is a huge move of capital out of emerging markets and out of Middle Eastern states whose currencies consequently have been adversely affected. For the first time, too, we see the end of the petro-dollar as a system for recirculating oil revenues to Wall Street.

For the first time, it has turned negative: It is sucking liquidity out from Wall Street, not putting it in. The fall in the price of oil has suddenly created huge financial turbulence, which is endangering the global financial system.

The US can't win the Money War, because our industrial base has eroded and our financial hegemony is founded on a shared hallucination. The only way to keep the world in a perpetual state of hallucination is to do what hypnotists do: Offer gentle suggestions in a soft, reassuring tone of voice. But if we are loud and shocking, everyone will snap out of the trance.

We have lost the ability to speak in a soft and reassuring manner. We have become bellicose, onerous and annoying. We are dispensable. We will be dispensed with.