We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, March 23, 2015

The Petrocurrency War

Click here to access article by Gulam Asgar Mitha from Oriental Review.

I think this and other developments that indicate a decline in the hegemony of the US dollar and the US Empire is sometimes written about in a much too casual way.
Under above scenarios, the 40 years of political and economic marriage of convenience between Saudi Arabia and the US would likely change. Iran could well emerge as the regional Middle East superpower and a close Chinese and Russian ally under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – a new OPEC with nuclear bombs as suggested in brevity by Professor David Wall in Matthew Brummer’s Journal of International Affairs The Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Iran: A Power-Full Union. Could that well lead to World War 3 or history may refer to it as “the petrocurrency war”?
By the way, a key reference link is missing for the Reuter's article from which Mitha extracts some key quotes:
As per a Reuters report of 9 March 2015 “the launch of the CIPS will remove one of the biggest hurdles to internationalizing the yuan and should greatly increase global usage of the Chinese currency by cutting transaction costs and processing times”. Reuters mentioned that “CIPS will become the superhighway for the yuan”.
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