| Global Crisis!
Destruction of National Economies; Financial Warfare |
I first encountered this information in an article, "Financial Warfare," By Michel Chossudovsky, located on the Web at http://www.transnational.org/features/chossu_financial_war.html. In summary, here is what's happening:
- Currency traders (Global Investment Vultures -- GIV's), through the use of complex stock market instruments, are making huge profits (in the hundreds of billions) by stripping national currencies of value.
- When a nation's currency plummets in value real earnings plunge, leading to mass poverty; unemployment doubles overnight; debts skyrocket.
- The GIV's reappear as creditors demanding payment of debts. Up to 90 percent of businesses within the country are forced into bankruptcy.
- The IMF and World Bank step in with a "bailout plan." They place GIV's in charge of the bailout.
- The GIV's force bankruptcies and then purchase the businesses for a few cents on the dollar.
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Who are the GIV's? Institutional speculators -- the world's largest banks and brokerage houses:
- Deutsche Morgan Gruenfell
- Chase (one of the 'big six' Wall Street commercial banks),
- Bank America (one of the 'big six' Wall Street commercial banks),
- Citicorp (one of the 'big six' Wall Street commercial banks),
- J.P. Morgan (one of the 'big six' Wall Street commercial banks),
- Goldman Sachs (one of the 'big five' merchant banks),
- Lehman Brothers (one of the 'big five' merchant banks),
- Morgan Stanley (one of the 'big five' merchant banks) and
- Salomon Smith Barney (one of the 'big five' merchant banks)
- the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Why?
"The appropriation of global wealth through [the] manipulation of market forces"
Where has this happened?
- Korea,
- Thailand,
- Indonesia,
- Malaysia
- China,
- Latin America
- the Middle East
- Canada
- Australia,
- Japan
Indicators of the crisis:
- "The Dow Jones plunged by 554 points on August 31st [1998]"
- "September.. [1998, there was a] dramatic meltdown of stock markets around the World."
- "…2300 billion dollars of 'paper profits'..evaporated from the U.S. stock market [in September, 1998]."
- The ruble is in free fall.
- 500 billion dollars worth of Russian assets…have been confiscated by GIV's
- , more than 100 billion dollars of Asia's hard currency reserves had been confiscated by GIV's
- In Thailand 'an average of more than 200 companies [were] shut down per day (…) 4,000 workers every day were driven out onto streets as unemployed'
- In Korea, "…some 15,000 bankruptcies are expected in 1998 including 90 percent of Korea's construction companies
Current News on the Crisis
7-15-99 from OneWorld:
"The UN estimates that if funds were diverted back into health and education from debt repayment, the lives of seven million children could be saved within a year. That's 134,000 children a week."
7-14-99 Jubilee 2000 site represents and international movement calling for the cancellation of unpayable debts by third world countries, by the year 2000.
"Almost 20 per cent of Mexicans have no cash income; more
than 30 per cent make less than the minimum wage of $3 a day."
6-16-99
UNICEF calls for debt cancellation... "the UN body says,
denies women and children their basic rights."
6-13-99 50,000 people protest poor country debts in London
3-15-99 Africa's debt called a new form of slavery... "Africa's debt burdens, says Jesse Jackson, "are the new economy's chains of slavery"... calls the debt "a new form of slavery as vicious as the slave trade.".. Historical studies such as Joseph Miller's Way of Death,
recounting the Angolan slave trade, remind us that debt was one of the
driving forces behind the deadly commerce... Debt is morally "unsustainable" when keeping
up with payments takes money from the basic necessities of life."
Please send comments to:
Colby Glass, MLIS
