Rob Rook: UAE dollar swap

 

The fact Trump has stated he is thinking about giving the UAE a currency swap signals a lot of things, but part of why they make it a currency swap is not many people understand what that actually means. The truth is it is a loan without technically giving a loan.

The petrodollar system works, because the UAE constantly has a large amount of oil that leaves their country, exchanged for US dollars, and those US dollars buy things like food and western goods, and then the remaining dollars go into their eight sovereign funds which then pump trillions of dollars into the US economy.

Trump isn't necessarily being altruistic here. What a currency swap would do is allow for the petrodollar system to still work even without the inflows of US dollars that used to come in naturally through the sale of oil. Keep in mind, 90% of the food the residents of the UAE eat has primarily been flowing from China and Iran ever since this war began. That continues as the US has clarified they won't stop this food from entering even with a blockade, but that food can't be bought with US dollars even if we don't stop it because Iran is stopping any shipments that would have been bought in USD. In other words, US dollars are abnormally worth less than normal in the country, because they don't buy as much anymore, but Chinese Yuan are abnormally valuable, because they do buy things that can't be imported otherwise.

The fact they are asking for a bailout is a signal they want to stay with the petrodollar system for now rather than jump ship to China. The way it would work is the US would take UAE dirham (their version of a dollar). This is a bit of a formality, because we won't use any of that currency. It is strengthening the value of that currency despite the fact it is pegged to US dollars. They then get US dollars that they will use. At some unspecified time in the future, the US can ask for any number of US dollars the two think is fair in exchange for the UAE dirham we've been keeping in a vault. Normally this would work like a loan with more US dollars required compared to the number of dollars the US previously provided factoring in a calculated interest rate, but if this is a long conflict that might turn out to be impossible if we want their oil industry to return to full strength as fast as possible. It is possible we give their currency back for a very small amount of dollars in return turning this whole exercise into a gift.

But hidden within this exchange is the thing I see being missed by most of the Republicans that focus heavily on where Iran will be in the future. In reality, Iran is pretty inconsequential to the future of the US. It is near guaranteed at this point they will have a nuclear weapon, and it is highly likely that they won't use that weapon on the US as they couldn't reach the US even if they wanted to. If they are rational, they won't use any nuclear weapons at all, because the US may respond with its own nuclear weapons, and Iran cannot directly counter-attack the US. Iran using a nuclear weapon likely would lead to an Iran far more devastated by nuclear warfare than the devastation they do on others.

As far as oil, we haven't used their oil nearly at all since 2018. In fact, the sanctions shrunk their oil from 85% of their economy to 10%. The global oil supply is not reliant on anything going on with Iran at all. Iran is irrelevant. The UAE on the other hand is highly relevant. The reason why even Trump that gripes about NATO freeloading is talking about bailing them out is the people around him know how important the UAE is to US dominance.

If you have been reading what I've written for a while, you will know the world order that created a US system of dominance was established with the Bretton Woods Agreements after WW2. I won't go into too much detail other than the fact it allows us to run higher deficits with lower inflation and there is a periodic natural transfer of wealth into the US year-over-year through hidden mechanisms built into how the global trade system functions. The US position since 1979 has been that this global system of trade that rigs the system in the favor of the US is far more valuable than anything we might want out of Iran. This is the real reason no one has done what Trump has done in Iran. This war risked that system that provides US dominance with very little possible gain in return for the risk.

The key issue here is that currency swap they are asking for is a band-aid. It is only the first of many dollar infusions it is going to take to keep the petrodollar system working, and there are more countries than the UAE that we have to support to keep this system going. The underlying issue is with or without our blockade, the only way they can buy food right now is to lean primarily on China. Eventually, we have to either give up on the system that matters more for the US than Iran, the petrodollar system, and just let China take over, or we are just going to have to keep shouldering the cost of keeping multiple countries afloat on the Persian Gulf even as they produce only a fraction of the oil they used to.

I get the naive view is these countries own their own oil, and they trade it to countries that aren't the US, and we have our own oil. I get some may not want to take the time to understand why the Gulf States ever mattered to the US, but even if you don't want to learn why they matter, their importance should still be evident if you think about the actions of Bush Sr. and Trump. Bush invaded Iraq over Kuwait, because of this system. We were not the primary customer of Kuwait. Trump is sitting here openly voicing his desire to help UAE out even though we are not the primary customer of the UAE.

We care, because this is our system, and the number one issue is do we maintain the Gulf States or not. Do we get them back up to producing or not. Don't focus on whether Iran is facing shut-in wells. Focus on whether the UAE is facing shut-in wells. It's flashier to talk about Iran where our bombs are being dropped, but the truth is the real issue here is what happens to countries like the UAE. If you are an American that cares about American interests, then you have to realize that historians will measure whether we won or lost this war based on what happened to countries like the UAE, not based on what happened to Iran.

 

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Currency Swaps Explained Currency swaps involve central banks exchanging currencies at spot rates, with an agreement to reverse at predetermined future rates, providing temporary liquidity without being loans or gifts. The US Fed would lend USD to the UAE Central Bank against dirhams (held but unused), reversed later at the same rate—no interest or unequal exchange as claimed. This maintains the dirham peg (3.6725 AED per USD since 1997) amid war-disrupted oil dollar inflows, signaling UAE commitment to dollar stability over yuan shifts.

The Shah of Iran

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/151000744973882/?multi_permalinks=34340930725554113&hoisted_section_header_type=recently_seen

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1657886891483220/posts/1805737580031483/?comment_id=1805911726680735

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

smuggled nematode worms

 

https://www.michiganpublic.org/criminal-justice-legal-system/2025-09-11/judge-says-3-months-in-jail-are-enough-for-chinese-scientist-in-us-smuggling-case

Han was also accused of sending petri dishes that contained nematode worms, known as C. Elegans. Authorities said the packages were not properly labeled and that Han didn't have approval to ship them.

"C. Elegans is easy to obtain, easy to study, nonharmful," defense attorney Sara Garber said.

She said Han's research focuses on how organisms detect light, touch and temperature.

"This is not a case of smuggling in some sort of virus or a crop-destroying something or other," U.S. District Judge Matthew Leitman said. "From what I can tell, this material was not a threat at all."

An attempted color revolution in Hong Kong

by Philip Bowring, a British journalist and long-time Hong Kong resident

A NEW ASSISTANT

As a South China Morning Post reporter in 1991, I noted the rise of a new political group called the United Democrats, who had an “executive assistant” who was always seen at the right hand of the leaders.

His name was Tom Boasberg. So, not Chinese, but American. He was hyper-political, and his previous employer was the United States government. 

Many businesses in Hong Kong employed Americans, sure. We all liked Americans. But this wasn’t a business – it was supposedly a "grassroots" political party—and I thought it odd to have a foreigner at the top end of the noisiest political organization in the city. 

And when Boasberg moved on in 1992, I noticed that he was replaced by another executive assistant, a woman named Minky Worden. She too was American, she too was hyper-political, and she too was previously employed by the United States government: a coincidence.

When Ms Worden left that role in 1998, the group took another person in her place: a woman named Emily Bork.  She too was American, she too was hyper-political, and she too previously worked for the United States government. A series of coincidences? 

(Ms Worden went on to become an enthusiastic player in the Uyghur genocide hoax. Her journalist husband Gordon Crovitz, with whom I worked directly, later went on to sign a contract to work on media monitoring with the Pentagon.)

.

FACTIONS

For some of this period, I was a Legislative Council columnist for the South China Morning Post.

I lived next door to Yeung Sam, a leading member of the so-called “pro-democracy” party, and soon learned there were factions within it. Everyone’s favorite (including mine) was a rough diamond called Szeto Wah who was noisily patriotic about China while believing that western democracy would be good for Hong Kong. (Yeung himself was unpopular within the organization.) 

But many of the other “pro-democracy” politicians, unfortunately, became closely tied in with anti-China groups funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, which had taken over the CIA's “soft power” covert regime change duties. 

The NED had quietly started funding political organizations in Hong Kong in 1990, but kept under the radar, using multiple other identities. Cash arrived in Hong Kong listed as “donations” from a non-existent body called the American Institute for Free Labor Development (set up by the CIA for money transfers).

.

EXTREMELY DANGEROUS

The NED were and are extremely bad people. Working worldwide, they used the “pro-democracy” label as a cover to poison the public against local candidates who failed to be pro-Washington in any country. 

The NED successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996 and helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992, as intelligence historians noted.

And they would eventually cause chaos in my peaceful, gentle Hong Kong. 

The NED did this by using their bottomless funds to blend Hong Kong’s “pro-democracy” politicians with two groups they funded to poison Hong Kong people against mainland China. One was called the Human Rights Monitor and the other was the Confederation of Trade Unions (not to be confused with the HK Federation of Trade Unions, which was a genuine trade union organizing group).

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DESTRUCTION OF LEGCO

The "pan-democrats" quickly lost the goodwill of the Hong Kong people by automatically vetoing every act the government did, causing massive delays in a city used to efficiency. Legco became dysfunctional, sometimes grinding to a halt.

The physical violence seen in the Taiwan parliament was transferred to Hong Kong, with people such as Ted Hui throwing fists and foul matter into the parliamentary chamber (and becoming hated by the building's cleaners).

By 2012, this pro-US movement was working with the Oslo Freedom Foundation (which, despite the name, is based in the US), in a multi-year operation to organize massive demonstrations in Hong Kong with the aim of destabilizing the city.

The US plan was to present these anti-China protests as home-grown “pro-democracy” protests, trusting in the western mainstream media to excuse the horrific violence and hide the US funding. (Which they did.)  

A major aim was fearmongering. By forcing Beijing to send the tanks into Hong Kong, Taiwan would abandon its growing friendship with the mainland, and became once again a dependable part of the Pentagon's First Island Chain.

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A FAILED OPERATION

The rest is history. The Chinese refused to send in the tanks. The PLA stayed at home. The Hong Kong police managed to quell the riots without killing a single person (unlike police or soldiers in the six other uprisings in the world that same year, all of which led to multiple deaths). The US operation against Hong Kong failed.

By 2021, many people in Hong Kong knew about the foreign forces involvement and were disgusted with the pan-democrats. My friends and I, almost all of whom had been big fans for many years, became totally disillusioned with western-style democracy as a whole. 

The western mainstream press rigidly turned their faces away and refused to see any of this.

And today, the China-hostile media, from Reuters’ James Pomfret to the BBC’s Danny Vincent, continue to fail to report the real story. Whether they are hiding it or are genuinely unaware of what is going -- that's not for me to say.

But I will say that the catastrophic loss of trust in the western mainstream media is well deserved.

the Nanjing Massacre

 A professor from Nanjing on why the Nanjing Massacre can never be forgiven:

"What we remember is not hatred, but the absence of civilization — an absence that shows us how we must safeguard peace, protect life, and uphold justice…

As long as civilization survives, we can neither forgive nor forget."

"Why do we reopen this wound and remember the Nanjing Massacre, again and again? Not because I am from Nanjing, or China. It is because I am a human being."

"I have sat with dozens of survivors of the Nanjing Massacre. In their telling, I have never once heard a word of willingness to forgive.

Because those were their own mothers, fathers, siblings… We have no right to forgive on their behalf. Neither do any generations to come. Our only duty is to remember—for them."

"We remember because Japan chooses to forget. We remember because an official apology remains absent. We remember because war criminals are glorified at Yasukuni. We remember because the truth is still obscured in their textbooks. To forget would be to betray history itself."

https://fb.watch/E2Qr8sQYmf/

Who was Samuel Slater?

https://pooley.com/was-americas-industrial-revolution-based-on-trade-secret-theft/

By 1774, fifteen years before Slater slipped out of the country, England had criminalized both the export of textile machinery and the emigration of textile mechanics. Slater, because he had been trained in the craft, committed a criminal act just by leaving the country.

Samuel Slater is remembered well but variously. In the United States, Andrew Jackson dubbed him the “Father of American Manufactures.” In his hometown of Belper in Derbyshire, he is less fondly known as “Slater the Traitor.” (It also bears mention that Slater’s wife, Hannah Wilkinson Slater, became the first woman in America to receive a U.S. patent, covering her invention of cotton sewing thread.)

Is it reasonable to say that the U.S. got an unfair head start on the Industrial Revolution by stealing secrets from Britain? I don’t think so. Industrial espionage had been practiced in Europe throughout the 18th Century, with the British and French particularly active, even using diplomats to get access to valuable commercial information. 

Moreover, Britain, like some other European countries, frequently granted “patents of importation,” which didn’t require the applicant to be an inventor, if the invention was new within the country’s borders. In this way, governments regularly encouraged people to “steal” ideas from abroad and bring them home.

But there may be a broader lesson to be drawn from the Slater story, one that resonates in the modern, information-based economy. Some scholars think that Massachusetts, near where Slater’s mills were established, lost the march to Silicon Valley because non-competition agreements were regularly enforced against employees there and in other Eastern states. 

Many of those employees decamped to California, where the law prohibits such restrictions. Undoubtedly some confidential information has been lost along the way. But consider the results. Perhaps we should look to Slater as demonstrating the universal economic value of labor mobility.

Deng Xiaoping

 https://www.quora.com/How-did-China-surpass-South-Korea-and-Japanese-firms-to-become-the-leader-in-display-panel-manufacturing-industry/answer/Kanthaswamy-Balasubramaniam

In 1983, China had picture tubes made locally and also picture tubes imported from Japan for their State manufactured TV brands

The Japanese imports were top class and the Chinese Picture Tubes were low low quality

Chinese families would save longer to buy Japanese and scoff at the Chinese product

So the Chinese Party members advised to close down the Chinese factory making picture tubes and negotiate with Japan on reducing prices of imports

Deng Xiaoping said they had to better the production of Picture Tubes and match Japanese Quality and beat it

The Chinese party members reacted like how most Indians like Balaji Viswanathan and friends would react

They said:

We have to be Practical

We are an Agrarian Country

We have so many poor people

We can't compare ourselves with Japan

Luckily Deng had power and commanded what he wanted and weeded out most people and retained only those he felt could carry out his vision.