The role as world reserve currency is something no financial hegemon in history has willingly surrendered. It took two world wars for the City of London and Bank of England to reluctantly concede hegemony of the Pound Sterling to the Dollar. As Henry Kissinger is said to have remarked decades ago, "If you control the money, you can control the entire world." Whether or not Kissinger ever said that publicly, he and his patron, David Rockefeller, certainly believed it. Now, with US government debt shooting past $19 trillion and the true state of the American economy and its infrastructure at its worst since the Great Depression, with most Americans living on the brink of financial disaster, the brilliant financial engineers of Wall Street and Washington have once again come up with a scheme to prolong the role of Dollar as King in the world economy.

The recent Panama Papers revelations by a select group of Western mainstream media including the New York Times, BBC and Süddeutsche Zeitung, were notable as a brazen attempt to attack foreign leaders such as Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping for alleged corruption. Notably, the leaked files of the Panama law firm, Mossack Fonseca, so far have failed to leak even one significant name of a US citizen hiding money in offshore accounts of the Panama facilitators.

While the world's eyes were on the identities of alleged offshore money holders, they failed to consider the longer-term consequence of the huge revelations. The one country so far to benefit from the Panama Papers revelations is the country that is rapidly becoming the new "Panama" or better, the new Switzerland, namely the United States of America, the initiator of attacks on other hot money havens offshore over the past two decades.

Golden Dollar Era

Over the past seventy two years ever since the US and select wartime allied governments met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944 to decide the shape of the postwar monetary order, the US dollar has reigned supreme in the world economy. By end of the War in 1945 the US Federal Reserve held the overwhelming bulk of world monetary gold.

India aligns with the US against China and Russia. India's recent moves are putting India's multipolar commitment in doubt and raise questions about whether India has defected to the US's unipolar system.

India used to be universally acclaimed for being a multipolar pillar in the emerging world order. The country played a pivotal role in BRICS and in the larger globally transformative processes that are currently underway. Historically as one of the founder members of the Non-Aligned Movement India has been respected for its wise pragmatism and its ability to engage any partner on a win-win basis. India now looks ready to abandon its geopolitical traditions. It seems to be starting a new foreign policy trajectory openly siding with the US against China in the New Cold War.

Prime Minister Modi has made a series of moves over the past month which show that India's strategic calculations have radically changed since US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter visited the subcontinent last month.

Brazil's Senate has rejected the lower house speaker's decision to halt impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff. The head of the Senate said the vote on whether to put Rousseff on trial will be held as scheduled.

The impeachment procedure against President Dilma Rousseff is still in force and the vote on whether to bring her to trial over an alleged breach of budgetary laws will take place this week, Renan Calheiros, the head of the Senate has announced, according to Reuters.

The announcement comes in defiance of the lower house speaker's move earlier in the day to suspend the impeachment process. The surprise decision by Waldir Maranhao - who entered office last week - came as the impeachment process was being passed to the Senate for a vote, following last month's decision in the lower house. The upper chamber was set to vote on Wednesday.

The Ukrainian court did not find sufficient reason to consider the DPR and LPR as terrorist organizations.

The Zarechny district court of city of Sumy heard the case of a former SBU officer who tried to get a job in the Ministry of State Security of DPR. He failed, but he did almost go to jail. The Prosecutor's office of Ukraine tried to throw the man to the Gestapo's torture chambers only on the basis of job attempts.

However, the court fully acquitted the former officer of the SBU, citing a lack of evidence against him. It turns out that today Ukraine has still not established the fact that the DPR and LPR are terrorist organizations at the legal level. Checkmate, as they say.

The judge revealed the absence of normative-legal acts, where there would be a list of terrorist organizations from the Donetsk and Lugansk regions that are recognized at least by one state or international organization. Moreover, the relevant international courts' decisions, and even the final decision of the Supreme court of Ukraine on this subject do not exist in nature.

In other words, the DPR and LPR are terrorist organizations only in the sick imagination of the Maidan power. The rest of the world lives by different rules and norms.

According to a statement obtained by LawNewz, Benghazi Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy said "the committee has identified new facts that significantly impact our understanding of what happened before, during, and after Benghazi." In 2014, the House established the Select Committee on the events surrounding the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. The committee says they plan to release their report, with the revealing new facts, before the summer, which means it could come out in mere weeks.

The timing of the report is interesting because it comes just as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is poised to be nominated as the Democratic candidate for president. Clinton has come under fire for her handling of the attacks which killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith.

Hardline anti-crime candidate Rodrigo "Digong" Duterte has claimed victory in the Philippine presidential election.

The official PPCRV poll monitor said the mayor of the southern city of Davao had more than 14.8m votes - about 39% - with 90% of ballots counted.

Manuel Roxas is in second place with 9m (23%). The winner is decided on a simple majority of votes cast.

Mr Duterte has been the long-time front-runner in a campaign also driven by the economy and corruption.

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."—C.S. Lewis

Fool me once, shame on you.

"You" in this case is the government that keeps violating the sacred trust of its citizenry.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

"Me" in this case is the collective "we the people" who should have learned early on that a government that repeatedly lies, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority and abuses its power can't be trusted.

Fool me over and over and over again, shame on both of us.

Shame on every politician, bureaucrat and technician who is a shill for the U.S. government's abuses and lies, and shame on every gullible American who keeps buying into the government's propaganda, believing that it has our best interests at heart.

Unfortunately, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government has seldom had our best interests at heart.

The government didn't have our best interests at heart when it propelled us into endless oil-fueled wars and military occupations in the Middle East that wreaked havoc on our economy, stretched thin our military resources and subjected us to horrific blowback.

There is no way the government had our best interests at heart when it passed laws subjecting us to all manner of invasive searches and surveillance, censoring our speech and stifling our expression, rendering us anti-government extremists for daring to disagree with its dictates, locking us up for criticizing government policies on social media, encouraging Americans to spy and snitch on their fellow citizens, and allowing government agents to grope, strip, search, taser, shoot and kill us.

Certainly the government did not have our best interests at heart when it turned America into a battlefield, transforming law enforcement agencies into extensions of the military, conducting military drills on domestic soil, distributing "free" military equipment and weaponry to local police, and desensitizing Americans to the menace of the police state with active shooter drills, color-coded terror alerts, and randomly conducted security checkpoints at "soft" targets such as shopping malls and sports arenas.

It would be a reach to suggest that the government had our best interests at heart when it locked down the schools, installing metal detectors and surveillance cameras, adopting zero tolerance policies that punish childish behavior as harshly as criminal actions, and teaching our young people that they have no rights, that being force-fed facts is education rather than indoctrination, that they are not to question governmental authority, that they must meekly accept a life of censorship, round-the-clock surveillance, roadside blood draws, SWAT team raids and other indignities.

As Russia celebrates the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany 71 years ago, Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear talks with historian Peter Kuznick about the West's habit of downplaying the USSR's role in World War II and the United States' part in sparking the Cold War that followed.

"The Americans and the Soviet have such different memories of World War II," Kuznich, a professor at American University, told Loud & Clear's Brian Becker. "Americans see it in the triumphalist sense. The Good War, the victory against fascism. But the American sacrifice was relatively minimal compared to the Soviet sacrifice."

"The Soviets lost 27 million people in World War II. Everybody was affected. All families lost people and they all suffered immensely during the war."

As Filipinos choose their next President on Monday, prospect of election of anti-establishment candidate threatens the geopolitical viability of the US's Pivot to Asia. The Philippines votes for its next President on Monday. Whilst the rest of the world pays little attention, strategists in Washington are worried.

The electoral frontrunner is Rodrigo Duterte, an eccentric, no-nonsense former mayor from the southern island of Mindanao who commands a Trump-like popularity and an equally loyal following. He has shaken Philippine politics to its core over the past couple of months, defying establishment pundits who - just as they did with Trump - wrongly predicted that his campaign would fizzle out over the course of each passing week.

Having totally underestimated just how dissatisfied most Filipinos are with the status quo, Duterte's rivals missed the chance to outshine him by his anti-system rhetoric. With the race in its final days that is now too late. Instead - also paralleling what happened with Trump - there are desperate calls for coalitions and deals to stop him. Should these fail and should Duterte win on Monday, he promises a geopolitical revolution unlike anything the Philippines has ever seen in its history.

Indian Prime Minister Modi's realignment of India with the US threatens to shatter BRICS unity reversing the course away from the US-led unipolar world.

In an earlier article I discussed India's recent moves and how these threaten to realign India with the US against China and Russia. In this article I will discuss the background to this and the strategic implications and how these developments threaten the development of the multipolar order that is challenging US global power.

The Chinese-Indian Cold War

South East Asia

Prime Minister Modi's moves over the last month exacerbate an already existing low-intensity Chinese-Indian Cold War. The main focus of Chinese-Indian competition at the present time is in south east Asia.

India plans to ramp up its commercial ties with the mainland members of ASEAN - often referred to as "the Mekong River states" - by cooperating with them to build the Trilateral Highway through Myanmar and Thailand. Part of this project links up to the Japanese East-West corridor at the Myanmar port city of Mawlamyine, connecting India to northern Thailand, southern Laos, and central Vietnam.

This map shows the crisscrossing infrastructure corridors that are planned for the Greater Mekong Subregion. India's Trilateral Highway - labelled the Western Corridor - is coloured purple. Japan's East-Corridor is coloured turquoise. It is not a coincidence that these trade networks are expected to interlink with each other. India and Japan are the US's two most important Asian allies in "containing" China. From a US perspective, it makes sense for India and China [Japan] to pool their resources in the ASEAN theatre.

On the naval front, as I discussed in my previous article, India is slated to become one of the out-of-region forces active in the South China Sea alongside Japan, the US, and Australia in the "Quadrilateral Security Dialogue".