GOVERNMENTS: PART F
Question for today: what good is immortality if it comes with immorality?
The blog below takes on some new meaning since President Trump committed 50 million dollars of tax payer money without congressional approval to the World Bank:
http://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/women-entrepreneurs
"To help unlock the potential of women entrepreneurs, the new Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) will enable more than $1 billion in financing to improve access to capital, provide technical assistance, and invest in projects and programs that support women and women-led SMEs in World Bank Group client countries.
"The goal of the facility is to leverage donor grant funding of over $325 million and mobilize more than $1 billion in international financial institution and commercial financing, by working with financial intermediaries, funds, and other market actors, potentially through similar models as the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) Women Entrepreneurs Opportunity Facility/Banking on Women program.
"The We-Fi facility will work to break down barriers to financial access and provide complementary services such as capacity building, access to networks and mentors, and opportunities to link with domestic and global markets as well as improving the business environment for women-owned or women-led SMEs across the developing world.
"We-Fi builds on the success of past and current programs of the World Bank Group and other partners, while reaching into new areas, supporting women-led businesses at earlier stages of growth, and unlocking access to equity and insurance services. At the same time, the facility aims to support complementary public sector interventions that strengthen the enabling environment and enhance market opportunities for women entrepreneurs.
"We-Fi fills a gap where there was no significant fund or facility committed to a holistic public and private sector approach to addressing the constraints faced by women entrepreneurs."
Note: while this seems like a liberal save-all-the-women program, please actually read what's going on. First, they are not giving grants , they are "leveraging" grants from other institutions. Second, they are using their billion to provide advice and council and open insurance services which they may or may not be involved with. Third, they want to provide coaching, access to networks which may or may not listen access or not, and to mentors. Who may need payment of some sort for their mentorship, making the mentorship look suspect. Fourth, and most important, they want to open doors to easy finance for all the women applying. Easy finance crashed the world economy because debt was and still is, viewed as a commodity. A new crash, very likely because the US and world finances continue to blindly pretend such practices didn't crash the system, would mean all those small businesses would face loans called in before they were solvent enough to withstand the blow. What it may be doing is actually putting a new class of hopeful new business people at unnecessary risk. Or adding monetary stress to an already stressed small business to merely add to their disaster capitalism resume below.
I sometimes seem to be attacking capitalism, but I am really attacking the application of various forms of capitalism. It is an economic system even as socialism and all the various spots on the spectrum between what is seen as two extremes. Understand: the extremes I've discussed result from seeing an economic system as a religion. From seeing those who are practicing some form of what national leaders deem their religion as, therefore, friends. But socialism still exists. Oh, here is the country at the top of that list:
http://blog.peerform.com/top-ten-most-socialist-countries-in-the-world/
"In China the government manages and controls the economy. Many of the domestic companies are owned and run by the government. Recently, the Chinese economy has become more geared towards capitalism, but is still officially socialist. Life in China remains relatively less stressful and more relaxed than life in capitalist countries like America.
You see, the country of China remains socialist with the government ALLOWING capitalist expansion. But that would hardly make them a king of the east since the companies are the real kings running the economy. Except for one little fact: the government can seize all those assets including the business infrastructures and proceed to run them itself whenever it chooses. If you look back at the profile of Xi, you discover his daughter went to Harvard and you will find many of the countries firms operated on all the lower and middle tiers by Chinese, something the government insisted upon. One American manager of a factory plant in Vietnam told of being followed by government reps anywhere he went and of workers telling him they really wanted to take jobs from the USA not get rich themselves. True those leaderships use up subordinate labor at a killing pace but that is seen as again that term "acceptable losses". The point is China and Vietnam at least are positioning midlevel business people to take over operations when government views the time as right and when they feel the capitalist banking system is no longer in control and capable of leverage power by using disaster capitalism ro by undermining their ciurrencies with false" facts."
Precedent exists for such actions.
http://www.reuters.com/article/oil-nationalisations-idUSL5E8HEDXH20120615
By Peg Mackey and Andrew Callus
VIENNA, June 15 Venezuela's oil minister stood up in public this week and denounced the man beside him as "predatory" and a peddler of "the colonialist high-handedness which has done so much harm to the world". His unfortunate neighbour on the conference podium was the boss of U.S. oil firm ConocoPhillips, which is claiming billions of dollars in compensation for the 2007 nationalisation of its business there.
"Minister Rafael Ramirez' own boss, President Hugo Chavez, is one of the world's most outspoken critics of capitalism.
"The 21st Century nationalisers may have good reason to believe they can do a better job than the foreign and private sector oil firms they see as careless short-termists
"Veteran oil men point to a decades-old example of a well-run state company overseeing steady, efficient, modern production - Saudi Aramco. The one-time joint venture between U.S. companies and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is now strictly a state entity.
"It was on another podium back in 1967 that the American senior vice president of Aramco, then called the Arabian American Oil Company, told 200 young Saudis they would always be employed by a U.S. firm.
"Read tersely from note cards, his words angered many in the audience. In their eyes, much was wrong. Operations were being run from New York, Dallas and San Francisco, while Saudi oilfield workers lived in shanties.
"As the world grew thirstier for Saudi oil in the 1970s, the U.S. companies exploited the kingdom's reserves at "ridiculously high rates", cutting corners and making a mess of the oilfields and reservoirs, said Sadad Husseini, a former senior Saudi Aramco official.
(This was a response to the statement by Armand Hammer, late president of Occidental oil, about a "drain America first" policy in oil companies, that is, taking oil from this country before taking it from other available sources made no sense. His view was that it was better to take all the oil from foreign sources until they dried up and leave American oil, already available, in the ground and saving it until it was the last source, making America powerful in the long run. He saw himself as a successful American. He wanted the USA in as strong a position as possible for as long as possible. He died in 1990. Current oil company policy seems aimed at taking every ounce of oil from the US now and aimed at the corporate abandonment of the USA. Will)
"The general culture was: discover the resource, squeeze it as cheaply as possible and then move on."
"Fed up with Big Oil's mentality, a Saudi ruling class with a strong sense of ownership oversaw a nationalisation of Aramco that was completed in 1982.
"We were not going to squander or mishandle our assets," said Husseini, who was in charge of exploration and development. "We started building schools, creating jobs and developing our resources over 30 to 40 years ... We spent many years in the 80's correcting the problems they had left behind."
(Whether or not we like the Saudis and whether or not we suspect their motives, it seems the proper thing to do to protect their national interests. Will)
"The key to the Saudi model's success has been consistency - and that will continue," said a senior Western oil executive familiar with the inner workings of the state oil giant. "King Abdullah clearly sees Aramco as a national champion and is willing to develop young Saudis."
"Lucky geology helped. The kingdom straddles the world's largest oil reserves and they are easy to get at.
"Other similarly blessed countries have patchier records and less reason to blame the international oil companies for their woes - although Ramirez did exactly that in his speech this week at an OPEC industry conference - naming ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil."
One should add that, from the day of their takeover, the Saudis have kept explosives rigged to all their operations meaning seizing the oil wells or the operation costs the "winner" years of work reconstructing the whole thing. Rumor has it that the Saudi's have nuclear materials available to poison the oil wells for centuries to come if they lose power.
Big business has other indictments against it.
Naomi Klein on shock and disaster capitalism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG9CM_J00bw
Book review as summation of a theory:
Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe
by Antony Loewenstein
Disaster has become big business. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein travels across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies cash in on organized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining.
What emerges through Loewenstein’s reporting is a dark history of multinational corporations that, with the aid of media and political elites, have grown more powerful than national governments. In the twenty-first century, the vulnerable have become the world’s most valuable commodity.
Klein detailing the Katrina model for disaster profiteering:
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/24/get-ready-for-the-first-shocks-of-trumps-disaster-capitalism/
"WE ALREADY KNOW that the Trump administration plans to deregulate markets, wage all-out war on “radical Islamic terrorism,” trash climate science and unleash a fossil-fuel frenzy. It’s a vision that can be counted on to generate a tsunami of crises and shocks: economic shocks, as market bubbles burst; security shocks, as blowback from foreign belligerence comes home; weather shocks, as our climate is further destabilized; and industrial shocks, as oil pipelines spill and rigs collapse, which they tend to do, especially when enjoying light-touch regulation.
"All this is dangerous enough. What’s even worse is the way the Trump administration can be counted on to exploit these shocks politically and economically.
"Speculation is unnecessary. All that’s required is a little knowledge of recent history. Ten years ago, I published “The Shock Doctrine,” a history of the ways in which crises have been systematically exploited over the last half century to further a radical pro-corporate agenda. The book begins and ends with the response to Hurricane Katrina, because it stands as such a harrowing blueprint for disaster capitalism.
"That’s relevant because of the central, if little-recalled role played by the man who is now the U.S. vice president, Mike Pence. At the time Katrina hit New Orleans, Pence was chairman of the powerful and highly ideological Republican Study Committee. On September 13, 2005 — just 14 days after the levees were breached and with parts of New Orleans still underwater — the RSC convened a fateful meeting at the offices of the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.
"Under Pence’s leadership, the group came up with a list of “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices” — 32 policies in all, each one straight out of the disaster capitalism playbook.
"To get a sense of how the Trump administration will respond to its first crises, it’s worth reading the list in full (and noting Pence’s name right at the bottom).
This list appeared in an email sent by Rep. Paul Teller on September 13, 2005
Katrina
Gas Prices
Paul S. Teller
Deputy Director
House Republican Study Committee (RSC)
Office of Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), Chairman
202-226-9718--phone 202-226-1633--fax
"What stands out in the package of pseudo “relief” policies is the commitment to wage all-out war on labor standards and on the public sphere — which is ironic because the failure of public infrastructure is what turned Katrina into a human catastrophe. Also notable is the determination to use any opportunity to strengthen the hand of the oil and gas industry.
The first three items on the RSC list are “automatically suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas,” a reference to the law that required federal contractors to pay a living wage; “make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone”; and “make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone (comprehensive tax incentives and waiving of regulations).”
"Another demand called for giving parents vouchers to use at charter schools, a move perfectly in line with the vision held by Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos.
"All these measures were announced by President George W. Bush within the week. Under pressure, Bush was eventually forced to reinstate the labor standards, though they were largely ignored by contractors. There is every reason to believe this will be the model for the multibillion-dollar infrastructure investments Trump is using to court the labor movement. Repealing Davis-Bacon for those projects was reportedly already floated at Monday’s meeting with leaders of construction and building trade unions.
"Back in 2005, the Republican Study Committee meeting produced more ideas that gained presidential support. Climate scientists have directly linked the increased intensity of hurricanes to warming ocean temperatures. This connection, however, didn’t stop Pence and the RSC from calling on Congress to repeal environmental regulations on the Gulf Coast, give permission for new oil refineries in the United States, and to greenlight “drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”
"All these measures are a surefire way to drive up greenhouse gas emissions, the major human contributor to climate change, yet they were immediately championed by the president under the guise of responding to a devastating storm.
"The oil industry wasn’t the only one to profit from Hurricane Katrina, of course. So did a slew of well-connected contractors, who turned the Gulf Coast into a laboratory for privatized disaster response.
"The companies that snatched up the biggest contracts were the familiar gang from the invasion of Iraq: Halliburton’s KBR unit won a $60 million gig to reconstruct military bases along the coast. Blackwater was hired to protect FEMA employees from looters. Parsons, infamous for its sloppy Iraq work, was brought in for a major bridge construction project in Mississippi. Fluor, Shaw, Bechtel, CH2M Hill — all top contractors in Iraq — were hired by the government to provide mobile homes to evacuees just 10 days after the levees broke. Their contracts ended up totaling $3.4 billion, no open bidding required.
"And no opportunity for profit was left untapped. Kenyon, a division of the mega funeral conglomerate Service Corporation International (a major Bush campaign donor), was hired to retrieve the dead from homes and streets. The work was extraordinarily slow, and bodies were left in the broiling sun for days. Emergency workers and local volunteer morticians were forbidden to step in to help because handling the bodies impinged on Kenyon’s commercial territory.
"And as with so many of Trump’s decisions so far, relevant experience often appeared to have nothing to do with how contracts were allocated. AshBritt, a company paid half a billion dollars to remove debris, reportedly didn’t own a single dump truck and farmed out the entire job to contractors.
"Even more striking was the company that FEMA paid $5.2 million to perform the crucial role of building a base camp for emergency workers in St. Bernard Parish, a suburb of New Orleans. The camp construction fell behind schedule and was never completed. When the contractor was investigated, it emerged that the company, Lighthouse Disaster Relief, was actually a religious group. “About the closest thing I have done to this is just organize a youth camp with my church,” confessed Lighthouse’s director, Pastor Gary Heldreth.
"After all the layers of subcontractors had taken their cut, there was next to nothing left for the people doing the work. For instance, the author Mike Davis tracked the way FEMA paid Shaw $175 a square foot to install blue tarps on damaged roofs, even though the tarps themselves were provided by the government. Once all the subcontractors took their share, the workers who actually hammered in the tarps were paid as little as $2 a square foot. “Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung,” Davis wrote, “where the actual work is carried out.”
"In Mississippi, a class-action lawsuit forced several companies to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages to immigrant workers. Some were not paid at all. On one Halliburton/KBR job site, undocumented immigrant workers reported being wakened in the middle of the night by their employer (a sub-subcontractor), who allegedly told them that immigration agents were on their way. Most workers fled to avoid arrest.
"This corruption and abuse is particularly relevant because of Trump’s stated plan to contract out much of his infrastructure spending to private players in so-called public-private partnerships.
"In the Katrina aftermath, the attacks on vulnerable people, carried out in the name of reconstruction and relief, did not stop there. In order to offset the tens of billions going to private companies in contracts and tax breaks, in November 2005 the Republican-controlled Congress announced that it needed to cut $40 billion from the federal budget. Among the programs that were slashed were student loans, Medicaid, and food stamps. In other words, the poorest people in the United States subsidized the contractor bonanza twice: first, when Katrina relief morphed into unregulated corporate handouts, providing neither decent jobs nor functional public services; and, second, when the few programs that directly assist the unemployed and working poor nationwide were gutted to pay those bloated bills."
On an international level:
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Rebuilding is no longer the primary purpose of the reconstruction industry.
By Naomi Klein
APRIL 14, 2005
"Last summer, in the lull of the August media doze, the Bush Administration’s doctrine of preventive war took a major leap forward. On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate “post-conflict” plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries “at the same time,” each lasting “five to seven years.”
Additional research was provided by Aaron Maté and Debra Levy.
"Fittingly, a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction.
"Gone are the days of waiting for wars to break out and then drawing up ad hoc plans to pick up the pieces. In close cooperation with the National Intelligence Council, Pascual’s office keeps “high risk” countries on a “watch list” and assembles rapid-response teams ready to engage in prewar planning and to “mobilize and deploy quickly” after a conflict has gone down. The teams are made up of private companies, nongovernmental organizations and members of think tanks–some, Pascual told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in October, will have “pre-completed” contracts to rebuild countries that are not yet broken. Doing this paperwork in advance could “cut off three to six months in your response time.”
"The plans Pascual’s teams have been drawing up in his little-known office in the State Department are about changing “the very social fabric of a nation,” he told CSIS. The office’s mandate is not to rebuild any old states, you see, but to create “democratic and market-oriented” ones. So, for instance (and he was just pulling this example out of his hat, no doubt), his fast-acting reconstructors might help sell off “state-owned enterprises that created a nonviable economy.” Sometimes rebuilding, he explained, means “tearing apart the old.”
"Few ideologues can resist the allure of a blank slate–that was colonialism’s seductive promise: “discovering” wide-open new lands where utopia seemed possible. But colonialism is dead, or so we are told; there are no new places to discover, no terra nullius (there never was), no more blank pages on which, as Mao once said, “the newest and most beautiful words can be written.” There is, however, plenty of destruction–countries smashed to rubble...And where there is destruction there is reconstruction, a chance to grab hold of “the terrible barrenness,” as a UN official recently described the devastation in Aceh, and fill it with the most perfect, beautiful plans.
“We used to have vulgar colonialism,” says Shalmali Guttal, a Bangalore-based researcher with Focus on the Global South. “Now we have sophisticated colonialism, and they call it ‘reconstruction.'”
"It certainly seems that ever-larger portions of the globe are under active reconstruction: being rebuilt by a parallel government made up of a familiar cast of for-profit consulting firms, engineering companies, mega-NGOs, government and UN aid agencies and international financial institutions. And from the people living in these reconstruction sites–Iraq to Aceh, Afghanistan to Haiti–a similar chorus of complaints can be heard. The work is far too slow, if it is happening at all. Foreign consultants live high on cost-plus expense accounts and thousand- dollar-a-day salaries, while locals are shut out of much-needed jobs, training and decision-making. Expert “democracy builders” lecture governments on the importance of transparency and “good governance,” yet most contractors and NGOs refuse to open their books to those same governments, let alone give them control over how their aid money is spent.
(NOW compare that to the rescue of women's businesses planned above. Sounds so similar, it's scary. Will)
"Three months after the tsunami hit Aceh, the New York Times ran a distressing story reporting that “almost nothing seems to have been done to begin repairs and rebuilding.” The dispatch could easily have come from Iraq, where, as the Los Angeles Times just reported, all of Bechtel’s allegedly rebuilt water plants have started to break down, one more in an endless litany of reconstruction screw-ups. It could also have come from Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai recently blasted “corrupt, wasteful and unaccountable” foreign contractors for “squandering the precious resources that Afghanistan received in aid.” Or from Sri Lanka, where 600,000 people who lost their homes in the tsunami are still languishing in temporary camps. One hundred days after the giant waves hit, Herman Kumara, head of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Negombo, Sri Lanka, sent out a desperate e-mail to colleagues around the world. “The funds received for the benefit of the victims are directed to the benefit of the privileged few, not to the real victims,” he wrote. “Our voices are not heard and not allowed to be voiced.”
But if the reconstruction industry is stunningly inept at rebuilding, that may be because rebuilding is not its primary purpose. According to Guttal, “It’s not reconstruction at all–it’s about reshaping everything.” If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them. Kumara, in another e-mail, warns that Sri Lanka is now facing “a second tsunami of corporate globalization and militarization,” potentially even more devastating than the first. “We see this as a plan of action amidst the tsunami crisis to hand over the sea and the coast to foreign corporations and tourism, with military assistance from the US Marines.”
"As Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz designed and oversaw a strikingly similar project in Iraq: The fires were still burning in Baghdad when US occupation officials rewrote the investment laws and announced that the country’s state-owned companies would be privatized. Some have pointed to this track record to argue that Wolfowitz is unfit to lead the World Bank; in fact, nothing could have prepared him better for his new job. In Iraq, Wolfowitz was just doing what the World Bank is already doing in virtually every war-torn and disaster-struck country in the world–albeit with fewer bureaucratic niceties and more ideological bravado.
“Post-conflict” countries now receive 20-25 percent of the World Bank’s total lending, up from 16 percent in 1998–itself an 800 percent increase since 1980, according to a Congressional Research Service study. Rapid response to wars and natural disasters has traditionally been the domain of United Nations agencies, which worked with NGOs to provide emergency aid, build temporary housing and the like. But now reconstruction work has been revealed as a tremendously lucrative industry, too important to be left to the do-gooders at the UN. So today it is the World Bank, already devoted to the principle of poverty-alleviation through profit-making, that leads the charge.
"And there is no doubt that there are profits to be made in the reconstruction business. There are massive engineering and supplies contracts ($10 billion to Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan alone); “democracy building” has exploded into a $2 billion industry; and times have never been better for public-sector consultants–the private firms that advise governments on selling off their assets, often running government services themselves as subcontractors. (Bearing Point, the favored of these firms in the United States, reported that the revenues for its “public services” division “had quadrupled in just five years,” and the profits are huge: $342 million in 2002–a profit margin of 35 percent.)
"But shattered countries are attractive to the World Bank for another reason: They take orders well. After a cataclysmic event, governments will usually do whatever it takes to get aid dollars–even if it means racking up huge debts and agreeing to sweeping policy reforms. And with the local population struggling to find shelter and food, political organizing against privatization can seem like an unimaginable luxury.
"Even better from the bank’s perspective, many war-ravaged countries are in states of “limited sovereignty”: They are considered too unstable and unskilled to manage the aid money pouring in, so it is often put in a trust fund managed by the World Bank. This is the case in East Timor, where the bank doles out money to the government as long as it shows it is spending responsibly. Apparently, this means slashing public-sector jobs (Timor’s government is half the size it was under Indonesian occupation) but lavishing aid money on foreign consultants the bank insists the government hire (researcher Ben Moxham writes, “In one government department, a single international consultant earns in one month the same as his twenty Timorese colleagues earn together in an entire year”).
"In Afghanistan, where the World Bank also administers the country’s aid through a trust fund, it has already managed to privatize healthcare by refusing to give funds to the Ministry of Health to build hospitals. Instead it funnels money directly to NGOs, which are running their own private health clinics on three-year contracts. It has also mandated “an increased role for the private sector” in the water system, telecommunications, oil, gas and mining and directed the government to “withdraw” from the electricity sector and leave it to “foreign private investors.” These profound transformations of Afghan society were never debated or reported on, because few outside the bank know they took place: The changes were buried deep in a “technical annex” attached to a grant providing “emergency” aid to Afghanistan’s war-torn infrastructure–two years before the country had an elected government.
"It has been much the same story in Haiti, following the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In exchange for a $61 million loan, the bank is requiring “public-private partnership and governance in the education and health sectors,” according to bank documents–i.e., private companies running schools and hospitals. Roger Noriega, US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, has made it clear that the Bush Administration shares these goals. “We will also encourage the government of Haiti to move forward, at the appropriate time, with restructuring and privatization of some public sector enterprises,” he told the American Enterprise Institute on April 14, 2004.
These are extraordinarily controversial plans in a country with a powerful socialist base, and the bank admits that this is precisely why it is pushing them now, with Haiti under what approaches military rule. “The Transitional Government provide[s] a window of opportunity for implementing economic governance reforms…that may be hard for a future government to undo,” the bank notes in its Economic Governance Reform Operation Project agreement. For Haitians, this is a particularly bitter irony: Many blame multilateral institutions, including the World Bank, for deepening the political crisis that led to Aristide’s ouster by withholding hundreds of millions in promised loans. At the time, the Inter-American Development Bank, under pressure from the State Department, claimed Haiti was insufficiently democratic to receive the money, pointing to minor irregularities in a legislative election. But now that Aristide is out, the World Bank is openly celebrating the perks of operating in a democracy-free zone.
"The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been imposing shock therapy on countries in various states of shock for at least three decades, most notably after Latin America’s military coups and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet many observers say that today’s disaster capitalism really hit its stride with Hurricane Mitch. For a week in October 1998, Mitch parked itself over Central America, swallowing villages whole and killing more than 9,000. Already impoverished countries were desperate for reconstruction aid–and it came, but with strings attached. In the two months after Mitch struck, with the country still knee-deep in rubble, corpses and mud, the Honduran congress initiated what the Financial Times called “speed sell-offs after the storm.” It passed laws allowing the privatization of airports, seaports and highways and fast-tracked plans to privatize the state telephone company, the national electric company and parts of the water sector. It overturned land-reform laws and made it easier for foreigners to buy and sell property. It was much the same in neighboring countries: In the same two months, Guatemala announced plans to sell off its phone system, and Nicaragua did likewise, along with its electric company and its petroleum sector.
"All of the privatization plans were pushed aggressively by the usual suspects. According to the Wall Street Journal, “the World Bank and International Monetary Fund had thrown their weight behind the [telecom] sale, making it a condition for release of roughly $47 million in aid annually over three years and linking it to about $4.4 billion in foreign-debt relief for Nicaragua.”
"Now the bank is using the December 26 tsunami to push through its cookie-cutter policies. The most devastated countries have seen almost no debt relief, and most of the World Bank’s emergency aid has come in the form of loans, not grants. Rather than emphasizing the need to help the small fishing communities–more than 80 percent of the wave’s victims–the bank is pushing for expansion of the tourism sector and industrial fish farms. As for the damaged public infrastructure, like roads and schools, bank documents recognize that rebuilding them “may strain public finances” and suggest that governments consider privatization (yes, they have only one idea). “For certain investments,” notes the bank’s tsunami-response plan, “it may be appropriate to utilize private financing.”
"As in other reconstruction sites, from Haiti to Iraq, tsunami relief has little to do with recovering what was lost. Although hotels and industry have already started reconstructing on the coast, in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India, governments have passed laws preventing families from rebuilding their oceanfront homes. Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly relocated inland, to military style barracks in Aceh and prefab concrete boxes in Thailand. The coast is not being rebuilt as it was–dotted with fishing villages and beaches strewn with handmade nets. Instead, governments, corporations and foreign donors are teaming up to rebuild it as they would like it to be: the beaches as playgrounds for tourists, the oceans as watery mines for corporate fishing fleets, both serviced by privatized airports and highways built on borrowed money.
"In January Condoleezza Rice sparked a small controversy by describing the tsunami as “a wonderful opportunity” that “has paid great dividends for us.” Many were horrified at the idea of treating a massive human tragedy as a chance to seek advantage. But, if anything, Rice was understating the case. A group calling itself Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters says that for “businessmen-politicians, the tsunami was the answer to their prayers, since it literally wiped these coastal areas clean of the communities which had previously stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, casinos and shrimp farms. To them, all these coastal areas are now open land!”
"Disaster, it seems, is the new terra nullius.
So what is the World Bank?
First though, definition for the World Bank:
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans[2] to countries of the world for capital programs. It comprises two institutions: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), and the International Development Association (IDA). The World Bank is a component of the World Bank Group.
The World Bank's stated official goal is the reduction of poverty. However, according to its Articles of Agreement, all its decisions must be guided by a commitment to the promotion of foreign investment and international trade and to the facilitation of capital investment.[3][4]
Now what is the World Bank?
World Bank Group
The World Bank is different from the World Bank Group, an extended family of five international organizations:
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD)
International Development Association (IDA)
International Finance Corporation (IFC)
Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) (Recall that help with insurance for Wi-Fe?)
International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)
The Federal reserve:
By Kimberly Amadeo
Updated June 30, 2017
"The Federal Reserve is the central bank for the United States. This position makes it the most powerful actor in the global economy. It is not a company or government agency and its leader is not an elected official. This makes it seem highly suspicious to many people because it's not beholden to voters or shareholders.
Who Owns the Federal Reserve?
"The Federal Reserve is an independent entity established by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
"Congress wanted the Fed to have 12 regional banks to represent America's diverse regions. President Wilson wanted a government-appointed central board. The compromise meant the Fed has both. (Source: "Federal Reserve Act Signed by President Wilson," Federal Reserve History.)
"The president and Congress must approve all members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. But, their board members' terms deliberately don't coincide with those of elected officials. The President appoints the Federal Reserve Chair, currently Janet Yellen. Congress must approve the President's appointment. The Chair must report on the Fed's actions to Congress.
"Congress can alter the statutes governing the Fed. For example, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act limited the Fed's powers. It requires the Government Accountability Office to audit the emergency loans the Fed made during the 2008 financial crisis. It also required the Fed to make public the names of banks that received any emergency loans or TARP funds.
"It also required the Fed to get Treasury Department approval before making emergency loans, like it did with Bear Stearns and AIG.
"Other than that, the Fed's decisions don't have to be approved by the President, legislators or any elected official. Furthermore, the Fed does not receive its funding from Congress.
"The 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks are set up similarly to private banks. They store currency, process checks and make loans to the private banks within their area that they regulate. These banks are also members of the Federal Reserve banking system, and so must maintain reserve requirements. In return, they can borrow from each other at the discount rate when needed.
"To be a member of the Federal Reserve System, commercial banks must own shares of stock in the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks by law. But owning Reserve Bank stock is nothing like owning stock in a private company. These stocks can't be traded, and they don't give the member banks voting rights. They pay out dividends, but it's mandated by law to be six percent. (Source: "Who Owns the Federal Reserve?" Federal Reserve.)
How Does the Fed Work?
"The Fed's primary function is to set monetary policy to control inflation. Ongoing inflation is like a cancer that destroys any benefits of growth. For this reason, in recent years the Fed's primary responsibility has been to manage inflation. Its most important tool is the fed funds rate. During the financial crisis, it deployed innovative tools to stabilize the global banking system.
"Since the recession, it also pledged to reduce unemployment and spur economic growth.
"The Fed works by using its monetary policy tools. Setting low interest rates is called expansionary monetary policy, and makes the economy grow faster. If the economy grows too fast, it triggers inflation. Raising interest rates is called contractionary monetary policy. It slows economic growth by making loans and other forms of credit more expensive. This restricts the money supply. As demand falls, businesses lower prices. This creates deflation. That further lowers demand because consumers delay buying while waiting for prices to fall further.
"How does the Fed cut interest rates? It lowers the target for the fed funds rate. Banks usually follow the Fed's lead, cutting LIBOR and the prime interest rate. The Fed can also use its other tools, such as lowering the discount rate banks use to borrow funds directly from the Fed's discount window.
"To combat the financial crisis, the Fed got creative. It bought mortgage-backed securities from banks directly as a way to pump liquidity into the financial system. It also started buying Treasurys. Both purchases became known as quantitative easing.
"Critics worried that the Fed's policies would create hyperinflation. They argued that the Fed was just printing money. But banks weren't lending, so the money supply wasn't growing fast enough to cause inflation. Instead, they hoarded cash to write down a steady stream of housing foreclosures. The situation didn't improve until 2011. By then, the Fed had cut back on quantitative easing."
Oh. about that Dodd-Frank regulation:
The Republican bill, called the Financial Choice Act, passed the House 233-186 along party lines. The bill seeks to undo significant parts of the 2010 financial reform law.
Crafted by House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, the bill passed despite vehement objections by Democrats to preserve the sweeping law aimed at preventing another financial crisis and protecting American consumers.
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"Every promise of Dodd-Frank has been broken," said Hensarling following his bill's approval. "We will replace economic stagnation with a growing healthy economy."
"Republicans criticize the Dodd-Frank regulations as the primary driver for anemic economic growth in the U.S. and for enshrining too-big-to-fail, which they say paves the way for future taxpayer bailouts of the country's biggest banks.
"On Wednesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters Hensarling's bill would keep the GOP's promise to cut onerous financial regulations in order to help create jobs and foster economic growth.
"We see the Financial Choice Act as the crown jewel of this effort," Ryan said at a press conference. "The Dodd-Frank Act has had a lot of bad consequences for our economy, but most of all in the small communities across our country."
(If it sounds like World Bank thinking, well, it is. Will)
Related: House GOP bill would give Trump greater power over Wall Street regulation
Hensarling's bill would give the president the power to fire the heads of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a consumer watchdog agency created under Dodd-Frank, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, at any time for any -- or no -- reason.
It also gives Congress purview over the CFPB's budget, meaning lawmakers could defund the agency entirely.
The GOP proposal would also bar the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from overseeing the so-called living will process, which requires banks to write up plans on how they would safely be unwound in the event of a collapse. The FDIC and the Fed are the two regulators responsible for overseeing this requirement under the 2010 law.
Democrats objected to the bill calling it the "Wrong Choice Act." They say it would return the country to the "regulatory Stone Age" and be a disaster for the U.S. financial system.
"This is a dangerous piece of legislation," Steny Hoyer, the House minority whip said on the House floor on Thursday. He said the bill would repeat recent history and put Americans at risk of losing millions by taking "referees off the field."
The International Reserve and bitcoins:
https://www.facebook.com/International.Reserve/
The first observation is that the Antichrist will control money and require everyone to take his mark to do business. Many were worried that socialism was his idea. When the prophecy says he will control trade, it seems logical. But why use government controls when he could turn control over to the World Bank or the International Reserve both already corrupted as we can see above and know from the bitcoin scandals and use them with the US Reserve systems to control all the world's cash at the source. All the distributors are there and the conservative parties in many countries keep freeing the banks to merge and create that universal system, like the US in its repeal of Dodd-Frank.
https://bible.org/seriespage/25-destruction-commercial-babylon-rev-181-24
"The Babylon of this chapter undoubtedly includes an actual city that will be rebuilt on the Euphrates and a politico-commercial system that becomes the means and basis of a new worldwide religious system by which the beast will be worshipped (Rev. 13). If you recall, the beast brings about his own worship by his control of commerce, or buying and selling.
"The chief element of Babylon emphasized in this chapter is commerce on a worldwide scale, i.e., international or multinational organizations.
"In chapter Revelation 17 the beast and his allies in politico-commercial Babylon destroy religious Babylon, or apostate Christendom. Today there are a multitude of worldwide organizations already devoted to the concept of antichrist and are also already speaking of the overthrow of the present religious systems including Judaism, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism. But by contrast in this chapter it is God who overthrows commercial Babylon."
Re 13:16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: {to receive: Gr. to give them}
Re 13:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
As counterpoint to all the capitalism shots taken, Milton Friedman on colonialism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xeebU8VhmY
By his dismissiveness, Friedman reveals the heart of the matter. As a student of Ayn Rand, he had made up his mind. The facts could be jiggled to fit the situation. He was essentially saying being a colony was a good thing. One could have argued at the time of the war, as some did, that Vietnam had been a colony which the Democratic Kennedy regime sought to maintain for it's tin mines and was let go only after most of the tin was gotten out. Colonies are seen as a source of natural materials to be used up for the financial benefit of the richer colonizer. It has been a refined policy we see in effect today to convert the colony into a patron for goods.
Friedman gets one point very correct. The USSR was a colonial state of Russia. Putin seems intent on making at least parts of it so again as Ukrainians would readily point out. The problem with any government has always been the people in charge, most often men, attempting to shape things their way by using the very same methods of tribesmen long ago and failing to see that the tribes were cancelled out by the steam roller of mechanization. The communist people's republics were and are seldom shaped by or for the people any more than the capitalist regimes are so designed. It should be noted that those regimes were under constant economic pressure from capitalist run banking systems intent on their failure.
Next time we pursue more of history and the future searching for the answers to all the tensions of disaster and financial manipulation.
Question for today: what good is immortality if it comes with immorality?
The blog below takes on some new meaning since President Trump committed 50 million dollars of tax payer money without congressional approval to the World Bank:
http://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/women-entrepreneurs
"To help unlock the potential of women entrepreneurs, the new Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) will enable more than $1 billion in financing to improve access to capital, provide technical assistance, and invest in projects and programs that support women and women-led SMEs in World Bank Group client countries.
"The goal of the facility is to leverage donor grant funding of over $325 million and mobilize more than $1 billion in international financial institution and commercial financing, by working with financial intermediaries, funds, and other market actors, potentially through similar models as the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) Women Entrepreneurs Opportunity Facility/Banking on Women program.
"The We-Fi facility will work to break down barriers to financial access and provide complementary services such as capacity building, access to networks and mentors, and opportunities to link with domestic and global markets as well as improving the business environment for women-owned or women-led SMEs across the developing world.
"We-Fi builds on the success of past and current programs of the World Bank Group and other partners, while reaching into new areas, supporting women-led businesses at earlier stages of growth, and unlocking access to equity and insurance services. At the same time, the facility aims to support complementary public sector interventions that strengthen the enabling environment and enhance market opportunities for women entrepreneurs.
"We-Fi fills a gap where there was no significant fund or facility committed to a holistic public and private sector approach to addressing the constraints faced by women entrepreneurs."
Note: while this seems like a liberal save-all-the-women program, please actually read what's going on. First, they are not giving grants , they are "leveraging" grants from other institutions. Second, they are using their billion to provide advice and council and open insurance services which they may or may not be involved with. Third, they want to provide coaching, access to networks which may or may not listen access or not, and to mentors. Who may need payment of some sort for their mentorship, making the mentorship look suspect. Fourth, and most important, they want to open doors to easy finance for all the women applying. Easy finance crashed the world economy because debt was and still is, viewed as a commodity. A new crash, very likely because the US and world finances continue to blindly pretend such practices didn't crash the system, would mean all those small businesses would face loans called in before they were solvent enough to withstand the blow. What it may be doing is actually putting a new class of hopeful new business people at unnecessary risk. Or adding monetary stress to an already stressed small business to merely add to their disaster capitalism resume below.
I sometimes seem to be attacking capitalism, but I am really attacking the application of various forms of capitalism. It is an economic system even as socialism and all the various spots on the spectrum between what is seen as two extremes. Understand: the extremes I've discussed result from seeing an economic system as a religion. From seeing those who are practicing some form of what national leaders deem their religion as, therefore, friends. But socialism still exists. Oh, here is the country at the top of that list:
http://blog.peerform.com/top-ten-most-socialist-countries-in-the-world/
"In China the government manages and controls the economy. Many of the domestic companies are owned and run by the government. Recently, the Chinese economy has become more geared towards capitalism, but is still officially socialist. Life in China remains relatively less stressful and more relaxed than life in capitalist countries like America.
You see, the country of China remains socialist with the government ALLOWING capitalist expansion. But that would hardly make them a king of the east since the companies are the real kings running the economy. Except for one little fact: the government can seize all those assets including the business infrastructures and proceed to run them itself whenever it chooses. If you look back at the profile of Xi, you discover his daughter went to Harvard and you will find many of the countries firms operated on all the lower and middle tiers by Chinese, something the government insisted upon. One American manager of a factory plant in Vietnam told of being followed by government reps anywhere he went and of workers telling him they really wanted to take jobs from the USA not get rich themselves. True those leaderships use up subordinate labor at a killing pace but that is seen as again that term "acceptable losses". The point is China and Vietnam at least are positioning midlevel business people to take over operations when government views the time as right and when they feel the capitalist banking system is no longer in control and capable of leverage power by using disaster capitalism ro by undermining their ciurrencies with false" facts."
Precedent exists for such actions.
http://www.reuters.com/article/oil-nationalisations-idUSL5E8HEDXH20120615
By Peg Mackey and Andrew Callus
VIENNA, June 15 Venezuela's oil minister stood up in public this week and denounced the man beside him as "predatory" and a peddler of "the colonialist high-handedness which has done so much harm to the world". His unfortunate neighbour on the conference podium was the boss of U.S. oil firm ConocoPhillips, which is claiming billions of dollars in compensation for the 2007 nationalisation of its business there.
"Minister Rafael Ramirez' own boss, President Hugo Chavez, is one of the world's most outspoken critics of capitalism.
"The 21st Century nationalisers may have good reason to believe they can do a better job than the foreign and private sector oil firms they see as careless short-termists
"Veteran oil men point to a decades-old example of a well-run state company overseeing steady, efficient, modern production - Saudi Aramco. The one-time joint venture between U.S. companies and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is now strictly a state entity.
"It was on another podium back in 1967 that the American senior vice president of Aramco, then called the Arabian American Oil Company, told 200 young Saudis they would always be employed by a U.S. firm.
"Read tersely from note cards, his words angered many in the audience. In their eyes, much was wrong. Operations were being run from New York, Dallas and San Francisco, while Saudi oilfield workers lived in shanties.
"As the world grew thirstier for Saudi oil in the 1970s, the U.S. companies exploited the kingdom's reserves at "ridiculously high rates", cutting corners and making a mess of the oilfields and reservoirs, said Sadad Husseini, a former senior Saudi Aramco official.
(This was a response to the statement by Armand Hammer, late president of Occidental oil, about a "drain America first" policy in oil companies, that is, taking oil from this country before taking it from other available sources made no sense. His view was that it was better to take all the oil from foreign sources until they dried up and leave American oil, already available, in the ground and saving it until it was the last source, making America powerful in the long run. He saw himself as a successful American. He wanted the USA in as strong a position as possible for as long as possible. He died in 1990. Current oil company policy seems aimed at taking every ounce of oil from the US now and aimed at the corporate abandonment of the USA. Will)
"The general culture was: discover the resource, squeeze it as cheaply as possible and then move on."
"Fed up with Big Oil's mentality, a Saudi ruling class with a strong sense of ownership oversaw a nationalisation of Aramco that was completed in 1982.
"We were not going to squander or mishandle our assets," said Husseini, who was in charge of exploration and development. "We started building schools, creating jobs and developing our resources over 30 to 40 years ... We spent many years in the 80's correcting the problems they had left behind."
(Whether or not we like the Saudis and whether or not we suspect their motives, it seems the proper thing to do to protect their national interests. Will)
"The key to the Saudi model's success has been consistency - and that will continue," said a senior Western oil executive familiar with the inner workings of the state oil giant. "King Abdullah clearly sees Aramco as a national champion and is willing to develop young Saudis."
"Lucky geology helped. The kingdom straddles the world's largest oil reserves and they are easy to get at.
"Other similarly blessed countries have patchier records and less reason to blame the international oil companies for their woes - although Ramirez did exactly that in his speech this week at an OPEC industry conference - naming ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil."
One should add that, from the day of their takeover, the Saudis have kept explosives rigged to all their operations meaning seizing the oil wells or the operation costs the "winner" years of work reconstructing the whole thing. Rumor has it that the Saudi's have nuclear materials available to poison the oil wells for centuries to come if they lose power.
Big business has other indictments against it.
Naomi Klein on shock and disaster capitalism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG9CM_J00bw
Book review as summation of a theory:
Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe
by Antony Loewenstein
Disaster has become big business. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein travels across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies cash in on organized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining.
What emerges through Loewenstein’s reporting is a dark history of multinational corporations that, with the aid of media and political elites, have grown more powerful than national governments. In the twenty-first century, the vulnerable have become the world’s most valuable commodity.
Klein detailing the Katrina model for disaster profiteering:
https://theintercept.com/2017/01/24/get-ready-for-the-first-shocks-of-trumps-disaster-capitalism/
"WE ALREADY KNOW that the Trump administration plans to deregulate markets, wage all-out war on “radical Islamic terrorism,” trash climate science and unleash a fossil-fuel frenzy. It’s a vision that can be counted on to generate a tsunami of crises and shocks: economic shocks, as market bubbles burst; security shocks, as blowback from foreign belligerence comes home; weather shocks, as our climate is further destabilized; and industrial shocks, as oil pipelines spill and rigs collapse, which they tend to do, especially when enjoying light-touch regulation.
"All this is dangerous enough. What’s even worse is the way the Trump administration can be counted on to exploit these shocks politically and economically.
"Speculation is unnecessary. All that’s required is a little knowledge of recent history. Ten years ago, I published “The Shock Doctrine,” a history of the ways in which crises have been systematically exploited over the last half century to further a radical pro-corporate agenda. The book begins and ends with the response to Hurricane Katrina, because it stands as such a harrowing blueprint for disaster capitalism.
"That’s relevant because of the central, if little-recalled role played by the man who is now the U.S. vice president, Mike Pence. At the time Katrina hit New Orleans, Pence was chairman of the powerful and highly ideological Republican Study Committee. On September 13, 2005 — just 14 days after the levees were breached and with parts of New Orleans still underwater — the RSC convened a fateful meeting at the offices of the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.
"Under Pence’s leadership, the group came up with a list of “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices” — 32 policies in all, each one straight out of the disaster capitalism playbook.
"To get a sense of how the Trump administration will respond to its first crises, it’s worth reading the list in full (and noting Pence’s name right at the bottom).
This list appeared in an email sent by Rep. Paul Teller on September 13, 2005
Katrina
Gas Prices
Paul S. Teller
Deputy Director
House Republican Study Committee (RSC)
Office of Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), Chairman
202-226-9718--phone 202-226-1633--fax
"What stands out in the package of pseudo “relief” policies is the commitment to wage all-out war on labor standards and on the public sphere — which is ironic because the failure of public infrastructure is what turned Katrina into a human catastrophe. Also notable is the determination to use any opportunity to strengthen the hand of the oil and gas industry.
The first three items on the RSC list are “automatically suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas,” a reference to the law that required federal contractors to pay a living wage; “make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone”; and “make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone (comprehensive tax incentives and waiving of regulations).”
"Another demand called for giving parents vouchers to use at charter schools, a move perfectly in line with the vision held by Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos.
"All these measures were announced by President George W. Bush within the week. Under pressure, Bush was eventually forced to reinstate the labor standards, though they were largely ignored by contractors. There is every reason to believe this will be the model for the multibillion-dollar infrastructure investments Trump is using to court the labor movement. Repealing Davis-Bacon for those projects was reportedly already floated at Monday’s meeting with leaders of construction and building trade unions.
"Back in 2005, the Republican Study Committee meeting produced more ideas that gained presidential support. Climate scientists have directly linked the increased intensity of hurricanes to warming ocean temperatures. This connection, however, didn’t stop Pence and the RSC from calling on Congress to repeal environmental regulations on the Gulf Coast, give permission for new oil refineries in the United States, and to greenlight “drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”
"All these measures are a surefire way to drive up greenhouse gas emissions, the major human contributor to climate change, yet they were immediately championed by the president under the guise of responding to a devastating storm.
"The oil industry wasn’t the only one to profit from Hurricane Katrina, of course. So did a slew of well-connected contractors, who turned the Gulf Coast into a laboratory for privatized disaster response.
"The companies that snatched up the biggest contracts were the familiar gang from the invasion of Iraq: Halliburton’s KBR unit won a $60 million gig to reconstruct military bases along the coast. Blackwater was hired to protect FEMA employees from looters. Parsons, infamous for its sloppy Iraq work, was brought in for a major bridge construction project in Mississippi. Fluor, Shaw, Bechtel, CH2M Hill — all top contractors in Iraq — were hired by the government to provide mobile homes to evacuees just 10 days after the levees broke. Their contracts ended up totaling $3.4 billion, no open bidding required.
"And no opportunity for profit was left untapped. Kenyon, a division of the mega funeral conglomerate Service Corporation International (a major Bush campaign donor), was hired to retrieve the dead from homes and streets. The work was extraordinarily slow, and bodies were left in the broiling sun for days. Emergency workers and local volunteer morticians were forbidden to step in to help because handling the bodies impinged on Kenyon’s commercial territory.
"And as with so many of Trump’s decisions so far, relevant experience often appeared to have nothing to do with how contracts were allocated. AshBritt, a company paid half a billion dollars to remove debris, reportedly didn’t own a single dump truck and farmed out the entire job to contractors.
"Even more striking was the company that FEMA paid $5.2 million to perform the crucial role of building a base camp for emergency workers in St. Bernard Parish, a suburb of New Orleans. The camp construction fell behind schedule and was never completed. When the contractor was investigated, it emerged that the company, Lighthouse Disaster Relief, was actually a religious group. “About the closest thing I have done to this is just organize a youth camp with my church,” confessed Lighthouse’s director, Pastor Gary Heldreth.
"After all the layers of subcontractors had taken their cut, there was next to nothing left for the people doing the work. For instance, the author Mike Davis tracked the way FEMA paid Shaw $175 a square foot to install blue tarps on damaged roofs, even though the tarps themselves were provided by the government. Once all the subcontractors took their share, the workers who actually hammered in the tarps were paid as little as $2 a square foot. “Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung,” Davis wrote, “where the actual work is carried out.”
"In Mississippi, a class-action lawsuit forced several companies to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages to immigrant workers. Some were not paid at all. On one Halliburton/KBR job site, undocumented immigrant workers reported being wakened in the middle of the night by their employer (a sub-subcontractor), who allegedly told them that immigration agents were on their way. Most workers fled to avoid arrest.
"This corruption and abuse is particularly relevant because of Trump’s stated plan to contract out much of his infrastructure spending to private players in so-called public-private partnerships.
"In the Katrina aftermath, the attacks on vulnerable people, carried out in the name of reconstruction and relief, did not stop there. In order to offset the tens of billions going to private companies in contracts and tax breaks, in November 2005 the Republican-controlled Congress announced that it needed to cut $40 billion from the federal budget. Among the programs that were slashed were student loans, Medicaid, and food stamps. In other words, the poorest people in the United States subsidized the contractor bonanza twice: first, when Katrina relief morphed into unregulated corporate handouts, providing neither decent jobs nor functional public services; and, second, when the few programs that directly assist the unemployed and working poor nationwide were gutted to pay those bloated bills."
On an international level:
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Rebuilding is no longer the primary purpose of the reconstruction industry.
By Naomi Klein
APRIL 14, 2005
"Last summer, in the lull of the August media doze, the Bush Administration’s doctrine of preventive war took a major leap forward. On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate “post-conflict” plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries “at the same time,” each lasting “five to seven years.”
Additional research was provided by Aaron Maté and Debra Levy.
"Fittingly, a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction.
"Gone are the days of waiting for wars to break out and then drawing up ad hoc plans to pick up the pieces. In close cooperation with the National Intelligence Council, Pascual’s office keeps “high risk” countries on a “watch list” and assembles rapid-response teams ready to engage in prewar planning and to “mobilize and deploy quickly” after a conflict has gone down. The teams are made up of private companies, nongovernmental organizations and members of think tanks–some, Pascual told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in October, will have “pre-completed” contracts to rebuild countries that are not yet broken. Doing this paperwork in advance could “cut off three to six months in your response time.”
"The plans Pascual’s teams have been drawing up in his little-known office in the State Department are about changing “the very social fabric of a nation,” he told CSIS. The office’s mandate is not to rebuild any old states, you see, but to create “democratic and market-oriented” ones. So, for instance (and he was just pulling this example out of his hat, no doubt), his fast-acting reconstructors might help sell off “state-owned enterprises that created a nonviable economy.” Sometimes rebuilding, he explained, means “tearing apart the old.”
"Few ideologues can resist the allure of a blank slate–that was colonialism’s seductive promise: “discovering” wide-open new lands where utopia seemed possible. But colonialism is dead, or so we are told; there are no new places to discover, no terra nullius (there never was), no more blank pages on which, as Mao once said, “the newest and most beautiful words can be written.” There is, however, plenty of destruction–countries smashed to rubble...And where there is destruction there is reconstruction, a chance to grab hold of “the terrible barrenness,” as a UN official recently described the devastation in Aceh, and fill it with the most perfect, beautiful plans.
“We used to have vulgar colonialism,” says Shalmali Guttal, a Bangalore-based researcher with Focus on the Global South. “Now we have sophisticated colonialism, and they call it ‘reconstruction.'”
"It certainly seems that ever-larger portions of the globe are under active reconstruction: being rebuilt by a parallel government made up of a familiar cast of for-profit consulting firms, engineering companies, mega-NGOs, government and UN aid agencies and international financial institutions. And from the people living in these reconstruction sites–Iraq to Aceh, Afghanistan to Haiti–a similar chorus of complaints can be heard. The work is far too slow, if it is happening at all. Foreign consultants live high on cost-plus expense accounts and thousand- dollar-a-day salaries, while locals are shut out of much-needed jobs, training and decision-making. Expert “democracy builders” lecture governments on the importance of transparency and “good governance,” yet most contractors and NGOs refuse to open their books to those same governments, let alone give them control over how their aid money is spent.
(NOW compare that to the rescue of women's businesses planned above. Sounds so similar, it's scary. Will)
"Three months after the tsunami hit Aceh, the New York Times ran a distressing story reporting that “almost nothing seems to have been done to begin repairs and rebuilding.” The dispatch could easily have come from Iraq, where, as the Los Angeles Times just reported, all of Bechtel’s allegedly rebuilt water plants have started to break down, one more in an endless litany of reconstruction screw-ups. It could also have come from Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai recently blasted “corrupt, wasteful and unaccountable” foreign contractors for “squandering the precious resources that Afghanistan received in aid.” Or from Sri Lanka, where 600,000 people who lost their homes in the tsunami are still languishing in temporary camps. One hundred days after the giant waves hit, Herman Kumara, head of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Negombo, Sri Lanka, sent out a desperate e-mail to colleagues around the world. “The funds received for the benefit of the victims are directed to the benefit of the privileged few, not to the real victims,” he wrote. “Our voices are not heard and not allowed to be voiced.”
But if the reconstruction industry is stunningly inept at rebuilding, that may be because rebuilding is not its primary purpose. According to Guttal, “It’s not reconstruction at all–it’s about reshaping everything.” If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them. Kumara, in another e-mail, warns that Sri Lanka is now facing “a second tsunami of corporate globalization and militarization,” potentially even more devastating than the first. “We see this as a plan of action amidst the tsunami crisis to hand over the sea and the coast to foreign corporations and tourism, with military assistance from the US Marines.”
"As Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz designed and oversaw a strikingly similar project in Iraq: The fires were still burning in Baghdad when US occupation officials rewrote the investment laws and announced that the country’s state-owned companies would be privatized. Some have pointed to this track record to argue that Wolfowitz is unfit to lead the World Bank; in fact, nothing could have prepared him better for his new job. In Iraq, Wolfowitz was just doing what the World Bank is already doing in virtually every war-torn and disaster-struck country in the world–albeit with fewer bureaucratic niceties and more ideological bravado.
“Post-conflict” countries now receive 20-25 percent of the World Bank’s total lending, up from 16 percent in 1998–itself an 800 percent increase since 1980, according to a Congressional Research Service study. Rapid response to wars and natural disasters has traditionally been the domain of United Nations agencies, which worked with NGOs to provide emergency aid, build temporary housing and the like. But now reconstruction work has been revealed as a tremendously lucrative industry, too important to be left to the do-gooders at the UN. So today it is the World Bank, already devoted to the principle of poverty-alleviation through profit-making, that leads the charge.
"And there is no doubt that there are profits to be made in the reconstruction business. There are massive engineering and supplies contracts ($10 billion to Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan alone); “democracy building” has exploded into a $2 billion industry; and times have never been better for public-sector consultants–the private firms that advise governments on selling off their assets, often running government services themselves as subcontractors. (Bearing Point, the favored of these firms in the United States, reported that the revenues for its “public services” division “had quadrupled in just five years,” and the profits are huge: $342 million in 2002–a profit margin of 35 percent.)
"But shattered countries are attractive to the World Bank for another reason: They take orders well. After a cataclysmic event, governments will usually do whatever it takes to get aid dollars–even if it means racking up huge debts and agreeing to sweeping policy reforms. And with the local population struggling to find shelter and food, political organizing against privatization can seem like an unimaginable luxury.
"Even better from the bank’s perspective, many war-ravaged countries are in states of “limited sovereignty”: They are considered too unstable and unskilled to manage the aid money pouring in, so it is often put in a trust fund managed by the World Bank. This is the case in East Timor, where the bank doles out money to the government as long as it shows it is spending responsibly. Apparently, this means slashing public-sector jobs (Timor’s government is half the size it was under Indonesian occupation) but lavishing aid money on foreign consultants the bank insists the government hire (researcher Ben Moxham writes, “In one government department, a single international consultant earns in one month the same as his twenty Timorese colleagues earn together in an entire year”).
"In Afghanistan, where the World Bank also administers the country’s aid through a trust fund, it has already managed to privatize healthcare by refusing to give funds to the Ministry of Health to build hospitals. Instead it funnels money directly to NGOs, which are running their own private health clinics on three-year contracts. It has also mandated “an increased role for the private sector” in the water system, telecommunications, oil, gas and mining and directed the government to “withdraw” from the electricity sector and leave it to “foreign private investors.” These profound transformations of Afghan society were never debated or reported on, because few outside the bank know they took place: The changes were buried deep in a “technical annex” attached to a grant providing “emergency” aid to Afghanistan’s war-torn infrastructure–two years before the country had an elected government.
"It has been much the same story in Haiti, following the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In exchange for a $61 million loan, the bank is requiring “public-private partnership and governance in the education and health sectors,” according to bank documents–i.e., private companies running schools and hospitals. Roger Noriega, US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, has made it clear that the Bush Administration shares these goals. “We will also encourage the government of Haiti to move forward, at the appropriate time, with restructuring and privatization of some public sector enterprises,” he told the American Enterprise Institute on April 14, 2004.
These are extraordinarily controversial plans in a country with a powerful socialist base, and the bank admits that this is precisely why it is pushing them now, with Haiti under what approaches military rule. “The Transitional Government provide[s] a window of opportunity for implementing economic governance reforms…that may be hard for a future government to undo,” the bank notes in its Economic Governance Reform Operation Project agreement. For Haitians, this is a particularly bitter irony: Many blame multilateral institutions, including the World Bank, for deepening the political crisis that led to Aristide’s ouster by withholding hundreds of millions in promised loans. At the time, the Inter-American Development Bank, under pressure from the State Department, claimed Haiti was insufficiently democratic to receive the money, pointing to minor irregularities in a legislative election. But now that Aristide is out, the World Bank is openly celebrating the perks of operating in a democracy-free zone.
"The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been imposing shock therapy on countries in various states of shock for at least three decades, most notably after Latin America’s military coups and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet many observers say that today’s disaster capitalism really hit its stride with Hurricane Mitch. For a week in October 1998, Mitch parked itself over Central America, swallowing villages whole and killing more than 9,000. Already impoverished countries were desperate for reconstruction aid–and it came, but with strings attached. In the two months after Mitch struck, with the country still knee-deep in rubble, corpses and mud, the Honduran congress initiated what the Financial Times called “speed sell-offs after the storm.” It passed laws allowing the privatization of airports, seaports and highways and fast-tracked plans to privatize the state telephone company, the national electric company and parts of the water sector. It overturned land-reform laws and made it easier for foreigners to buy and sell property. It was much the same in neighboring countries: In the same two months, Guatemala announced plans to sell off its phone system, and Nicaragua did likewise, along with its electric company and its petroleum sector.
"All of the privatization plans were pushed aggressively by the usual suspects. According to the Wall Street Journal, “the World Bank and International Monetary Fund had thrown their weight behind the [telecom] sale, making it a condition for release of roughly $47 million in aid annually over three years and linking it to about $4.4 billion in foreign-debt relief for Nicaragua.”
"Now the bank is using the December 26 tsunami to push through its cookie-cutter policies. The most devastated countries have seen almost no debt relief, and most of the World Bank’s emergency aid has come in the form of loans, not grants. Rather than emphasizing the need to help the small fishing communities–more than 80 percent of the wave’s victims–the bank is pushing for expansion of the tourism sector and industrial fish farms. As for the damaged public infrastructure, like roads and schools, bank documents recognize that rebuilding them “may strain public finances” and suggest that governments consider privatization (yes, they have only one idea). “For certain investments,” notes the bank’s tsunami-response plan, “it may be appropriate to utilize private financing.”
"As in other reconstruction sites, from Haiti to Iraq, tsunami relief has little to do with recovering what was lost. Although hotels and industry have already started reconstructing on the coast, in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India, governments have passed laws preventing families from rebuilding their oceanfront homes. Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly relocated inland, to military style barracks in Aceh and prefab concrete boxes in Thailand. The coast is not being rebuilt as it was–dotted with fishing villages and beaches strewn with handmade nets. Instead, governments, corporations and foreign donors are teaming up to rebuild it as they would like it to be: the beaches as playgrounds for tourists, the oceans as watery mines for corporate fishing fleets, both serviced by privatized airports and highways built on borrowed money.
"In January Condoleezza Rice sparked a small controversy by describing the tsunami as “a wonderful opportunity” that “has paid great dividends for us.” Many were horrified at the idea of treating a massive human tragedy as a chance to seek advantage. But, if anything, Rice was understating the case. A group calling itself Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters says that for “businessmen-politicians, the tsunami was the answer to their prayers, since it literally wiped these coastal areas clean of the communities which had previously stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, casinos and shrimp farms. To them, all these coastal areas are now open land!”
"Disaster, it seems, is the new terra nullius.
So what is the World Bank?
First though, definition for the World Bank:
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans[2] to countries of the world for capital programs. It comprises two institutions: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), and the International Development Association (IDA). The World Bank is a component of the World Bank Group.
The World Bank's stated official goal is the reduction of poverty. However, according to its Articles of Agreement, all its decisions must be guided by a commitment to the promotion of foreign investment and international trade and to the facilitation of capital investment.[3][4]
Now what is the World Bank?
World Bank Group
The World Bank is different from the World Bank Group, an extended family of five international organizations:
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD)
International Development Association (IDA)
International Finance Corporation (IFC)
Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) (Recall that help with insurance for Wi-Fe?)
International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID)
The Federal reserve:
By Kimberly Amadeo
Updated June 30, 2017
"The Federal Reserve is the central bank for the United States. This position makes it the most powerful actor in the global economy. It is not a company or government agency and its leader is not an elected official. This makes it seem highly suspicious to many people because it's not beholden to voters or shareholders.
Who Owns the Federal Reserve?
"The Federal Reserve is an independent entity established by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
"Congress wanted the Fed to have 12 regional banks to represent America's diverse regions. President Wilson wanted a government-appointed central board. The compromise meant the Fed has both. (Source: "Federal Reserve Act Signed by President Wilson," Federal Reserve History.)
"The president and Congress must approve all members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. But, their board members' terms deliberately don't coincide with those of elected officials. The President appoints the Federal Reserve Chair, currently Janet Yellen. Congress must approve the President's appointment. The Chair must report on the Fed's actions to Congress.
"Congress can alter the statutes governing the Fed. For example, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act limited the Fed's powers. It requires the Government Accountability Office to audit the emergency loans the Fed made during the 2008 financial crisis. It also required the Fed to make public the names of banks that received any emergency loans or TARP funds.
"It also required the Fed to get Treasury Department approval before making emergency loans, like it did with Bear Stearns and AIG.
"Other than that, the Fed's decisions don't have to be approved by the President, legislators or any elected official. Furthermore, the Fed does not receive its funding from Congress.
"The 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks are set up similarly to private banks. They store currency, process checks and make loans to the private banks within their area that they regulate. These banks are also members of the Federal Reserve banking system, and so must maintain reserve requirements. In return, they can borrow from each other at the discount rate when needed.
"To be a member of the Federal Reserve System, commercial banks must own shares of stock in the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks by law. But owning Reserve Bank stock is nothing like owning stock in a private company. These stocks can't be traded, and they don't give the member banks voting rights. They pay out dividends, but it's mandated by law to be six percent. (Source: "Who Owns the Federal Reserve?" Federal Reserve.)
How Does the Fed Work?
"The Fed's primary function is to set monetary policy to control inflation. Ongoing inflation is like a cancer that destroys any benefits of growth. For this reason, in recent years the Fed's primary responsibility has been to manage inflation. Its most important tool is the fed funds rate. During the financial crisis, it deployed innovative tools to stabilize the global banking system.
"Since the recession, it also pledged to reduce unemployment and spur economic growth.
"The Fed works by using its monetary policy tools. Setting low interest rates is called expansionary monetary policy, and makes the economy grow faster. If the economy grows too fast, it triggers inflation. Raising interest rates is called contractionary monetary policy. It slows economic growth by making loans and other forms of credit more expensive. This restricts the money supply. As demand falls, businesses lower prices. This creates deflation. That further lowers demand because consumers delay buying while waiting for prices to fall further.
"How does the Fed cut interest rates? It lowers the target for the fed funds rate. Banks usually follow the Fed's lead, cutting LIBOR and the prime interest rate. The Fed can also use its other tools, such as lowering the discount rate banks use to borrow funds directly from the Fed's discount window.
"To combat the financial crisis, the Fed got creative. It bought mortgage-backed securities from banks directly as a way to pump liquidity into the financial system. It also started buying Treasurys. Both purchases became known as quantitative easing.
"Critics worried that the Fed's policies would create hyperinflation. They argued that the Fed was just printing money. But banks weren't lending, so the money supply wasn't growing fast enough to cause inflation. Instead, they hoarded cash to write down a steady stream of housing foreclosures. The situation didn't improve until 2011. By then, the Fed had cut back on quantitative easing."
Oh. about that Dodd-Frank regulation:
The Republican bill, called the Financial Choice Act, passed the House 233-186 along party lines. The bill seeks to undo significant parts of the 2010 financial reform law.
Crafted by House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, the bill passed despite vehement objections by Democrats to preserve the sweeping law aimed at preventing another financial crisis and protecting American consumers.
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"Every promise of Dodd-Frank has been broken," said Hensarling following his bill's approval. "We will replace economic stagnation with a growing healthy economy."
"Republicans criticize the Dodd-Frank regulations as the primary driver for anemic economic growth in the U.S. and for enshrining too-big-to-fail, which they say paves the way for future taxpayer bailouts of the country's biggest banks.
"On Wednesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters Hensarling's bill would keep the GOP's promise to cut onerous financial regulations in order to help create jobs and foster economic growth.
"We see the Financial Choice Act as the crown jewel of this effort," Ryan said at a press conference. "The Dodd-Frank Act has had a lot of bad consequences for our economy, but most of all in the small communities across our country."
(If it sounds like World Bank thinking, well, it is. Will)
Related: House GOP bill would give Trump greater power over Wall Street regulation
Hensarling's bill would give the president the power to fire the heads of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a consumer watchdog agency created under Dodd-Frank, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, at any time for any -- or no -- reason.
It also gives Congress purview over the CFPB's budget, meaning lawmakers could defund the agency entirely.
The GOP proposal would also bar the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from overseeing the so-called living will process, which requires banks to write up plans on how they would safely be unwound in the event of a collapse. The FDIC and the Fed are the two regulators responsible for overseeing this requirement under the 2010 law.
Democrats objected to the bill calling it the "Wrong Choice Act." They say it would return the country to the "regulatory Stone Age" and be a disaster for the U.S. financial system.
"This is a dangerous piece of legislation," Steny Hoyer, the House minority whip said on the House floor on Thursday. He said the bill would repeat recent history and put Americans at risk of losing millions by taking "referees off the field."
The International Reserve and bitcoins:
https://www.facebook.com/International.Reserve/
The first observation is that the Antichrist will control money and require everyone to take his mark to do business. Many were worried that socialism was his idea. When the prophecy says he will control trade, it seems logical. But why use government controls when he could turn control over to the World Bank or the International Reserve both already corrupted as we can see above and know from the bitcoin scandals and use them with the US Reserve systems to control all the world's cash at the source. All the distributors are there and the conservative parties in many countries keep freeing the banks to merge and create that universal system, like the US in its repeal of Dodd-Frank.
https://bible.org/seriespage/25-destruction-commercial-babylon-rev-181-24
"The Babylon of this chapter undoubtedly includes an actual city that will be rebuilt on the Euphrates and a politico-commercial system that becomes the means and basis of a new worldwide religious system by which the beast will be worshipped (Rev. 13). If you recall, the beast brings about his own worship by his control of commerce, or buying and selling.
"The chief element of Babylon emphasized in this chapter is commerce on a worldwide scale, i.e., international or multinational organizations.
"In chapter Revelation 17 the beast and his allies in politico-commercial Babylon destroy religious Babylon, or apostate Christendom. Today there are a multitude of worldwide organizations already devoted to the concept of antichrist and are also already speaking of the overthrow of the present religious systems including Judaism, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism. But by contrast in this chapter it is God who overthrows commercial Babylon."
Re 13:16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: {to receive: Gr. to give them}
Re 13:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
As counterpoint to all the capitalism shots taken, Milton Friedman on colonialism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xeebU8VhmY
By his dismissiveness, Friedman reveals the heart of the matter. As a student of Ayn Rand, he had made up his mind. The facts could be jiggled to fit the situation. He was essentially saying being a colony was a good thing. One could have argued at the time of the war, as some did, that Vietnam had been a colony which the Democratic Kennedy regime sought to maintain for it's tin mines and was let go only after most of the tin was gotten out. Colonies are seen as a source of natural materials to be used up for the financial benefit of the richer colonizer. It has been a refined policy we see in effect today to convert the colony into a patron for goods.
Friedman gets one point very correct. The USSR was a colonial state of Russia. Putin seems intent on making at least parts of it so again as Ukrainians would readily point out. The problem with any government has always been the people in charge, most often men, attempting to shape things their way by using the very same methods of tribesmen long ago and failing to see that the tribes were cancelled out by the steam roller of mechanization. The communist people's republics were and are seldom shaped by or for the people any more than the capitalist regimes are so designed. It should be noted that those regimes were under constant economic pressure from capitalist run banking systems intent on their failure.
Next time we pursue more of history and the future searching for the answers to all the tensions of disaster and financial manipulation.
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