It's win, win, whereas the West preferred to extract all the resources out of these countries instead taking all the money and running off with it making the populations of these countries much poorer.
The other way the Western elite have made a lot of money is by bombing the rest of the world into submission which is good for investors in the military-industrial complex.
In this Summer Solution episode of the Keiser Report, Max and Stacy contrast the situation with China, a perhaps emerging superpower, to the United States, a possibly declining superpower. As the US grew powerful as an empire of debt, extracting resources and equity from economies colonized by their debt rather than their military armies, what happens when China begins doing the same? Lots of complaints from U.S. officials who want American lenders to take over debt markets the U.S. has overlooked in the past few decades. They look at the case of Africa where Chinese mobile phone manufacturers and tech entrepreneurs are radically altering the telecom landscape left wide open to them after the departure of Nokia. What happens when the African consumer becomes wealthy enough to transform the Chinese global power play?
“A top US official says that China is overloading the world with debt…”
ReplyDeleteInfinite hypocrisy. Endless projection of one’s own evil onto others.
The more the USA and Israel victimize others, the more they claim to be “victims.” The more they destroy democracy and human rights, the more they claim to be champions of democracy and human rights. Both nations claim to be “exceptional.” Both nations commit “humanitarian” genocide. Both nations are the supreme perpetrators of terrorism.
As Kaivey says, the Western Empire’s chief weapon of colonialism is debt, sprinkled with actual bombing. The IMF and World Bank create loan dollars out of thin air, and they use those dollars to enslave and impoverish billions of people.
Think how far humanity would have advanced if the USA had used its money-creating powers for good instead of evil. We could have solved any problem. Pollution, climate change, nuclear waste, you name it. We could have created a better world.
That's what so sad, Konrad, and we even could have solved the population explosion problem, but instead the elite said that greed was good and that greed would put everything right. This was because they were exceptionally greedy so they used neoclassical economists to spread their propaganda.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally that hypocritical U.S. official a**hole is Ray Washburne, head of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC).
ReplyDeleteOPIC’s function is to encourage private investors (as differentiated from the IMF and World Bank) to indebt, impoverish, and enslave foreign nations. This enslavement is called “development.” That is, OPIC funds “development” (of debt).
If private investors have connections with the U.S. government, then they can’t lose. They buy sovereign bonds from distressed nations that have no hope of ever paying the money back. Therefore the distressed nations pay back the loans via mass privatization, and by surrendering their natural resources to investors. If a distressed nation refuses to submit to this extortion, then the lender (the investor) is compensated (with interest) by the U.S. government.
For example, Rafael Correa (president of Ecuador, 2007-2017) refused to submit to foreign investor extortion, as did Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (president of Argentina, 2007-2015). Both inherited debt from previous (neoliberal) administrations. Both have since been replaced with neoliberals, who have fully repaid private foreign investors at the expense of their own nations’ people.
When you refuse to pay back private foreign investors on their terms (or pay back entities like the IMF and World Bank), your nation is said to be in “sovereign debt default.” Many nations have done this. The U.S. government has done it six times.
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_debt_crises
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In the video, Stacy Herbert discusses the question of whether China will become the world’s next great super-power.
As I have noted before, if China’s global trade deficit continues to grow, causing China to spend all its foreign currency reserves, then China will go nowhere.
The USA has the world’s biggest trade deficit (by far) but this is not a problem, since US dollars are accepted worldwide, unlike Chinese renmindi.
The U.S. Empire is doomed by its own internal corruption. Will China replace the U.S. Empire? We’ll have to see how this plays out.
Max Keiser says something that reminds me of the late comedian George Carlin. Stacy mentions this idiot Ray Washburne’s claim that China is overloading the world with debt. Max Keiser responds, “Hey, that’s our job.”
In the video below at 2:13 George Carlin says, “Can you remember any white people we have ever bombed? The Germans, but that’s only because they were trying to cut in on our action. They wanted to dominate the world. Bullshit! That’s our fu*king job!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwlVAkXcXOI