Dear RN list,
Wendell Solomon is a prolific writer on globalization issues who has
contributed some interesting messages to this list. Here is his spoof of the
Jubilee debt forgiveness announcement:
all the best, Jan
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Date: Sun, 03 Oct 1999 02:56:38 +0600
To: •••@••.•••
From: "wendell w. solomons" <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Jubilee Year spoof
Cc: •••@••.•••
Greetings!
Jan writes:
What are we to make of the news, below, that the Clinton administration
is proposing to offer debt relief to the world's poorest countries and
that the money saved must be used for social programs? Great news, but
I can't help but be sceptical...
Richard writes:
He's forgiving debts owed to "the United States", which presumably has
nothing to do with money owed to private US banks or to the IMF. He
may be making a significant gesture, or he may be talking about
peanuts. Does anyone know?
Indeed this is symbolic. As much as the G7 was programmed for MAI and WTO,
there was every opportunity to program for debt at the IMF years ago. Let's
take the news excerpt first.
*
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Clinton pledged Wednesday the United States
would forgive all debts owed to it by impoverished countries, challenging
other rich nations to be equally generous.
Clinton, speaking at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund
and World Bank said it was ``an economic and moral imperative that we use
this moment of global consensus to do better'' for the world's poorest
countries ...
Following Clinton's speech, advocates for debt relief were ecstatic. Jubilee
2000, a coalition which has been dogged in its push for complete debt
forgiveness, said that the G7 should now work out a deal to match Clinton's
pledge.
``This announcement changes everything,'' Jubilee 2000 Director Ann Pettifor
said. ``In order to meet the president's challenge to 'do better,' the
world's leaders must meet again before the millennium.''
The group, which boasts the Pope, rocker Bono, noted Harvard economist
Jeffrey Sachs and many U.S. lawmakers among its supporters, has been
pushing for the debt forgiveness as a gift for the poor on the eve of
the new millennium.
Clinton said funding for the expanded debt relief was included in his
request to Congress last week for almost $1 billion to fund the U.S.
contribution to debt relief ...
The countries in question owe the United States about $5.7 billion. But
since the debt is valued at much less than its face value, the entire amount
could be financed with the $1 billion budget request, Summers said ...
*
Since the founding of the Fed in 1913, the American people have been placed
in hock on Public Debt to the tune of several trillion dollars. This is no
act of malice. The wolf slays a sheep not because he is malicious or angry.
After the Gates of Heaven opened on network TV and disgorged Milton
Friedman's anarchism, these 20 years have accelerated putting in hock the
population of
hundreds of countries (to whom?.)
China has external assets 150 TIMES that of Clinton's net $ 1 billion
request from Congress. China has these assets because it was not slain
through destabilization. Its population is just too large; population
flows would have inundated Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ...
and more of the Pacific rim.
Other Marxist fellows of China's were slain through the introduction of
"market economies" with an anarchist base. A Financial Times article of
Sept. 22, 1999 focuses on Joseph Stiglitz, World Bank Chief Economist:
Mr Wolfensohn's comments about Mr Stiglitz referred to a paper
delivered at the World Bank's annual conference on development
economics in Washington in April. In it, Mr Stiglitz said the
"failures" of Russia's transition towards a market economy were
not just due to sound policies being poorly implemented but to
"a misunderstanding of the foundations of a market economy".
Wayne Merry, Director of the *Program on European Societies in Transition
of the Atlantic Council of the United States*, had this to say in Washington
to a House committee studying the banking scandal:
The "crony capitalism" we helped create (and then rationalized as a
mere blemish on the road to the Promised Land) has failed because it
is lawless. The rule of law did not develop automatically or by
accident in America; it will not in Russia.
Instead of helping create legality for the market, Friedman's model created
indebtedness in this new group of countries which included asset stripping
and pyramid schemes sometimes devised by Western intermediaries. Damaged
countries included Albania and Yugoslavia. Then, for three months in the
cause of "humanitarianism," car and pharmaceutical factories were strafed
by missiles in Yugoslavia leaving costs of several TRILLIONS of dollars and
heavy groundwater pollution.
On the other hand those baby oligarchs who appeared in Russia need protection
in the face of an elections' challenge from the Primakov - Luzhkov duo. In
that country the aura of new PM Putin is being developed as St. George
the Dragon Killer. Unlike Kosovo, network TV does not give us half-hourly
scripts on humanitarianism. Chechnya and Dagestan have another virtue for
the scriptwriters of the Gates of Heaven. Putin must keep the oligarchs
beyond the law.
To take a few figures. Some $ 4 billion of IMF money was consigned by
Russian oligarch sources into the hands of the Bank of New York for
placement in private storage. A modest estimate for flight of capital
from Russia alone during these 7 years runs into half a trillion.
Yet, one of the last estimates from TIME for black money in Swiss accounts
(1998) was $ 13 trillion and all this is now electronic/paper money that
serves no particular purpose. Therefore the IMF and the Bank of England
were induced to sell public gold at discount prices to the money cartel
so as to hedge with treasure (despite three decades of talking down gold
the oligarchy wants it.)
The Bill Clinton and Al Gore administration, which can now only be
understood by the layman as the ugly tool of the new unipolar world of
the money oligarchy, is being humored today with some pre-Millenium
circus. Clinton introduced for U.S. consumption a case against tobacco
barons. He forgot to introduce it for overseas sales where the tobacco
barons are planting kilometer after kilometer of billboards. He gives
that overseas world instead the $ 5.7 billion Jubilee stunt (net $ 1
billion.) Needless to say the trillion dollar public debt of the American
flock will remain. Interest on public debt has expanded so that it now
eats up all the income tax that Americans can generate for the wolf.
So, today having the wolf at our door gives us two types of spectacle. A
chilling act in Russia - Putin to become Dragon Killer. In America a
nostalgic one - Clinton, humane trustee of the Jubilee year. The inner
logic of the spectacles? The baby wolf oligarchs and the big daddy
oligarchs intend to remain in the next millennium.
Will the sheep come home and find out how to respond to these spoofs that
precede Jubilee year?
The 113-nation Non-Aligned Group has asked for regulation of mega
fund transactions. The Canadian parliament moved in March for a tax on
the transactions to be credited to a fund for developing countries.
Yet, the Fed's Allan Greenspan was saying the funds will flee elsewhere
from Wall Street.
He is admitting a point that Richard mentions:
The question isn't how to curb corporations, for example, but
how best to reallocate the resources and technologies that they
currently control.
So some medicine for Greenspan below.
rgds
\'
Subj: Caption Wanted
--------------------
The Fed is the flagship of a pirate fleet. The American people, who work
the longest hours in the developed world, see the currency used by them
debased at 40% per decade by the private Federal Reserve which issues
currency at will.
The schooners which flank the Fed are so heavy with cannon that they are
capable of pulling off economic raids in other countries. Indeed these
galleons may have more liquid resources aboard than most poor countries
of the world who are rendered tribute payers to them through being asked
to play in an Open Economy in which they are not equals.
The Fed places its seal, left unauthenticated by a signature of its private
owners, on a note captioned boldly UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Like fleet
commanders Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh did in the role of sea
pirates under a writ of Queen Elizabeth, the private Fed operators use a
statute granted them on Dec 23, 1913, when six Congressmen were present.
Solomon's Wisdom in our times suggests that the Fed be made an audited,
accountable institution like any Central bank of any major country so that
piracy flaunting the name of the New World be removed from the sea of world
finance.
*
If you like to send in a caption for the 6 preceding sentences see
WorldCity.Org or reply to <•••@••.•••>
