|
Open (Neither Ukraine Nor Palestine) Thread 2024-290
News & views not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine …
This currently makes the rounds:
A Giant of Journalism Gets Half its Budget From the U.S. Government – Ryan Grim / Drop Site News, Dec 2 2024
OCCRP works with dozens of major newspapers to collaboratively publish the kinds of scoops you’re well aware of, such as the Panama Papers or the Pandora Papers. What we can reveal today is that the single largest funder of OCCRP is the U.S. State Department.
Duh …
Selective Leaks Of The #PanamaPapers Create Huge Blackmail Potential – Moon of Alabama, Apr 4 2016
A real leak of data from a law firm in Panama would be very interesting. Many rich people and/or politicians hide money in shell companies that such firms in Panama provide. But the current heavily promoted "leak" of such data to several NATO supporting news organization and a US government financed "Non Government Organization" is just a lame attempt to smear some people the U.S. empire dislikes. It also creates a huge blackmail opportunity by NOT publishing certain data in return for this or that desired favor.
…
A year ago someone provided tons of data from Mossak Fonseca to a German newpaper, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung. The Munich daily is politically on the center right and staunchly pro NATO. It cooperates with the Guardian, the BBC, Le Monde, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and some other news organization who are all known supporters of the establishment.
…
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is part of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) which is financed by the U.S. government through USAID.
The "leak" is of data selected by U.S. friendly organization out of a database, likely obtained by U.S. secret services, which can be assumed to include much dirt about "western" persons and organizations.
…
another test of Putin quote trying to get by typepad filter
Vladimir Putin: First of all, I agree with you that the use of the dollar as a global currency brings the United States a large amount of unearned money. According to our experts, somewhere in the last ten years or so, they received about ten trillion dollars just like that, out of the sky, for the fact that the dollar was used as the world’s settlement reserve currency. This is based on bets, placements in their banks, and so on. Ten trillion dollars is very decent, which means that they consume more than they produce. And this is a very important thing.
That is, in fact, the United States, at the expense of the dollar, continues to exploit other economies of the world in its favor. Very few people think about this, but it is a fact, and in this part I agree with you. This is the first one.
Now the second one. You said that the newly elected President Trump threatened that he would impose sanctions and increased duties against those who would not use the dollar. As far as I can tell, he didn’t say that. I understand that everything related to the United States causes a certain reaction in our country. As far as I’ve seen, I don’t really have time to look at what’s going on somewhere “over the hill”, but nevertheless I drew attention to it: he said that if someone prohibits the use of the dollar, restricts it, they will react accordingly. It’s not the same thing. It is one thing to prohibit the use of the dollar, but another thing is not to use it. You see, these are completely different things. This is the second one.
The third. After all, the newly elected president has not been in the White House you mentioned for four years. And during this time, there have been some changes in the global economy and in the American economy. His successors and political opponents have done a great deal to undermine the fundamental foundations of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. And first of all, they did it with their own hands, using the dollar as an instrument of political, and perhaps even armed struggle, in order to harm other countries that the current authorities in the United States consider their opponent. We never counted them, but they suddenly decided that we were opponents and started to impose restrictions. And given the fact that the US share in the global economy is declining, which means that the dollar’s influence on global economic processes is also decreasing, processes related to the use of other instruments naturally occur.
For example, who can ban bi tc oin? No one. And who can prohibit the use of other electronic means of payment? No one, because these are new technologies, and no matter what happens with the dollar, these tools will evolve in one way or another, because everyone will strive to reduce costs and increase reliability. This is an inevitable process, and the dollar has absolutely nothing to do with it.
But if there is a further reduction in the use of the dollar in the world, and with their own hands, then, of course, they will undermine the foundations of their economic power. This is quite obvious, and I completely agree with you here.
And finally, we’ve never given up on the dollar. Did we refuse? We were the ones who were denied its use. You know, as we say: what we fought for, we ran into—we ran into the problems of the dollar itself. Now, of course, we need to think about what to do next. This all comes from self-confidence, from swagger, including in the economic sphere. This is unacceptable. We need to understand the processes that are taking place in the world, and build our policies based on this understanding, including at the international level.
See what happens and happens naturally. Even countries that are unconditional allies of the United States, they are reducing their gold and foreign exchange reserves, both in dollars and euros, by the way. Over the past ten years, the reduction has been approximately 13 percent–-a significant amount. And this happens naturally, and no one will be able to reverse these processes, especially with the help of sanctions and forceful methods, which are destructive for the economy, and for those who accept it first of all.
Posted by: psychohistorian | Dec 5 2024 21:15 utc | 109
|
