The ultrarich are prepping for doomsday right now. France is on fire. The U.S. ruling elite and the mainstream media they own are avoiding reporting on it. The American rich want to exploit the workers more and more, and facing the wrath of the "common man and woman" is their greatest fear. So they have been increasingly coming up with ways to avoid the guillotines.
The ruling class knows what's coming: social instability caused by a combination of the climate crisis, banks failing, the soul-killing inequality of late-stage capitalism, and the impending dilution of the petrodollar.
So what's going on here?
Think of it this way - When you're on a ship or in a building, and you see all the rats running toward you, you know there's some horrible shit behind them because they're the first ones to flee. You see rats running; you run with them! Well, the rats of our society are beginning to flee. The richest of the rich are making a run for it.
The rats, I mean the rich, are fleeing to higher ground or sometimes to multimillion-dollar underground bunkers.
The decline of the petrodollar is a major factor driving their fear. The U.S. has been able to control much of the world for close to a century because every country has needed to hold dollars in order to buy crude oil. The petrodollar system allowed the U.S. to create a virtually endless supply of dollars. They just printed whatever they wanted. A trillion dollars a year for the military? Easy. Trillion-dollar subsidies for Big Oil? Cool! Four trillion dollars for Wall Street crooks during the pandemic. Of course!
This didn't create cataclysmic inflation because no matter how much they printed, there would always be demand for those dollars abroad. If almost any other country printed that much money, their currency would have collapsed faster than Morgan Spurlock's career.
The petrodollar has given the U.S. immense power, and yet it's never mentioned by the mainstream media.
Go ahead, listen to how often you hear the word "petrodollar" on CNN. It's rarer than them saying the "C word" on a live broadcast! Capitalism.
The word "petrodollar" doesn't even have its own English-language Wikipedia article! There's a Wikipedia article for "Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space." There's no petrodollar entry, but there's an entry for "duck face." There's no petrodollar page, but there's a page for Baron Gustaf Adolf Reuterholm - a man whose only accomplishment was acting as the de facto regent of Sweden in 1792.
Why can't average people learn about the petrodollar? Because the greatest power of the U.S. is also its greatest weakness. The moment people question the petrodollar, they realize the truth. The U.S. only maintains control as long as the world is buying and selling a disgusting amount of fossil fuels and doing it in dollars. This fact cannot be talked about in the national dialogue. It's also why the U.S. can never do anything about fossil fuel use. Joe Biden would race to the end times before he'd dare lift a finger to stop fossil fuels.
Now that countries like China, Russia, and Brazil are buying and selling more fossil fuels in other currencies, the good times for the petrodollar economy are coming to an end.
Some places are also taking the climate crisis seriously and getting off fossil fuels altogether. This means there is no possibility the dollar will maintain its power in the years to come.
The point is the ruling class sees the writing on the wall, and they are preparing for what comes next. They're hoping their billions can help them escape reality.
Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of Behind The Headlines' new series: The Most Censored News With Lee Camp. He is a former comedy writer for the Onion and the Huffington Post and has been a touring stand-up comic for 20 years.