The first rule of Fiat Club is, you do not talk about Fiat Club.
Dana Perino is under strict instructions … to not talk about the dollar.
Q I’d like to follow up on their refusal to talk about the dollar, if I could. I mean, we’re in a kind of a bad situation here, when OPEC says the reason for $105 or $106 a barrel of oil is the falling value of the dollar — and you won’t address that issue. Where do we go to find out who is right?
MS. PERINO: Well, as he just said, the Treasury Secretary is where you go to talk about the dollar. It’s a longstanding policy that predates this administration, and I’m not going to change it today. But Treasury can talk about it.
Q I don’t expect you to change it, but I do expect you to be able to say whether OPEC is completely wrong about this, or whether there is at least something to their claim that the dollar is responsible for the high price of oil right now.
MS. PERINO: Wendell, I’m under strict instructions, and have been from the beginning, to not talk about the dollar, and I’m not going to get fired to satisfy your question.
Had you just sat through a long presentation on the rotten economic situation in the U.S., which studiously avoided any mention at all of the collapsing value of the government’s fiat currency, you might also want to get a some answers. In particular, answers about the calculated policies of the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to make the world safe for finance capital–and doing it by exercising the federal government’s money monopoly, so as to suck every last drop of purchasing power out of working people’s wages and cash savings (which increase, if they ever do, much later, and much more slowly, than the commodity prices that we have to pay in order to go on driving and eating).
You might want some answers; however, you’ll have to get them from somebody other than the White House press flack. She believes that if she says word one about the situation, she’ll likely be fired for it.
(Via Crooks and Liars 2008-03-11, via Lew 2008-03-12.)