Nations Built on Lies - How the US Became Rich: Part 5f
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Bill Totten
Jan 10, 2022, 9:59:14 PM1/10/22
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Nations Built on Lies - How the US Became Rich: Part 5f
by Larry Romanoff
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com (October 2021)
http://dxczjjuegupb.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/MilIndComplex-680x496_c.jpg
The World Bank and the IMF
Yet another area by which the US has become such a wealthy nation is the international financial institutions. One of the most insidious instruments of colonisation and empire is the IMF which is totally under the control of the US and a few Western nations. IMF reforms require an 85% majority, but the US conveniently controls 17% of the vote, giving it an absolute veto over all reforms, especially to reductions of Western imperial power. Other colonial efforts are accomplished through the financial machinations of the World Bank and the international Jewish bankers like the Rothschilds, who make unrepayable loans then seize basic infrastructure and millions of acres of land in compensation. Nations weak enough to capitulate to these demands, and there are many of them, are doomed to perpetual poverty and slavery in the worst colonial tradition.
One of the more recent victims was Greece who, having gotten itself deeply into debt and lacking the courage to leave the Euro and revert to its own currency, instead capitulated to the Rothschilds and other bankers who deprived it of all its national assets. In return for interim financing to stave off bankruptcy, Greece was forced to place all its physical infrastructure holdings, including ports, communications, airports, transportation, all state-owned enterprises, and more into a trust which was "entirely outside all influence of the Greek government". Control of this trust was of course in the hands of those same bankers, who would now determine appropriate selling prices by which they would distribute these same assets to themselves. Today, Greece's only significant asset is its ability to tax its citizens, which taxes are already spent for the next 40 years to repay the loans to the bankers. The Greek government now has only two functions: one, to collect taxes, and two, to maintain social order by whatever means necessary in order that the taxes can continue to be collected and paid to the bankers. Greece has virtually ceased to exist as a sovereign nation, and there are many others like it.
It has long been recognised in the developing world that institutions like the IMF and the World Bank are simply one of the means by which the Western powers control their colonies. The financial policies forced onto developing nations in return for financial assistance are precisely those which will inflict the maximum colonial stranglehold to prevent these nations from any possible economic or social progress. They are simply instruments of Imperial financial power, flying moralistic flags of free-market liberalisation while plundering the victims. Under a new international regime of political and financial dependence coupled with a constant military threat, undeveloped nations continue to be exploited by the West in the framework of an international capitalist system, "where it is virtually impossible for any country to disassociate itself from the overall structure". Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist and dissident former chief economist at the World Bank, describes it as having "brought disaster to Russia and Argentina and leaves a trail of devastated developing economies in its wake". The World Bank and the IMF were primarily designed to plunder the developing world on behalf of the US and European ruling class. World Bank development projects often destroy local culture and environment while providing infrastructure almost free of charge for the further profit of US-based multinational corporations (MNCs). IMF-mandated financial measures force the abandonment of health, education, and social programs and allow public assets such as infrastructure to be acquired by American-based multinationals or international bankers for a fraction of their true worth. "The net effect of all this is that, contrary to the carefully nurtured myth, developing nations have transferred far more wealth to the US than has been transferred to them, and that, of course, is the whole idea".
In his article "Empire of Capital", George Monbiot made appropriate points when he noted that these institutions and the large powers that control them forced Asian nations to liberalise their currencies only so that Jewish financial speculators like George Soros, Goldman Sachs, and the European bankers could attack them. Americans read about the "Asian financial crisis" presented as some accidental act of God, without being told that it was deliberately planned and executed. All prescriptions from the IMF are intended to drain developing nations and maintain income disparity. They are instruments of financial power for the rich Westerners, who did not end their colonial controls until they had established other means of subjugation. William Blum stated the situation precisely when he wrote,
It was under Reagan administration influence that the IMF and World Bank began widely imposing the policy package known as structural adjustment - featuring deregulation, privatization, emphasis on exports, cuts in social spending - that has plunged country after country in the developing world into economic destitution. The IMF chief at the time was cruelly honest about what was to come, saying in 1981 that, for low-income countries, "adjustment is particularly costly in human terms".
The policies of the World Bank and IMF are designed to have a high failure rate, leaving nations with perpetual debt and a steady transfer of wealth out of the Third World to the Western bankers. Despite claims of assisting development and alleviating poverty, these institutions typically do the opposite, and in almost every case they force nations to reduce all social and government services, restrict education and health care, and generally force poor nations into perpetual ignorance and poverty. The money lent to these poor nations must almost all be spent in the US or another Western nation, essentially operating as a corporate welfare program for firms like Bechtel, Halliburton, and Brown and Root, leaving these companies with the money, and small nations with failed projects and unrepayable debt. James Corbett wrote of the World Bank, "This process was described most famously by former insider and self-described "economic hitman" John Perkins, who wrote his Confessions of an Economic Hitman (2004) to shed light on the means by which the seemingly benevolent IMF/World Bank system is used to oppress and plunder the very populations it is designed to enrich. According to Perkins:
So how does the system work? We economic hitmen have many vehicles to make this happen, but perhaps the most common one is that we will identify a country - usually a developing country - that has resources our corporations covet, like oil, and then we arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. Now most everybody in our country believes that loan is going to help poor people. It isn't. Most of the money never goes to the country. In fact, it goes to our own corporations. It goes to the Bechtels and the Halliburtons and the ones we all hear about, usually led by engineering firms, but a lot of other companies are brought in and they make fortunes off building the infrastructure projects in that country. Power plants, industrial parks, ports, those types of things. Things that don't benefit the poor people at all; they're not connected to the electrical grid, they don't get the jobs in the industrial parks because they're not educated enough. But they as a class are left holding a huge debt. The country goes deep into debt in order to make this happen, and a few of its wealthy people get very rich in the process. They own the big industries that do benefit from the ports and the highways and the industrial parks and the electricity. The country is left holding this huge debt that it can't possibly repay, so at some point we economic hitmen go back in and we say, "You know, you can't pay your debts. You owe us a pound of flesh; you owe us a big favor. So, sell your oil real cheap to our oil companies, or vote with us on the next critical United Nations vote, or send troops in support of ours to some place in the world like Iraq." And so, we use this whole process as, first of all, a means for getting their money (money we loan them) to enrich our own corporations, and then to use the debt to enslave them.
In his book, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (2003), Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa provides extensive documentation of precisely how this process has functioned over the years through the Structural Adjustment Loan and Sector Adjustment Loan programs at the World Bank's disposal. This documentation includes details of the Bank's oversight of the build-up of Rwanda's military budget in the run-up to its bloody internal war of 1994, the Bank's own admission of how its loan-dictated deregulation of Vietnam's grain market led to widespread child malnutrition in the country, and the World Bank's contribution (in conjunction with the IMF) to the unprecedented plundering of Russia that took place in the wake of the Soviet collapse. The World Bank, despite its friendly exterior and the lofty platitudes its proponents spout in its defense, continues to undergird a system of exploitation and debt enslavement of developing countries. For half a century, the Bank has been responsible for the furtherance of a Pax Americana built not upon peace, prosperity, and free trade but violence, debt and enforced servitude.
Image credit: https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202109/17/WS6143dbbda310e0e3a6822281.html
Mr Romanoff's writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney's new anthology When China Sneezes (2020). His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/ and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/. He can be contacted at: 21866...@qq.com
Copyright (c) Larry Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai, Blue Moon of Shanghai, 2021
https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2021/12/en-larry-romanoff-nations-built-on-lies.html
TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
the appropriate link at the top or bottom of https://billtotten.wpcomstaging.com/2022/01/11/nations-built-on-lies-how-the-us-became-rich-part-5f/
by Larry Romanoff
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com (October 2021)
http://dxczjjuegupb.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/MilIndComplex-680x496_c.jpg
The World Bank and the IMF
Yet another area by which the US has become such a wealthy nation is the international financial institutions. One of the most insidious instruments of colonisation and empire is the IMF which is totally under the control of the US and a few Western nations. IMF reforms require an 85% majority, but the US conveniently controls 17% of the vote, giving it an absolute veto over all reforms, especially to reductions of Western imperial power. Other colonial efforts are accomplished through the financial machinations of the World Bank and the international Jewish bankers like the Rothschilds, who make unrepayable loans then seize basic infrastructure and millions of acres of land in compensation. Nations weak enough to capitulate to these demands, and there are many of them, are doomed to perpetual poverty and slavery in the worst colonial tradition.
One of the more recent victims was Greece who, having gotten itself deeply into debt and lacking the courage to leave the Euro and revert to its own currency, instead capitulated to the Rothschilds and other bankers who deprived it of all its national assets. In return for interim financing to stave off bankruptcy, Greece was forced to place all its physical infrastructure holdings, including ports, communications, airports, transportation, all state-owned enterprises, and more into a trust which was "entirely outside all influence of the Greek government". Control of this trust was of course in the hands of those same bankers, who would now determine appropriate selling prices by which they would distribute these same assets to themselves. Today, Greece's only significant asset is its ability to tax its citizens, which taxes are already spent for the next 40 years to repay the loans to the bankers. The Greek government now has only two functions: one, to collect taxes, and two, to maintain social order by whatever means necessary in order that the taxes can continue to be collected and paid to the bankers. Greece has virtually ceased to exist as a sovereign nation, and there are many others like it.
It has long been recognised in the developing world that institutions like the IMF and the World Bank are simply one of the means by which the Western powers control their colonies. The financial policies forced onto developing nations in return for financial assistance are precisely those which will inflict the maximum colonial stranglehold to prevent these nations from any possible economic or social progress. They are simply instruments of Imperial financial power, flying moralistic flags of free-market liberalisation while plundering the victims. Under a new international regime of political and financial dependence coupled with a constant military threat, undeveloped nations continue to be exploited by the West in the framework of an international capitalist system, "where it is virtually impossible for any country to disassociate itself from the overall structure". Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist and dissident former chief economist at the World Bank, describes it as having "brought disaster to Russia and Argentina and leaves a trail of devastated developing economies in its wake". The World Bank and the IMF were primarily designed to plunder the developing world on behalf of the US and European ruling class. World Bank development projects often destroy local culture and environment while providing infrastructure almost free of charge for the further profit of US-based multinational corporations (MNCs). IMF-mandated financial measures force the abandonment of health, education, and social programs and allow public assets such as infrastructure to be acquired by American-based multinationals or international bankers for a fraction of their true worth. "The net effect of all this is that, contrary to the carefully nurtured myth, developing nations have transferred far more wealth to the US than has been transferred to them, and that, of course, is the whole idea".
In his article "Empire of Capital", George Monbiot made appropriate points when he noted that these institutions and the large powers that control them forced Asian nations to liberalise their currencies only so that Jewish financial speculators like George Soros, Goldman Sachs, and the European bankers could attack them. Americans read about the "Asian financial crisis" presented as some accidental act of God, without being told that it was deliberately planned and executed. All prescriptions from the IMF are intended to drain developing nations and maintain income disparity. They are instruments of financial power for the rich Westerners, who did not end their colonial controls until they had established other means of subjugation. William Blum stated the situation precisely when he wrote,
It was under Reagan administration influence that the IMF and World Bank began widely imposing the policy package known as structural adjustment - featuring deregulation, privatization, emphasis on exports, cuts in social spending - that has plunged country after country in the developing world into economic destitution. The IMF chief at the time was cruelly honest about what was to come, saying in 1981 that, for low-income countries, "adjustment is particularly costly in human terms".
The policies of the World Bank and IMF are designed to have a high failure rate, leaving nations with perpetual debt and a steady transfer of wealth out of the Third World to the Western bankers. Despite claims of assisting development and alleviating poverty, these institutions typically do the opposite, and in almost every case they force nations to reduce all social and government services, restrict education and health care, and generally force poor nations into perpetual ignorance and poverty. The money lent to these poor nations must almost all be spent in the US or another Western nation, essentially operating as a corporate welfare program for firms like Bechtel, Halliburton, and Brown and Root, leaving these companies with the money, and small nations with failed projects and unrepayable debt. James Corbett wrote of the World Bank, "This process was described most famously by former insider and self-described "economic hitman" John Perkins, who wrote his Confessions of an Economic Hitman (2004) to shed light on the means by which the seemingly benevolent IMF/World Bank system is used to oppress and plunder the very populations it is designed to enrich. According to Perkins:
So how does the system work? We economic hitmen have many vehicles to make this happen, but perhaps the most common one is that we will identify a country - usually a developing country - that has resources our corporations covet, like oil, and then we arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. Now most everybody in our country believes that loan is going to help poor people. It isn't. Most of the money never goes to the country. In fact, it goes to our own corporations. It goes to the Bechtels and the Halliburtons and the ones we all hear about, usually led by engineering firms, but a lot of other companies are brought in and they make fortunes off building the infrastructure projects in that country. Power plants, industrial parks, ports, those types of things. Things that don't benefit the poor people at all; they're not connected to the electrical grid, they don't get the jobs in the industrial parks because they're not educated enough. But they as a class are left holding a huge debt. The country goes deep into debt in order to make this happen, and a few of its wealthy people get very rich in the process. They own the big industries that do benefit from the ports and the highways and the industrial parks and the electricity. The country is left holding this huge debt that it can't possibly repay, so at some point we economic hitmen go back in and we say, "You know, you can't pay your debts. You owe us a pound of flesh; you owe us a big favor. So, sell your oil real cheap to our oil companies, or vote with us on the next critical United Nations vote, or send troops in support of ours to some place in the world like Iraq." And so, we use this whole process as, first of all, a means for getting their money (money we loan them) to enrich our own corporations, and then to use the debt to enslave them.
In his book, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (2003), Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa provides extensive documentation of precisely how this process has functioned over the years through the Structural Adjustment Loan and Sector Adjustment Loan programs at the World Bank's disposal. This documentation includes details of the Bank's oversight of the build-up of Rwanda's military budget in the run-up to its bloody internal war of 1994, the Bank's own admission of how its loan-dictated deregulation of Vietnam's grain market led to widespread child malnutrition in the country, and the World Bank's contribution (in conjunction with the IMF) to the unprecedented plundering of Russia that took place in the wake of the Soviet collapse. The World Bank, despite its friendly exterior and the lofty platitudes its proponents spout in its defense, continues to undergird a system of exploitation and debt enslavement of developing countries. For half a century, the Bank has been responsible for the furtherance of a Pax Americana built not upon peace, prosperity, and free trade but violence, debt and enforced servitude.
Image credit: https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202109/17/WS6143dbbda310e0e3a6822281.html
Mr Romanoff's writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney's new anthology When China Sneezes (2020). His full archive can be seen at https://www.moonofshanghai.com/ and http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/. He can be contacted at: 21866...@qq.com
Copyright (c) Larry Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai, Blue Moon of Shanghai, 2021
https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2021/12/en-larry-romanoff-nations-built-on-lies.html
TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
the appropriate link at the top or bottom of https://billtotten.wpcomstaging.com/2022/01/11/nations-built-on-lies-how-the-us-became-rich-part-5f/
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