What to do when the Saudi monarchy falls?

Secretary of State John Kerry with King Salman bin Abdulazziz

Photo Credit: The Atlantic.

The United States, back to the times of Henry Kissinger and maybe Franklin Roosevelt, has based its Middle East policy on support for the Saudi Arabian monarchy.

Washington has treated the Saudi monarchy’s enemies (except for Israel, and maybe Israel is not that much of an enemy) as its own enemies—Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the ayatollahs in Iran, the Assad regime in Syria and even the Shiite community in Yemen.

In return, the Saudi monarchs have kept oil prices under control, charged for oil in dollars and deposited those dollars in U.S. banks, and bought billions of dollars with of weapons from American aerospace and defense contractors.

But Sarah Chayes and Alex de Waal, writing in The Atlantic, warn that the Saudi Arabian monarchy, like the rule of the Shah in Iran, cannot go on forever.   And like the Shah, the Saudi royal family is ripe to be overthrown  by militant, anti-American religious zealots.

The Saudi government has appeased these zealots by encouraging them to go wage jihads in foreign lands.  The best result, from the Saudi perspective, is that they die fighting and never come home.  The next best result is that their identities are known and they can be tracked.

The passing scene: Links & comments 10/14/14

 Saudis Deploy the Oil Price Weapon Against Syria, Iran, Russia and the US by Yves Smith for Naked Capitalism.

The Saudi Arabian government says it will allow oil prices to fall to $80 a barrel, an action that will hurt oil-producing nations such as Iran, Russia and the United States.  Saudis control so much of the world’s oil that they can set prices by increasing or cutting back on production.

This will be good for American homeowners and motorists as we face another severe winter, but it makes domestic oil and gas production, and also renewable energy, less competitive in the marketplace.  To the extent that the United States is increasingly dependent on its energy industry, this hampers the economic recovery.

Yves Smith quoted sources who think the Saudis are doing this to punish the U.S. for failing to overthrow the government of Syria.

Americans Face Post-foreclosure Hell As Wages Garnished, Assets Seized by Michaelle Collins for Reuters (via Business Insider)

Thousands of Americans lost their homes to foreclosures years ago, and thought they had closed the door on this part of their lives.   Now they find debt collectors coming after them for the unpaid balance.

The most aggressive of the debt pursuers are the two government-owned mortgage companies, the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. (Freddie Mac).

Whose side is the government on?

Ebola Vaccine Would Likely Have Been Found By Now If Not For Budget Cuts by Sam Stein for Huffington Post.

Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, said the NIH has been working on a vaccine for the Ebola virus since 2001, and would have found one if not for cuts in the NIH research budget.

Whether a vaccine really would have been discovered is unknowable.  But funds for research on infectious diseases should be increased, not decreased.  The Ebola virus will not be the last mutant killer disease that is invulnerable to known antibiotics.