KISS THE DOLLAR GOODBYE

So screams today's Drudge Report headline in a thunderous "xx-large" Arial font. The linked AFP article discusses the possibility that the dollar might lose its place as the preferred global currency, but based on the headline, the reader might be excused for thinking that the nation is about to return to the barter system or else adopt Chinese renminbi.

Indeed, the headline is intentionally misleading. The collapse of the dollar has become an idée fixe among paranoid right-wingers who believe that the government is deliberately killing the dollar in order to make way for a new international currency: the Amero.

The Amero first came to my intention in a New York cab in the summer of 2008. When you take a cab in New York, you can reliably expect that 1) the driver will be a male immigrant, and 2) he will not speak to you except to ask you where you're going. On the few occasions that I've been picked up by white native-born Americans, I've been regaled with conspiracy theories and wacky religious doctrine, so I knew that I was in for some entertainment when my white American driver asked me not only where I was going (a movie theater) but also what I planned to see. He then went on to inform me that he doesn't watch movies any more. He had conspiracy sites on the Internet instead. Warily, I asked him what sort of conspiracies he was into. That's how I found out about the Amero.

According to my driver, who seemed very knowledgeable on the subject, the Amero is a joint North American currency, equivalent to the Euro, that will be established along with a North American central government called the North American Union, equivalent to, you guessed it, the European Union. (Apparently, the masterminds aren't very original.) The plan was supposedly hatched by the Federal Reserve Bank, which as "everyone" knows is really a private corporation created in 1913 to protect tycoons like John D. Rockefeller. It has been gradually accumulating power since then, waiting for it's moment to pounce.

That moment has come. The FRB knows full well that we Americans won't willingly give up our sovereignty, so it plans to exacerbate the current financial crisis and encourage the government to respond with deficit spending. When the government is deep in debt (or rather, deeper in debt), the FRB will call in the debts. Unable to pay, the government will be forced to accept the FRB's conditions: the establishment of the Amero and North American Union. The plotters are also planning to build a 16-lane NAFTA superhighway that will bisect the country and deliver goods from Mexico to Canada. (I don't know why this detail is important to plot, but it will surely lead to protests of new highways in middle Ameria.)

When I took that cab ride, G.W. was still president, and people like Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs weren't on my radar. But the Amero was on theirs. You might think of Beck as a diehard Republican, but in fact he owes allegiance to paranoia over party, and he's been pushing the Amero mythology since at least October 2007, when he hosted Jerome Corsi on his CNN program in a segment called "Liberty in Peril: What You Need to Know." Corsi is making headlines these days for pushing the Obama birther conspiracy theory, but in 2007, he wrote a book, The Late Great U.S.A.: The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada, that discusses a "secret agenda...to dissolve the United States of America into the North American Union. The [Bush] administration has no intent to secure the border, or to enforce rigorously existing immigration laws." Here's Beck response:

I was with one of the country's leading economists having dinner the other night, and I said, "What point do you start" -- and this guy's an optimist. "At what point do you start worrying about the dollar?" And he said, "Glenn, about six months ago." He said, "It's almost like we`re intentionally destroying the dollar."

Beck also mentioned that nefarious superhighway:

You've got the trans -- the NAFTA superhighway that, again, everybody denies, but you've got it broken up in chunks being built right now. It will deliver goods from China right to Mexico through America into Canada.

Before Beck joined the party, Lou Dobbs, another birther conspiracist, was already pushing the North American Union theory. According to Media Matters, Dobbs discussed the NAU 56 times on his CNN show in 2006-2007, e.g.

It's unofficially known as the North American Union. Some, for some reason, suggest there's no such thing, that there is no plan to merge the United States and Mexico and the United States without the knowledge and approval of the citizens of those three countries. Well, tonight, you're going to find out that there really is such a thing and it's all part of a plan.

Dobbs explicitly blamed the Bush administration, but with Democrats in power, the idea of a secret plan to establish a North America Union and replace the dollar with a trans-American currency has gained...um...currency among the right wing, hence the Drudge headline.

So let this blog be your first warning. We're going to hear a lot more about the Amero in coming weeks.

PS As TPM has previously documented, Representative Michele Bachman (R-MN) once suggested that Geithner wants to replace the dollar with a global currency.

Update: Here's precursor from a reader's comment to an article about the dollar's decline.

Incriminally Sane Says:

Folks, looking at the markets around the world, I believe we are DAYS AWAY from an absolute collapse of the dollar and when it happens, you can expect that you will NO LONGER be able to buy ANYTHING with your Dollars, no food, fuel, rent or anything that is exchanged in Americas former currency.......THE DOLLAR.

They will wait for people to move to the streets and the killing starts before they declare Martial Law in America. Then, when things get really ugly, they will integrate the Amero into the system and will charge you $10.00 for one Amero and they will make you believe you are getting a good deal since the Dollar has been devalued to NOTHING.

This has all been planned for much longer than you or I have been alive. Gold, Silver and a system of Barter will be the only way we will be able to make it when this happens.

Good Luck People!

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Stay tuned for more bad currency puns in my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.