Petrodollar Warfare: Understanding the US Obsession with Iran

First invasion of Iraq 1991

When the USA was planning its first invasion of Iraq, a young Kuwaiti nurse testified before Congress  describing Iraqi soldiers pulling infants out of their incubators and tossing them on the floor.  The "nurse" turned out to be a princess of the Kuwaiti royal family, and her testimony pure fiction. However, her story created the needed public support for the invasion.

Second invasion of Iraq 2003

As the USA was preparing its second invasion of Iraq, Colin Powell was tasked with presenting "irrefutable" evidence that Saddam Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction.  Powell's presentation together with the totally fatuous belief, held by some Americans, that Hussein was responsible for 9/11 were sufficient to once again garner support for a war against Iraq.  As is well known at this point, the proclaimed purpose of the war was baseless--no WMDs or facilities were found.

USA preparing for war in Iran

As the USA once again prepares to go to war in the Middle East, this time against Iran, perhaps it's time to ask why.  What is the "real" reason the USA is about to invade Iran?  The answer is for the same reason the USA invaded Iraq:  petrodollars.  There are hundreds of sites on the internet which will give you a more detailed, sophisticated description and expert explanation of petrodollars than I will give you here.  As usual, I am shocked by my own ignorance.  However . . .

Petrodollars are basically another name for American dollars, but to understand the significance of this simple fact we need a primer on how money works.  Imagine you are looking at a house and the price is one million USD.  We always think in terms of what the house or the product or the service is worth in terms of money, but we rarely ask "What is $1,000,000 worth?"

Prior to the 1970s it was easy to say what one American dollar was worth, because the USA promised to maintain a stockpile of gold and every American dollar was backed up by that gold.  However in the early 70s the USA was no longer able to maintain a sufficient amount of gold to back up the amount of money they were spending on the Vietnam War.  Richard Nixon announced that the US dollar was no longer on the gold standard.

How the "gold standard" became the "petrodollar"

Keep in mind that money, the US dollar, for example, is physically just paper or pixels--pretty worthless.   The challenge for the USA was:  How do you make your money worth something when you don't have the gold or resources or anything else to back up the trillions and trillions of dollars you want to create and spend?   The answer is that the USA made a deal with the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia--the largest oil producing country in the world.  "We will buy your oil and provide you with military protection against any and all your enemies.  In return, you agree to only sell your oil for American dollars."  Eventually, all the OPEC countries signed on to the same deal.  Over time, virtually all oil transactions world-wide would come to be conducted using American dollars.

Why is an American dollar worth something even in China or Japan or Sweden or Australia?  Because you are going to need American dollars if you want to buy oil, and every industrialized country in the world needs oil (so far).  Oil remains the most valuable resource on the planet. From an American perspective this means you can print paper money and produce pixel dollars, endlessly running up deficits and debts, but you don't have to worry about your money losing its value because virtually every country in the world has a vested interest in maintaining the value of the US dollar because they have some and they need them to buy oil.

As William Clark puts it in Petrodollar Warfare, "No longer backed by gold, the dollar became backed by black gold."  The irony is, of course, that the American dollar isn't backed by American oil; it's backed by oil from other countries.  What happens if some countries and some oil producers decide that they want to start buying and selling oil in a currency other than American dollars?

Military defense of oil, the USD and the petrodollar seems inevitable

The USA is the largest debtor nation in the world.  The USA spends more on its defense and runs larger deficits than any other country in the world.  The economy of the USA (including the strength of its military) depends on oil, the US dollar, and the connection between these two.  If you are still wondering why the USA invaded Iraq in 2003, as Williams points out: "On September 24, 2000, Saddam Hussein emerged from a meeting of his government and proclaimed that Iraq would soon transition its oil export transactions to the euro currency."

Iran has also announced its intention to sell oil for Euros and other currencies--as has Venezuela.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWtIu7mbnbM&feature=youtu.be

Is Donald Trump the Alien Invader that Canada Needs?

Unlikely Canada:  One more time

 I thought this was the right time to remind readers of my post on “Unlikely Canada,”  Peter Zeihan’s prediction that Canada was unlikely to survive as a country beyond 2030, together with his claim that Alberta was destined to become the 51st American state. Ever since my youthful Canadian nationalist phase in the 1970s, I have rankled at Canada’s acting like an economic branch plant, as well as a cultural and political colony of the USA. The history of Canada has always been a story of its relationship with the USA.   The Canadian Encyclopedia offers a succinct overview of this history, the vacillations from resistance to acquiescence and back again, from  the American Revolution, to the War of 1812, to the Rebellions of 1837,  from John MacDonald’s anti-American grumblings to Wilfred Laurier’s concessions to reciprocity.  We live in the constant shadow of "manifest  destiny." 

A History of back and forth and con jobs

The USA was late to enter the First World War (three years after Canada), but in the 1920s and 30s the similarities between the two countries grew, and with the Second World War, the USA emerged as the great defender of the values Canadians held dear.  Animosity between Diefenbaker and Kennedy kept Canada out of the nuclear arms race. (Diefenbaker blamed American inference for his election loss in 1963.) Pearson kept Canada out of the Vietnam War (politically if not materially), and Pierre Trudeau opened the door to accept American draft evaders.  Flickerings of Canadian nationalism in the 1970s were extinguished with the Reagan-Mulroney bromance in the 1980s and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).  Under Mulroney, Canadian men and women served in George Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 1990-91.  (You may remember how we were conned by a young girl claiming to be a nurse telling stories of Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of their incubators.  She turned out to be a member of the Kuwaiti royal family.  See Petrodollar Warfare.)  Jean Chrétien  kept Canada out of George W. Bush’s bogus-WMD war in Iraq in 2003.  

After the Harper Conservatives had negotiated and signed the Canada-China  Foreign Investment Promotion and Protecton Agreement, the Justin Trudeau Liberals were elected, in 2015, on the promise of a free-trade agreement with China,  Canada’s second largest trading partner and only leverage against total US economic domination.  [The Government of Canada web site on Canada-China free trade has been removed since I posted a link to it on 11 October 2024.  See Pubic Inquiry on Foreign Interference] * In 2016, Donald Trump was elected as US President.  Unbeknownst to President Trump, his National Security Advisor, John Bolton hatched a plot in 2018 to make Canada the patsy by having the RCMP arrest the CFO of Huawei  ensuring the breakdown of trade relations between Canada and China.  Far from garnering respect and appreciation from the Americans, our mindless acquiescence to US interests in detriment to our own has made us appear weak, inept and fearful.  The newly elected US President will not hesitate to exploit our ineptitude, weakness and fear.

The Merger: For and against  (Conrad Black against!?!?)

In my faulty memory Conrad Black, one-time Canadian owner of the world’s third-largest newspaper empire, was an advocate of Canada joining the USA.  I therefore read with great interest his critique and rebuttal of Diane Francis’s book, The Merger of the Century:  Why Canada and the USA Should Become One Country. In his editorial (18 Jan. 2014), Black claims, “I was for a time reviled [. . . ] by some of the traditional, leftist Canadian nationalists, [that would be me] though I was never an annexationist.” 

As Francis was promoting her book, arguing that the merger was already underway and nigh on inevitable,  Black countered that   

Canada is, by every measure, a better-governed country than the United States, and much of this is new in the last 30 years. Not even the multi-trillion-dollar pay-off Diane Francis envisions would be an adequate compensation to Canadians to take such a great leap backwards in good government.

Diane Francis in 2014

Diane Francis laid out the basic arguments of her book in a lecture at the University of Western Ontario in 2014.

Diane Francis in 2025

Interviewed last week, Francis’s perspective seemed to have shifted slightly, as she emphasized the last chapter of her book on what Canada had to do if there was no merger with the USA:  end tariff barriers between provinces, take over the defence of its own borders and coastline, expand its business and trade options.  However, in the recent interview, she did return to the notion of Canada and the USA becoming a single federation, following a European Union economic model.

Can We now start talking about the US threat to Canadian sovereignty and independence, or should we maintain our focus on Chinese influence on Canadian elections?

One point that particularly struck me in this recent interview is her claim that she was blacklisted by the media as she attempted to promote her book in 2014.  Perhaps we would have benefited from having a more robust conversation ten years ago.  I tried to to make this point, from a very different perspective, in 2002, at a conference presentation at the University of Toronto: “ I am prepared to be unsentimental about the destiny of the Canadian nation, but I would consider it a tragedy if Canadians did not participate fully in the exchange and debate and decision-making process.

Will Trump force us to start acting like a sovereign nation?

Back to the question.  In theory, it is thought that an external threat is sometimes what a nation needs to appreciate the value of its sovereignty, to generate solidarity and unity.  For a moment I thought Donald Trump might be that beneficial threat.  Unfortunately, so far the response has been lip service and chaos.  And Danielle Smith has already responded like the Governor of Alberta, the 51st state, as predicted by Peter Zeihan: holding one-on-one meetings with President-elect Trump and refusing to join with Canadian Premiers and the Prime Minister in threatening to cut off energy supplies from Canada to the USA in the event of a trade war.  The survival of Canada may still not be “unlikely” but it is looking less and less likely these days. 

Addendum

* After a bit of searching I found another Government of Canada web page which makes reference to the Canada-China Free Trade Agreement which was in the exploratory stages in 2016.

World War III: Will History Record that Jody Wilson-Raybould Was the Canadian Gavrilo Princip?

 "If I listened to John Bolton, we would have had world war six by now!"

                                                        Donald Trump, President of the USA

Homo Sapiens?  Are we?

When Yuval Noah Harari speculated in Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind, rather off-handedly, that the human species was unlikely to be around for another thousand years, I thought he was exaggerating.  These days, I'm not so sure.  One thousand years is beginning to sound optimistic.

The Doomsday Clock

In 2020, the Doomsday Clock moved to 100 seconds 'til midnight.  According to the "Thucydides trap" hypothesis, a war between China and the USA isn't just possible, it is statistically probable. When he first presented this hypothesis in 2015, Harvard professor Graham Allison argued that 

Managing this relationship [China/USA] without war will demand sustained attention, week by week, at the highest level in both countries. It will entail a depth of mutual understanding not seen since the Henry Kissinger-Zhou Enlai conversations in the 1970s. Most significantly, it will mean more radical changes in attitudes and actions, by leaders and publics alike, than anyone has yet imagined.

Since 2015, we have been moving rapidly in the opposite direction, with marked acceleration in 2021.  According to the 2021--Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

US and Russian nuclear modernization efforts continued to accelerate, and North Korea, China, India, and Pakistan pursued “improved” and larger nuclear forces. Some of these modernization programs are beginning to field weapons with dangerous enhancements, like Russia’s nuclear-tipped Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles, which are being installed on new SS-29 (Sarmat) missiles designed to replace 1980s-era intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Russia continues to field battalions of intermediate-range, ground-launched, nuclear-armed missiles—missiles previously banned by the now-defunct Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, from which the United States withdrew in 2019. China, which has historically relied on a small and constrained nuclear arsenal, is expanding its capabilities and deploying multiple, independently retargetable warheads on some of its ICBMs and will likely add more in the coming year.

The Triggers of war

The causes of war usually involve complicated gestalts which experts will spend generations attempting to untangle and explain. The causes of the Vietnam War are entangled with the vagueries and incoherence of an ideological Cold War which make them near impossible to fully understand even fifty years later.  However, in our high-school history classes, we Boomers were always instructed about the "triggers of war."  For example, the Spanish-American War was triggered by the sinking of the USS Maine.  "Remember the Maine" became the battle cry of the war; however, subsequent investigations concluded that the sinking of the Maine was likely an accident caused by an internal explosion onboard. (For more recent "triggers" see Petrodollar Warfare: Understanding the US Obsession with Iran) 

The most significant trigger of all time was a 19-year-old Bosnian-Serb named Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, which led to World War I which, arguably, with the botched Treaty of Versailles, led to World War II.  I first alluded to Gavrilo Princip in 2018 in a post on "The Chaos Theory of International Trade." 

Imagine a high-school history class after World War III. There are a lot of "ifs" here: if there is a third world war, if the Species survives, and if History is still taught in high school.

A History of the future

My historical narrative begins with Richard Donoghue, a young army officer who joins JAG (Judge Advocate General's Corps), first as an attorney, then becomes a judge.  In 2011, he accepts a position as vice president and Chief Litigator for CA Technologies, one of the largest tech companies in the world (in the top 100 according to Bloomberg).  [CA needed a good lawyer.  In 2006, the chairman of the board was sentenced to 12 years in prison for fraud.]  January 2,  2018, Donoghue leaves CA to become US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.  Eight months later (22 August 2018),  Donoghue issues a warrant for the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, CFO of Huawei and daughter of the company's founder

Why was Meng arrested?

Why? [Try explaining this to a class of high-school students!]  The charge is "bank fraud."  For most people, "bank fraud" means she stole money, but not in this case. According to the indictment, at a meeting in a tea-house in Hong Kong in 2013 she allegedly told an executive of HSBC (Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation) that Huawei did not control a company called Skycom which was doing business in Iran in contravention of US sanctions.

Is she guilty?

Did she really say this?  Did she really fool HSBC into contravening US sanctions?  Who knows?  Does it really matter? HSBC had already been convicted of money laundering, including making investments in Iran, but Meng's "lying," saying or not saying, really has no bearing on the ultimate story.  There was no precedent for arresting a business executive for moving money in Iran, though many companies had been convicted and paid fines.  Meng was arrested because the USA, for political reasons, ideological reasons, business reasons, security reasons (choose the one which makes the most sense to you), was out to get Huawei.  Meng (and Canada), it has become evident, were collateral damage in the plan to undermine Huawei.  The sensible thing for Canada to do was just get out of the way, but it was up to the Minister of Justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to get us out of the way.

Meng was traveling the world as Huawei's leading sales-person but, apparently, Donoghue couldn't find a country willing to serve his warrant.  Then, on December 1, 2018, he asked the Canadian Minister of Justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould, in keeping with the Treaty on Extradition Between the Government of Canada and the Government of the United States of America and the Canadian Extradition Act to have Meng arrested, and she did.

Why arrest Meng in Canada?

Why did she accept to have Meng arrested?  [Try explaining this to a high-school class!]  Why would she accept to proceed with this unprecedented arrest which would have predictable and dire political consequences?  To most of the world, the arrest would appear arbitrary and illegal, Canada kowtowing to US hegemony--showing the Americans that Canada would ditch its trade deals with China if that's what the Trump White House wanted.  In truth, the Americans, that is, Donoghue did the minimum in asking Canada to serve the warrant.  Chances are they were surprised by how easy it was to get Canadian law enforcement onboard even to the point of "accidentally" contravening Meng's rights. Donoghue did the necessary,  specifying that the crime was "bank fraud," which was on the Treaty's list of extraditable offenses. And he went through the motions of a Grand Jury trial, which would have been a foregone conclusion.  

Is there any chance that the USA will keep a Chinese executive in prison?

Has anybody noticed how little the Americans have to say about the seriousness of Meng's crimes?  Clearly, the Americans are keeping their options open; allowing them to release Meng at a later date without much fanfare.  The last thing the Americans want is to have a major Chinese executive in a US jail, while they continue to do 100 to 150 billion dollars in trade every year with China.  Can you imagine a situation--with Meng in a US jail--where every American business executive who travels to China or any country where China holds influence would risk arrest and/or extradition? Meng's extradition to the USA allows only three possibilities:  1) she and/or Huawei will pay a fine proving that she should never have been extradited in the first place (the Extradition Act and the Treaty specify that the minimum requirement to justify extradition is one year of imprisonment), 2) an all-out Sino-American war or 3) she will be released (without prejudice) and some US Democrat will express media-wide surprise that Canada went along with the ill-conceived Republican plot (orchestrated by John Bolton and Richard Donoghue) to arrest her.

Richard Donoghue's conflict of interest

I originally speculated that there might be a financial pay-off for Donoghue from CA Technologies for slowing down a competitor--Huawei.  But CA Technologies was sold to Broadcom in 2018, so Donoghue's pay-off would probably have to come elsewhere. 

Donaghue was given the honour of announcing the conviction of El Chapo, head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, in 2019.  Of course, attorneys, NYPD, FBI, DEA, Homeland Security, etc, etc, had been working the case for 30 years, but Donaghue got the plum of announcing the conviction after little more than a year on the job.  Then he was promoted to special duties on the Ukraine file.  In public media, no-one seemed to know exactly what "Ukraine file" meant, but I interpreted he was assigned to getting the dirt on Hunter Biden. When William Barr resigned as Attorney general, Deputy Attorney General Rosen replaced him, and Donald Trump named Donoghue the new Deputy Attorney General.

Did Trump know?

Did Trump know the very day he was having a one-on-one meeting with Xi that Donoghue was having Meng arrested in Vancouver?  No.  Despite hedging in the Guardian interview, claiming he didn't know if Trump knew, John Bolten confirms in this book that he, as National Security Advisor, had been informed of Meng's arrest and decided not to tell President Trump.  Trump was incredulous when he found out and, according to Josh Rogin in Chaos under Heaven, complained that they had "arrested the Ivanka Trump of China."  

Why did Jody Wilson-Raybould arrest "the Ivanka Trump of China"?

Why did Jody Wilson-Raybould arrest "the Ivanka Trump of China"?  When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked about the arrest:

“The appropriate authorities took the decisions in this case,” he told reporters. “We were advised by them with a few days’ notice that this was in the works but of course there was no engagement or involvement in the political level in this decision because we respect the independence of our judicial processes.”

If extradition isn't political, why was the Prime Minister informed in advance? Who were "the appropriate authorities"?  According to the Canadian Extradition Act, the only appropriate authority was the Minister of Justice, Jody Wilson-Raybould.  Who is "them" in the PM's statement?  Did the PM think that Richard Donoghue or the American DOJ was the appropriate authority to decide a Canadian extradition case?  As I've pointed out a dozen times and a dozen different ways, the claim that in Canadian extradition law, "there is no engagement or involvement in the political level in this decision" is completely wrong.  It is easy to disprove the claim of the independence of the judicial processes in extradition cases with a quick click on the Canadian Extradition Act and 15 minutes of reading.  I think we can forgive the PM for not knowing the Canadian Extradition Act just days after (and before) Meng's arrest.  But what about Jody Wilson-Raybould?  What about the "free" and "independent" Canadian media which has been repeating or ignoring this falsehood for over two years now?

Who makes extradition decisions?  The Minister? Or "officials"?

Eleven days after Meng's arrest, Jody Wilson-Raybould issued a statement, in lockstep with the PM's misinformation, saying that "The decision to seek a provisional arrest warrant from the court is made by Department of Justice officials without any political interference or direction." I believe that it may be common practice for "Department of Justice officials" to seek an arrest warrant without necessarily consulting the Minister of Justice, but this was obviously no typical extradition case.  Moreover, what the law (The Extradition Act) specifies is:

Warrant for Provisional Arrest
Minister’s approval of request for provisional arrest
12 The Minister may, after receiving a request by an extradition partner for the provisional arrest of a person, authorize the Attorney General to apply for a provisional arrest warrant, if the Minister is satisfied . . .

Since Jody Wilson-Raybould was both Minister of Justice and Attorney General, the law specifies that Jody Wilson-Raybould "may" (she could have ignored or refused the request)  authorize herself "to apply for a provisional arrest warrant."  Nowhere does it say that DOJ officials were supposed to make the decision and keep Jody Wilson-Raybould out of the loop.

Why would Jody Wilson-Raybould pass the buck to underlings?

Why would Jody Wilson-Raybould duck her responsibilities as Minister of Justice?  Well, there was the SNC Lavalin case.   [Try explaining this to high-school students!]  We've already been there, but the short version is that the PMO had been putting pressure on JWR to break the law and give SNC Lavalin a pass on its various bribery crimes.  JWR resisted and was on the verge of being demoted out of Justice for her resistance when Meng was arrested.  

The combination of the laws governing Remediation Agreements (a new, Liberal version of Deferred Prosecution Agreements) and those governing the Public Prosecutors Office made it impossible for JWR to do what the PMO was asking without breaking the law.  The Extradition Act is the exact opposite in terms of the Minister getting involved.  The Act makes it the Minister's responsibility to investigate and make a decision.  Would the public understand this difference?  Did politicians know the difference?  Both Trudeau and Freeland have been very public in denying this distinction and insisting that extradition is a judicial and not a political decision--despite the explicit wording of the Act and the Supreme Court's ruling to confirm that extradition is an "executive"; i.e., political decision.

When Allen Rock, former Minister of Justice, was on Power and Politics to present the argument that Meng should be released, Vassy Kapelos asked him if he had ever intervened in an extradition case.  He hadn't.  I was struck by his response but then it occurred to me:  politicians are politicians.  Politicians don't like to get publicly involved in extradition cases because there is nothing for a politician to gain.  No matter what decision they make, they will be criticized by one quarter or another.  For a politician, it's always better to leave the impression that an extradition was decided by anonymous officials.

We shouldn't be too surprised that JWR decided not to take the heat and opted for "bureaucracy as usual" despite the obvious that this case was not "as usual." Someone from the PMO should have pointed out her power according to the law: 

Withdrawal of the authority to proceed
(3) The Minister may at any time withdraw the authority to proceed and, if the Minister does so, the court shall discharge the person and set aside any order made respecting their judicial interim release or detention

Since the PMO and JWR were already at odds (not speaking to each other?) over SNC Lavalin, we can imagine that in the end no-one said anything.

Now what?

The atomic scientists who manage the Doomsday Clock point out that 

Unchecked internet disinformation could have even more drastic consequences in a nuclear crisis, perhaps leading to a nuclear war that ends world civilization. Disinformation efforts across communications systems are at this moment undermining responses to climate change in many countries. The need for deep thinking and careful, effective action to counter the effects of internet-enabled disinformation has never been clearer.

Are we at war with China?

The general Canadian public could be forgiven for imagining that we are already at war with China.  China has been accused of genocide in terms usually reserved for the Holocaust.  The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is being compared to the Third Reich and Xi Jinping to Hitler.  China is being accused of undermining Canadian sovereignty, intimidating Canadian citizens, taking over Canadian businesses, manipulating Canadian politicians, mistreating Canadian workers, arbitrarily imprisoning Canadians in China, infiltrating Canadian universities, cyber espionage, and stealing Canadian intellectual property.  What more do we need to know before going to war?

In addition to the rape, murder, sterilization, forced labour, and mass imprisonment of Uyghurs, China is overthrowing democracy in Hong Kong, threatening Taiwan, and illegally claiming sovereignty over the South China Sea.  The Chinese are using dystopian levels of surveillance of their own citizens, especially ethnic minorities. And the Chinese are responsible for the coronavirus which has spread around the world and killed millions.  What more do we need to know before going to war?

The Devil's advocate

Dare we consider a Chinese perspective and response?  Despite claims of "free speech" and "transparency," it has become common practice to denigrate and dismiss anyone who challenges the common Canadian discourse on China (and/or Meng). 

Here, at least, it is possible to play "devil's advocate." 

A response to terrorism?

There is no genocide taking place in Xinjiang.  Every neutral observer who has visited the region comes to this same conclusion.  China faced a terrorist threat in the region and, in comparison to the USA with its invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan killing a million Muslims, has responded with moderation and efficiency in dealing with religious extremism. As reported by  Colin Clarke and Paul Rexton Kan in “Uighur Foreign Fighters: An Underexamined Jihadist Challenge,” The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague 8, no. 5 (2017):

Uighurs, specifically individuals of Turkic descent from China’s northwest province of Xinjiang, have become a noticeable part of the constellation of globally active jihadist terror groups. Uighur jihadists first came to the world’s attention when the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001. While continuing their cooperation with the Taliban under the banner of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), Uighur jihadists have now spread to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. ETIM’s members are part of the Turkestan Islamic Party fighting with the Al-Qaeda umbrella group in Syria, but other Uighurs have joined IS in Syria and Iraq, and still others have joined local terror groups in Indonesia. 

China:  A multi-ethnic nation

China is home to twenty-six different ethnic groups.  While Western democracies have paid lip service to individual human rights as they practiced "systemic racism" and "white supremacy," over the last 30 years, China has raised 800 million of its citizens out of dire poverty--many from the ethnic minorities it is now being accused of mistreating.  As reported by the Brookings Institute, China's policies with regard to the Uyghur began in the 1990s, but only since China's economic power began to rival that of the USA have we heard any claim of genocide.

Hong Kong is part of China--not a distant island

Hong Kong is literally a stone's throw from the mainland and has always been part of China.  As a condition of losing the Opium Wars, whereby the British Empire forced China to accept imports of opium, China accepted that Hong Kong would remain a British colony for 99 years.  That period of 99 years expired in 1997 at which time China reclaimed sovereignty over Hong Kong while allowing it to operate as a distinct, autonomous region.  China was prepared to allow this situation to continue until demonstrations, protests, and riots broke out in Hong Kong.  Even after the demonstrators' demands were met and the new extradition act repealed, riots continued with demands for full, Western-style democracy.  China's allowing Hong Kong to, once again, become a Western colony is about as likely as the USA returning Texas to Mexico.  Logically, the continuing protests can only be understood as part of an American plan to destabilize the country and eventually overthrow the regime in Beijing.  The fact that Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai, a leader of the pro-democracy demonstrations, had frequent meetings with Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, confirms this interpretation.

Security and surveillance

Yes, China uses CCTV to guard the security and safety of its citizens, just as is done in London, England, and in every major city in the world these days.  Chinese computer surveillance systems have been developed but they are nowhere near as widespread or invasive as the Anglo-American ECHELON system designed to intercept private and commercial communication all over the world, or the PRISM surveillance system used by the US National Security Agency to spy on US citizens as well as people around the world.  Chinese data collection is modest in comparison to that of American technology companies like Facebook and Google.

Education in Xinjiang

China believes that education is the key to equality.  As outlined in MA Rong's research on "The development of minority education and the practice of bilingual education in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region," Uyghurs, traditionally, have the highest birth rate in China but  . . .

The development of an education system started late in Xinjiang, where there were only 525 college graduates and 593 high school graduates in 1957 (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Bureau of Statistics, 2006, p.519). In 2005, however, college enrollment reached 59 000,

And university enrollment of Uyghur both throughout China and abroad has continued to grow. 

Is Paid labour "forced labour"?

Uyghur workers are paid for their labour wherever they work.  On some occasions, they are required to work outside their home regions where their labour is needed but are paid wages that exceed what they would earn at home. Throughout its history, China has called upon its citizens and leaders of the Communist Party (including Xi Jinping) to work as manual labourers in the fields as a demonstration of equality, discipline, and solidarity.

The Arrest of two Canadians

There are only two possible explanations for China's arrest of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor and in both cases, Canada is to blame.  Either they are guilty of espionage (presumably on behalf of Canada) as the Chinese courts have alleged or, as is generally assumed in Western media, they have been imprisoned in retaliation for Canada's arrest of Meng--in which case Canada is guilty of having thrown the first punch.

Where's the truth?

Here's a Chinese joke I encountered on Quora.  A young Chinaman is at customs about to enter the USA.  The customs agent asks him, "Why are you entering the USA?"  The young man replies, "I'm here to study the new brainwashing techniques."  The agent responds angrily, "We don't have brainwashing in the USA, we're not like China!"  "Yes, yes, that's it," the young man answers, "that's what I'm here to study."

"The truth," it is commonly observed, "is always the first casualty of war."  In the claims and counter-claims about China, I don't know where the truth lies, but the more I investigate, the more I find the inflated and inflammatory rhetoric of Western mass media to be uncontextualized, weakly supported by evidence, and reckless.

The "Thucydides trap" denied

In Chaos Under Heaven, Josh Rogin claims that the "Thucydides trap" "theory doesn’t fit the US-China relationship." As Rogin rightly points out, there are many variables in the lead-up to war.  One weakness of the theory, according to Rogin, is that "it assumes that China's rise is inevitable."  In 2015, China's rise might have been an assumption, but in 2021 it seems an undeniable fact.  By what measure would it be possible to conclude that China has not risen to the level of a world power?

Rogin concludes: "The Thucydides Trap concept is interesting, but we shouldn’t base our strategy on it."  "Interesting" is what we academics say when we want to say nothing. Given that the subtitle of Rogin's monograph is  "the Battle for the 21st Century," what is the logic of claiming that as we concoct a strategy (for what?) we should not consider the possibility of a war?  No-one in their right mind wants a war and yet they keep happening.  The whole point of the Thucydides argument (as I've quoted above) is that it is possible to avoid a war.  We can reduce the risk of war by cooling down the rhetoric, by being empirical, logical, accurate, precise, transparent, well-informed, and measured--all the things that we are not doing and being now.  Simply denying any possibility of a war does not reduce the possibility of it happening.

How a hot war begins

I was ten when President Kennedy announced that Soviet ships bringing missiles to Cuba would result in a nuclear war.  In our town, we had a special siren to announce that nuclear bombs had been launched.  I vividly recall the day the siren sounded.  No, it wasn't a nuclear war, but some idiot thought we should test the system without bothering to inform ten-year-olds like me. Cuba is 103 miles from the USA.  Taiwan is 81 miles from China. While the USA continues to impose sanctions on Cuba; goods, services, and people move freely between Taiwan and China.  According to the Taiwanese government website: "Today, Taiwan is one of the biggest investors in China." However, China is ready to go to war to prevent a US-backed Taiwan from declaring independence.  At least one observer has pointed out that "A US War with China over Taiwan Would Be Foolish and Costly"--not to mention potentially nuclear and absurd because Taiwan and China seem to be getting along fine if not for US intervention.

Preparations for war

With relatively little notice being taken in Western media, both China and the USA are preparing for war.  The focus of preparations is the South China Sea.  In theory, the battle is between China and the Philippines over conflicting claims of territorial waters. The Philippines, like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia and Canada, is a pawn in the conflict between the USA and China.

Adm. Phil Davidson, commander of US forces in the Indo-Pacific, warned that Chinese military developments looked to him like a nation planning for a war.

Davidson added that he believed China would attempt to forcibly reunify Taiwan "in the next six years." To guard against this possibility, Davidson asked Congress to provide a whopping $27 billion in additional funding over the current defense budget.

Ships and chips

It seems a historical motif that wars begin with the sinking of ships.  The sinking of the USSS Maine started the Spanish-American War, the sinking of the Lusitania brought the USA into WWI.  The Gulf of Tonkin incident led to a US escalation of the war in Vietnam. Everyone knows about the Japanese "surprise" attack on Pearl Harbour, but do people know why the Japanese attacked?  It wasn't a surprise.  In fact, it was quite predictable.  The USA had imposed sanctions on Japan, blocking the supply of oil while Japan was at war with China.  The Japanese had to destroy the blockade or lose the war with China.  These days, the equivalent of oil is computer chips, and the USA is doing all it can to block the supply of computer chips to China.  Taiwan is the world's largest manufacturer of computer chips.  The government of Taiwan is happy to continue with its "unofficial" independence and its sales of computer chips to China.  The USA seems to be the one more interested in Taiwan's "official" independence and in cutting off the supply of Taiwanese chips to Chinese companies.

More ships, more triggers

The USA has been conducting naval war games in the South China Sea displaying increases in firepower over the last three years.  In 2021, the USA began simulating Air-Force war games over Taiwan.

As if arresting Meng weren't enough, in the midst of ongoing tensions, the Canadian navy warship, HMS Calgary, crossed the South China Sea because it was the shortest route between A and B, and to show whose side we're on.

With the US canceling the nuclear treaty, Iran has begun to process high-grade uranium once again.  In the face of US sanctions, Iran has formed a closer alliance with China.  As reported in Haaretz, just as new treaty negotiations were getting underway (without US participation), Israeli forces attacked an Iranian cargo ship which had been anchored in the Red Sea for years.

Why blame Jody Wilson-Raybould?

Why blame Jody Wilson-Raybould?  Because I believe in the theory of chaos.  Each of us is the potential trigger of a future that we could not possibly imagine.  And history isn't fair.  From 1949, when the Communist Party of China took control, until 1970, China was treated as a global pariah by Western powers.  In 1973, Pierre Eliot Trudeau was the first Canadian Prime Minister and one of the first Western heads of state to visit China.  From that period until 2017, Canada's trade and diplomatic relations with China grew and improved steadily under both Conservative and Liberal governments, until the government of PM Justin Trudeau faced increasing criticism for becoming too friendly with China.  The Canadian arrest of Meng Wanzhou, Dec. 1, 2018, was an abrupt about-face from the last 48 years of our relations with China.  History will also mark that date as the day Canada was given the opportunity for another Lester B. Pearson moment, the opportunity to prove that Canada could be an independent peace-maker.  History will mark the day, in contrast to what might have been, as the moment when the channels for dialogue and negotiations between China and the West were broken, and Canada played a key role in the break.

To continue my Gavrilo Princip analogy, Richard Donoghue supplied the gun, but Jody Wilson-Raybould pulled the trigger.  Or, at least, she stood down from her responsibility as Minister of Justice, and let anonymous officials of the DOJ take responsibility for pulling the trigger.  In consequence, we face the absurdity of government leaders in two countries saving face with their constituencies by keeping a Chinese under house arrest in Canada and two Canadians in prison in China, the minor inconvenience of declining trade and economies, and 300,000 Canadians living in China put at risk while Chinese living in Canada face Anti-Asian hate crimes.  If the unimaginable worst-case scenario, which I have imagined here, happens, the question which will be asked:  "How did the Canadian Minister of Justice  allow it to happen over something so petty and remote as the allegation of a Chinese executive telling a fib to a Chinese banker in China?"

A Glimmer of hope

The Canadian justice bureaucracy continues to grind on in acquiescence to Richard Donoghue's dictates, meaning Meng and the two Michaels will, unless justice and common sense intervene, likely remain under arrest for another ten years. Richard Donoghue was replaced as Deputy Attorney General on January 20, 2021.  Donoghue has since disappeared from my internet radar.  However, his replacement, John Carlin, offered a glimmer of hope in the opening of his first public statement:

Before I begin, I’d like to address an important issue: the reports of horrific attacks on Asian Americans across the country.  I want to be clear here: No one in America should fear violence because of who they are of what they believe.  Period.  These types of attacks have no place in our society.  We will not tolerate any form of domestic terrorism or hate-based violent extremism, and we are committed to putting a stop to it.

We in the West need to be smart in our dealings with the superpower China has become.  Gross vilification of China and, "trickle-down," ignorant, myopic antagonism toward anyone who in Western eyes looks Asian is the opposite of smart.  

Addendum

"US Nuclear Fears Are Shifting From a Clear Russian Threat to a Murkier Chinese One"

Virtues, Vices, and Values

A Charter of Values?

 In 2013, when the Parti Québécois government was proposing a “Charte des valeurs”  I reacted, on this blog, with "outrage, shame, embarrassment, anger, frustration, fear."  Admittedly, by the time the  Coalition Avenir Québec introduced its  "Bill 21: An Act respecting the laicity of the State," a watered-down version of similar legislation, my reactions had mellowed.  (See The "We" Vote in Quebec.) Nonetheless, I remain distinctly uncomfortable whenever I hear a politician invoking "values" and, still worse, "our shared values."  We might expect the expression "our shared values" to be followed by a list of said values but it almost never is.  Upon hearing "our shared values," the white supremacist and the advocate of Black Lives Matter might both breathe a sigh of relief thinking "finally, one of us"--which explains politicians' love of this empty expression.

The Common Objects of a People's Love

In his inauguration speech, Joe Biden offered this list: "Opportunity. Security. Liberty. Dignity. Respect. Honor. And, yes, the truth."  But he didn't call them values.  Citing Saint Augustine, he referred to them as "the common objects" which define a multitude as a people, and this particular list as what defines Americans.  However, as some critics have pointed out, what Augustine was suggesting wasn't necessarily values or virtues.  

“If one should say, 'a people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love,’ then it follows that to observe the character of a people we must examine the objects of its love.” — St. Augustine, City of God 19.24

The objects of a people's love could equally well be venal, could be vices.  The USA may be the "land of opportunity," whose "military-industrial complex" ensures its security, and whose constitution guarantees its citizens the liberty to have guns but not necessarily abortions or to use the girls' washroom if your birth certificate says you're a boy, but I've never thought of dignity, respect, honor (except for the spelling) and truth as being distinctly American. 

Deadly Sins and Heavenly Virtues

The more I have reflected on this topic, the less certain I've felt about what counts as a value.  In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the vices or "deadly sins" are clear:  pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth.  The "heavenly virtues"--prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and charity--are more ambiguous. We might like to imagine that virtues and vices are absolutes, but it seems obvious that the difference between them is one of degree.  Moderate degrees of the vices seem desirable, while exaggerations of the virtues are equally undesirable.

Values and Valour

Invariably, we imagine our values are virtues and, conversely, we are likely to imagine that other people's values seem like vices.  In truth, few of us ever have to discover what our values truly are or if we have any.  The word "values" shares its underlying root with "valour"; that is, not just worth but strength and courage.  Our values are the principles that we have the strength and courage to maintain under stress and to act upon.  Still, even the most valourous among us can find themselves in a conflict of values, a no-win, double-bind situation which is the defining characteristic of tragedy.  (See The Double-bind Theory of Tragedy and Madness.)

Obedience to Authority:  Virtue or Vice?

Anomie, the absence of values, has long been the claimed condition of privileged, modern societies.  I am mindful of social psychologist Stanley Milgram's infamous Yale "Obedience to Authority" experiments which revealed that 65% of the test subjects would torture a victim to death using electric shock simply because someone who appeared to be in authority told them to.  Obedience is, of course, the most taught and enforced value in education.

What Are Your Values?

The webpage What Are Your Values? provides a list of 150 potential values, including obedience.  Looking at this list and every other list I have considered, I come away wondering:  are these really values?  The webpage offers a soft definition of values as "the things you believe are important." Sex and money don't make anyone's list of values, but I've met a few people who seem to think they are important.

The Central Bank:  God or the Devil?

I was drawn to Mark Carney's Value(s), in the first place, because of the title and because he was Governor of the Bank of Canada and Governor of the Bank of England.  To conspiracy theorists like my friend Henry Makow and members of the Zeitgeist Movement (not to mention bitcoin fans and fanatics), central banks are the spawns of Satan.  Against this foil, it was striking to read Carney's passionate prescriptions and earnest defense of central banks and a "sound dollar."  His sententious, Polyanna proposals for a better world are occasionally ponderous and left me wondering: would fat cats on Wall Street and in the Federal Reserve give two seconds of consideration to what he is recommending?

What's Good for General Bullmoose . . .

In Values, Carney comes across as a nice guy determined to be nice to everyone, even  Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase and a member of the New York Federal Reserve Board.  However, in Plutocrats, Chrystia Freeland reports on the animosity between Carney and Dimon which exploded at a meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington in 2011.  Freeland points out:

The battle between Carney and Dimon gets at a bigger and more contentious issue [than taxes and profits]:  Are the interests of the state and its big businesses synonymous?  If not, who decides? And if they do clash, does the state have the right--and the might--to curb specific businesses for the collective good?

As Freeland records, Dimon widely promulgated his position that the kinds of global banking regulations Carney was proposing were "anti-American." The Carney speeches Freeland quotes show that the genesis of Value(s):  Building a Better World for All is at least a decade old.  Carney himself traces its origins to his childhood in Canada.

Can values drive value?

Carney argues that:

Values and value are related but distinct. In the most general terms, values represent the principles or standards of behaviour; they are judgements of what is important in life. Examples include integrity, fairness, kindness, excellence, sustainability, passion and reason. Value is the regard that something is held to deserve – the importance, worth or usefulness of something. Both value and values are judgements. And therein lies the rub.

"Therein lies the rub" indeed.  Can we separate values and value, the dancer and the dance?  Or, on the other hand, are they in complete contradiction to one another?  Witness the paradox of The Antiques Roadshow.  An expert explains the values embued in an artifact, but the climax of every episode is the revelation of the dollar value of the object, which is based on the current market and only a tertiary result of beauty or craftsmanship, history or sentiment.

The fiat global reserve currency:  where's the trust, integrity and transparency?

Carney claims that the value of "fiat money is grounded in the values of trust, integrity and transparency." The US greenback, the fiat (non-gold/commodity-based) money that really counts because it is the "global reserve currency" and about which Carney has remarkably little to say, as we have seen, is backed by the threat of military intervention.  (See Petrodollar Warfare.)  Moreover, in recent years, as Kishore Mahbubani (Has China Won?) decries and Josh Rogin  (Chaos under Heaven) lauds, the US has been weaponizing the dollar. (See Analysing the Discourse on the USA-China Cold War.)  The US Federal Reserve was born in secrecy and, to this day, most people don't realize, as Carney confirms, that 80% of the money in the world is created by private banks.  (See The Truth About Money.)

How Many "values" are there?

Carney's orbit of values expands centrifugally to include, in his final chapters: "solidarity – fairness – responsibility – resilience – sustainability – dynamism, and – humility." Once again, I find myself questioning which, if any, of these stand as values.  Values are the principles we are prepared to uphold in the most challenging of times.  Logically, values spring from ethics.  The word "ethics" comes from "ethos," behaviour over time, often translated as "character," and contrasts with "pathos," the emotions of the moment.  In the end, I conclude "values" is a misnomer.  There is only one value: justice.  Those things we call "values" are details:  customs, habits, rituals, and allegories.  Justice must be based on ethics, and Kant's much-maligned "categorical imperative"--laws are moral if you accept them being applied to you--imperfect as it is, is as good an option as we have available to us.

Do the Money Men Really Run the World?

Can't have a war without money

In Johnson's Life of London: The People Who Made the City that Made the World, Boris Johnson writes that NM Rothchild's "role in financing governments was so crucial that it was said that a war could not be begun without the consent of the Rothschilds."  It is an obvious fact of our time that the world runs on money.  No war can be declared, no university inaugurated, no church established, no hospital or bridge or building or monument built without money.  Nothing can be imported or exported, bought or sold without money.  Charities, volunteer organizations, political parties, families and individuals require money.  The health of your offspring and the attractiveness of your spouse will be affected by money.  It has never been more true than it is today:  if you want to understand the world, "follow the money."

Just because it's a conspiracy theory  . . .

The pursuit of this question led me to Henry Makow who, as it happens, was a friend of mine in graduate school.  Henry is a very smart guy.  In fact, he was a syndicated columnist and best-selling author at the age of eleven.  He has become, according to Tabetha Southey in the Globe and Mail, Canada's leading conspiracy theorist.  In Illuminati:  The Cult that Hijacked the World, Henry claims

The New World Order is a hydra-headed monster. The bankers work through many fronts such as Communism, Socialism, Liberalism, Feminism, Zionism, Neo conservatism and Freemasonry. Unknown to most members, these "progressive" movements are all secretly devoted to "world revolution" which is a euphemism for banker hegemony and Satanism.  

Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

Old acquaintances notwithstanding, Henry's rhetoric is obviously over the top and his claim that unnamed extant bankers are responsible for all the ism's Henry doesn't like is less than convincing.  Like all conspiracy theories, Illuminati is an eclectic cache of facts, observations and quotations.  The data isn't the question.  The question is how it is all woven together.  (As the linguist de Saussure observed, meaning [and therefore truth] does not reside in words or letters but in the spaces between words and letters--that is, how we connect one to another to create meaning.)

Conspiracy theory versus chaos theory

The world may obviously run on money, but "do money men run the world?" is a separate and different question.  We've been here before (see The Chaos Theory of International Trade):  the choice is between conspiracy theory and chaos theory.  Things happen.  Things that happen might even be predictable within a significant range of probabilities.  However, that Person X or Mr. Daddy-Big-Bucks banker made everything happen is a leap to another level of cause-and-effect determinism requiring another level of evidence.

How banks make money? (disambiguate "make")

However, the unrefuted fact is that the monetary system, which underpins the financial system and the economy, begins and ends with private banks.  Private banks (according to the Parliamentary web site I quoted extensively in Central Banks and the Bitcoin Experiment) create 80% of the money in Canada (and I surmise that this percentage is true for all money creation worldwide).  Private banks are legally empowered to create money out of nothing with a few clicks of a computer mouse.  So what?

So what!?

Do you or I have any reason to be concerned or care about how money is created and who is creating it?  This DW documentary offers a clear and succinct explanation of How the Rich Get Richer though  The Deluge of Money.  The general theme of the documentary is that the money-creation system which allows banks to exponentially create money is guaranteed to exacerbate wealth inequality.  As the economy is flooded with money, if you have a little bit of money, your money will lose value over time.  However, if you already have billions, you will be able to access billions more that the banks are creating at low-interest rates.  Risking little of your own billions, you will be able to buy real estate, businesses, factories and even billion-dollar companies.  The documentary offers specific examples but the common feature is that the money men aren't producing anything, they are simply making more money with these transactions in borrowed, bank-created money while degrading the condition of workers and the savings of the middle class.

To create money the government must sell a bond to a bank

The documentary follows a research project which demonstrates that most people, even some bankers, simply don't know where money comes from and how it is created.  Henry Makow quotes the inventor Thomas Edison who said "It is absurd to say our country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the people."

The paradox of money:  a private bank created the money, so why am I responsible?

Most people (myself included until recently) believe in the illusion that our national currency is created by the government.  It is worth stopping to take note that every time a bank creates money, those dollars or euros or pesos create a debt owed by the national government to whomever holds the currency and a promise to pay which is ultimately the responsibility of you and me, the citizens of that country.  There is a fledgling group in Switzerland, as revealed in How the Rich Get Richer, campaigning to prevent banks from being able to create money and advocating a system in which only the government can produce a national currency.

Who's in charge here?

Back to the question:  do the money men run the world?  For Henry Makow and advocates of the Zeitgeist movement the answer is beyond obvious that an unnamed they/them fronted by the world's central banks are running the world, and what we typically call "world affairs" (politics, business and religion) are but smoke and mirrors. Boris Johnson notes that successive kings of England had to borrow money from Dick Whittington, and when the British Government wanted to buy the Suez Canal they had to borrow the cash from Lionel Rothschild.  However, Johnson writes that "Today a young Rothschild can still make the headlines with a knock-out yacht-based party on the coast of the former Yugoslavia.  But no one needs his permission to go to war."

Perhaps.  But How the Rich Get Richer concludes with the observation that Brexit and the election of Donald Trump promise even less regulation of private banks and an even greater flood of unregulated, low-interest, private-bank-created money.

Afterword

Two thoughts remained in my mind as I was writing this post.  I feared they were tangential to the question, but I have decided to include them as an afterword/afterthought.

It seems a predicable human tendency to always imagine that someone is in charge, a powerful someone is pulling the strings to make whatever happens in the world happen--the Wizard of Oz fallacy.   As I wrote this post, I kept thinking about a remarkable documentary I saw on CBC television in 1983.  Produced and directed by Allen King, it was promoted as an exposé on unemployment.  In fact, as an example of his proto-reality-show filming, King invited a number of unemployed participants to sit on a bleacher in front of a bank of television cameras.  The participants were given no instructions, and there was no script.  What emerged was a series of assumptions from the participants about the objective of the film, and vitriolic outbursts of blame and counter blame for whatever emotions the participants were feeling.  The show was entitled "Who's in Charge Here?"  Participants launched a court case to block the presentation of the production, but the injunction was not granted.

The second thought that kept coming to me was "Why am I writing about money again!?"  I started this blog, some years ago, thinking I know something about something (roughly university education).  However, over time it has evolved (or devolved) into a study of all the things I don't know--the things that make me wonder about the depths of my own ignorance, that provoke me to ask "How could I not know this?"  I'm not that modest, so I assume there must be a lot of people who don't know what I don't know.  Here is a list of my blog posts on money, just in case you want to follow the slow meandering process of my self-education on the subject:

When Should You Repay Your Student Loan? How about . . . Never!

How Did University Degrees Become Subprime Mortgages?

What Is Money?

How Is Money Created?

Why Are the Poor Always with Us? "Moral Hazard."

“Derivatives”:  When Wall Street Went Postmodern!

Should Bank Robbery Be Deregulated?

Saint Mathew Pray for Us! Bank Deregulation Is Back!

Petrodollar Warfare: Understanding the US Obsession with Iran

The Market, the State and the Monkey in the Middle

Central Banks and the Bitcoin Experiment

The Sour Bibliography