-------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~> <FONT COLOR="#000099">eGroups eLerts It's Easy. It's Fun. Best of All, it's Free! </FONT><A HREF="http://click.egroups.com/1/9698/6/_/1406/_/971842345/"><B>Click Here!</B></A> ---------------------------------------------------------------------_-> Please send as far and wide as possible. Thanks, Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] (*STRIDER*) Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2000 WM. H. K�tke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> IMPORTANT NEW BOOK/HISTORY/BACKGROUND/WTO I would like to submit the following for the list. My bona fides appear at the end of this email. Thanks a bunch. I use your list often! WM. BOOK REVIEW Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the Twenty- first Century. J.W. Smith. M.E. Sharpe, pub. 2000. 380 p. $99.00. (Ask your library to order a copy). THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE ORIGINS OF THE WTO This significant new text is destined to become a handbook for those who are becoming awakened to the new planetary economic order. This book will also be a tremendous resource for anyone wanting to understand the history and present realities of the economic power relationships of world society. Smith traces the origins of the ownership and control of industrial society to its beginnings in medieval European society. When the elites within medieval city-states began to create rustic technology in such industries as cloth making they had to go to their countryside to get the raw materials such as wool. They also needed to sell their products for profit within the city and enough back to the countryside to pay for those resources. As Smith describes, the peasants in the countryside observed this rudimentary technology in the city and began to duplicate it. To maintain their profits and economic power, the elites sent their military forces to the countryside and destroyed the peasants' machinery, militarily forcing the countryside to provide raw materials and become a captive market for manufactured products. The elites, to maintain their profits and economic power made a military response. The military force went to the countryside and destroyed the peasants' machinery and militarily enforced the pattern of the countryside providing raw materials and becoming a forced market. Centuries later we see Gandhi in India always sitting with a spinning wheel as protest against the British Empire that ruled the land. Although India had previously produced some of the finest cloth in the world, Britain prohibited the production of cloth in India in order to funnel the wealth spent for cloth to the mills in the imperial center. Many years later we see the IMF and World Bank force Third World countries to "privatize" their publicly owned utilities and such and sell the facilities off to the transnational corporations and banks of the imperial center. There has been no change in the mechanism of economic power. Smith focuses on the aspect of unequal trades. This is the mechanism that funnels the wealth to those in control. Smith also examines the changing strategies of military control of empire and exposes the fact that monopolies are still alive and well. In olden times the mounted troops simply came and destroyed the peasants' looms. Now we have control of money through the international banks and the control of ideas through intellectual property rights and patents guaranteed by the WTO and backed by worldwide military force. All of this is done with the acquiescence of the mass populations unaware that monopolies, which deny the masses their full rights, are structured within capitalism's laws. Smith does an excellent and scholarly job of documenting how these monopolies are hidden through a continual refinement of imposed "Social Control Belief Systems." He shows how the British imperial elite took the work of Adam Smith and twisted it to further hide the very monopolies that Adam Smith had argued against and deplored! While the Wizard of Oz in the background used covert operations, military force, and various forms of colonialism, they held out the myth of the "free market" to the eyes of the masses: "No one is in control, economic events and consequences are simply the work of the free market working itself out for all of our benefit!" The U.S. is 5% of the world population and sucks up 48% of world resources each year. Their military budget is larger this year than the next nine countries behind them - combined. The U.S. keeps military troops stationed in over 100 countries in the world. Are we to believe that this is not a military and economic empire held in place by force? Of course not! This economic elite is so concentrated that it owns the U.S. government. Notice how quickly all involved stepped up to pass NAFTA. (This "free trade" document is more than 1,000 pages of "rules"). One half of one per cent of the U.S. population owns wealth equal to the bottom 80%. The activities of those in power are not for our benefit. According to studies of the United Nations Development Program, the assets of the top three world billionaires are more than the combined GNP of all 48 least developed countries and their 600 million people. A yearly contribution of 1% of the wealth of the 200 richest people in the world could provide universal access to primary education for all. As Smith demonstrates in his voluminous scholarly documentation, this is not a matter of "economics" carrying all of those emotionally laden words, it is a matter of massive social institutions of whatever label, that own and control the lives of the worlds' people. This power of the planetary economic elite is now projected over and above government's -by the WTO and all of its institutional appendages. No one on the planet has ever voted in a democratic election to militarily control the world and have the WTO run it! Solutions Smith's scholarly study goes on to point out solutions that we can use in the future. There is enough, he points out. Smith states that $17 trillion (1990 dollars) has been spent on arms since World War II. "�[T]hat is five times enough to have industrialized the developing world to a sustainable level over the past forty-five years," he says. "The $3.15 trillion needed for developing world industries would have left $13.85 trillion to provide training to run the machines and society; to install initial communications infrastructure to reach the populations with that training (including population control); to guarantee food until a country was able to produce its own; to search for, catalog, and develop, resources; and for environmental protection." In this scholarly study Smith points to the actual ability of society to produce the adequate needs of all. The presently imposed belief system, as Smith describes, would have us believe there is scarcity. At the same time, the miniscule group at the top says there is not enough for schools, they allocate whatever is needed for the vast structure of economic and military warfare that they are carrying out. In a number of chapters of elaborate description, Smith shows how the productive force of society could be easily directed toward adequate standards of living that also guarantee protection of the environment. This is a great value of his work -to provide a vision of how easily it could be done and to provide an image that can shine through the fog of propaganda generated by the tiny but powerful world economic elite. WM. H. K�TKE LITERARY SERVICES web site (writing, editing, book production) http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/literaryservices/ AUTHOR: THE FINAL EMPIRE: THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION AND THE SEED OF THE FUTURE BOOK REVIEW AT: http://www.flyingdisk.com/finalemp.htm PUBLISHER: ARROW POINT PRESS, 400 North Combs Flat Road, Prineville,OR 97754 1 541-447-7964 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ====== ASSOCIATE: INSTITUTE FOR ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY 1635 Via Sabroso, Santa Maria, CA 93454 phone/fax 1-805-928-7060 http://www.slonet.org/~ied/ OUR DEFINING WORK: ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY: THE POLITICAL STRUGGLE OF THE 21st CENTURY, by J.W. Smith to be published in November 2000 by M.E. Sharpe. ====== ASSOCIATE: ECO DESIGN EXPERIENCE A course of study created by Ecological Systems Design, Inc. AND The San Francisco Institue of Architecture ===Oracle Campus Located At=== 1290 Rancho Robles Road:::MAIL: P.O. Box 5209,Oracle, AZ 85623 Phone;1-520-896 3303/3301 Toll Free at: 1-877-208-6673 EMAIL; [EMAIL PROTECTED] WEBSITE ADDRESS: http://personal.riverusers.com/~philhawes ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Peace! *STRIDER* Sector Air Raid Warden at /RENEGADE/ /RENEGADE/ news_service: http://fornits.com/renegade/ DEDICATED TO SPIRIT, TRUTH, PEACE, JUSTICE, AND FREEDOM e-list info: http://fornits.com/renegade/peaars.cgi?fetch=3763 usenet: news:alt.thebird news:misc.activism.progressive chat: http://jupiter.beseen.com/chat/rooms/i/1055/ e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] WHEN SPIDERS UNITE, THEY CAN TIE DOWN A LION -- Ethiopian Proverb ***** Robin Ramsay ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Lobster, Hull, UK Dear Robert, Here is a very important piece abut the IMF which appeared in this country's Sunday broadsheet, The Observer. To my knowledge this is the first time an actual IMF country plan has been exposed; and exposed as gangsterism pure and simple. The author, Greg Palast, is an American - and just about the most important radical journalist being published in the mainstream media in this country. Cheers, Robin Ramsay Failures of the 20th century: see under IMF An internal study reveals the price 'rescued' nations pay: dearer essentials, worse poverty and shorter lives Observer Sunday October 8, 2000 Gregory Palast So call me a liar. I was standing in front of the New York Hilton Hotel when the limousine carrying International Monetary Fund director Horst Kohler zoomed by, hitting a bump. Out flew a confidential report, Ecuador Interim Country Assistance Strategy. You suspect that's not how I got it, but you can trust me that it contains the answer to a puzzling question. Inside the Hilton, Professor Anthony Giddens told an earnest crowd of London School of Economics alumni that 'globalisation is a fact, and it is driven by the communications revolution'. Wow. That was an eye-opener. The screeching green-haired freaks outside the hotel demonstrating against the IMF had it all wrong. Globalisation, Giddens seems to say, is about giving every villager in the Andes a Nokia internet-enabled mobile phone. What puzzled me is why anyone would protest against this happy future. So I thumbed through my purloined IMF Strategy for Ecuador seeking a chapter on connecting the country's schools to the world wide web. Instead, I found a secret schedule. By 1 November this year, it says, its government is ordered to raise the price of cooking gas by 80 per cent. It must eliminate 26,000 jobs and halve real wages for the remaining workers by 50 per cent in four steps in months specified by the IMF. It must begin to transfer ownership of its biggest water system to foreign operators by July and grant BP's Arco subsidiary the right to build and own an oil pipeline over the Andes. That's for starters. In all, the IMF's 167 loan conditions look less like an assistance plan and more like a blueprint for a financial coup d'�tat. The IMF would say it has no choice. Ecuador is broke, thanks to the implosion of its commercial banks. But how did Ecuador, an Opec member with resources to spare, end up in such a pickle? For that, we have to turn back to 1983, when the IMF forced its government to take over the soured private debts owed by Ecuador's elite to foreign banks. For this bail-out of US and local financiers, Ecuador borrowed $1.5 billion. To repay this loan, the IMF dictated price hikes for electricity and other necessities. And when that didn't drain off enough cash, yet another assistance plan required the state to eliminate 120,000 jobs. Furthermore, while trying to meet the mountain of IMF obligations, Ecuador foolishly 'liberalised' its tiny financial market, cutting local banks loose from government controls and letting private debt and interest rates explode. Who pushed Ecuador into this nutty romp with free-market banking? Hint: the initials are IMF. It made bank liberalisation a condition of another berserk assistance plan. The facts of this nasty little history come from the IMF report marked: 'Please do not cite.' Pretend I didn't. The IMF and the World Bank have lent a sticky helping hand to scores of nations. Take Tanzania. Today, 1.4 million people there are getting ready to die. They are the 8 per cent of the nation's population who have the Aids virus. The financial 'rescuers' found a brilliant neo-liberal solution: require Tanzania to charge for hospital visits, previously free. This cut the number of patients treated in the three big public hospitals in the capital, Dar es Salaam, by 53 per cent. The financial cures must be working. The bodies told Tanzania to charge school fees. Now the bank expresses surprise that school enrolment is down from 80 per cent to 66 per cent. Altogether the Bank and IMF have 157 other helpful suggestions for Tanzania, and the Tanzanian government secretly agreed last April to adopt them all. It was sign or starve. No developing nation can borrow hard currency without IMF blessing (except China, whose output grows at 5 per cent a year thanks to it studiously following the reverse of IMF policies). The IMF and World Bank have effectively controlled Tanzania's economy since 1985. Admittedly, when they took charge they found a socialist nation mired in poverty, disease and debt. Their experts wasted no time in cutting trade barriers, limiting government subsidies and selling off state industries. This worked wonders. According to bank-watcher Nancy Alexander of the Washington-based Globalisation Challenge Initiative,in just 15 years Tanzania's GDP has dropped from $309 to $210 per capita, the literacy rate is falling and the rate of abject poverty has jumped to 51 per cent of the population. Yet somehow the bank has failed to win over the hearts and minds of Tanzanians to its free-market gameplan. Last June, the bank reported in frustration: 'One legacy of socialism is that most people continue to believe the state has a fundamental role in promoting development and providing social services.' The World Bank and the IMF were born in 1944 with simple, laudable mandates: between them to fund post-war reconstruction and development projects and lend hard currency to nations left skint by temporary balance of payments deficits. But in 1980 they seemed to take on an alien form. In the early Eighties, Third World nations, haemorrhaging after the fivefold increases in oil prices and a similar jump in dollar interest payments, brought their begging bowls to the two bodies. But instead of debt relief, they received structural assistance plans listing an average of 114 'conditionalities' in return for capital. The particulars varied from nation to nation, but in every case, they had to remove trade barriers, sell national assets to foreign investors, slash social spending and make labour 'flexible' (that is, crush unions). Some say the vicious policy change resulted from the election that year of Ronald Reagan as US President, the quickening of Margaret Thatcher's powers and the beginning of the neo-liberal ascendency. (My own information is that the IMF and World Bank were taken over by a space alien named Larry. It's obvious that 'Larry' Summers, once World Bank chief economist and now US Treasury Secretary, is really a platoon of extra- terrestrials sent to turn much of the human race into a source of cheap protein. But I digress.) So what have The Aliens accomplished with their e free-market prescriptions? An article by Samuel Brittan in last week's Financial Times declared that the new world capital markets and free trade have 'brought about an unprecedented increase in world living standards'. Brittan cites the huge growth in GDP per capita, life expectancy and literacy in the less developed world from 1950 to 1995. Now hold on a minute. Until 1980, virtually every nation in his survey was either socialist or welfare statist. They were developing on the 'Import Substitution Model', by which locally-owned industry was built through government investment and high tariffs, anathema to the neoliberals. In those dark ages of increasing national government control and ownership (1960-1980), per capita income grew by 73 per cent in Latin America and by 34 per cent in Africa. By comparison, since 1980, Latin American growth has come to a virtual halt, growing by less than 6 per cent over 20 years - and African incomes have declined by 23 per cent. Now let's count the corpses. From 1950 to 1980, socialist and statist welfare policies added more than a decade of life expectancy to virtually every nation on the planet. From 1980 to today, life under structural assistance has become brutish and shorter. Since 1985, the total number of illiterate people has risen and life expectancy is falling in 15 African nations. Brittan attributes this to 'bad luck, [not] the international economic system'. In the former Soviet states, where IMF and World Bank shock plans hold sway, life expectancy has plunged, adding 1.4 million a year to the death rate in Russia alone. Admittedly, the World Bank and IMF are reforming. The dreaded structural assistance plans have been renamed 'poverty reduction strategies'. Doesn't that make you feel better? Recently, the IMF admitted that 'in the recent decades, nearly one- fifth of the world population have regressed' - arguably 'one of the greatest economic failures of the twentieth century.' And that, Professor Giddens, is a fact. [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist Newswire, please visit http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist/ and sign up. Or, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject: "I NEED 2 KONFORM!!!" (Okay, you can use something else, but it's a kool catch phrase.) Visit the Klub Konformist at Yahoo!: http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/klubkonformist
