---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 7:52 PM Subject: Economic History : Global Power and Global Government: Part 3 To: [email protected] http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14614 <http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14614>excerpt : regarding oil price hikes : * * *As Peter Gowan stated in The Globalization Gamble, “the oil price rises were the result of US influence on the oil states and they were arranged in part as an exercise in economic statecraft directed against America’s ‘allies’ in Western Europe and Japan. And another dimension of the Nixon administration’s policy on oil price rises was to give a new role, through them, to the US private banks in international financial relations.” He explained that the Nixon administration was pursuing a higher oil price policy two years before the Yom Kippur War, and “as early as 1972 the Nixon administration planned for the US private banks to recycle the petrodollars when OPEC finally did take US advice and jack up oil prices.”* Regarding Debt as tool for Neo Liberal Economic Policy : * “The phrase ‘Washington Consensus’ was coined to capture the agreement upon economic policy that was shared between the two major international financial institutions in Washington (IMF and World Bank) and the US government itself. This consensus stipulated that the best path to economic development was through financial and trade liberalization and that international institutions should persuade countries to adopt such measures as quickly as possible.”[93] The debt crisis provided the perfect opportunity to quickly impose these conditions upon countries that were not in a position to negotiate and with no time to spare, desperately in need of loans. Without the debt crisis, such policies may have been subject to greater scrutiny, and with a case-by-case analysis of countries adopting SAPs, the world would become quickly aware of their dangerous implications. The debt crisis was absolutely necessary in implementing the SAPs on an international scale in a short amount of time. The effect became quite clear, as the result “of these policies on the population of developing countries was devastating. The 1980s is known as the ‘lost decade’ of development. Many developing countries’ economies were smaller and poorer in 1990 than in 1980. Over the 1980s and 1990s, debt in many developing countries was so great that governments had few resources to spend on social services and development.”[94] With the debt crisis, countries in the developing world were “[s]tarved of international finance, [and] states had little choice but to open their economies to foreign investors and trade.”[95] The “Third World” was recaptured in the cold grasp of economic colonialism under the auspices of neo-liberal economic theory. * -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens