Kushmonster

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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

IMF GHOUL CRASHES NAIROBI STREET PARTY (where two elephants fight, the grass suffers)




Most probably the distinguished Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, did not have the opportunity nor the inclination to meet with any of the ordinary denizens of the streets of Nairobi, Kenya, some of whom are on full display plying their unusual and desperate trade in the above video. "Le grande seducteur", as Strauss-Con(!) had been dubbed by the Parisian tabloids endlessly titillated by his numerous sexploits, was busy with consultations on behalf of the IMF with the "Two Elephant"power sharing coalition of president Mwai Kibaki and his former arch-rival and present premier Raila Odinga. Louse- Con(!) was kicking off his third visit to the Mother Continent in just four months. The Two Elephants had engaged in a mutually vitriolic and contentious rivalry in the disputed December 27, 2007 presidential election , followed by an unprecedented outbreak of "tribal violence" which left thousands dead, 350,000 displaced refugees and a national catastrophe of once unimagined proportions in a country which had long held a reputation as an"oasis of peace in a troubled region".

"The prize at stake was the presidency. As in many other African countries, the ultimate prize comes with unimaginable powers to misappropriate national economic resources, reward political cronies and frustrate rivals into submission. Sadly, neither of the two elephants has had the courage to make the ultimate sacrifice for his own political ambitions. Instead innocent Kenyans have paid the price. With vitriolic rhetoric, the assorted cast of Kenyan politicians goaded masses of supporters into battle, while they, ensconced in their villas, looked on, only occasionally venturing out in heavily protected convoys of SUVs"
Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator

Kenya, like the rest of the African continent can expect little but more of the same. According to former World Bank president and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, "under the guiding hand of IMF structural assistance, Africa's income dropped by 23%." Far from being the international economic missionary organization which it pretends to be, the IMF resembles more of a vast mobilization of international piracy devoted to the subjection, domination and economic enslavement of entire sovereign nations. This is accomplished by a complex series of bribes payoffs and kickbacks, the manipulation of currency and above all, the number one tool of banksters world wide, interest bearing loans and collateralized debt obligations involving real estate, land, national utilities and resources etc. As investigative journalist Greg Palast reports, "The IMF is really its own secret government"

That the African continent with its vast untapped resources and potential immense pool of cheap labor would attract the malign interests and intentions of the IMF/World Band and WTO is scarcely surprising. Palast's work "IMF's Four Steps to Damnation" is a concise, brief and informative primer on the devious machinations of the supra-national agency. Based on interviews with Stigligz and top secret, "confidential and restricted" memoranda obtained from IMF sources, Palast exposes the IMF playbook and its clandestine game plan for global economic domination. Let's cut right to the chase with the following quote from Palast's excellent chronicle of the skullduggery and and malignant treachery practiced by plutocrats who inhabit the thrones of world power, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy". Speaking about the violent 1999 protests which scuttled the WTO shenanigans in Seattle, Palast writes the following:

"The spiky-haired protesters in the streets of Seattle believe there’s some kind of grand conspiracy between the corporate powers, the IMF, the World Bank and an alphabet soup of agencies which work to suck the blood of Bolivians and steal the gold from Tanzania. But the tree-huggers are wrong; the details are far more stomach-churning than they imagine. In March 2001, when Ecuador’s government raised the price of domestic gas and hungry Indians burned the capital, I was reading the World Bank’s confidential plan issued months before. The bank, with the IMF, had directed this 60 per cent increase in the price of domestic fuel, predicting coldly this could set the nation alight. It’s as if the riots were scheduled right into the plan. And they were, at least according to one of the only inside sources I can name, Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank. “We called them the IMF riots.” The riots were programmed as well as the response, what the document called “resolve”—the police, the tanks, the crackdown."


As to the four steps to IMF damnation


Step One is Privatization. In marginalized and impoverished third world countries such as the African continent, the international mobsters employ the time honored methods of any reputable organized criminal organization; extortion, bribery, payoffs and kickbacks to secure the allegiance and loyalty of the political leadership, which in many cases the IMF has helped to install. The result is a massive sell off of public assets and utilities at fire sale prices and lucrative commissions for the corrupt brokers. This kind of gangsterism pales in comparison with the wholesale looting of the Russian economy in the late 90's after the fall of the Soviet Union. Presided over by Stiglitz himself with the able assistance of present Office of Management and Budget head Peter Orszag who was acting as Russian Finance Minister under the aegis of economic hit man vice president Al Gore, Russian industrial, mineral and oil concessions were appropriated by U.S./IMF backed oligarchs who subsequently engaged in an orgy of asset stripping resulting in the crippling of national output by 50%.


Step Two is Market Liberalization. With any vestiges of protectionism via trade barriers and tariffs effectively removed the market predators go to work on the public assets. Hot money inflows lead to rampant "speculation in real estate and currency". As speculative investment at low rates of interest builds so do prices, as the impoverished majority is marginalized even further. Then the rug is pulled out from under the unwary parties to the scam, the bubble bursts, and capital flees the country with the resultant social unrest and societal breakdown. Interest rates grow astronomically as property values deflate, industrial and infrastructure development cease and " the national treasury is drained."To this is added the infamous and destructive IMF quota, where each country is required by the economic predators to deposit large amounts of "aid money" into the IMF coffers itself at pitiable low rates of interest while the further borrowing of US$ at much higher rates of interest are necessitated for IMF sponsored infrastructure and development projects.


Step Three is Market Based Pricing which in simple terms represents the elimination of food and fuel subsidies necessitated by the IMF predatory lending policies themselves as the majority of impoverished denizens are pushed further and further below the poverty line. Prices on basic necessities rise.This is, of course, productive of the Stiglitz "IMF riot" mentioned above. The innocuous sounding "Interim Country Assistance Policy" is the document that Palast refers to when he suggests that IMF policy is actually designed to bring about the the expected and resultant social chaos. Palast suggests that this is nothing short of "economic arson", which allows the process of the vicious circle to proceed to the next step- the final appropriation of what little assets remain at prices which are just a step above outright expropriation.


Step Four is Free Trade. This represents the new frontier of so called "free market capitalism"of the likes of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics. It is also the province of the WTO and World Bank, the sister organizations of the IMF, and the regulatory and fiscal agents of the IMF depredations. Now that the major means of production and public utilities are firmly in IMF hands, the newly established economic institutional parameters represented by the WTO and WB insure the consistent flow of national wealth into the coffers of the western central banks and the US Treasury and IMF. Obama's recent bequest of $100 billion to the IMF is representative of the symbiotic relationship between the two agencies. That these four steps are in the process of being rapidly enacted in the United States itself are symptomatic of the tightening grip which the international cabal has slowly established over the domestic economic policies of the once great nation.


Obama's Coming out Party

A strange and unexpected party to the Kenyan election conflagration was the relatively unknown junior U.S. Senator from the state of Illinois, one Barack Hussein Obama. In his third trip to the continent in 2006, Obama was on a critical mission to Kenya, might we guess, at the behest of the same plenipotentiaries who were grooming him for the U.S. presidency and whom Strauss-Kahn might serve in in a very special capacity as well. Though ostensibly on some transparent AIDS awareness mission, his appearance just before the critical and hotly contested election in the country of his supposed origins and in obvious support of the Odinga, testified to his real agenda. Kibaki himself was outraged, accusing the senator of meddling in Kenyan politics while Obama made daily appearances with Odinga, deploring the corruption of the Kibaki government.
obamaodinga
Odinga himself, educated in East Germany and apparently somewhat of an avowed marxist, openly cultivated the minority Muslim constituency in the overwhelmingly Christian Kenya. A Luo tribesman like Obama's putative father(see Obama, Neptune and the Culture of Death on Kushmonster September 13, 2009), he has been accused of making common cause with "radical Muslims seeking to expand Islam in Kenya". The National Muslim Leaders Forum came out in full support of Odinga, who promised "to rewrite the Constitution of Kenya to recognize Shari'a as the only true law sanctioned by the Holy Quran..." These and similar extreme measures served to exacerbate religious tensions in addition to the already inflamed tribal divides which broke out into open warfare after the election results declared the Kikuyu tribesman Kibaki the winner. Odinga ,assured the inevitability of the ensuing carnage when he refused to accept the election results.

Though Obama subsequently posed as a disinterested broker of the disputed Kenyan elections in his own presidential primary campaign, his ongoing support of Odinga was quite obvious and in a large way responsible for the inclusion of the latter in the provisional coalition government along with the efforts of the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. This characteristic subversion of a national electoral process by the exploitation of ethnic, class, tribal and religious tensions, and the subsequent "resolution" at the behest of these same agents of provocation is the "divide and conquer" stratagem so effectively deployed in the Balkans during the breakup and civil war in the former Yugoslavia, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan, and in the republics of the former Soviet Union in the various color code"peoples revolutions". The most attempt to destabilize the Iranian government in another "disputed election" and yet another color code people power "revolution" succeeded only in a retrenchment of the reactionary regime in that country. It is interesting to note that Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement evoked Yushchenko's Orange Revolution in the Ukraine in 2004.

Obama's foray into Kenyan politics could be regarded as the coming out party for the remarkably divisive and polarizing impact with which his handlers have intended to effect the radical and necessary socio-economic changes attendant upon the engineered collapse of the American economy, while strengthening and further amalgamating the incestuous union of the financial and governmental institutional power which has been slowly coalescing over the past decades. It was no accident that the future president in 1983 had worked at Business Corporation International (BIC) after a CIA sponsored trip to Pakistan in 1981 in the possible capacity as an NOC (Non Official Cover) in the initial stages of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. According to Wayne Madsen, Obama's association with the longstanding CIA front organization involved, at the least, providing financial intelligence to the CIA. This type of pedigree might be understood in light of Obama's other decided gifts for duplicity as a preeminent qualification for his assignment as economic hit man for the post-industrial economy.


IMF Hegemony

Strauss-Kahn's recent foray into Africa was his third trip in only four months, testifying to the increasingly avid interest which the IMF is displaying towards certain nations on the continent. Kenya, Zambia, and South Africa were the particular focus on this excursion, with the usual IMF platitudes being liberally dispensed concerning its avowed and magnanimous interest in the economic and social welfare of the continent as a whole. At the end of his Kenyan mission, Strauss-Kahn in a very pithy and revealing statement disclosed that "You need us and the global economy needs you. We are trying to build something new here in Kenya, which will help you help us. Notice the interesting juxtaposition; not which will help us help you, as one might expect, but instead which will help you help us.

Just what the nature of what the IMF and its interchangeable partners in the WTO, World Bank, and WHO, are trying to "build" in Kenya and throughout the African continent can perhaps best be understood by the actions undertaken by the megalithic economic entity since its inception in 1944 as an outgrowth of the Bretton-Woods agreement, itself a creation of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference chaired by Harry Dexter White of the U.S. Treasury and English economist John Maynard Keynes. In an exceedingly gross understatement of the purposes of this cabal of elite economic theoreticians, Keynes stated with the same kind of contumacious arrogance as evinced by Strauss-Khan, "I doubt if the world understands the bigger things we are bringing to birth".

The substance of the bigger things being brought to birth are open to interpretation. The IMF, of course, depicts itself as an essential and even indispensable agent for the maintenance and development of a thriving world economy. Its mandate according to the IMF website was to ostensibly reinvigorate world trade which had collapsed during the Great Depression years due to protectionism and national barriers to foreign trade creating a competitive devaluation of national currencies in an effort to create larger export markets. As with so many of the fund's policies, such a simplistic assumption was more likely an effort to justify a prearranged agenda which had other and distinctly less altruistic aims.

The wholesale destruction visited upon Europe, Russia, and Japan during the Second World War cleared the world stage for the implementation of a world order designed to finally eliminate the antiquated and outmoded nation/state in favor of a universal world governmental body of which the United Nations itself was but the prototype. In similar manner the League of Nations had emerged from the rubble of the Great War along with the first inchoate steps towards the establishment of an Jewish homeland in Palestine with the Sykes-Picot agreement prefiguring the establishment of the State of Israel at the end of WW II. With the utter subjugation of the power of an aspiring colonial Imperial Germany, the way was paved for the next stage of the Hegelian dialectic, the Cold War. And just as the Federal Reserve laid the groundwork for the "War to End All Wars", so the supra-monetary IMF emerged internationally to establish the framework for an much greater and seemingly impossible endeavor; the elimination of the East-West Cold War struggle between the remaining superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States.

SDR

That the nature of World War IV would partake of the financial hurricanes which would devastate nations as thoroughly and more efficiently than large and protracted military struggles was prefigured in the collapse of the Bretton-Woods agreement in 1971. With the keen anticipation or, should we say, the prescient and pro-active planning which has characterized IMF agenda since its inception, a new agent of credit and monetary exchange was created in 1969 called the SDR or Special Drawing Rights. This novel financial entity antedated Nixon's announcement in 1971 of the final decoupling of gold from the US dollar as foreign sovereigns, notably France, gang rushed the U.S. Treasury seeking to exchange their suddenly dubious dollar denominations for Au. It was déjà-vu /1934, when Roosevelt had to fend off a similar unfriendly run on U.S. banks by its own citizens, declaring a bank holiday, confiscating gold and gold certificates and devaluing the dollar by 60%, while revaluing gold from $24 to $35 (A similar measure appears pending here in 2010) These sticky situations are emblematic of the kind of wanton financial destruction of which we shall see the IMF carpetbaggers are past masters.

The innate predilection of the IMF for creating crises and then proposing "solutions" for the very conflagrations they have set in motion has been the standard modus operandi from its inception. In this respect it was suggested that the SDR based flexible exchange rates which ensued in 1971 "made it easier for the various national economies to adjust to "more expensive oil". In effect though as with so many other such self-congratulatory dictums, the exact opposite was the case. Artificial shortages of crude oil created the "exogenous shocks" of rising prices for domestic products thus effectively denominating national debt in petro-dollars. Money transferred to petro-producing countries for oil was returned in the United States in Treasury bond investment thus subsidizing the exponetially rising national debt at the gas pump. In less developed countries, the inflows of IMF capital loan investment were soon flowing out in disproportionate amounts to both fund infrastructure and development projects as well as the rapidly accelerating rates of interest payments with the intended and expected diminishment of asset values, local productive capacities and the sequestering of national treasuries.

The IMF explanation of the SDR was to establish a "supplementary reserve asset" as gold and the US$ had become "inadequate to support trade and financial development". Once again in a self fulfilling prophecy, two years later in 1971 the US$ was dutifully and finally severed from any last tenuous grounding in Au and allowed to float along with and against other world currencies while retaining its status a world reserve currency. Originally valued @ .888671 gm. of fine gold, after the collapse of Bretton-Woods, the SDR came to be appraised against the original basket of currencies: Euro, JPYen, English Pound Sterling and US$, based on "exchange rates at noon on the London Market". The new and "bigger" arrangement however involved the subsumption of the dollar into the larger orbit of the IMF/World Bank macro-economic schema. This alignment some four decades later has evolved into its intended objective of ultimately jettisoning the rapidly weakening US$ in favor of the SDR and a "basket" of world currencies with the eventual inclusion of the Chinese yuan (renminbi) as a new reserve currency, an eventuality which Strauss-Khan has recently openly suggested.

It becomes quite obvious that the incremental decades long strategy enacted with the creation of the IMF/World Bank at Bretton-Woods and based upon the Keynesian economic model has finally come full circle. The departure of the U.S. industrial and manufacturing base coupled with job and capital flight along with loss of intellectual properties has been creative of a paper thin consumer-servant economy. A concomitant proliferation of progressive levels of debt, cycled and recycled into a succession of asset inflated bubbles supported only by systemic financial criminality at the Federal Reserve and Treasury with the collusion of supra-national banking cartels, has finally and fatally subverted the economic and social welfare of the people of the United States. That this signal calamity should follow so immediately on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the late 90's sell off of Russian assets under the Clinton administration reveals the IMF/World Bank agenda is rapidly approaching its denouément under the regime of Messieur Dominique Strauss-Khan.

postscript:Reply to Robert Jones On Dominique Strauss-Kahn's January 20, 2010 Asian Financial Forum address in Hong Kong

Louse-Con's most recent African campaign which concluded just a few days ago expressed a significant re-iteration of the themes contained in his Asian address. Any thorough assessment of the aims, objectives and overall agenda of the IMF/World Bank/WTO requires a careful reading between the lines of the official statements trotted out for public consumption. Basically a pack of lies interlaced with self serving platitudes, you can generally assume that any mission statement usually signifies the opposite especially from the standpoint of past history.
His disingenuous pledges to "make the financial sector safer" and "reduce the burden of the financial crisis on taxpayers" can be construed to mean more thoroughgoing subversion of financial markets (especially with derivative instruments) and a shifting of the losses inherent therein to the"taxpayers", precisely echoing the hypocrisy and outright mendacity of his promise to reverse "privatization of profits and socialization of losses" which has been an elemental corner stone of IMF asset stripping over the past several decades.
Increasing and significant investment by the PRC throughout the African continent is but another part of the IMF playbook whose quota system of SDR (Special Drawing Rights) "supplementary reserve assets" serve as the financial platform whereby, through currency and interest rate manipulations, developing countries are required to divert large -amounts of their currency into IMF deposits drawing ridiculously low rates of interest while at the same time borrowing US$ denominated SDRs at much higher interest rates to fund IMF "development and infrastructure projects".
The combination of vast untapped resources and immense pools of cheap labor in the African and South American continents combined with the vast accumulations of US Treasury assets on reserve in Chinese banks, and an emerging Chinese domestic consumer base, are a perfect set up for a global economic juggernaut destined to upend and supplant the economically eviscerated and militarily overextended U.S. imperial empire. The IMF Trojan Horse headquartered in Washington, recently funded with a $100 billion loan from Obama via the U.S. Treasury to complete its recent $1 trillion capitalization, will only ensure the inevitability of our national collapse

pps: The role of the SDR as "supplementary reserve asset" in the context of the increasingly volatile and unstable currency exchange rates assumes a growing and more significant importance in the internal affairs of nations via the preponderance of sovereign debt. The IMF, in like manner, will grow to assume its long expected and intended status as the ultimate arbiter and repository of world currencies in the establishment of the new world reserve currency. The inevitable addition of the Chinese yuan to the present baskets of currencies will signify the attainment of the long held IMF aim of supplanting the US$ as the ultimate unit of account. A polar shift in the world economic paradigm has been underway since the inception of the IMF at the watershed Bretton-Woods Agreement which paved the way for the establishment of Keynesian economic modalities in the emerging trilateral sphere of post war "economic cooperation". The creation of the SDR in 1969, anticipating the establishment of free floating rates of exchange, and the final abandonment of the gold standard, itself laid the groundwork for the supplanting of the provisional aims of Bretton-Woods in favor of the emerging petro-dollar economies based on relative consumption of oil resources.The successive exogenous shocks, attendant upon the new oil economy, to global national economies and particularly newly emerging and oil importing third world nations necessitated the establishment of a successive adaptation of IMF lending instruments to accommodate increasing borrowing from commercial banks at increasing rates of interest. For this purpose, SDR allocated holdings involving loans paid and charged to IMF member nations on a portion of requisite quota subscriptions have been enabled. In the context of of the potential claim by the IMF via the SDR on "freely usable currencies" of its members, the competition for export markets by means of devaluation of national currencies, and the raising of barriers to foreign trade are in the final stages of elimination in favor of the global entity envisioned by IMF world governance. The suggestion that Greece, or for that matter any other IMF member nation would petition the fund for stand by arrangements and other forms of financial support incumbent upon structural and enhanced structural adjustments is and has been a given for the past several decades


pps: The assumption here as with so much other reportage concerning the crisis in Euroland is that the IMF has stood aloof from the economic dislocations roiling the continent and even the United States itself. Ever since its inception more than a half century ago, and through its successive evolutions through the significant economic disruptions which were the expected and intended results of its own policies, the IMF has played a pivotal if not generally acknowledged role in the inexorable progression to the institution of a world economic order with the SDR "supplementary reserve asset" as the fulcrum of a new world reserve currency.The glaringly obvious disparity between the IMF projected GDP growth, sovereign balances versus the "actuals" is nothing especially new in the IMF playbook. This tactic is an essential tool in the undermining and subversion of existing economies by an overestimation of asset values and GDP growth with the obvious intention of exploiting the resulting and unsustainable gap between the devaluing assets and the exponentially developing debt burdens engineered largely through IMF allocations and quota reserve funds interest rates.What has happened here in the United States over the past several years is an object lesson in the application of IMF funding, interest rate and currency exchange manipulations which have long been standard practice in third world and developing nations and are now coming home to roost. First in the Euro Zone, where sovereigns will be attacked and picked apart one by one by currency speculation and counter party claims to OTC derivative contracts, and secondly in the U.S. where the pickings will be still larger with vast pension funds, state and municipality bonds and infrastructure developments all fatally encumbered with the same excessive leverage, unserviceable debt levels and the same OTCD outstanding claims on pre-engineered funding gaps, courtesy of the Federal Reserve and its IMF big brother.

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