# Bad Things Unfolding...Financial Meltdown



## austexdude (Oct 19, 2008)

I know I am new here and don't want to sound like an alarmist and I hate to say this but...

Our economy is on the brink of complete failure that will make the Great Depression seem like a paid holiday.

7 million people starved to death in America during the GD, and that is when 75% of people knew how to grow food in some way and lived in country areas...

Now, nobody knows how to grow anything and everyone lives in big cities...

If you want to make SOUND FINANCIAL PLANS, READ THIS...Back in 2001, Joseph Stiglitz defected from the elites and told us a plan that the 
IMF and World Bank would use to destroy the US economy. Here is the 4 
step plan. Looks like everything is going according to plans... 

Gregory Palast 
Sunday April 29, 2001 
The Observer (UK) 

How crises, failures, and suffering finally drove a 
Presidential adviser to the wrong side of the barricades 

It was like a scene out of Le Carré: the brilliant agent comes in from 
the cold and, in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors 
committed in the name of an ideology gone rotten. 

But this was a far bigger catch than some used-up Cold War spy. The 
former apparatchik was Joseph Stiglitz, ex-chief economist of the 
World Bank. The new world economic order was his theory come to life. 

He was in Washington for the big confab of the World Bank and 
International Monetary Fund. But instead of chairing meetings of 
ministers and central bankers, he was outside the police cordons. The 
World Bank fired Stiglitz two years ago. He was not allowed a quiet 
retirement: he was excommunicated purely for expressing mild dissent 
from globalisation World Bank-style. 

Here in Washington we conducted exclusive interviews with Stiglitz, 
for The Observer and Newsnight, about the inside workings of the IMF, 
the World Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US Treasury. 

[Who effectively controls the US Treasury? The Federal Reserve 
Corporation? And who owns the Fed? See: http://www.transaction.net/money/national 
for some interesting leads.] 

And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache 
of documents marked, `confidential' and `restricted'. 

Stiglitz helped translate one, 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 `investigation' involves 
little more than close inspection of five-star hotels. It concludes 
with a meeting with a begging finance minister, who is handed a 
`restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for `voluntary' signature. 


Each nation's economy is analysed, says Stiglitz, then the Bank hands 
every minister the same four-step programme. 

Step One is privatisation. Stiglitz said that rather than objecting to 
the sell-offs of state industries, some politicians -- 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 possibility of commissions for shaving a few billion off the sale 
price. 

And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case 
of the biggest privatisation 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."' 

Stiglitz cannot simply be dismissed as a conspiracy nutter. The man 
was inside the game -- a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet, chairman of 
the President's council of economic advisers. 

Most sick-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped 
Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that national output was 
cut nearly in half. 

After privatisation, Step Two is capital market liberalisation. In 
theory this allows investment capital to flow in and out. 
Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money often simply 
flows 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. 

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. Higher interest rates 
demolish property values, savage industrial production and drain 
national treasuries. 

At this point, according to Stiglitz, 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] squeezes the last drop 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. 

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 believe the riot 
was expected. 

And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that Newsnight obtained 
several documents from inside the World Bank. In one, last year's 
Interim Country Assistance Strategy for Ecuador, the Bank several 
times suggests -- with cold accuracy -- that the plans could be 
expected to spark `social unrest'. 

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 IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed 
by bullets, tanks and tear gas) cause new flights of capital and 
government bankruptcies. This economic arson has its bright side -- 
for foreigners, who can then pick off remaining assets at fire sale 
prices. 

A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers but the clear winners seem 
to be the western banks and US Treasury. 

Now we arrive at Step Four: free trade. This is free trade by the 
rules of the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank, which 
Stiglitz likens to the Opium Wars. `That too was about "opening 
markets",' he said. As in the nineteenth century, Europeans and 
Americans today are kicking down barriers to sales in Asia, Latin 
American and Africa while barricading our own markets against the 
Third World's agriculture. 

In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades. Today, the World 
Bank can order a financial blockade, which is just as effective and 
sometimes just as deadly. 

Stiglitz has two concerns about the IMF/World Bank plans. First, he 
says, because the plans are devised in secrecy and driven by an 
absolutist ideology, never open for discourse or dissent, they 
`undermine democracy'. 

Second, they don't work. Under the guiding hand of IMF structural 
`assistance' Africa's income dropped by 23%. 

Did any nation avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, Botswana. Their 
trick? `They told the IMF to go packing.' Stiglitz proposes radical 
land reform: an attack on the 50% crop rents charged by the propertied 
oligarchies worldwide. 

Why didn't the World Bank and IMF follow his advice? 

`If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the 
power of the elites. That's not high on their agenda.' 

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. 

`It's a little like the Middle Ages,' says the economist, `When the 
patient died they would say well, we stopped the bloodletting too 
soon, he still had a little blood in him.' 

Maybe it's time to remove the bloodsuckers.


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## butcher (Oct 20, 2008)

have always grown or hunted majority of my food,live in country, have lived through enough hard times to Know I can, worry will not help anything, dont know if this will get as bad as the depression but I do think the honeymoon is over and we need to wake up to reality.


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## Seamus (Oct 20, 2008)

The great depression taught my family to hoard commodities, grow their own food, make and sew their own clothing ect. Scrap metals (precious) and enough land to grow food on are the things that I'm hoarding. Big brother can't help us now. He's looking to us for advice, or he should be looking to us.


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## butcher (Oct 21, 2008)

hes looking for our gold to give to others who dont work for themselves and expects us to take care of them while they party.


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## Seamus (Oct 26, 2008)

He has to dig it up himself or pry it from my cold dead hands if I'm hanging on to it at the time. Either way, he would have to work for it. Ooouuhhhh, that's a first. If he's like my little brother, then work would be a stranger to him.


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## OMG (Oct 26, 2008)

That first post sounds really scary. :roll:


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## istari9 (Oct 28, 2008)

So the world is coming to an end as we know it. If you think about it we are all survivors or this forum would not have the allure it has. We all have seen the future and looked at the tube pictures of a vast conspiracy. All is not a total lose gentlemen and ladies. Our future is of our making just hang onto your hats it may be a wild ride!! I too have sown the seed and carved my meat from an arrow or weapon. In the end, life goes on...


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