by John Perkins

Listen 1 hr and 20 minutes into the show

Thanks. Tom is getting a little better about excessive ranting
but he still boils everything down to Boston.

From the Dominion: Interview with John Perkins

Well, the company I worked for was a company named Chas. T. Main in Boston, Massachusetts. We were about 2,000 employees, and I became its chief economist. I ended up having fifty people working for me. But my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan--let's say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador--was that the country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to US companies, to build the infrastructure--companies like Halliburton or a Bechtel. Those companies would then go in and build an electrical system or ports or highways, and these would basically serve just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries. The poor people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt that they couldn't possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it really can't do it. So we have them over a barrel. When we want more oil, we go to Ecuador and say, "Look, you're not able to repay your debts, so give our oil companies your Amazon rain forest, which are filled with oil." And today we're going in and destroying Amazonian rain forests, forcing Ecuador to give them to us because they've accumulated all this debt.
So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United States, the country is left with the debt plus lots of interest, and they basically become our servants, our slaves. It's an empire. There's no two ways about it

http://dominionpaper.ca/labour/2004/12/19/confession.html

on a related note: Kirschner to Imf--F' OFF!

This week the Inter-American Development Bank demonstrated more flexibility than the IMF by extending a $200 million loan to Argentina for investment in agricultural projects. Hoping to exploit differences among international lenders, the government appears set to end its negotiations with the IMF for new credits. It will make payments on its old IMF debt but will chart an independent course over future debt payments and new economic policies.

Kirchner declares: 'We are not going to repeat the history of the past... We don't want new agreements that will frustrate us and the world. For many years we were on our knees before financial organizations and the speculative funds... We've had enough

http://www.counterpunch.org/burbach12302004.html


FABULOUS!!!

President Kirchner of Argentina may have sensed that the IMF will not be in a position to make net new loans in the future.

The IMF's three biggest borrowers are Argentina, Brazil and Turkey. The South Americans have figured out that their bargaining position is improving vs. the IMF.

Turkey was massively bribed to serve as a staging area for the U.S. invasion of Iraq ... and then declined to do so.

The IMF just can't get no respect.

Are rich countries likely to agree to new capital contributions to the IMF, when the results of prior IMF lending are steadily souring?

Maybe not. And if the IMF can offer little or no net new funding, the borrowers' best interest is simply to slow their payments to a trickle, and let the IMF squirm.

To paraphrase Stalin's caustic jibe at the pope, "How many divisions does the IMF have?"