MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘World Bank’

Goodbye G20, hello BRICS+

Posted by M. C. on November 18, 2022

Meanwhile, the role of the BRICS’s New Development Bank (NDB) as well as the China-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will be enhanced – coordinating infrastructure loans across the spectrum, as BRICS+ will be increasingly shunning dictates imposed by the US-dominated IMF and the World Bank.

https://thecradle.co/Article/Columns/18477

By 

Pepe Escobar

The redeeming quality of a tense G20 held in Bali – otherwise managed by laudable Indonesian graciousness – was to sharply define which way the geopolitical winds are blowing.

That was encapsulated in the Summit’s two highlights: the much anticipated China-US presidential meeting – representing the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century – and the final G20 statement.

The 3-hour, 30-minute-long face-to-face meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Joe Biden – requested by the White House – took place at the Chinese delegation’s residence in Bali, and not at the G20 venue at the luxury Apurva Kempinski in Nusa Dua.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs concisely outlined what really mattered. Specifically, Xi told Biden that Taiwan independence is simply out of the question. Xi also expressed hope that NATO, the EU, and the US will engage in “comprehensive dialogue” with Russia. Instead of confrontation, the Chinese president chose to highlight the layers of common interest and cooperation.

Biden, according to the Chinese, made several points. The US does not seek a New Cold War; does not support “Taiwan independence;” does not support “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan”; does not seek “decoupling” from China; and does not want to contain Beijing.

However, the recent record shows Xi has few reasons to take Biden at face value.

The final G20 statement was an even fuzzier matter: the result of arduous compromise.

As much as the G20 is self-described as “the premier forum for global economic cooperation,” engaged to “address the world’s major economic challenges,” the G7 inside the G20 in Bali had the summit de facto hijacked by war. “War” gets almost double the number of mentions in the statement compared to “food” after all.

The collective west, including the Japanese vassal state, was bent on including the war in Ukraine and its “economic impacts” – especially the food and energy crisis – in the statement. Yet without offering even a shade of context, related to NATO expansion. What mattered was to blame Russia – for everything.

The Global South effect

It was up to this year’s G20 host Indonesia – and the next host, India – to exercise trademark Asian politeness and consensus building. Jakarta and New Delhi worked extremely hard to find wording that would be acceptable to both Moscow and Beijing. Call it the Global South effect.

Still, China wanted changes in the wording. This was opposed by western states, while Russia did not review the last-minute wording because Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had already departed.

On point 3 out of 52, the statement “expresses its deepest regret over the aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine and demands the complete and unconditional withdrawal of armed forces from the territory of Ukraine.”

“Russian aggression” is the standard NATO mantra – not shared by virtually the whole Global South.

The statement draws a direct correlation between the war and a non-contextualized “aggravation of pressing problems in the global economy – slowing economic growth, rising inflation, disruption of supply chains, worsening energy, and food security, increased risks to financial stability.”

As for this passage, it could not be more self-evident: “The use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible. The peaceful resolution of conflicts, efforts to address crises, as well as diplomacy and dialogue, are vital. Today’s era must not be of war.”

This is ironic given that NATO and its public relations department, the EU, “represented” by the unelected eurocrats of the European Commission, don’t do “diplomacy and dialogue.”

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Great Reset Morality: Euthanization of the Inessentials — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on April 21, 2021

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/04/19/great-reset-morality-euthanization-of-inessentials/

Joaquin Flores

https://player.vimeo.com/video/538752416
Our aim is to attempt to understand the real motives of the elites, understanding that aside from what they may view as their own agency or intentions, are paradigmatic and formative questions in culture, of which they too are subjects of.

2 Corinthians 10:3-5

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh:

For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;

Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ

Genocide or Slavery? What do the elites plan for us? In the next several installments, we will address possible competing visions for the Great Reset’s technocratic coup against constitutional republican norms.

The present debate must take into account the status of corporate culture and corporate ideology and ideals in the transition from plutocratic oligarchical norms into technocratic oligarchical norms.

While the corporate elites of the banking institutes centered around the IMF, World Bank, Bank for International Settlements, and voiced through the World Economic Forum have a particular vision for the society they want to shape, they do not do so in a vacuum. Rather, they themselves are both shaped and severely limited by the paradigm from which they emerged, and the combined ecosphere of social views within which they swim.

While some form of 4th Industrial Revolution is inevitable for the same reason that the Luddites of 19th century England were doomed from the start, the particular vision of a post-financial order being now enforced by the elites only bears all of the greatest defects and birthmarks of the historical era and paradigm from which their values and visions were formed.

This piece aims to focus on that sphere of values and visions – in short, the corporate ideal.

We have demonstrated that there is a positive version of the 4IR that free citizens can fight for and win, but they must both be engaged in a fight where the freedoms they have to carry out that fight against the Bill Gates and Klaus Schwabs of the world, give shape and form to the same type of society which can be formed on those same constitutional and republican principles of freedom, community empowerment, and individual, bodily, and economic autonomy, and property rights.

The debate surrounds several end-game scenarios of western elites with this Great Rest Agenda for 2030. Primarily, these are;

Whether the eradication of the majority of humanity is preferable;

Or

Whether the enslavement of the majority of humanity is preferable;

Naturally, any varying combination of the above is within play, but we are interested in whether one will predominate over the other.

In other words, is it preferable that some 9/10ths of the world’s population figure is eliminated? Or that some number closer to the present number is sustained, but reduced to complete subservience? By this we mean regimentation, surveillance, restricted movement, and cybernetic controls over cognitive and biological processes. Or is some measure squarely in between these two the most preferable?

Another possibility, is that after some 9/10ths of the population figure is reduced, that some relatively ‘normal’ (in terms of liberal democracy) rights (privileges) are ‘given’ to the remaining global population. This much may be entertained if what we are involved in presently is a broad eugenics program, not just blind population reduction, so that the remaining population will be those who – while not a part of the present financial elite – are considered genetically or socially important in terms of the gene pool or remaining subject/underling population, as part of some idealized vision of a hierarchical society somewhat reminiscent in form of the one we are presently leaving behind. As dark as that seems, we must understand that this is the ‘light’ scenario – which doesn’t speak to any benevolence afoot, but rather to the utter severity of the very ugly and real situation at hand.

In our next installment, we will dig further into these two alternative visions. Within these, various subplots are possible.

But to really understand things, will require a deeper discussion into the nature of rulership, of power, of control, of whether pain and suffering are tools towards an end, or ends in and of themselves. And while this part of the discussion will no doubt be a more dazzling encounter with the grim, the underlying thesis will be lost without an understanding of the corporate ideology which shaped the present discourse, which is our immediate subject today.

But nevertheless it came to pass that crimes against humanity; mass imprisonment, regimentation, and human experimentation towards a type of reified transhumanist dystopia, had come to characterize the trajectory of a totalitarian societal development in the western world.

With this, of course we refer to the Covid-19 measures and the Great Reset Agenda for 2030.

See the rest here

© 2010 – 2021 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

The One Certain Victor in the Pandemic War – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on April 24, 2020

Indeed, the one certain victor in the coronavirus pandemic war will likely be Big Government. As John Donne wrote, “No winter shall abate this spring’s increase.”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/patrick-j-buchanan/the-one-certain-victor-in-the-pandemic-war/

By

“War is the health of the state,” wrote the progressive Randolph Bourne during the First World War, after which he succumbed to the Spanish flu.

America’s war on the coronavirus pandemic promises to be no exception to the axiom. However long this war requires, the gargantuan state will almost surely emerge triumphant.

Currently, the major expenditures of the U.S. government, as well as a growing share of total federal spending, are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

None of these programs will be curtailed or reduced this year or next. And if the Democrats win in November, the nation will likely take a great leap forward – toward national health insurance.

Republicans are calling for a suspension until 2021 of payroll taxes used to finance Social Security and Medicare. While that would provide an economic stimulus, it would also blow a huge hole in federal revenue and further enlarge the deficit and national debt.

Even before the virus struck with full force in March, that deficit was projected at or near $1 trillion — not only for fiscal year 2020 but for every year of the new decade.

The next major item of the budget is defense, considered untouchable to the Republican Party. Hence a confident prediction: This generation will never again see a budget deficit smaller than $1 trillion.

Indeed, the $2 trillion lately voted on to save businesses and keep paychecks going to workers will lift the deficit for 2020 above $3 trillion.

As of March 1, 2020, the nation was at full employment, with the lowest jobless rates among women and minorities in our history.

Less than two months later, 26 million Americans are out of work.

These workers will soon begin picking up unemployment checks, a new burden on the federal budget, to which will be added the cost of expanding food stamps, rent supplements and welfare payments.

Consider education.

Though Harvard, with its $41 billion endowment, was shamed into returning the $8.7 million in bailout money coming its way, does anyone believe the stream of U.S. revenue going into higher education will ever fall back to what it was before the pandemic?

As for that $1.5 trillion in student loan debt, is it more likely that vast sum will be paid back by those who incurred the debt, or that it will be piled atop the federal debt?

Congress has already voted to bail out our stressed hospitals.

  Now, standing patiently in line for their bailouts, are the states — and America’s cities and counties. These governmental units are virtually all certain to face falling tax revenue and expanded social demands, leading to exploding deficits.

Their case: You bailed out the businesses and the hospitals. What about us? When does our turn come?

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, anticipating the mammoth bill for bailing out states and cities, has suggested that governments be allowed to use bankruptcy laws to write down and write off their debts.

Probably not going to happen.

Recall what happened when President Gerald Ford told New York City that Uncle Sam was not going to bail out the Big Apple. “Ford to City: Drop Dead!” was the famous headline splashed across the front page of the New York Daily News.

Ford recanted but did not recover. His perceived callousness in the face of New York City’s crisis — though that fiscal crisis was entirely of the city’s own making — factored into his defeat by Jimmy Carter.

Donald Trump is not going to give Red State governors facing gaping budget deficits because of the coronavirus crisis the wet mitten across the face. For his political future will be decided by those states. 

Still, the cost of bailing them out promises to be enormous and to create a precedent for bailouts without end.

Then there is the clamor, already begun, from, and on behalf of, the Third World. The IMF, World Bank and the West, it is said, have a moral obligation to replace revenue shortfalls these nations are facing from lost remittances from their workers in the developed world.

There is talk of hundreds of billions of dollars in monetary transfers from the world’s North to the world’s South.

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist once famously declared: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

What is more likely to be drowned in that bathtub is the philosophy: “That government governs best which governs least.”

What is more likely to be drowned in that bathtub is the philosophy that champions small government, the primacy of the private sector, a belief in “pay as you go,” and that “balanced budgets” are the ideal.

Call it Robert Taft conservatism. Today, it appears irrelevant.

Indeed, the one certain victor in the coronavirus pandemic war will likely be Big Government. As John Donne wrote, “No winter shall abate this spring’s increase.”

Be seeing you

 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Working Around Leviathan – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 18, 2020

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/01/lew-rockwell/working-around-leviathan/

Here is what strikes me as a profound political paradox. The US government is larger, more consolidated, more powerful, and more intrusive than it has ever been in its history —indeed our sweet land of liberty is now host to the most powerful leviathan state that has ever existed.

Never before has a government in human history owned more weapons of mass destruction, looted as much wealth from a country, or assumed unto itself the power to regulate the minutiae of daily life as much as this one. By comparison to the overgrown behemoth in Washington, with its printing press to crank out money for the world and its annual $2.2 trillion dollars in largesse to toss at adoring crowds, even communist states were powerless paupers.

At the same time — and here is the paradox — the United States is overall the wealthiest society in the history of the world. The World Bank lists Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Norway as competitive in this regard, but the statistics don’t take into account the challenges to mass wealth that exist in the US relative to small, homogenous states such as its closest competitors. In the United States, more people from more classes and geographic regions have access to more goods and services at prices they can afford, and possess the disposable income and access to credit to put them to use, than any other time in history. Truly we live in the age of extreme abundance.

What is the relationship between the rise of big government and the rise of American prosperity? It seems that people on the right and left are quick to confuse correlation with causation. They believe that the US is wealthy because the government is big and expansive. This error is probably the most common of all errors in political economy. It is just assumed that buildings are safe because of building codes, that stock markets are not dens of thieves because of the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), that the elderly don’t starve and die because of Social Security, and so on, all the way to concluding that we should credit big government for American wealth.

Cause and Effect Commission

Now, this is where economic logic comes into play. You have to understand something about the way cause and effect operates in human affairs to understand that big government does not bring about prosperity. Government is not productive. It has no wealth of its own. All it acquires it must take from the private sector. You might believe that it is necessary and you might believe it does great good, but we must grant that it does not have the ability to produce wealth in the way the market does.

Lasting prosperity can only come about through human effort in the framework of a market economy that allows people to cooperate to their mutual advantage, innovate and invest in an environment of freedom, retain earnings as private property, and save generation to generation without fear of having estates looted through taxation and inflation. This is the source of wealth. This is the means by which a rising population is fed, clothed, and housed. This is the method by which even the poorest country can become rich.

Now, does this system as described characterize the United States? Yes and no. This is, after all, the country that recently jailed Martha Stewart, the world’s most successful woman entrepreneur, for the crime of having not disclosed to the inquisitors every last detail about the circumstances surrounding her choice to sell a stock before its bottom dropped out.

Some of our most successful magazines celebrate entrepreneurship, but recently enacted laws, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, empowered the federal government to oversee the books of every publicly listed company and even manage their methods and operations in every detail. Some have compared this act to FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act.

This is a country with cradle-to-grave security promises that just recently added a benefit of low-price prescriptions for seniors that is going to cost hundreds of billions over time. This is a country that, when faced with a problem of airport security, created a whole new federal bureaucracy to gum up the workings of every airport in the country.

These are incredibly bad policies, enterprise killers in every way. Why, then, does enterprise continue to thrive? The answer is complex. In many ways we continue to live off the borrowed capital of previous generations. Some economic sectors benefit too greatly from an artificial injection of created credit, making prosperity seem more real than it is in sectors such as housing and perhaps stocks. There is a bitter irony at work here too in that the larger the economy is, the more there is to tax, and so government grows as an aftereffect of economic growth.

People Resist Control Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Everyone Washes Their Hands as Gaza’s Economy Goes Into Freefall – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on October 3, 2018

https://original.antiwar.com/cook/2018/10/01/everyone-washes-their-hands-as-gazas-economy-goes-into-freefall/

by 

The moment long feared is fast approaching in Gaza, according to a new report by the World Bank. After a decade-long Israeli blockade and a series of large-scale military assaults, the economy of the tiny coastal enclave is in “freefall”.

At a meeting of international donors in New York on Thursday, coinciding with the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, the World Bank painted an alarming picture of Gaza’s crisis. Unemployment now stands at close to 70 per cent and the economy is contracting at an ever faster rate.

While the West Bank’s plight is not yet as severe, it is not far behind, countries attending the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee were told. Gaza’s collapse could bring down the entire Palestinian banking sector…

In fact, the main parties that could make a difference appear intent on allowing the deterioration to continue. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »