Stephen Lendman: IMF Financial Terrorism!
- Both the IMF and World Bank are Illuminist banks. The plan of the Illuminists is for a One World Currency managed by a Global Supra-National Central Bank. This bank is likely to be the IMF (with the BIS as backup). The World Bank will in all likelihood be the global Treasury Department.
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IMF Financial Terrorism!
Stephen Lendman, Contributing Writer, Activist PostIn July 1944, the IMF and Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now the World Bank) were established to integrate developing nations into the Global North-dominated world economy in ways other than initially mandated.
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Under a new post-war monetary system, the IMF was created to stabilize exchange rates linked to the dollar and bridge temporary payment imbalances. The World Bank was to provide credit to war-torn developing countries. Both bodies, in fact, proved hugely exploitive, using debt entrapment to transfer public wealth to Western bankers and other corporate predators.
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On a grander scale today, the scheme destructively obligates indebted nations to take new loans to service old ones, assuring rising indebtedness and structural adjustment harshness, including:
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— privatization of state enterprises, many sold for a fraction of their real worth;
— mass layoffs;
— deregulation
— deep social spending cuts;
— wage freezes or cuts;
— unrestricted free market access for western corporations;
— corporate-friendly tax cuts;
— tax increases for working households;
— crushing trade unionism; and
— harsh repression
– against opposition to a system incompatible with social democracy, civil and human rights.–
As a result, bankers and other corporate predators strip mine countries of their material wealth and resources, shift them from public to private hands, crush democratic values, hollow out nations into backwaters, destroy middle class societies, and turn workers into serfs if they manage to have any means of employment.
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In other words, perpetual debt bondage substitutes for freedom. A race to the bottom follows. An elite few benefit at the expense of the many, entrapped nations henceforth forced to pay homage to their money masters, effectively handing over their sovereignty.
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As a result, neoliberalism is neo-Malthusianism writ large, destroying humanity to save it. Its holy trinity, in fact, mandates no public sphere, unrestrained corporate empowerment, and eliminating social spending to devote all state resources for bottom line profits, national security and internal control.
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Except for the privileged few, it’s the worst, not the best, of all possible worlds, financializing economies into debt bondage, transforming them into hollow shell dystopian backwaters.
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For example, in the 1980s, 187 IMF loans caused poverty, hunger, malnutrition, disease and death for many developing countries, including all sub-Saharan ones entrapped by structural adjustment harshness. Their growth, in fact, declined on average by 2.2% per year, and per capita income dropped below pre-independence levels.
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Debt service required health expenditures cut 50% and education by 25%. Moreover, as indebtedness rises, so does forced austerity, what, in fact, becomes a death spiral requiring new loans to service old ones, a never-ending cycle to oblivion for many nations in hock to IMF mandates.
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In Latin America, the 1980s was a lost decade. Loans to Chile required 40% wage cuts. During Mexico’s 1982 debt crisis, wages as well as spending for health, education, and basic infrastructure dropped by half. As a result, infant mortality tripled and vital human needs were unmet to assure bankers got paid.
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