Tag: IMF

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega celebrating Sandinista election victory in 2006 in the Revolutionary Plaza, Managua.

“You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.” – CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. (from “Katherine The Great,” by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991)

Thus Davis chronicles the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) official campaign to turn American newspapers, into conduits for its anti-communist ideology which began after World War II.  It was called “Operation Mockingbird”.   Perhaps the operation would have been more accurately named “Operation Cuckoo” as the cuckoo will lay its egg in another bird’s nest and steal the original. With this propaganda operation and spying operation, the CIA effectively threw objectivity out of the nest of American journalism and put CIA denominated news in its place.  

The CIA was successful in capturing the nests of the biggest newspapers in the U.S., including the the “Washington Post”, the “N.Y. Times” , and the “Los Angeles Times”, among many others.  They all still seem to be on team.  During the years of the Contra war against the lawful Sandinista government in the 1980’s, the CIA employed similar methods here in Nicaragua.  Is it still going on here?

   The IMF said last week that Greece is behind schedule with its economic reforms. The threat behind the statement was not very subtle.

 Greece has reached its limit in raising taxes and needs to refocus its austerity program on long-term spending cuts, the International Monetary Fund has said.

  However, the threats have become almost meaningless at this point.

What the global financial leaders are demanding is that Greece double-down its draconian spending cuts even while its economy is collapsing.

 Its GDP has been in contraction for 12 quarters running, most recently at an annualized rate of 5.5%. The rate of unemployment oscillates around the 18% mark – official unemployment, that is. Consumer confidence has collapsed, industrial production has been in decline at double digit rates since early 2008. The stock market is down by 90% from its 2007 highs and the government’s one year note yields an absurd 330%. The banking system is de facto bankrupt and subject to an accelerating flight of deposits.

   You get the picture – these are the kind of economic data that normally indicate that the society concerned is only a small step away from major social upheaval and a descent into conditions of chaos.

   The next big shock to the world’s financial system could happen as soon as Monday morning.

  How do I know this? Because the world’s financial leaders are expecting something really bad, and have publicly announced their intentions of preventing the consequences of something that they have proven unable to fix.

 It started on Friday, when Germany gave up on Greece.

 Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is preparing plans to shore up German banks in the event that Greece fails to meet the terms of its aid package and defaults, three coalition officials said…

  Greece is “on a knife’s edge,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told lawmakers at a closed-door meeting in Berlin on Sept. 7, a report in parliament’s bulletin showed yesterday. If the government can’t meet the aid terms, “it’s up to Greece to figure out how to get financing without the euro zone’s help,” he later said in a speech to parliament.

 When it comes to unofficial leaks like this, I tend to fall back on the wisdom of Otto von Bismarck when he said, “Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.”

 Then, right on cue, both Greece and Germany officially denied it. Thus making it true.

 What is really scary is the two developments that immediately followed this news.

 The G7 stepped up and promised their support in defending the financial status quo.

 Central Banks stand ready to provide liquidity to banks as required. We will take all necessary actions to ensure the resilience of banking systems and financial markets.…

  Excess volatility and disorderly movements in exchange rates have adverse implications for economic and financial stability. We will consult closely in regard to actions in exchange markets and will cooperate as appropriate.

 Why would they bother to announce this unless they suspected that people questioned either their resolve, or their ability?

 To conclude all these official declarations that “there is nothing to worry about” and “everything is under control”, the IMF also promised to step in if necessary.

 The International Monetary Fund will likely re-activate a $580 billion resource pool in coming weeks to ensure it has funds to help cover Europe’s worsening sovereign-debt crisis, according to several people close to the matter….

  According to the IMF, the pool of supplementary resources are only to be activated when “needed to forestall or cope with a threat to the international monetary system.”

 The IMF has been beefing up this fund since shortly before the European debt crisis reached this new crisis level. It’s almost as if they knew something like this was inevitable.

  The problem is that politics often works more slowly than bankers.

 The board of governors agreed in December to roughly double quotas from around $375 billion to around $750 billion. But out of the 187 member countries, only 17 have legally accepted the increase, including Japan, the U.K. and Korea. Most of the countries with the biggest quotas, such as the U.S., China and Germany, haven’t yet gone through the legal process, such as parliamentary or congressional approval, need to hand over their promised dues.

 While the American media focuses on opening week of football, handicapping the presidential race, celebrity gossip, reality TV, or talking about the latest electronic gadget, the financial markets are preparing for crisis in ways that we haven’t seen since early 2008.

  If the worst happens, the American public will be caught by surprise again because the news media failed us yet again.

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

 – Karl Marx

 The world’s leaders gathered in Washington last weekend to try to address the global imbalances that continue to weight on the economies of the world. It didn’t go well.

 The IMF meeting, meant to lay the foundation for some greater co-operation on the co-ordination of national economic policies, instead ended in mutual recrimination. And that has made it harder to reach agreement at the gathering in Seoul next month of the Group of 20 industrialised and developing nations.

 The heart of the disagreement is the “international currency war”, as Guido Mantega, the Brazilian finance minister, called it three weeks ago. The media has focused on the verbal spat between America and China, but the beggar thy neighbor policies are being waged by dozens of nations around the world.

 What I find surprising is that so far the media has failed to recognize how familiar this scenario is.

  The IMF has been making a lot of noise recently, but their biggest move almost managed to slip through completely unnoticed.

 The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) today approved a ten-fold expansion of the Fund’s New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB) and the transformation of the Fund’s premier standing credit arrangement into a more flexible and effective tool of crisis management. The NAB will be increased by SDR 333.5 billion (about US$500 billion) to SDR 367.5 billion (about US$550 billion), representing a major increase in the resources available for the Fund’s lending to its members.

 This IMF program didn’t even exist until a year ago, when the IMF began issuing SDRs for the first time since the 1970’s. The IMF has only sold SDRs in times of global financial stress.

  It makes a person wonder “Why now?” Why is the IMF suddenly tripling its lending facilities? What do they know that we don’t?

 To answer that, let’s look at the announcements of the past few weeks.

  Wall Street CEO’s are deaf to Main Street while awarding themselves record bonuses from taxpayer bailout money.

  Democrats in Congress, in the White House, and regulators in the Federal Reserve who propose a permanent TARP bailout program are also deaf to Main Street.

Crossposted at DKos

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

Here is a good example of what is in H.R. 2346

   We are going to give $230+ million to a DoD Base Closure Account in order to carry out operation and maintenance, planning and design and military construction projects not otherwise authorized by law.

    ???

    Are we getting single payer health care? Are we getting a commitment to rebuilding America through building infrastructure and the manufacturing sector? Are we getting the return of the Glass-Steagal Act, or the repeal of Gramm/Leech/Bliley? Are we getting to the end of mountain top removal coal mining, or the beginning of a more sustainable energy plan? Are we getting investigations and a Special Prosecutor for the War Crimes committed by Bush/Cheney?

    No.

    What we are getting are drone missiles, new army bases overseas and defense contracts. With a side of suppression of evidence of war crimes and a big financial bailout on the side.

    We are getting a bill called H.R. #2346, The Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2009

This is an example of what your scarce national resources that are not there for national health care is going to…