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pain on the poorest in the heap, to maximize profit to the super-duper rich. And wouldn't bankers just love to micro-manage you little family "economy" to get as much of your money under their control as possible! I think we can be quite sure that Wolfowitz/Bushite policy is of no benefit to the poor or to poor nations, and that they are using blackmail and coercion in typical Bushite fashion, to punish political and corporate enemies, reward toadies and enrich themselves. I can't imagine them having control of that much money and dispersing it with fairness and justice. That's not what control over money is for, don't you know? Control over money is to make MORE money and increase your power! That's true of the rich nations, vis a vis the World Bank, anyway--but with a Bushite in charge, gross and unconscionable injustice would be expectable. Picking on little guys, while the big crooks get away. BEING the big crooks, and extorting money and concessions from the poor, by bribing their leaders. Holding impoverished nations to draconian standards and requirements--and who cares that the west destroyed these economies in the first place, and have enforced poverty thereafter with resource extraction, produce dumping, sweatshop labor and other evil practices? We want our pound of flesh! Again, that's the World Bank on its best days. Add Wolfowitz, and God knows what horror is being inflicted in the name of "reform"! No doubt it's much like Bolton's plans to "reform" the U.N.
I was just wondering why the smooth operators who run the World Bank would put up with Wolfowitz, and the answer just flashed in my head. Argentina! The World Bank/IMF inflicted such onerous conditions on Argentina in return for its "loans"--drastic cuts in education, for instance, and all social programs--and these were so devastating to Argentina's economy that they nearly destroyed Argentinian society. But then a coalition of the poor and the middle class rebelled. They went round with little hammers and broke all the ATM display windows in Buenos Aires, to protest the banks' collusion with these policies. Three governments later--in quick succession--the people finally got a government that promised to free them from the World Bank/IMF, which they did, with Venezuela's (!) help (Venezuela bought up some of the debt on easy terms). Now Argentina is part of a vast, peaceful, democratic, leftist (majorityist) revolution in South America, with good leftist governments elected in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela and Bolivia--virtually the entire continent has turned "blue"--with a strong leftist movements also in Peru, and a new leftist movement even in Columbia (still small), as well as big leftist movements in Central America (notably Mexico and Nicaragua).
The common themes of these leftist governments are national and regional self-determination, and freedom from U.S. and World Bank/IMF interference. And this sentiment is not restricted to Latin America. There is in fact a worldwide movement against US/western domination of markets, finance/banking, and resources. Brazil led the revolt of 20 third world countries at the WTO meeting in Cancun a couple of years ago. There is a huge worldwide small farmer movement, which includes peasant farmers in So. Korea and India, as well as throughout Latin America.
Can it be that the World Bank NEEDS Bushite bullying, threats, blackmail, extortion and all their panoply of fascist weapons, and their lack of conscience and lack of accountability to the American people (due to stolen elections), in order to keep western banks in high profits, given these changed circumstances in FORMERLY easy-to-exploit countries? Could this apparent rebellion against Wolfowitz be more show than anything else? (Perhaps a show for their more democratically-empowered constituents and their political representatives who are more tuned into events in third world countries than we tend to be.)
I am reminded of the big revolt here against the WTO, in Seattle '99: 50,000 people in the streets--labor unions, workers, teachers, professionals, religious groups, human rights and environmental groups, students, a wide spectrum of the population--which shut down the WTO meeting in protest of its undemocratic, secret proceedings, and ill treatment of poor countries, as well as secretly negotiated trade policies that undermined the sovereignty of the American people and its right to regulate labor conditions and the environment. Result: the Bush Junta, and, most recently, Bushite corporate control over our elections in the new electronic voting systems, using TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code. Our Corporate Rulers saw that they could NOT control us if we remained a democracy. We are a quite dangerous population, if we get our dander up--and we are far more progressive and better informed than anyone gives up credit for. And, in fact, we have the power as a sovereign people to dismantle these bad actor corporations--Chevron, Exxon-Mobile, Halliburton, Bechtel, Faux News, Clear Channel, et al--and seize their assets for the common good. They are chartered here. They are disbandable here. And so they needed direct control over our elections, and all the panoply of Bush Junta fascist weapons--bullying, blackmail, anthrax letters, "swift-boating," et al--and fascist policy (torture, pre-emptive war, ripping up the Constitution) to prevent us from regulating them, and--if we really get our dander up--from dismantling the Corporate Rulers' unjust accumulations of wealth and power.
They've got a Wolfowitz in the World Bank, and wolves in the White House (and in the Diebold Congress) because these global corporate predators, which got their start here--using our infrastructure (largely paid for by the middle class), our well-educated, high-standard-of-living, productive labor and our resources to get where they are--are now quite threatened by democracy because they want more and more and more, and it is undemocratic, unfair, unbalanced, and, indeed, unconscionable, for them to take more and more and more.
One of the things I know the World Bank is doing is pushing "sustainable" logging of the Amazon (through the now corporate-dominated Forest Stewardship Council). There is no such thing as "sustainable" logging of the Amazon, as ecologists well know. (Also, the profiteers are Swiss and German, not natives.) But the world is getting down to the last resources of forest, fresh water, oil and other profitable commodities. And it takes conscienceless bastards to get at the last of it. Liars, bullies, cheats. People who think nothing of slaughtering 100,000 Innocent people to get their oil. People like the Bushites. And people like those at Bechtel Corp., who privatized the water in one Bolivian city, and then jacked up the prices to the poorest of the poor, even charging poor peasants for collecting rainwater! (Bolivians, to their credit, revolted, and threw Bechtel out of their country--and elected their first indigenous president, socialist Evo Morales.) But such a mentality! It's a slander on wolves (quite altruistic animals) to compare them. Perhaps cancerous is a better word. They are a cancer on the human race, and are eating us alive.
They didn't fire Wolfowitz.
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