Bcc: contributors
"Fascism should rightly be called corporatism
as it is a merge of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini [sent to me by Cyberbrook]
Friends,
Make no mistake - this phony war on terrorism is simply the
military arm of globalization. And globalization is just
another name for the New World Order, which is nothing less
than global fascism. We're seeing the final push, the final
consolidation of global elite power. We all know that Bin
Laden was a child of the CIA (like Noriega and Saddam before
him), and my guess is that he's still on the payroll.
Everything he says and does plays directly into the designs
of the Bush regime. He is probably under the impression
that he'll be personally spared. He won't be the first who
was betrayed.
The Senate is now passing a bill that lays
the firm foundation for arbitrary arrests with life
sentences for vague offenses - they won't call the result
'concentration camps', but what's the difference? Any 'enemy
of the Reich' can be put away indefinitely. A short piece
precedes our feature article.
rkm
http://cyberjournal.org
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From: •••@••.•••
Delivered-To: •••@••.•••
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 04:20:29 EDT
Subject: "War" Pre-Planned
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Pre-Planned US/UK War
Against Afghanistan
By Francis A. Boyle
•••@••.•••
10-12-1
Obviously, the war against Afghanistan was planned for quite
some time We know for a fact that it had been war-gamed by
the Pentagon going back to 1997 Right around September 11,
two US Aircraft carrier task forces conveniently arrived in
the Persian Gulf right at the same time on "rotation"
Obviously, preplanned Just before September 11, the UK had
put together what was billed at the "largest armada since
the Falklands War" and had it steaming towards Oman, where
now 23,000 UK troops are on maneuvers This had been planned
for at least 3 years Also, the US "Bright Star" operation is
currently going on in Egypt 23,000 US troops plus an
additional 17,000 from NATO and its associates This had been
planned at least two years ago Finally, NATO just landed
12,000 troops into Turkey This had been planned for at least
two years It is obvious that we are seeing an operational
War Plan being executed here that had been in the works for
at least the past four years September 11 is either a
pretext or a trigger or both.
Francis A Boyle Professor of
International Law
Francis A Boyle Law Building
504 E Pennsylvania Ave
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954
217-244-1478 fax
Sourced from rense
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From: •••@••.•••
To: •••@••.•••
Subject: JOE STIGLITZ: THE GLOBALIZER WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 00:42:48 -0400
TODAY'S WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS
The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are
eye-popping - including how the IMF and US Treasury fixed
the Russian elections
by Greg Palast
The Observer, London
October 10, 2001
"It has condemned people to death," the former apparatchik
told me. This was like a scene out of Le Carre. The
brilliant old agent comes in from the cold, crosses to our
side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of
horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now
realizes has gone rotten.
And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used
Cold War spy. Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the
World Bank. To a great extent, the new world economic order
was his theory come to life.
I "debriefed" Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge
University, in a London hotel and finally in Washington in
April 2001 during the big confab of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. But instead of chairing the
meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept
exiled safely behind the blue police cordons, the same as
the nuns carrying a large wooden cross, the Bolivian union
leaders, the parents of AIDS victims and the other
'anti-globalization' protesters. The ultimate insider was
now on the outside.
In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed
quiet retirement; US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I'm
told, demanded a public excommunication for Stiglitz' having
expressed his first mild dissent from globalization World
Bank style.
Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of
exclusive interviews for The Observer and BBC TV's Newsnight
about the real, often hidden, workings of the IMF, World
Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US Treasury.
And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained
a cache of documents marked, "confidential," "restricted,"
and "not otherwise (to be) disclosed without World Bank
authorization."
Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a "Country
Assistance Strategy." There's an Assistance Strategy for
every poorer nation, designed, says the World Bank, after
careful in-country investigation. But according to insider
Stiglitz, the Bank's staff 'investigation' consists of close
inspection of a nation's 5-star hotels. It concludes with
the Bank staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister
who is handed a 'restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for
his 'voluntary' signature (I have a selection of these).
Each nation's economy is individually analyzed, then, says
Stiglitz, the Bank hands every minister the same exact
four-step program.
Step One is Privatization - which Stiglitz said could more
accurately be called, 'Briberization.' Rather than object
to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national
leaders - using the World Bank's demands to silence local
critics - happily flogged their electricity and water
companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect
of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply
shaving a few billion off the sale price of national assets.
And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in
the case of the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995
Russian sell-off. "The US Treasury view was this was great
as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don't care if it's a
corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin" via
kick-backs for his campaign.
Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black
Helicopters. The man was inside the game, a member of Bill
Clinton's cabinet as Chairman of the President's council of
economic advisors.
Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs
stripped Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that
the corruption scheme cut national output nearly in half
causing depression and starvation.
After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank
one-size-fits-all rescue-your-economy plan is 'Capital
Market Liberalization.' In theory, capital market
deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out.
Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply
flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money"
cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and
currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A
nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that
happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own
capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest
rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.
"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money
tidal waves in Asia and Latin America. Higher interest
rates demolished property values, savaged industrial
production and drained national treasuries.
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step
Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices
on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to
Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, 'The IMF riot.'
The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is,
"down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the
last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat
until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as when the
IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in
Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there
are other examples - the Bolivian riots over water prices
last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the
rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You'd
almost get the impression that the riot is written into the
plan.
And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the
States, BBC and The Observer obtained several documents from
inside the World Bank, stamped over with those pesky
warnings, "confidential," "restricted," "not to be
disclosed." Let's get back to one: the "Interim Country
Assistance Strategy" for Ecuador, in it the Bank several
times states - with cold accuracy - that they expected their
plans to spark, "social unrest," to use their bureaucratic
term for a nation in flames.
That's not surprising. The secret report notes that the
plan to make the US dollar Ecuador's currency has pushed 51%
of the population below the poverty line. The World Bank
"Assistance" plan simply calls for facing down civil strife
and suffering with, "political resolve" - and still higher
prices.
The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations
dispersed by bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked
flights of capital and government bankruptcies. This
economic arson has it's bright side - for foreign
corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such
as the odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.
Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless
adherents to market economics. At the same time the IMF
stopped Indonesia 'subsidizing' food purchases, "when the
banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the market) is
welcome." The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars
to save Indonesia's financiers and, by extension, the US and
European banks from which they had borrowed.
A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system
but one clear winner: the Western banks and US Treasury,
making the big bucks off this crazy new international
capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy meeting,
early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia's new president
in the nation's first democratic election. The World Bank
and IMF had ordered Ethiopia to divert aid money to its
reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a pitiful 4%
return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at 12% to feed
its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let
him use the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the
loot went straight off to the US Treasury's vault in
Washington.
Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank
call their "poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade. This
is free trade by the rules of the World Trade Organization
and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider likens free trade
WTO-style to the Opium Wars. "That too was about opening
markets," he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and
Americans today are kicking down the barriers to sales in
Asia, Latin American and Africa, while barricading our own
markets against Third World agriculture.
In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force
open markets for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World
Bank can order a financial blockade just as effective - and
sometimes just as deadly.
Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO's
intellectual property rights treaty (it goes by the acronym
TRIPS, more on that in the next chapters). It is here, says
the economist, that the new global order has "condemned
people to death" by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes
to pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines.
"They don't care," said the professor of the corporations
and bank loans he worked with, "if people live or die."
By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion
of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable
masks of a single governance system. They have locked
themselves together by what are unpleasantly called,
"triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school
'triggers' a requirement to accept every 'conditionality' -
they average 111 per nation - laid down by both the World
Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF requires
nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the
official WTO rules.
Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised
in secrecy and driven by an absolutist ideology, are never
open for discourse or dissent. Despite the West's push for
elections throughout the developing world, the so-called
Poverty Reduction Programs "undermine democracy."
And they don't work. Black Africa's productivity under the
guiding hand of IMF structural "assistance" has gone to hell
in a handbag. Did any nation avoid this fate? Yes, said
Stiglitz, identifying Botswana. Their trick? "They told
the IMF to go packing."
So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor,
how would you help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed
radical land reform, an attack at the heart of
"landlordism," on the usurious rents charged by the
propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a
tenant's crops. So I had to ask the professor: as you were
top economist at the World Bank, why didn't the Bank follow
your advice?
"If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change
in the power of the elites. That's not high on their
agenda." Apparently not.
Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was
the failure of the banks and US Treasury to change course
when confronted with the crises - failures and suffering
perpetrated by their four-step monetarist mambo. Every time
their free market solutions failed, the IMF simply demanded
more free market policies.
"It's a little like the Middle Ages," the insider told me,
"When the patient died they would say, 'well, he stopped the
bloodletting too soon, he still had a little blood in him.'"
I took away from my talks with the professor that the
solution to world poverty and crisis is simple: remove the
bloodsuckers.
*
A version of this was first published as "The IMF's Four
Steps to Damnation" in The Observer (London) in April and
another version in The Big Issue - that's the magazine that
the homeless flog on platforms in the London Underground.
Big Issue offered equal space to the IMF, whose "deputy
chief media officer" wrote:
"... I find it impossible to respond given the depth and
breadth of hearsay and misinformation in [Palast's] report."
Of course it was difficult for the Deputy Chief to respond.
The information (and documents) came from the unhappy lot
inside his agency and the World Bank.
At http://www.GregPalast.com you can read more about
globalization - and view Palast's reports for BBC
Television's Newsnight, including his broadcast interview
with Joe Stiglitz (Meirion Jones, Producer). We will soon
post a complete transcript of the 90-minute interview.
--
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Richard K Moore
Wexford, Ireland
Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance
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-- Frantz Fanon
Capitalism is the relentless accumulation of capital for the
acquisition of profit. Capitalism is a carnivore. It
cannot be made over into a herbivore without gutting it,
i.e., abolishing it.
- Warren Wagar, Professor of History, State University
of New York at Binghamton
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