Economic Meltdown
by Margaret Kimberley
From Black Agenda Report and Smirking Chimp
How will Americans react when their economy collapses? The story of the coming crisis is barely being told because the corporate media's information bubble gets thicker by the day. Very few people know or understand the depths of the coming crisis. There is talk of recession, and falling home prices, but there has been little if any explanation of the havoc that will be played out across the country when the day of reckoning comes.
Banks all over the world are taking "write downs" in the billions of dollars. In plain English, a write down is a loss. Not only are international investment banks losing money hand over fist, but the almighty dollar isn't so mighty anymore. Stores in New York City are accepting euros along with the greenback.
Humorous anecdotes of Manhattanites using euros are no longer funny. No nation on earth wants dollars anymore. Tourists can no longer use them at the Taj Mahal and oil rich Saudi princes would dump them if they could do so without hurting themselves. "My feeling is that the mere mention that OPEC countries are studying the issue of the dollar is itself going to have an impact that endangers the interests of the countries. There will be journalists who will seize on this point and we don't want the dollar to collapse instead of doing something good for OPEC."
So said Prince Saud al-Faisal when he thought his microphone was turned off at an OPEC meeting. His words were stunning, so too is the fact that few Americans know he uttered them. The average American knows about the subprime mortgage crisis and knows that the neighbors lost their house. They think the problems were created by greedy banks and gullible home buyers who thought interest-only mortgages actually made sense. They don't know much else. They don't know that the subprime mortgage crisis is part of a larger crisis in the derivatives market that has enveloped the entire world.
Neither the corporate media nor politicians are telling the country the true extent of our economic troubles. The country will be wholly unprepared for the coming catastrophe. While foreigners are waiting for an opportune moment to drop the dollar like a bad habit, the presidential candidates say nothing and the people won't know what hit them when the hammer falls.
The three trillion dollar cost of the Iraq occupation, and giveaways to corporate cronies have sucked the treasury dry. Bush will have won the day, and left the next president with no money for any new initiatives, regardless of any campaign promises.
What will be the human cost when the bottom falls out? Americans have no safety net, no job security, and no health insurance without the jobs they are about to lose. There will be wide spread human misery among the people less prepared than any other to cope with the crisis.
As always, black Americans will suffer more. The little wealth we had, real estate, has been taken away by the banking industry derivatives schemes that are at the heart of this crisis. Those who were barely in the middle class won't be any longer without assets or jobs to sustain them.
Trouble will spread outside of the nation as well. America produces nothing but warfare with a military budget larger than that of every other country on earth combined. The very existence of an Iran oil market, based on Iran's currency, not dollars, may be enough to instigate Uncle Sam to do the only thing it still can: wage war and kill many human beings. The response to the loss of domination will be more wars.
The most basic understandings that Americans had of their country are about to shaken to the very core. Despite all evidence to the contrary, most still believe they have the best standard of living and the strongest economy. Those beliefs have not been true for a long time and those foolish ideas will be put to the test in a painful way.
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