"Gleaned from "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy". ISBN: 1 84119 714 9
Sunday, 14 June 2009
The Golden Straitjacket
Laughably supposed to "end poverty and the tyrannies of government".
"The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political economic garment of globalisation, and the tighter you wear it, the more gold it produces."
This was said by a man called Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist and amateur economist who wrote 'The Lexus and the Olive Tree'. The book was in favour of globalisation.
There are a dozen specific steps in this process, but the key ones are:
cut governments cut the budgets and bureaucracies and the rules they make;
privatise just about everything;
deregulate currency and capital markets,
free the banks to speculate in currency and shift capital across borders.
It doesn't stop there, after this comes:
Open every nation's industry to foreign trade,
eliminate those stodgy old tariffs and welcome foreign ownership without limit;
wipe away national border barriers to commerce;
let the market set prices on everything from electricity to water;
and let the arbitrageurs direct our investments.
Then haul those old government bureaucracies to the guillotine:
cut public pensions,
cut welfare,
cut subsidies;
let politics shrink
and let the marketplace guide us.
Friedman claims selling these rules is easy work.
There have been protests against this strategy;
Tony Blair said, "People who indulge in the protests are completely misguided. World Trade is good for people's jobs and people's living standards. These protests are a complete outrage."
These policies were given birth by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan through oddball Milton Friedman's (no relation to Thomas)economic theories. Other academics considered Professor Milton Friedman's free market fanaticism off the kooky edge.
The current measurable failure of the economics of the free markets, starvation from Quito to Kyrgyzstan, is "dismissed" as the pain of "transition" to market economies.
In March 2001, when Ecuador's government raised the price of cooking gas and hungry Indians burned the capital.
The World Bank's plan issued months before with the IMF, had directed the 80% increase in the price of domestic fuel, knowing it could set the nation ablaze.
According to Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank. "We called them the IMF riots."
There were 167 "conditionalities" attached to the loans from the World Bank and the IMF, using article VI.4 of the GATS treaty under the World Trade Organisation; and intellectual property rules under something called the TRIPS agreement; all the dirty little facts of globalisation as it is actually practiced.
The IMF "Strategy for Equador" also included:
eliminating 20,000 jobs, and cut real wages for the remaining workers by 50% in four steps and on a timetable specified by the IMF.
Also by July 2000, Equador had to transfer ownership of it's biggest water system to foreign operators, then grant British Petroleum rights to build and own an oil pipeline over the Andes.
The IMF's 167 detailed loan conditions were like a blueprint for a financial coup d'etat.
Alumni from the London School of Economics heard Professor Anthony Giddens at the Hilton, when he said " Globalisation is a fact, and is driven by the communications revolution".
Well all I have to say to that, is that there are a lot of other things driven by the communications revolution, and they will be the nemesis and downfall of these dangerous, off the wall and kooky ideas/theories.
As a postscript to the above (taken from "Hitler : a study in tyranny);
Hitler loved the role of visionary and prophet, and waxed lyrical at the dinner table at his HQ during 1941-2:
He would elaborate on his fabulous schemes for a vast empire embracing the Eurasion Heartland of the geopoliticians;
his plans for breeding a new elite biologically pre-selected;
his design to reduce whole nations to slavery in the foundation of his new empire.
What he could not achieve by warmongering, he is achieving through his acolytes by financial means.
Britain is halfway there thanks to our stupid, treacherous, self centred, lily-livered politicians to whom party politics is more important than nation."
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