Headlines that have recently hit the media say that the Saudis are threatening to sell off assets worth hundreds of billions of US dollars if the congress passes the 9/11 report. But according to a report by Moon of Alabama, it is not the Saudis who are making threats, it’s actually congress who are threatening to seize Saudi U.S. assets: It is the U.S. Congress that is threatening to lift the immunity of nation states in front of U.S.
Richard Gamble reviews John Wilsey’s American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion, and finds Wilsey’s version of exceptionalism to be dangerous in its own way:
Submitted by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,
The elephant’s not even in the room, which is why the 2016 election campaign is such a soap opera. The elephant outside the room is named Discontinuity. That’s perhaps an intimidating word, but it is exactly what the USA is in for. It means that a lot of familiar things come to an end, stop, don’t work the way they are supposed to - beginning, manifestly, with the election process now underway in all its unprecedented bizarreness.
Currently the US Dollar, traded on the stock market as (UUP), and (USDU); is the world's reserve currency. Although there is talk of the fall of the US Dollar as the world reserve currency, it's all talk and there's no signs that this will happen any time soon. Hungary recently issued sovereign bonds in Yuan - but so what? It's just a drop in the bucket. The practical fact is there is no real threat to the US Dollar's status as a reserve currency. However, there may be one.
Back in 2014 Obama promised that as part of the US war against ISIS, there would be "no ground troops in Iraq." Moments ago U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter gave the latest confirmation that Obama was not being exactly "honest", when during a visit to Baghdad in which he met U.S. commanders, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, and Iraqi Defence Minister Khaled al-Obeidi, he announced that the US would send another 200 additional troops, raising the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to about 4,100.