By Lowell Ponte, Special for USDR
Can you smell that smell? It comes not only from burning buildings and cars torched in Baltimore protests, and from the shots fired by Iranian warships as they seized a U.S.-allied freighter in the Persian Gulf on April 28, but also from the global economy and its reserve currency, the U.S. Dollar, catching fire.
The evidence of this appears in a new investigative report titled America Engulfed.
This free White Paper is co-authored by Craig R. Smith, a monetary expert frequently interviewed by Fox’s Neil Cavuto and other major business journalists, and Lowell Ponte, a former think tank futurist who worked for 15 years as an investigative reporter and Roving Editor for Reader’s Digest Magazine.
“World War III may have already begun in the Middle East, in our opinion,” with the destabilization of governments and expansion of terrorism in Libya, Egypt, Iraq, and Yemen, write Smith and Ponte.
“This is happening amid a struggle for regional dominance between two oil-rich Muslim powers, Shiite Iran and its rival across the Persian Gulf, Sunni Saudi Arabia,” says Ponte.
“America’s President Barack Hussein Obama is promoting an agreement with Iran that, according to U.S. allies such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would ‘pave the way’ to Iran’s theocratic regime acquiring nuclear weapons,” says Ponte.
“Iran’s ruling ayatollahs believe that they can bring about the global triumph of Islam by launching an apocalyptic war,” says Ponte. “It seems odd that President Obama wants to prohibit law-abiding Americans from owning a .22 caliber rifle, yet is eager to sign an agreement to help Iran’s doomsday ayatollahs acquire atomic bombs.”
In their new investigation, America Engulfed, Smith and Ponte show how Iran, by using terrorists as their delivery system for nuclear weapons, could turn 32 American and two Canadian cities, into “radioactive holes beneath their mushroom clouds that will remain ‘clicking hot’ with radioactivity for the next 20,000 years.”
“Or, as we explain, these 34 North American cities and the regions around them could be destroyed technologically – turned into a pre-technology civilization and economically destroyed – by a cunning way terrorists might use the nuclear weapons they acquire from Iran. Such weapons might also come from one of the other oil-rich nations that rush to get nukes of their own to deter a nuclear Iran from attacking them,” says Ponte.
“Terrorists could anonymously devastate 800-mile-wide circles of American territory with only a single small nuclear weapon per circle – or even wipe out six or more major European cities with a single bomb,” says Ponte.
See their list at the end of this text to find if you live in a likely target city or region for such atom-armed terrorist attacks.
“The irony in this nightmare,” Smith and Ponte write, “is that the uranium in these bombs may have come from the United States” via a deal whereby President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let Russia buy one-fifth of America’s strategic uranium deposits – and Russia has supplied nuclear materials, reactors, and other assistance to Iran’s nuclear program.
“If this nightmare comes true, shattering our nation and economy, this Obama-Clinton radioactive legacy will be remembered through the entire 1,000-year Dark Age that will follow,” says Ponte.
“However, our place in the world economy is now severely threatened even if such nuclear terrorism never happens,” says Craig R. Smith.
“When President Richard Nixon cut off the gold anchor of the U.S. Dollar in 1971, an agreement with our allies, Saudi Arabia and the Shah of Iran (later deposed by today’s Islamist rulers), guaranteed that we were exchanging the dollar’s ‘gold standard’ for a ‘Petrodollar oil standard,’” says Smith.
“By requiring other countries to buy oil using U.S. Dollars as the ‘global reserve currency,’ Saudi Arabia and most other members of OPEC [the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries] have kept the world dependent on the paper dollars we print and thereby propped up our dollar’s value. In exchange, we gave them a financial and military superpower ally,” says Smith.
“Under President Obama, we are perceived as a weak, unreliable and untrustworthy ally and a declining military and economic power,” says Smith.
“Many nations, including Russia and China, want to undermine the U.S. Dollar’s status and power as the world’s sole reserve currency. As soon as this coming October, the International Monetary Fund [IMF] may grant at least partial reserve currency status to China’s currency the Yuan/ Reminbi.”
“This might happen, because we have gone recklessly deep in debt and printed astronomical numbers of dollars out of thin air,” says Smith. “By turning to oil hydraulic fracturing [“fracking”] to keep our own fragile economy afloat, we have angered OPEC allies who were forced to lower their oil prices in an effort to put half our fracking companies out of business.”
“Bloomberg Business reported on April 13 that “Oil-rich nations are selling off their Petrodollar assets at a record pace” and some “are burning through their savings,” making a fire sale of their Petrodollar assets. This could be the beginning of the end of our dollar’s power as the monopoly global reserve currency – and one source of the smoke and flame that alert investors are smelling,” says Smith. “The dollar is catching fire.”
In America Engulfed, Smith and Ponte warn that America is caught in quicksand, likely to suffer great losses whether we retain or abandon our military and economic entanglements with Middle Eastern oil powers.
They warn that as the wars for dominance involving Islam, oil, and global currency grow worse, Americans are at risk of losing 20%, 30%, 40% or more of the value of our dollar-denominated assets and savings.
“Those who live in a burning world should hedge against the risk of living in an economy and a house made entirely of propped-up, overvalued paper money,” Smith and Ponte write.
“It is prudent to invest a portion of your assets into fire insurance….” they write. “You need to create at least a ‘safe room’ in your life of assets that are fireproof and will never burn to ashes.”
Western Journalism readers may request a free copy of their new investigation, America Engulfed, and/or their latest of five co-authored books, Don’t Bank On It! The Unsafe World of 21st Century Banking.
Below is a list of cities, and the regions around them, that Smith and Ponte warn are prime targets where terrorists with even a few nuclear weapons could use a special technique to destroy bank account records, computers and telecommunications, water supplies, electrical power grids and their transformers, and much more in all of these places combined:
Chicago, Toronto, Indianapolis, Detroit, New York City,
Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Miami, Tampa,
Orlando, Atlanta, Nashville, New Orleans, Baton Rouge,
Little Rock, Denver, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, B.C.,
Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Dallas,
Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, Phoenix, Tulsa,
Washington, D.C., St. Louis, Omaha, Berlin, Milan,
London, Paris, Copenhagen