Eamon Javers of Politico recently wondered why Matt Drudge, the proprietor of the widely-read Drudge Report, so frequently links to stories detailing the decline of the dollar. In the first three weeks of October, he noted, Drudge linked to such stories eighteen times. Javers suggests that Drudge’s interest in the subject may be politically motivated:
“What Drudge is doing is relentlessly hammering the continuing point which is linking Barack Obama’s administration and what some see as their failures on spending and their agenda on the economy, linking that to the declining value of the dollar. And what we see is the dollar becoming extremely politicized in the debate over whether this is Obama’s fault.”
The quote is revealing in more ways than one. For one thing, it lays bare the mindset of the mainstream media. Javers is only one of a legion of mainstream journalists who automatically assume that any story that reflects badly on the president must be an act of political gamesmanship. It apparently does not occur to them that Matt Drudge may be highlighting those items, because they are intrinsically newsworthy. So intent are they on pushing Obama’s agenda that they have failed to notice one of the most important stories of our time – the ongoing disintegration of the US dollar.
The repercussions of this are immense. Once the dollar collapses, it will take down with it the world’s monetary regime, which has the dollar as its foundation. This will impact all of us in profound and life-changing ways. But rather than reflecting on this situation, the journalistic elite merely wonders whether those who bring this matter to public attention have a political ax to grind with the president.
They would do well to consider that the story of the falling dollar is decidedly not the invention of Matt Drudge or some right-wing attack machine. It is financial market’s verdict on the fiscal mismanagement in Washington, DC. Last week Bloomberg – one of world’s premier business news agencies – opened one of its wires with the revelation that “The dollar reached a 14-month low versus the euro.” On Monday yet another report opened with this: “The dollar slid against high-yielding currencies, led by the Australian dollar.”
In recent months, there has been a proliferation of such stories. The fact that they are almost completely ignored by the mainstream media is less an indictment of Matt Drudge than of the media’s failure to inform the public. Reuters, another premier news service, recently posted a story quoting a close aide to French President Nicolas Sarkozy who accused Washington of “risking global inflation by printing money and flooding the world with liquidity.” Even more ominously, a French government spokesman said that Sarkozy will propose “a new international monetary organization which better reflects today’s world when France holds the presidency of the Group of 20 wealthy nations in 2011.” Whether this particular scheme succeeds or not, the mainstream media should take the clue: The dollar’s rein as king may drawing to an end.
Ever eager to help out President Obama, Politico tries to make the best of the bad situation by suggesting that a weak dollar is actually a good thing. It quotes a New York Times reporter Nelson Schwartz who recently wrote that:
“A weak dollar could prove beneficial to the American economy by aiding long-suffering manufacturers, rebuilding a stronger industrial base and lifting exports even if it makes life harder for trading partners around the world, especially in Europe.”
The idea is that the falling dollar will make American products cheaper abroad and as such they will be bought in greater quantities by foreigners. This is true enough, but the idea that the Obama presidency will somehow benefit American manufacturers is ludicrous. This is because President Obama has no intention of helping American industry. If he had, he would not push so hard for the odious “cap and trade” legislation. By penalizing the use of energy deriving from fossil fuels – which makes up for 85 percent of all energy used in America – this legislation will hit the manufacturing sector especially hard, since manufacturing tends to be energy intensive. The result will be the loss of millions of jobs and the devastation of whatever manufacturing is still left in America today.
The main reason for the collapsing dollar is not the president’s desire to help business but his out-of-control spending. With exploding deficits, Obama has brought federal expenditures to levels unseen since the height of World War II. Injecting trillions into the economy, some of which has been created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve, has dramatically increased the money supply and resulted in the dollar’s inevitable depreciation. The falling of the dollar has not been orchestrated by Obama out of his concern for his country’s industrial sector; it is a consequence of his fiscal recklessness. That this is not a better understood in the country is not the fault of Matt Drudge.
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