Bush Talks “Strong Dollar” as the Economy Goes to Hell in a Hand-basket

Kurt Nimmo Truthnews November 14, 2007

In a television interview, Bush tells us “the dollar will be stronger” if markets “would look at the strength of our economy.” In Bushzarro world, a strong dollar is predicated on a weak dollar and all is fine and dandy—that is if you live on Martha’s Vineyard or Kennebunkport.

“His comments come as the U.S. dollar has hit record lows against other major currencies, including the euro and the British pound, as it is falling against the Japanese yen,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “While the president didn’t offer a major shift in his administration’s position on the dollar, almost any commentary from the president on currency can move the markets.”

In other words, the president’s “commentary”—read from a globalist script—has the potential to send a ripple through markets wildly over-valued and pegged to devalued fiat dollars. For the stock market yuppies, Bush’s words are soothing and reassuring, never mind they will soon be selling off their BMWs at fire sale prices and confronting eviction notices on their posh condos.

Pity poor Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury Secretary, who has to chant this nonsense about a strong dollar—a mantra etched in ideological stone by former treasury secretary Robert Rubin, now chairman of Citigroup—as he faces “pressure from European policy makers to more forcefully defend the currency after it fell to a record low last week,” according to Bloomberg.

“The falling currency threatens to stoke inflation at a time when the Fed has been lowering interest rates to buttress growth. Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said last week the Fed will ensure the weaker dollar doesn’t feed through to broader prices. There are also questions about the dollar’s status as the dominant reserve currency.”

Somebody needs to ask Helicopter Ben when the last time was he bought a gallon of gas or milk.

Meanwhile, in the America not mentioned in Bush’s interview, home foreclosures are going through the stratosphere. “Cities in California, Florida and Ohio dominated the 25 U.S. metro areas with the highest home foreclosure rates, though rates jumped in most of the top regions during the third quarter,” reports Reuters. “A broad credit and liquidity crisis during the third quarter exacerbated U.S. housing industry troubles, pushing sales sharply lower and unsold inventory to record highs.”

Instead of clarion calls about all of this, we get rosy predictions from a pathological liar who told us all to go shopping after 9/11.

In order to get the truth, we need only jump on the web and take a look at the dissenting, reality-based, non-corporate media.

“When the mainstream press fails to report news and offer analyses that a large number of people are aware of, we can turn to citizen journalists on the web,” writes Shepherd Bliss. “The mainstream press is loosing readers because it no longer adequately investigates and reports some of the important stories. Fortunately, we now have other places to go to be informed and educated.”

And what we learn is often not pretty:

Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: The USSR Was Better Prepared for Collapse than the US” was published by the authoritative www.energybulletin.net. A Russian, Dmitry Orlov, who now lives in the US, wrote, “The US economy is poised to perform something like a disappearing act.” Orlov compares the “two 20th century superpowers.” An extended version of his analysis will be published as the book “Reinventing Collapse” in May by New Society Publishers.

Orlov examines the arms race, the space race, the jails race, and the “Hated Evil Empire Race.” He concludes that “many of the problems that sunk the Soviet Union are now endangering the US.” So we should “expect shortages of fuel, food, medicine, and countless consumer items, outages of electricity, gas, and water.” If we plan for such possibilities now, we will be better able to deal with them.

Of course, there is a big difference between citizens of the USSR of yesterday and the USA of today—the former were lulled into complacency by the dysfunctional socialist nanny state while the latter are generally no longer the polite sort of folks who obediently line up to receive their government bowl of soup and crust of bread as their ancestors did during the “Great Depression.”

It will get ugly out there very soon and any number of lame speeches and interviews delivered by a blue-blood decider-commander guy will be like putting lipstick on a pig.