Do not miss this. Yanis Varoufakis on the political and economic impact of the crisis – and its inextricable links with the 2008 crash.
Price to you? Eighteen minutes and twenty-two seconds of your life.
(See also: Kevin Ovenden on Covid-19 … Klein on Covid-19)
It would be useful to have a discussion and/or some guidance from anyone with the requisite knowledge as to the impact of what appears to be the imminent end of the petro-dollar.
Varoufakis details in one of his books the way the process by which the petro-dollar scam enables the USA to maintain a high level of national debt and print dollars to cover it – as well as shovel them to other Central Banks to keep the bubble inflated – because to meet much of the energy needs of their economies most countries need to buy dollars to obtain oil.
Two questions seem to arise from this which Varoufakis does not seem to cover here.
Firstly, the twin impact on the value of the dollar and the ability of the US economy to not only sustain itself and its present debt level but actually survive from crashing as a viable economy – with all that actually means in practical terms.
Secondly, given the fact that the petro-dollar system is being undermined by a growing ‘consortium?’ of States which include Russia, China, India, Iran, possibly Saudi Arabia now? (given the apparent phony oil war which looks set to finish off the US fracking industry, itself supported by public subsidy and junk pension bonds because it is not economically viable, on the pretext of US energy independence) amongst others; the question arises as to whether whatever replacement this consortium introduce will be able to use those financial resources to better effect for the benefit of the global commons rather than to enrich the few parasites?
Mason, before he lost his marbles, identified what he seemed to claim was the stalling of the Capitalist dynamic – the cycle of creative destruction which replaced what were previous new technologies which had matured and no longer profitable without massive public support from the Commonwealth – identified by Kondratiev.
And it does indeed seem like the ne0-liberal and neo-conservative Powers That Be have been deliberately stopping the dynamic – you only have to look at the level of public subsidies to the now over mature carbon based energy technologies and associated markets – to freeze a moment in time to maintain a particular type of hegmony.
A sort of control the future by freezing the present kind of approach.
This video is certainly a start but there is a need to go further at a number of levels.