BRICS meeting - dollar dies slowly

The BRICS meeting (Brazil, Russia, India, China) passed without fanfare, but some incident. The dollar didn't take a public hit; but the four emerging economies will try to eliminate use of the dollar in trade between them. Not a sudden death, but one of a thousand cuts, as the World Currency Watch puts it.

Predictions of the demise of the dollar have been around for years. The bailout hastens that demise.

If the dollar is no longer the reserve currency, the US cannot keep living beyond its means. As well as collapsing living standards at home, the American Empire will have to disengage. Its ill-conceived military endeavours in the Middle East are predicated on complacency about the economy, an ideologically blinkered attachment to free-trade at any costs, which the Americans probably thought would be a mechanism to democratise and westernise the world, rather than impoverish them. Ultimately the debt is about America's inability to produce enough to support its spending. Off-shoring has a lot to do with it.

How will geriatric, defence-spending shy Europe feels when the Americans take away their military umbrella?

QE liquidity goes abroad

According to Chris Woods on RGEmonitor.com, most of the liquidity from Quantative Easing will not benefit American or British consumers, but will be channelled into Asian equities, causing a bubble. Asian stock markets are on the way up, having partially decoubpled from the West, whereas the Western markets are going down.

Where the right is still going wrong

Read this argument against the strategic idiocy of preventative war and the obsession with biffing on the head every bad guy who pops up and says "boo" to the West.

The present warfare state fails to properly defend US (or Western) interests, but it is eroding civil liberties and sucking out its economic lifeblood. Not that the US has much of an economy left.

To jacobins supposed conservatives, torture is OK, but many right-of-centre people go along with it, and vote for corporate republicans and fake conservatives.

The Republicans deserve to lose in 2012 if they continue to be dominated by the war-party. If they don't change, what is the point of the Rebublicans? They don't defend conservatism or liberty; the Obama administration is as interventionist as Bush. So you may as well vote Democrat if you want to bomb bad guys and trash your freedoms.

Cross-posted on Social Conservative view.