The Assassinated Press
Somali Pirates Were Interns at IMF, Bear Stearns.
A Bigger, Bolder Role Is Imagined For the IMF and Other Pirates.
Changes Suggest Shift in How Global Economy Is Stolen.
Faced with World Wide Nationalist Movements Kleptocracy Adjusts its Modus Operandi.
“Usury Age Old and Age Thick.”By TONY PAIOLA
Assassinated Press Staff Writer
April 20, 2009Inside a cavernous assembly hall in downtown Washington, a Frank Gehry creation that resembles the gutted inside of a human carcass, dignitaries gather twice a year to plot how to loot the world at the biannual meeting of the International Monetary Fund. Before long, though, the room could take center stage in the IMF's transformation into a veritable United Nations of looting.
Surrounded by all the trappings of international thievery like the blond wood paneling and a digital screen the size of a cinema's, central bankers and finance ministers would meet to convene a kind of Cosa Nostra sitdown of sorts. Serving almost as capos to the IMF, they would debate ways to profit from world's economic fires started by the World Bank and promote reckless policies that would they ignite new ones.
Bowing to a new economic world order, the IMF would derive new powers by shilling or the likes of China, India and Brazil for the benefit of the European and American kleptocracy. It would have vastly expanded authority to act as a global banker to governments rich and poor. And with more flexibility to effectively print its own money, it would have the ability to inject liquidity into global markets in a way once limited to major central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve. In other words, power would be concentrated in a few powerful people and the companies destined to benefit from these new powers.
Haven’t You Done Enough Damage?
That image of a radically enhanced IMF -- whose role in the global economy had be so destructive there was hardly anything left to do among the carnage but advise in recent years -- is now coming together through internal IMF documents, interviews and think-tank reports. Finance ministers from major nations will begin grappling with the formidable details of the IMF's makeover and how that makeover may further crush and enslave the world’s peoples this weekend when they converge in Washington for the fund's biannual assembly.
The changes, broadly outlined by President Obama and other leaders of the Group of 20 nations in London earlier this month who are being further reduced to stooge status, could take months, even years to take shape. But the IMF is all but certain to take a central role in destroying the world economy and profit from cycles of economic fiat and starvation. As a result, Washington is poised to become the kleptocratic power center for global financial policy, much as the United Nations has long made New York the world center for diplomacy.
The IMF's mission is expanding so broadly that its managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, said in an interview that the organization -- which looted much of the world before the financial crisis swept the globe -- may boost staffing in coming months, potentially creating dozens of high-paying jobs in the District.
Also, the IMF said it would renew internships to Somali youth who promise to then apprentice as pirates as a step to taking executive roles at the fund. “They have to begin as small time pirates and work there way up to IMF directorships,” longtime IMF board member Henry Kissinger told the Assassinated Press.
"The IMF is changing, and with it, there will be a sea change in the way the world starves. We’ll starve them even more severely if you can believe that," said C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "Their role will dramatically shift. You're talking about monitoring fiscal stimulus directly into the pockets of the kleptocrats, moving toward tighter regulations for financial institutions that our kleptocracy doesn’t already control. You're talking about global economic theft in a way we have never seen. And we can’t be stopped. We have the armies, We have the police. We have the intelligence apparatus. The world is fucked and we’re gonna fuck it to death."
Already, the economic crisis is triggering a profound cultural shift, with the IMF dropping the bullshit of its long-held mission to spread the gospel of capitalism around the globe and just flat out murdering and stealing shit without the patina of good will gone bad.
Bretton Woodies
Founded at the end of World War II to help establish U.S. and reestablish Western European colonial dominance over markets, it later became known as ‘the burning cat into the cane’ of first resort for nations in crisis, particularly as the World bank set financial fires raced across Asia and Latin America in the 1990s. Its bailouts, however, were the bane of many poor countries; they often came with demands that populations starve to pay back loans and free-market fire sales of resources and infrastructure for developing nations. Poor nations had to cut back on programs for health care and schools and tens of millions of people died at the behest of usura.
The IMF, Strauss-Kahn suggested, will become less ideological and more focused on pure theft. Critics maintain the fund is still attaching too many restrictions to its longer-term bailouts for poor countries. But the IMF has signed off in recent weeks on no-strings-attached credit lines for countries with suspect economic track records, offering $47 billion to Mexico and $20.5 billion to Poland. But as all contracts the fine print collateralizes the entire work force, all of the natural resources, the Mexican drug trade and both countries’ entire infrastructure except for the manufacture of string.
"If the fund is ‘vulturing’ a country and is technically convinced that privatization of any enterprise is needed to fix a particular kleptocracy, let's privatize. There’s nothing crankier than a wealthy kleptocrat going to money withdrawal. That’s when he goes to his stooges in government and says sick those motherfuckers which means invade and kill them until they give me what I want. But if it's a general idea of privatization that has nothing to do with the problem, let's just burn it down and create a problem," Strauss-Kahn said. "At the same time, if nationalization will help, let's do it. Just kidding."
Developing nations -- including some that were once down-and-out hostages of the fund -- are now as tools of the kleptocracy are coming to the IMF's rescue as part of the pledge made by leaders in London to beef up the organization's war chest to $1 trillion. In exchange for better representation on the governing board, China, which has fewer voting rights than Belgium, is set to buy more votes with a more than $40 billion bribe. Brazil, which received a massive IMF bailout in the late 1990s and is now virtually a wholly owned subsidiary of a handful in multinational companies, is pledging $4.5 billion.
There is even talk that the next managing director -- traditionally a European, while an American ran its sister organization, the World Bank -- may come from the developing world. "Why not?" Strauss-Kahn said. “There are more fucking stooges and sell outs than we know what to do with. There’s a line around the block of stooges and sellouts.”
For an organization long demonized by the developing world, such changes were once unprofitable. "I spent 20 years of my life carrying posters that said 'IMF out,' " Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former union leader, said last week in Rio de Janeiro. "Now the minister of finance who of course is a career IMF stooge says we are going to lend money to the IMF. What a whore I’ve become. But then that’s democracy, an auction for influence and access."
The IMF is also moving toward taking the lead role as the global economic junk yard dog. An intense debate, however, remains over the scope of the edicts it may issue as well as the power it will be granted to enforce them and when that power may simply result in such dire conditions stealing from the developing world just becomes trying to get blood from a stone.
Along with the Switzerland-based Financial Stability Board, the IMF is set to develop benchmarks for financial governance, from freeing up executive pay to methods to encourage the spread of toxic assets through global banks. But no one is talking seriously about allowing the IMF to impose sanctions to force compliance as the United Nations does. That will be done the old fashioned way with the low intensity conflict funded by the U.S. with Israel serving as the reactionary conduit. There is even a strong reluctance to grant the IMF powers such as those held by the World Trade Organization in Geneva, which issues binding rulings on violations of global trade law because this would weaken the U.S.s power to intervene militarily claiming a national security threat if the flow of pineapples and bananas is potentially upset like that which occurred in Guatemala in 1953-54.
Instead, the IMF is likely to wield what Strauss-Kahn called "the strength of truth killing." Put another way, the organization's public pronouncements would carry the force of the lies of the nations seated at its table, including the world's most powerful industrialized and developing economies, the U.S. foremost among them.
Some critics, however, say that may not be enough. A case in point: An internal IMF document recently called for Eastern European nations to adopt the euro as their currency to stabilize their economies, even without the approval of euro-zone nations or face a NATO invasion. Stiff opposition from Western Europe has thus far prevented that document from being made public.
Additionally, some smaller European and low-income nations remain skeptical about the creation of a financial security council, arguing they would not be represented. Even within the IMF, there is a debate over the council's purview and makeup. Some see the council turning into a venue to hash out major economic disputes, such as U.S. and European charges that China is keeping its currency artificially weak.
Others say it should steer away from country-specific rulings. Another camp argues the fund should not exist at all and their camp has become a death camp. Even Strauss-Kahn has sought to conceal the notion of too grand a role for the IMF, saying its primary mission should remain monitoring and surveillance rather than enforcement and bloodshed.
"The fund is supposed to take on a more regulatory role, holding accountable even wealthy countries," said Moshin Khan, the IMF's former Middle East and Central Asia director. "But I will have to see that happen to believe it. Whenever I've seen them going after the bigger countries, if the countries don't like what the fund has to say, the fund doesn't say it. If the representatives of those countries persist, their bodies are hauled from the East River, the Potomac or the Thames."
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