I would have to think about it. I usually don't think in those kinda terms...
Political Gang Cultures
- Thread starter Iolo/Penderyn
- Start date
I would have to think about it. I usually don't think in those kinda terms...
Well the establishment makes the rules, no you or I......
SO there would be a tone test??
Truck Fump / h1b
Verified User
our intelligence as a species cuts both ways. we can create entire worlds in our imagination, that allow is to do great things, but its a world that can be hijacked against our best interests, by propagandists and abusers.
"the worst things in my life never happened" -- mark twain
Truck Fump / h1b
Verified User
look at the assads in syria. those people are straight up crackers.
Geeko Sportivo
Verified User
Hate is the only thing to hate itself! [Geeko Sportivo]
I care about the same issues as most other Americans such as Healthcare, Healthcare Insurance, Decent Wages, Sensible Gun regulations, Protecting our Interests around the world, maintainging great relationships with our allied nations, Defeating poverty, Free Trade, resolving Immigration problems, Educating our young, The US setting a good example of Democracy for the World, curing of diseases, protecting our environment and our natural resources, affordable housing, preventing inflation, paying off our national debt, protecting human rights, protecting and insuring freedom for all, maintaining fair elections and making sure every vote counts, and everyone gets to vote, and investing in America with new renewable energies and getting us off of our addiction to oil and sludge.
Those are just a few, but are the main things that concern me!
StoneByStone
It's OK to Be White
Part of race realism is accepting how race functions in the real world. The establishment can say that all Arabs are white, but that won't make it true in practice.
And no, we don't need tone tests, we just need to be able to look at people. Shakira is half Arabic, but would anyone look at her and say she isn't white?
Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
When you mature, maybe you’ll realize what I was referencing.
There are many events out of our control but that does not imply we should be complicit..
In many, many ways the human mind is an endless & magical universe`but w/ a parallel trapped in a labyrinth of conflicting emotions, thoughts & desires, & then that's just the surface..
Sadly most seem to just submit, even subverting their own best interests, WILLINGLY..
Perhaps w/ no foundation &/or conviction they can't think critically~causing them to merely double down on their mistakes/errors as the default.......
Over the years I have posted several threads related to this phenomena but most ppl aren't interested & are comfortable in the worlds, mindsets & prisons of their own makings..
Truck Fump / h1b
Verified User
decent wages conflicts with totally free trade, so then what? you choose globalism?
Truck Fump / h1b
Verified User
excellent post.
Geeko Sportivo
Verified User
I believe in Free Trade- throughout the world!
Globalism, at its core, seeks to describe and explain nothing more than a world which is characterized by networks of connections that span multi-continental distances.
It attempts to understand all the inter-connections of the modern world — and to highlight patterns that underlie (and explain) them.
Are you sure you don't mean globalization?
In contrast, globalization refers to the increase or decline in the degree of globalism. It focuses on the forces, the dynamism or speed of these changes.
In short, consider globalism as the underlying basic network, while globalization refers to the dynamic shrinking of distance on a large scale.
Globalism is a phenomenon with ancient roots. Thus, the issue is not how old globalism is, but rather how “thin” or “thick” it is at any given time.
As an example of “thin globalism,” the Silk Road provided an economic and cultural link between ancient Europe and Asia. Getting from thin to thick globalism is globalization — and how fast we get there is the rate of globalization.
Of course, the Silk Road was plied by only a small group of hardy traders. Its direct impact was felt primarily by a small group of consumers along the road.
In contrast, the operations of global financial markets today, for instance, affect people from Peoria to Penang. Thus, “globalization” is the process by which globalism becomes increasingly thick/intense.
So let me just ask you a question. North Korea is a country that isolated itself from the rest of the world. Is that what you are wanting America to do?
Last edited:
Truck Fump / h1b
Verified User
it's an idiotic race to the bottom as profiteers incentivize governments to commodify their people into slaves and make them vulnerable to corporate malfeasance, putting free people out of work. its materialistic and quite evil, your haze of bullshitty rhetoric aside.
Geeko Sportivo
Verified User
So, you would rather isolate yourself from the rest of the world- Like North Korea for example!
How do you think that is working out for them?
Geeko Sportivo
Verified User
It sure got quiet all of a sudden!
Truck Fump / h1b
Verified User
if its a choice between losing all employment, and any independence, then yes, isolation is preferable, especially in a nation with tons of farmland and natural resources such as ours. too much dependence on others can make us weak and vulnerable to those who wish us ill.
Truck Fump / h1b
Verified User
he Globalizer Who Came In From the Cold Joe Stiglitz: Today's Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics
by Greg PalastOctober 10, 2001
The World Bank’s former Chief Economist’s accusations are eye-popping – including how the IMF and US Treasury fixed the Russian elections
“It has condemned people to death,” the former apparatchik told me. This was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from the cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now realizes has gone rotten.
And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy. Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent, the new world economic order was his theory come to life.
I “debriefed” Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a London hotel and finally in Washington in April 2001 during the big confab of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But instead of chairing the meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept exiled safely behind the blue police cordons, the same as the nuns carrying a large wooden cross, the Bolivian union leaders, the parents of AIDS victims and the other ‘anti-globalization’ protesters. The ultimate insider was now on the outside.
In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet retirement; US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I’m told, demanded a public excommunication for Stiglitz’ having expressed his first mild dissent from globalization World Bank style.
Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of exclusive interviews for The Observer and BBC TV’s Newsnight about the real, often hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank, and the bank’s 51% owner, the US Treasury.
And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of documents marked, “confidential,” “restricted,” and “not otherwise (to be) disclosed without World Bank authorization.”
Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a “Country Assistance Strategy.” There’s an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation, designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But according to insider Stiglitz, the Bank’s staff ‘investigation’ consists of close inspection of a nation’s 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a ‘restructuring agreement’ pre-drafted for his ‘voluntary’ signature (I have a selection of these).
Each nation’s economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.
Step One is Privatization – which Stiglitz said could more accurately be called, ‘Briberization.’ Rather than object to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders – using the World Bank’s demands to silence local critics – happily flogged their electricity and water companies. “You could see their eyes widen” at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion off the sale price of national assets.
And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest ‘briberization’ of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. “The US Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don’t care if it’s a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin” via kick-backs for his campaign.
Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet as Chairman of the President’s council of economic advisors.
Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia’s industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.
After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all rescue-your-economy plan is ‘Capital Market Liberalization.’ In theory, capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the “Hot Money” cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A nation’s reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation’s own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.
“The result was predictable,” said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves in Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values, savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, “The IMF riot.”
The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, “down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up,” as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples – the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You’d almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.
And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC and The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank, stamped over with those pesky warnings, “confidential,” “restricted,” “not to be disclosed.” Let’s get back to one: the “Interim Country Assistance Strategy” for Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states – with cold accuracy – that they expected their plans to spark, “social unrest,” to use their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames.
That’s not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the US dollar Ecuador’s currency has pushed 51% of the population below the poverty line. The World Bank “Assistance” plan simply calls for facing down civil strife and suffering with, “political resolve” – and still higher prices.
The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it’s bright side – for foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.
Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia ‘subsidizing’ food purchases, “when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the market) is welcome.” The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to save Indonesia’s financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks from which they had borrowed.
A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia’s new president in the nation’s first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at 12% to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to the US Treasury’s vault in Washington.
Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their “poverty reduction strategy”: Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider likens free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. “That too was about opening markets,” he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa, while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.
In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial blockade just as effective – and sometimes just as deadly.
Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO’s intellectual property rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on that in the next chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has “condemned people to death” by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines. “They don’t care,” said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, “if people live or die.”
By the way, don’t be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly called, “triggers.” Taking a World Bank loan for a school ‘triggers’ a requirement to accept every ‘conditionality’ – they average 111 per nation – laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official WTO rules.
Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised in secrecy and driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for discourse or dissent. Despite the West’s push for elections throughout the developing world, the so-called Poverty Reduction Programs “undermine democracy.”
And they don’t work. Black Africa’s productivity under the guiding hand of IMF structural “assistance” has gone to hell in a handbag. Did any nation avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, identifying Botswana. Their trick? “They told the IMF to go packing.”
So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack at the heart of “landlordism,” on the usurious rents charged by the propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a tenant’s crops. So I had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why didn’t the Bank follow your advice?
“If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of the elites. That’s not high on their agenda.” Apparently not.
Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the failure of the banks and US Treasury to change course when confronted with the crises – failures and suffering perpetrated by their four-step monetarist mambo. Every time their free market solutions failed, the IMF simply demanded more free market policies.
“It’s a little like the Middle Ages,” the insider told me, “When the patient died they would say, “well, he stopped the bloodletting too soon, he still had a little blood in him.”
I took away from my talks with the professor that the solution to world poverty and crisis is simple: remove the bloodsuckers.
******
https://www.gregpalast.com/the-globalizer-who-came-in-from-the-cold/
by Greg PalastOctober 10, 2001
The World Bank’s former Chief Economist’s accusations are eye-popping – including how the IMF and US Treasury fixed the Russian elections
“It has condemned people to death,” the former apparatchik told me. This was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from the cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now realizes has gone rotten.
And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy. Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent, the new world economic order was his theory come to life.
I “debriefed” Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a London hotel and finally in Washington in April 2001 during the big confab of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But instead of chairing the meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept exiled safely behind the blue police cordons, the same as the nuns carrying a large wooden cross, the Bolivian union leaders, the parents of AIDS victims and the other ‘anti-globalization’ protesters. The ultimate insider was now on the outside.
In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet retirement; US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I’m told, demanded a public excommunication for Stiglitz’ having expressed his first mild dissent from globalization World Bank style.
Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of exclusive interviews for The Observer and BBC TV’s Newsnight about the real, often hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank, and the bank’s 51% owner, the US Treasury.
And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of documents marked, “confidential,” “restricted,” and “not otherwise (to be) disclosed without World Bank authorization.”
Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a “Country Assistance Strategy.” There’s an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation, designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But according to insider Stiglitz, the Bank’s staff ‘investigation’ consists of close inspection of a nation’s 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a ‘restructuring agreement’ pre-drafted for his ‘voluntary’ signature (I have a selection of these).
Each nation’s economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program.
Step One is Privatization – which Stiglitz said could more accurately be called, ‘Briberization.’ Rather than object to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders – using the World Bank’s demands to silence local critics – happily flogged their electricity and water companies. “You could see their eyes widen” at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion off the sale price of national assets.
And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest ‘briberization’ of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. “The US Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don’t care if it’s a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin” via kick-backs for his campaign.
Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet as Chairman of the President’s council of economic advisors.
Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia’s industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.
After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all rescue-your-economy plan is ‘Capital Market Liberalization.’ In theory, capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the “Hot Money” cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A nation’s reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation’s own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.
“The result was predictable,” said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves in Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values, savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, “The IMF riot.”
The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, “down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up,” as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples – the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank. You’d almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan.
And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC and The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank, stamped over with those pesky warnings, “confidential,” “restricted,” “not to be disclosed.” Let’s get back to one: the “Interim Country Assistance Strategy” for Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states – with cold accuracy – that they expected their plans to spark, “social unrest,” to use their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames.
That’s not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the US dollar Ecuador’s currency has pushed 51% of the population below the poverty line. The World Bank “Assistance” plan simply calls for facing down civil strife and suffering with, “political resolve” – and still higher prices.
The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it’s bright side – for foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.
Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia ‘subsidizing’ food purchases, “when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the market) is welcome.” The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to save Indonesia’s financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks from which they had borrowed.
A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia’s new president in the nation’s first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at 12% to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to the US Treasury’s vault in Washington.
Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their “poverty reduction strategy”: Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider likens free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. “That too was about opening markets,” he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa, while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.
In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial blockade just as effective – and sometimes just as deadly.
Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO’s intellectual property rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on that in the next chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has “condemned people to death” by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines. “They don’t care,” said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, “if people live or die.”
By the way, don’t be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly called, “triggers.” Taking a World Bank loan for a school ‘triggers’ a requirement to accept every ‘conditionality’ – they average 111 per nation – laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official WTO rules.
Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised in secrecy and driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for discourse or dissent. Despite the West’s push for elections throughout the developing world, the so-called Poverty Reduction Programs “undermine democracy.”
And they don’t work. Black Africa’s productivity under the guiding hand of IMF structural “assistance” has gone to hell in a handbag. Did any nation avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, identifying Botswana. Their trick? “They told the IMF to go packing.”
So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack at the heart of “landlordism,” on the usurious rents charged by the propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a tenant’s crops. So I had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why didn’t the Bank follow your advice?
“If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of the elites. That’s not high on their agenda.” Apparently not.
Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the failure of the banks and US Treasury to change course when confronted with the crises – failures and suffering perpetrated by their four-step monetarist mambo. Every time their free market solutions failed, the IMF simply demanded more free market policies.
“It’s a little like the Middle Ages,” the insider told me, “When the patient died they would say, “well, he stopped the bloodletting too soon, he still had a little blood in him.”
I took away from my talks with the professor that the solution to world poverty and crisis is simple: remove the bloodsuckers.
******
https://www.gregpalast.com/the-globalizer-who-came-in-from-the-cold/
StoneByStone
It's OK to Be White
There is a middle ground. We could have trade with other countries while still restricting outsourcing.
Someone should Email the idiots in Singapore & Switzerland, they don't even realize the mess they are in.......
I wouldn't call it a 'mess'. I think it's easier to have a 'National Identity' when you're a similar ethnicity.
I don't agree, race, religion, politics, sex, whatever are mere excuses men use to separate themselves from others & occasionally use to justify their indecencies towards others..
Look @ the fools here, mostly of the same race wishing death & disease on each other.
Problem isn't race or any of that, it's them, man~women=us......Do you realize how old Switzerland is??
That is old thinking IMHO........ Cooperation is the future as epitomized by Singapore, @ least IMHO....
ASEAN is a classic example as well... Many ethnic, racial, religious groups all working together for common good, who would of thunk it??? Kinda the opposite of good races in Europe killing each other off every so often & causing repeated world wars......
Truck Fump / h1b
Verified User
these globalist types only understand full spectrum dominance. they're sociopaths.