The International Monetary Fund
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose headquarters are in Washington, oversees the development of ‘third world’ countries. The methods of development used are many and varied but most follow a similar pattern. When a small country seeks to develop it applies to the IMF which provides a business development plan and guarantees development loans provided by the World Bank. The business plans invariably require the loans to be spent with western companies to develop businesses which provide for the growing of food or production of goods that are supplied to western companies. The loans often contain an expensive hidden sweetener.
The size of the projects invariably affects the balance of supply of whatever good is selected so that the bottom is knocked out of the world market and the workers are effectively enslaved to the project. Their land and facilities are usurped by long-term contracts and they are unable to use their own resources to maintain their own lives. In short they are enslaved and their country raped. The promised profits never materialise and the projects never pay for themselves because the world prices are set very low by large multi-national corporations. The pattern is well established which is why the western consumer has been able for the last thirty years to buy foreign goods at remarkably low prices. Virtually every third world country now has a completely unsustainable debt which has been used to fund first world greed.
This method has now proceeded so far that Britain and much of the United States has been turned into a ‘Rust Belt’ by huge international finance taking jobs from these countries and moving them to whichever country will offer the best terms. This is a Dutch Auction with the workers in almost every country suffering reduced living standards and a small number of international companies making ever-increasing profits and growing ever more powerful. Now even western countries have unsustainable debts.
The fundamental rights of people all over the world have been usurped and denied by large multinational companies aided and abetted by the International Monetary Fund and financed by unsustainable debts set up by the World Bank. The poor people that these well-meaning schemes were set up to help have been raped and pillaged by the grand schemes operated in a manner never envisaged by those who thought up the scheme. The multi-national corporations have taken over each scheme and are rapidly destroying everything of value on the planet.
It is inevitable when such schemes are promoted that the main local beneficiaries will be a very small number of politicians, business men and crooks. The real winners are the very rich western corporations and the greedy western consumers.
The disbanding of the International Monetary Fund, The World Bank and the World Trade Organisation will be the first steps in a return to a sane world that is not raping and pillaging the planet upon which we live and depend.
28th March 2011
Colin Walker