BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR MONETARY REFORM

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The Hidden Menace To World Peace

extract (pages 104-105) from an incredible book by James Gibb Stuart

....find those self same bankers getting tough.
The official line was enunciated by R.T. MacNamer, Deputy Secretary to the U.S. Treasury, when addressing a forum to the American Chamber of Commerce in October 1983. Speaking of the prospect of debt repudiation by one or other of the debtor countries, he said its foreign assets "would be attached by creditors throughout the world; its exports seized by creditors at each dock where they landed; its national airlines unable to operate and its sources of desperately needed capital goods and spare parts virtually eliminated".
That was Big Brother talking. He spoke for a nation which in the previous century had erected a Statue of Liberty in the approaches of New York Harbour, and had openly projected itself as a Hope for the Homeless and Land of the Free. Under such threats the LDC debtors paid up and kept on paying, even if their cities were reduced to shanty towns, their peasantry starved and their urban population dwelt in squalor and disease. It was calculated that living standards for the debt-ridden Third World had declined by 40% during the decade and this reflected a massive transfer of resources from the poorer to the richest nations.
Adam Smith could never have condoned this particular aspect of the free market. Neither would he have been happy with the next stage in the story, which takes place when a debtor nation, despite prodigious efforts and sacrifices, is simply unable to keep up with its loan commitments, and accordingly gets a visit from IMF experts who will advise on how to make the local economy perform more effectively.
Such advice has the sanction of an injunction. The supplicants are expected to do what they're told. If that means switching out of essential food production into cash crops which can be exported for hard currency, then so be it. The experts, who are mostly accountancy-orientated; make it painfully clear that balancing the books is the first consideration, with human welfare a long way second. So a cash crop takes precedence. And in recent history, by far the most profitable cash crops are heroin, opium and cocaine, to supply the ever-expanding networks of the international drugs cartels which have established centres around the Third World for the laundering of their dirty money. So one way or another the bankers get paid.
It would not have happened without bank deregulation. It would probably not have been possible without bank deregulation. Cause and effect! In bowing to the promptings of their banking lobbyists and other financial pressure groups, the U.S. Congress had created a hell on earth for millions of wretches in primitive societies who would live and die in abject misery without ever knowing what it was all about.
(Underlining by BAMR)

Available from: Ossian Publishers, 268 Bath Street, Glasgow, G2 4JR.
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