Alex Christoforou made an interesting point on his Rumble channel yesterday.

For many decades in this world, the dollar was almighty and sovereign because it was backed by oil–the black gold standard.

This gave the Empire the ability to project power anywhere, usually without even having to fire a shot.

They used this power with savvy most of the time. No one cared, for example, if sanctions (a pulling-back of dollars) against Iraq or Cuba or Venezuela led to suffering and death there. Madeleine Albright, who went to her reward in the blackest depths of hell yesterday, is perhaps most famous for telling Leslie Stahl that her sanctions on Iraq, which no one argues killed half a million children there, were totally “worth it”.

Hey, baby, them that’s got the gold makes the rules, y’know? What kin ya do? The world is a rough place. Suck it up.

But in its jaded dotage, the Empire begins to think that its power is absolute and infinite.

There’s a war in Ukraine, but we don’t dare to face off in the air against a nuclear-armed Russia? No problem. Sanction the hell out of them and bring them to their knees! Declare total economic war and they’ll bend to the imperial will soon enough.

Only … it doesn’t seem to be working, even a little bit.

Okay, well … what about the Chinamen? They aren’t making the right kind of noises about the Russians, and it’s time they recognized who runs things around here. Let’s give them a taste of Sanctions! That should patch things right up!

No, Joe. It’s doing worse than nothing, you blind old fool.

It has in fact at last begun to backfire badly. The catastrophic results of your foolishness are being felt already, and it’s going to get much worse very quickly.

The other lesser powers in the world are fed up with the Empire’s bullshit. It was one thing to send Venezuelan kids to bed hungry because America didn’t like the cut of their leader’s jib.

But now they’re fucking with people who are able, and increasingly motivated, to strike back in mercilessly effective ways.

Joe let the Saudi prince off the hook for cutting up a journalist and packing his bloody remains home in a suitcase.

But the Saudi prince is an oligarch and an ungrateful bastard. China has already made what they think is a better offer, and sooner or later, the prince will take it.

When the petrodollar becomes the petroyuan, or the petro-ruble, or whatever else it will become, the power of the regular dollar in your bank account is going to precipitously drop with it, much further than it already has.

Meanwhile, back on the northamerican continent, look what Trudeau did to the truckers, on the Canadian side.

You won’t get off my streets? Fine bitches. That’s an emergency, and your accounts are frozen, just like that. You’re Sanctioned. That means that you’re broke. And by the way, we pulled your truck’s insurance too, so you can’t make any new money either.

The people on your side, trying to GoFundYou? That money is frozen too, because we own the tech monopolies.

If you think for one moment that your Empire Representatives won’t freeze you out too, the moment they have the slightest pretext of a reason, you’re living in a 1950s dream world.

In short, your dollars (even if they remain yours at all) are going to grow weaker and weaker as a direct result of your Empire neolib/neocon duopoly trying to go on playing King Shit in every corner of the habitable world for longer than you’ve been alive.

Go on and tell me now, how Hunter’s laptop is another nefarious Russian plot.

Tell me voting is important, and that blue no matter who is the only moral thing.

Tell me all about how Zalensky is a heroic freedom fighter and can’t possibly be a Nazi because … he’s a Jew! It’s so obvious!

Help me to get properly agitated about where trans women piss, or what sports they should be able to play.

Help me forget it all with a funny cat video.

Sell me on every angle of the big lie, as we watch your dollars and mine circle the drainpipe to oblivion.

I promise to listen attentively.

And even politely, for as long as I can stand to be polite about evil and what it’s done to our culture and our brains.