We Have Entered The Looting Stage Of Capitalism
— Paul Craig Roberts
We Have Entered The Looting Stage Of Capitalism
Germany’s Assault On The IMF
Paul Craig Roberts
Having successfully used the EU to conquer the
Greek people by turning the Greek “leftwing” government into a pawn of
Germany’s banks, Germany now finds the IMF in the way of its plan to loot
Greece into oblivion .
The IMF’s rules prevent the organization from
lending to countries that cannot repay the loan. The IMF has concluded on the
basis of facts and analysis that Greece cannot repay. Therefore, the IMF is
unwilling to lend Greece the money with which to repay the private banks.
The IMF says that Greece’s creditors, many of
whom are not creditors but simply bought up Greek debt at a cheap price in
hopes of profiting, must write off some of the Greek debt in order to lower the
debt to an amount that the Greek economy can service.
The banks don’t want Greece to be able to
service its debt, because the banks intend to use Greece’s inability to service
the debt in order to loot Greece of its assets and resources and in order to
roll back the social safety net put in place during the 20th century. Neoliberalism
intends to reestablish feudalism—a few robber barons and many serfs: the One
Percent and the 99 percent.
The way Germany sees it, the IMF is supposed to
lend Greece the money with which to repay the private German banks. Then the
IMF is to be repaid by forcing Greece to reduce or abolish old age pensions,
reduce public services and employment, and use the revenues saved to repay the
IMF.
As these amounts will be insufficient,
additional austerity measures are imposed that require Greece to sell its national
assets, such as public water companies and ports and protected Greek islands to
foreign investors, principally the banks themselves or their major clients.
So far the so-called “creditors” have only
pledged to some form of debt relief, not yet decided, beginning in 2 years. By
then the younger part of the Greek population will have emigrated and will have
been replaced by immigrants fleeing Washington’s Middle Eastern and African
wars who will have loaded up Greece’s unfunded welfare system.
In other words, Greece is being destroyed by
the EU that it so foolishly joined and trusted. The same thing is happening to
Portugal and is also underway in Spain and Italy. The looting has already
devoured Ireland and Latvia (and a number of Latin American countries) and is
underway in Ukraine.
The current newspaper headlines reporting an
agreement being reached between the IMF and Germany about writing down the
Greek debt to a level that could be serviced are false. No “creditor” has yet
agreed to write off one cent of the debt. All that the IMF has been given by
so-called “creditors” is unspecific “pledges” of an unspecified amount of debt
writedown two years from now.
The newspaper headlines are nothing but fluff
that provide cover for the IMF to succumb to pressure and violate its own
rules. The cover lets the IMF say that a (future unspecified) debt writedown
will enable Greece to service the remainder of its debt and, therefore, the IMF
can lend Greece the money to pay the private banks.
In other words, the IMF is now another lawless
Western institution whose charter means no more than the US Constitution or the
word of the US government in Washington.
The media persists in calling the looting of
Greece a “bailout.”
To call the looting of a country and its people
a “bailout” is Orwellian. The brainwashing is so successful that even the media
and politicians of looted Greece call the financial imperialism that Greece is
suffering a “bailout.”
Everywhere in the Western world a variety of
measures, both corporate and governmental, have resulted in the stagnation of
income growth. In order to continue to report profits, mega-banks and global
corporations have turned to looting. Social Security systems and public
services–and in the US even the TSA airline security screening–are targeted for
privatization, and indebtedness so accurately described by John Perkins in his
book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, is used to set up entire
countries to be looted.
We have entered the looting stage of
capitalism. Desolation will be the result.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books areThe Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West
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