No strings attached? Yeah, right. Here’s a rundown of some of the major ways that international loans are used to control entire populations.
Those seeking dominance wield control in modern society largely through the manipulation of finance and economics. Power over entire countries comes not only through the debts themselves, but through the conditionalities tied to the financial agreement, as is done regularly by the IMF, World Bank and other aid programs. Notoriously, many locales – free in name – have been brought under the yoke of international domination, altering the shape of its development and its population.
Here’s a look at how the dangerous agendas tied to these loans have been used to takeover regions around the world for the benefits of the ruling global corporations.
From: Truthstream News #2: How the Globalists Are Raping Africa (and the Rest of the World, Too):
One overt example comes from John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, who claims that he was as an international agent of influence, to convinced leaders of developing nations to accept enormous development loans from institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, USAID and others. These loans then gave leverage that effectively forced leaders to capitulate to political pressure and outside meddling. According to Perkins, these economic hitmen use “extortion, sex and murder” as well as the manipulation of documents, elections or official data to tilt the outcome desired by the lenders.
GMO food aid
In 2002, several needy nations in southern Africa – including Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique – controversially rejected food aid, despite being in the middle of a famine, because it was comprised of genetically modified crop staples. Leaders in these countries questioned the safety of biotech foods, expressed suspicions about hidden risks as well as contamination. The diplomatic row stirred emotions, with one supposedly anonymous USAID official telling the Africans “beggars can’t be choosers.” But should even the poorest nations be forced to accept food they consider tainted?
In U.S. occupied Iraq, an agricultural program was instituted under Paul Bremer’s 100 Orders that essentially forced farmer’s to use registered seeds controlled by biotech. It mandated a policy of Plant Variety Protection (PVP) that clearly favored corporate giants like Syngenta and Monsanto, while making it difficult or impossible to use heirloom seeds traditionally saved by farmers since the early days of the Fertile Crescent – threatening the biodiversity and heritage of the region’s rich agricultural history.
This was complicated by the Inma Agribusiness Program, overseen by USAID and operated by members of Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture of the Texas A&M System, who implemented new CAFO lots (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) to bring red meat cattle industries to the war torn nation, along with new fisheries and other mass produced food facilities. Monocrops of corn and soy were raised in Iraq to feed these livestock, much of which was genetically modified. USAID program guides (dated 2007) even advised Iraqi farmers on the use of Syngenta brand pesticides.
Economic shock therapy
Shock therapy was implemented on various economies through Latin America, Russia and Eastern Europe under the banner of neo-liberalization, where sudden shifts to a market economy caused severe disruption and destabilization in the lives of the poorest.
According to Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, the hallmarks of economic Shock Therapy were implemented under warped, hyper-capitalism where transitioning markets were effectively pirate-ized (rather than privatized). Actions included “structurally adjusted mass-privatizations, government deregulation, unrestricted free market access for foreign corporations, and deep cuts in social spending with repressive laws, harsh crackdowns and torture.”
Her colleague, Nobel Prize winner in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, who has held top positions at the World Bank, said:
There was another kind of shock therapy, which was a dramatic change in society, changing from a socialist economy, a communist economy, into a market economy by overnight privatizing, liberalizing, changing the rules of the game overnight rather than the gradual approach of changing one thing after another.
You had asset stripping. You had the undermining of the basic social fabric of society. You didn’t have growth; you had decline. You had increase in poverty rather than the fruits that capitalism was supposed to bring.
For Argentina, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, it was hyper-inflationary debt, exacerbated by sharply increased rates by the Federal Reserve, at a time when wage drops led to government revenue drops and subsequent debt shortfalls. This was all complicated by IMF loans and their associated agenda.
IMF riots
Greece: The consequences of the 2008 global economic crisis forced governments to bailout banks over risky loans and other side effects; many countries were devastated, with some of the worst fell on Greece, which not only threatened to drag down the rest of Europe’s economy with it, but led toviolent unrest, new draconian leadership, and austerity, heavy debt and pushbacks in the average living standard for the population. IMF agreements controversially set in place job cuts, particularly in the public sector, a drop in the minimum wage and severe slashing to the budget for retirement and other benefits, all of which triggered shock and anger in the society.
Debt traps for struggling countries
Jamaica + IMF Debt: The documentary Life + Debt profiled Jamaica’s long struggle to overcome a first, a struggling developing economy, then sagging debt under an IMF loan, and further by the crippling conditions under the loan that forced it to import food, adjust agriculture to global preferences while out pricing Jamaica farmers, creating factory jobs with sweatshop conditions and even importing pools of cheap Chinese labor to the island’s semi-autonomous “Free Trade Zone.”
The effects of this crushing debt and its draconian influence over development has stunted opportunity for ordinary people in Jamaica for decades to come. Yet, these patterns of exploitation mirror the loans given to developing countries across the globe.
Read more: The Center for Economic and Policy Research – The Multilateral Debt Trap in Jamaica
Privatizing water, putting a price on life
Bolivia 2000: Protests and riots resulted in the major metropolitan area of Cochabamba as a result of IMF and World Bank orders to privatize the municipal water supply. A contract was handed over to the firm Aguas del Tunari (owned in part by the San Francisco-based contractor Bechtel) who denied people access to water, and even reportedly used militarized riot police to prevent the collection of rain water during its harsh transition to a (corporatized and captured) market economy.
Even after immense backlash, the World Bank supported corporate privatization of the water, stating that “no subsidies should be given to ameliorate the increase in water tariffs in Cochabamba” also stating that “poor governments are often too plagued by local corruption and too ill equipped to run public water systems efficiently. …[and that the use of private corporations] opens the door to needed investment and skilled management. Aguas del Tunari was eventually forced to give up and leave the country.
Spread of disease during disaster relief
Haiti – Post-earthquake relief in 2010 by international organizations led by UN peacekeepers resulted in the spread of cholera to Haitian residents, killing thousands. Vengeful and suspicious of the source, lynchmobs killed Voodoo priests and angrily protested the United Nationsencampments, casting blame on these sources. A scientific investigation indeed proved that a UN camp had supposedly-unintentionally spread the disease through a contamination wastewater source, resulting in lawsuits. As of April 2014, the U.N. is still struggling to contain the spread of cholera, making for a volatile destructive force in the already poverty stricken and disaster ravaged island nation.
In wake of polio vaccine, 47,500 cases of non-polio paralysis
Pakistan, India and Polio Vaccines – Despite the fact that the World Health Organization recorded no new cases of polio in India for 2012, signaling its rapid disappearance as a major threat, the private foundations led by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation were aggressively vaccinating millions upon millions of children in India and Pakistan.
Doctors Pulliyel and Vashisht conducted a study finding that in 2012 – with no cases of polio –approximately 47,500 children were diagnosed with non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP), which is twice as deadly as polio, in the areas where the oral polio vaccine was administered.
Suspicion, backlash against vaccines: Beware of those bearing gifts
With distrust and concerns about Western-led vaccination efforts in Pakistan following revelations that U.S. intelligence used a “fake vaccination program” in a sting to “hunt Osama bin Laden,”Pakistan Taliban groups were blamed for killing several vaccine workers and bombing vaccination vans in 2012.
In 2013, at least 9 vaccine workers were shot in Nigeria. These deaths closely followed reports thatat least 40-50 children were paralyzed in Chad, Africa from Gates-foundation backed Meningitis shots in late 2012.
Covert infertility from vaccines?
1994-96 Philippines: Tetanus vaccines supplied by a World Health Organization-sponsored vaccine effort were found to be tainted with human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), correlating with numerous reports of terminated pregnancies and spontaneous abortions. Necessary for a healthy pregnancy, hCG becomes an anti-fertility agent when “carried” by the tetanus vaccine, which produces antibodies against hCG when tetanus antibodies are also produced.
The BBC reported in 1995:
Women should have been told that the injection would cause miscarriage and, in the end, infertility. The Department of Health should have asked beforehand, so that only those who didn’t want to have children had the injection. I really hope and pray to God that I will still have a baby and get a normal pregnancy. And I am still hopeful that the Department of Heath will find an antidote to the antibodies as well.
It during the mid-1990s that an anti-fertility vaccine for women was announced that used human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) growth hormone in a tetanus vaccine to trigger an immunoresponse against the pregnancy. As Jurriaan Maessan uncovered, “The work on LHRH and HCG vaccines was supported by research grants of The Rockefeller Foundation.”
Food as a weapon of depopulation
In 1974, Henry Kissinger issued the then-secret NSSM 200, a National Security Memo identifying 13 key countries where the use of “food as a weapon” was desired to contain overpopulation (supposedly a top threat to U.S. national security). India was at the top of the list.
Food-for-coercive sterilization scandals: India’s great “emergency”
India: Food aid delivered to India through USAID since at least the Johnson Administration has included population control and family planning efforts.
This pressure peaked during the 1975-77 “Emergency” under Indira Gandhi where the government, backed by international aid organizations, forcibly sterilized more than 8.3 million low caste Indians – primarily women, but also many men – in notorious medical camps. Included in this horror, are reports of systematic abuse, with incentives for turning people in for sterilization and even grabbing people off the street. These efforts were led by Indira’s son Sanjay Gandhi (incidentally, these leaders were from the Nehru family and not related to India’s founding father Mohatma Gandhi, but used his name in the quest for power).
Please watch Melissa Melton’s intensely researched report on coercive population control measures in India, using “food [and other incentives] as a weapon.”
Further Reading:
- The Commanding Heights : The Battle for the World Economy
- Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy [PBS DVD SERIES]
- Food and Human Rights in Development – volume I: Legal and Institutional Dimensions and Selected Topics
- Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid (Counterblasts)
- ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism
- A Brief History of Neoliberalism
