The Saudi problem - it is not the oil | The View from Canada |Axisoflogic.com

Miles Report No. 106 - The Saudi problem - it is not the oil

Listening to various pundits and news reporters discussing Prime Minister Trudeau’s reaction to events in Turkey vis à vis the alleged murder of a Saudi dissident makes me realize the shallowness and wilful ignorance of the majority of them. Most think his comments are highly moderated, not offensive, in part because Canada’s position is weak with respect to Saudi Arabia due to an earlier [un]diplomatic tweet concerning an individual jailed in Saudi Arabia for reasons of human rights protests domestically.

Trudeau is not alone, though, as the rest of the western world either remains silent or mutters some platitude about checking facts, or needing more information, or we are looking into this. But amongst all this angst two statements have stood out to make it all seem irrelevant to actual global political concerns.

First is Thomas Friedman, New York Times mouthpiece of empire, and apparently a personal friend of Jamal Khashoggi but also a fawning admirer of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman [MBS]. After the news of Khashoggi’s disappearance, Friedman had to twist himself around, and argued that the Khashoggi event is far more severe of an international concern than the war in Yemen.

Thus the first idiocy of the whole affair: the western world is tied up in confusion about what to say to MBS yet - and this points directly at the mainstream media and its corporate-governmental control - say very little about Saudi attempts at genocide and ethnic cleansing in Yemen supported in large part by western countries including through Canada’s military sales to MSB. It would appear that a few thousand Canadian jobs are being bargained off against tens of thousands of dead Yemenis, hundreds of thousands suffering from cholera and millions in imminent danger of starvation, disease, and death from U.S. supplied armaments.

Secondly, a pundit on CBC’s Power and Politics this afternoon (Thursday, October 12, 2018) indicated that not much can actually be done because the west buys much of its oil from Saudi Arabia and thus cannot complain too loudly. Canada imports only about ten per cent of its oil from Saudi Arabia and is set up to be able to cover that if lost by accessing other sources. [www.oilprice.com, August 08, 2018]. The U.S. receives only nine per cent of its oil from the Saudis and forty per cent from Canada, and while it imports 10 million barrels per day, it also exports about 6 million barrels per day [www.eia.gov - the U.S. Energy Administration]. In short, if necessary oil itself is not the problem as its purchase and sales can be rearranged between other countries.

However, the comment reveals, as usual, the common misrepresentation of Saudi oil in the western marketplace. The important factor is not the oil per se, but the fact that the oil is priced in US$ - everybody seems to know this, but few will admit to its impact, its importance to the global economy. If the Saudis decided to sell oil to whatever country using the whatever country's currency - yuan, rial, kroner, euro, et al - the US$ would die a nasty death. The only thing actually supporting the US$ dollar in face of the enormous global debt and the enormous global debt leverage available through near zero interest rates for the banks and corporations (but not for the regular little guy, the consumer) is the fact that the Saudis have agreed with the U.S. to sell the oil only using the US$. Superficially all seems well in the U.S. but it is an economy run on debt, enormous amounts of debt, all susceptible to a faltering and unsupported US$.

Just ask Libya, or Iraq, both of whom were intending to sell oil using another currency (the euro in Iraq’s case, a gold backed African currency in Libya’s case). Any country with oil that dares even to think about selling oil in something other than the US$ becomes a military target (as per the above mentioned Thomas Friedman’s infamous line about the military as the “hidden hand of the market”), one of the main factors in the devilization of Iran.

The second idiocy then is adhering to the mainstream message that we cannot do without Saudi oil, therefore we must be quiet in our complaints on other fronts. The oil is not the problem, the US$ is the problem. Although oil can be re-sourced, but because we are dependent on the US$ ourselves, Canada cannot do much about perceived Saudi problems (of which there are many).

The money received by the Saudi government is used to finance its huge armaments purchases from the west - mostly from the U.S. but also from Canada. It is also used to fund various fanatical religious groups throughout the world, be it in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan or wherever else the U.S. has chosen to create chaos and assist in the creation of fanatical Muslim religious sects. It is currently being used to destroy the people of Yemen, in a war that mostly demonstrates the ineffectiveness of the Saudi military and the desires of MSB for regional hegemony over the Arab states in the region along with their U.S. partners.

All our concerns about Khashoggi are over-inflated in contrast to the Yemen situation and in contrast to the support provided to the militant religious fanatics. They are over-inflated about our access to oil as that can be located elsewhere (Horrors! Maybe even from Alberta!). Without the recognition of the Saudi grasp on the world by way of its pricing of oil using the US$, they will be able to operate with impunity in face of these true incidents but over inflated reactions.

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