[P2P-F] Fwd: Economic History : Global Power and Global Government: Part 3

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 7:52 PM
Subject: Economic History : Global Power and Global Government: Part 3
To: econowmix at googlegroups.com


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.


*



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