To: "Health Freedom, Codex Issues
Subject: Remove the Bloodsuckers! - Former World Bank Chief Economist Fired: Attempts to Warn World of Precise Currupt Tactics Used By IMF to Shaft Us All
From: John Hammell jham@iahf.com
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 20:24:51 -0400
IAHF List: This article below from the Observer Newspaper (UK) may be the most succinct condemnation of the corrupt monetary system I've ever seen. The interview below with former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz is eye opening in the extreme,succinctly exposing the precise oily methods of the money lenders to rape, pillage, and plunder this planet. (Duh- could this war in Afghanistan POSSIBLY have any connection to the manipulations of these bloodsuckers? DUH!)
Stiglitz message: short and sweet: "Remove the Bloodsuckers!" (Here this insider reveals these scoundrels oily methods!)
How can everyone help to best attack the bloodsuckers? Forward this mssg to generate more widespread AWARENESS! We are all monetized slaves. Our SS# is our slave number under the IMF. If you aren't ARMED, GET ARMED and support Gun Owners of America http://www.gunowers.org , Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership http://www.jpfo.org Concerned Citizens Against Police States http://www.ccops.org and of course International Advocates for Health Freedom- the hardest core vitamin consumin' anti New Whirrrrrrld Odor crowd en todo el mundo http://www.iahf.com Please forward this to more people. Anyone can be on the IAHF list, and help gear up for the coming Anti Codex war on US soil against the Pharma Cartel/IMF/WB/UN/WTO/and all alphabet gangs and their corrupt gummint toadies. Sign up at http://www.iahf.com Donations badly needed: IAHF POB 625 Floyd VA 24091 or via paypal with your credit or debit card at http://www.iahf.com Please forward widely, and don't let the sands of time.... get in your LUNCH!
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 ëanti-globalizationí 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, Iím told, demanded a public excommunication for Stiglitzí 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 TVís Newsnight about the real, often hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank, and the bankís 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." Thereís an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation, designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But according to insider Stiglitz, the Bankís staff ëinvestigationí consists of close inspection of a nationís 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a ërestructuring agreementí pre-drafted for his ëvoluntaryí signature (I have a selection of these).
Each nationís 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, ëBriberization.í Rather than object to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bankís 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 ëbriberizationí of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. "The US Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We donít care if itís 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 Clintonís cabinet as Chairman of the Presidentís council of economic advisors.
Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russiaís 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 ëCapital Market Liberalization.í 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 nationís reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nationís 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, ëThe IMF riot.í
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. Youíd 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." Letís 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.
Thatís not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the US dollar Ecuadorís 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 itís 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 ësubsidizingí 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 Indonesiaís 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 Ethopiaís new president in the nationís 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 Treasuryís 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 WTOís 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 donít care," said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, "if people live or die."
By the way, donít 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 ëtriggersí a requirement to accept every ëconditionalityí -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 Westís push for elections throughout the developing world, the so-called Poverty Reduction Programs "undermine democracy."
And they donít work. Black Africaís 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 tenantís crops. So I had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why didnít the Bank follow your advice?
"If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of the elites. Thatís 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.
"Itís a little like the Middle Ages," the insider told me, "When the patient died they would say, ëwell, he stopped the bloodletting too soon, he still had a little blood in him.í"
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 IMFís Four Steps to Damnation" in The Observer (London) in April and another version in The Big Issue - thatís 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 [Palastís] 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 Palastís 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.