A Further Look at Privatisation
By LARRY ROMANOFF – October 10, 2020
Privatisation is generally considered to mean the selling off to privately-owned companies the basic publicly-owned physical and social infrastructure of a country, including things like airports, railways, electricity generation, ports and so on, and also including the takeover of health care and educational systems by private for-profit firms. But in the dictionary of the Americans and their European banker friends, privatisation has an expanded meaning, the above forming only one segment of an overall plan. Let's look at the pieces.
Privatisation began with, and was almost always executed hand in hand with, the colonial military, beginning with that of the British Empire and latterly that of the US. It consisted of raw aggression against weaker nations to enable a few European bankers and their multinational companies to take ownership of those nations' coveted wealth and resources. I have written elsewhere that early in the 19th century the US United Fruit Company owned most of Guatemala including 70% of all the arable land, the communications facilities, the only railroad and shipping port, and controlled most of the nation's exports through ownership of most major corporations. Yet US President Coolidge orchestrated the overthrow of Guatemala's government when it refused to grant yet more concessions. This pattern was followed throughout Central and South America, where nation after nation saw its government replaced by a brutal US-financed dictator, its infrastructure stolen, its resources looted and plundered, while the population was repeatedly terrorised and maintained in abject poverty. In Zaire, the European bankers and industrialists so coveted the gold and diamonds that they used the CIA to assassinate yet another leader and install yet another dictator amenable to Western bribery. The Boer wars fought in South Africa were arranged by the Rothschilds and other industrialists, using the British military to exterminate a population resistant to colonisation, then claim the gold fields and diamond mines for their own. The entire sorry episode of opium in China involved the Jewish Rothschilds, Sassoons and Russells, backed by the power of the British military for execution, as was much else involving India. For at least the past 200 years, military imperialism produced enormous profits and economic growth for the US and untold trillions in wealth for a handful of European bankers while keeping countless nations buried in poverty. This was 'privatisation' on the largest scale the world has seen, involving the wholesale theft by military force of the wealth and resources of weaker nations. Two of the more recent travesties following this same pattern are the destruction of Iraq and Libya, and for the same reasons - the 'privatisation' of those nations' resources, involving the destruction of the country and millions of casualties, and the "pacification" of the population by terrorism.
I wrote elsewhere that the world would be astonished to learn how commercial was the American invasion of Iraq, that Bremer's 100 Orders paved the way for foreign commercial control, permitting multinationals to privatize the entire nation, a degree of foreign and private control that has not been witnessed since the days of the Rothschild-controlled British East India Company and its extraterritoriality treaties. Upon subduing the Iraqi military, the US and its European banker friends looted Iraq's central bank of all its gold and foreign currency, and established yet another privately-owned central bank patterned on the FED and with the same owners. They closed more than 200 state-owned enterprises employing more than 500,000 people, and turned all these industry sectors over to foreign firms. Bremer's laws further gave this same small insider group the power to purchase anything and everything in Iraq, including the entire physical and social infrastructure, at any price they choose. They allocated to foreign oil companies owned by these same people the exclusive right to control at least 65% of the country’s oil reserves, for both production and sales, and to determine the distribution of revenue and profit allocated to Iraq and to themselves. The same laws provided a perpetual annuity for Monsanto and Cargill by outlawing all but their GM seed, prohibiting the use of any and all natural seed stocks. And of course, all these foreigners are exempt from all Iraqi laws and taxes. Approximately the same occurred in Libya, with US$30 billion in gold confiscated and a privately-owned central bank established that would now control the nation's money supply and oil revenue.
The pattern of privatisation by invasion took a rest after Reagan's reign in the 1980s when the world could no longer stomach the vast atrocities perpetrated by the US military and its banker friends, though as mentioned above it has returned again with Iraq and Libya. As a temporary substitute, the Americans and their handlers turned to what Hillary Clinton so cutely named "Democracy Promotion", which simply involved fostering home-grown revolutions, instigated and financed by the US, but relying on revolution and civil war to install compliant governments. The confiscation and looting of resources and infrastructure continued as before.
In early 2015, Eric Zeuss wrote in a Washington's Blog article that the plan for a wholesale 'dismemberment-by-privatisation' of the Ukraine had been originally drawn up in the 1990s by the Jewish-American Lawrence Summers of Harvard, as a way for American corporate insiders "to buy the USSR's assets dirt-cheap, and thereby profit from its dissolution, having planned the massive dismemberment of infrastructure, resources and industrial assets throughout the former Soviet Union." This is the process being executed today in the Ukraine, assets that include not only industrial infrastructure but the nation's few resources including Ukraine's huge gas fields and, as Zeuss noted, "Western agribusiness giants are now coming into Western Ukraine to buy up Ukrainian farmland, which is among the world’s most fertile". It was entirely a Jewish enterprise. He wrote that the Jewish-American Victoria Nuland of Obama’s State Department selected the Jewish-Ukrainian banker Arseniy Yatsenyuk as the person to take control over Ukraine. The plan concocted by the Jewish financier George Soros and Obama was to privatize as much of the Ukrainian Government as possible in a fire-sale of its assets. As with every other nation targeted, the assets are being offered to only a few bidders and will be sold at prices far below their real value, just as occurred, for example, with the Royal Mail and UK railways.
The IMF and the World Bank were deeply involved in not only the war but in forcing and financing the 'privatisation' of Ukraine. If you needed proof that the IMF is just a Western capitalist front, here it is: Media reports revealed the IMF offered Ukraine a $17 billion loan, which will be unrepayable and result in the wholesale seizure of infrastructure in lieu of payment, on the condition that Ukraine agreed to remove all restrictions on agricultural biotechnology and specifically to permit Monsanto to freely sell its GM seed and chemicals. These same firms have also been maneuvering to purchase or otherwise take control of Ukraine's rich farmland which has for centuries been the breadbasket of Eastern Europe. These so-called 'loans' come from the same private European bankers who have been engineering this vast takeover of arable land on many continents, and do not constitute financial assistance by any realistic measure since the loans will be repaid to the same bankers - with interest - but at the additional price of the forced divestiture of national assets to corporations owned and controlled by these same bankers. To put it simply, the bankers are saying "We will lend you short-term funds on condition you sell us all your assets at half their value, after which you will still have to repay the loans". How could any nation be better off after such an arrangement? And yet this is precisely the program being forcibly executed all over the world.
To this point, we have two pillars of the house of privatisation: (1) direct military invasion and subsequent confiscation of assets, and (2) destruction from within by the fostering of instability and inciting revolutions and civil wars to effect the installation of a government leader that would permit privatisation to continue unhindered. The third, which I have already discussed elsewhere, is the imposition wherever possible, usually by force, of a privately-owned central bank, a specialty of the Rothschilds and friends, transferring virtually total control of money and the economy to a small group of international vultures and exposing these nations to predatory economic booms and busts.
A fourth way that became wildly popular with the bankers in the late 1970s and 1980s involved the manipulation of the US dollar exchange rate and the FED's power to control liquidity and interest rates. One of the tools the Western nations use to strip the world is the FED's control of the US dollar. The FED floods the market with liquidity while the value of the dollar is talked down in relation to other currencies, interest rates are pushed to zero, depreciating the dollar further and making US dollar loans attractive to developing nations. When the loan books are full, the plug is pulled. The money supply is contracted, the dollar is pushed up again, interest rates rise quickly, and emerging nations suddenly face impossible costs to service those dollar loans with their currencies plummeting against the dollar and interest costs magnifying substantially. Countless nations have been deliberately forced into default by precisely this method. Most of this emerging nation debt is taken out on the assumption (and often the assurance) that the FED will continue to flood the world with liquidity and that the dollar will remain low, but these are always empty promises. Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and many other nations suffered greatly from this vulnerability to treason on the part of Western bankers, causing massive outflows of wealth from these poorer nations to the few rich ones and most especially into the personal pockets of a very few European bankers.
These international bankers conspire with the US FED and the Bank of England to produce liquidity, a low dollar and low interest rates, then encourage nations and their large corporations to take out US dollar loans beyond the ability of most to repay. When enough gullible victims are in the trap, the FED then obediently raises the interest rates to unaffordable levels, with these nations' foreign currency earnings now insufficient for debt service, and their domestic currency depreciated by as much as 30% against the dollar, making repayment impossible. Then they bring in the IMF and the World Bank driving a carriage of financial salvation that will keep these nations permanently in poverty. Greece is a good current example. Unable to repay its debt, the country is forced into a savage economic restructuring, cutting all social services including education, health care and pensions, and reallocating those funds to debt service. This being insufficient, Greece was then bullied into selling off its physical and other infrastructure, its arable land, water resources and other physical assets to the same bankers and their friends far below actual value, leaving that country in almost permanent destitution. This program is part of an extensive detailed plan that has been in execution for many decades. With Greece, the Jewish European bankers forced the country to place virtually all its public infrastructure and public assets into a trust over which the Greek government "would have no control". Then, the bankers will sell all those assets to themselves at pennies on the dollar, and Greece will have entered an essentially perpetual bankruptcy. The country will have almost no assets, but will still be forced to repay the massive "restructuring" loans that will be far beyond its ability to repay. That means perpetually higher taxes, the impoverishment of the population and the slow but eventual destruction of Greek society.
The real money power behind these loans has always lurked in the background to force an exchange of debt for equity, meaning that when a small country can't repay its loans it will turn over its arable land and physical infrastructure to the bankers at a price usually far below its real value. After allowing an appropriate time for economies to stabilise, the process is repeated, with the US FED the prime instigator, working in conjunction with the hidden money people who provide funds to the World Bank and the IMF. The same process occurs with domestic companies in these countries, encouraged to borrow in US dollars at very low rates, then betrayed by the same bankers who arbitrarily raise the dollar exchange rate and interest rates to push these companies near or into bankruptcy. Then, take over the equity and ownership at pennies on the dollar. During the past 50 or 60 years we have read of numerous national and corporate defaults, all victims of this deliberate process of looting nations of their assets.
It is astonishing to see how often the UN and its agencies, working with the international bankers, manage to use food as a weapon in their drive to maintain economic disparity. In the early 2000s, the IMF forced Malawi to sell its emergency grain reserves to pay down the nation's debts, which were small at the time and not requiring such drastic measures. According to media reports at the time, "the IMF further forced Malawi to pursue a disastrous policy of mass privatisation, pushing the country to the brink of the worst famine in its history." At around the same time, in Somalia, the UN World Food Program "began the distribution of its entire year's grain aid just as the nation's farmers were bringing their harvest to market." The farmers of course were unable to sell their grain in competition with the UN's deliberately-timed unlimited free supply. A year later they repeated the process, this time using the conscripted military power of the Ethiopian army to put down local dissent. With this and other measures, the UN and the IMF managed to completely eviscerate whatever was left of Somalian domestic agriculture, leaving the nation forever after totally within the grip of the banking vultures.
It has long been recognised in the developing world that institutions like the IMF and the World Bank are simply one of the means by which the Western powers control their colonies. The financial policies forced onto developing nations in return for financial assistance, are precisely those which will inflict the maximum colonial stranglehold to prevent these nations from any possible economic or social progress. They are simply instruments of Imperial financial power, flying moralistic flags of free-market liberalisation while plundering the victims. Under a new international regime of political and financial dependence coupled with a constant military threat, undeveloped nations continue to be exploited by the West in the framework of an international capitalist system, "where it is virtually impossible for any country to disassociate itself from the overall structure". Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist and dissident former chief economist at the World Bank, describes it as having "brought disaster to Russia and Argentina and leaves a trail of devastated developing economies in its wake". An article in the Wall Street Journal stated that "(the bank's) management strictly follows the theory developed by developed countries for developing countries, so that the latter do not become developed ones."
The World Bank and the IMF were primarily designed to plunder the developing world on behalf of the US and European ruling class who consist primarily of a very small number of bankers and industrialists. World Bank development projects often destroy local culture and environment while providing infrastructure almost free of charge for the further profit of US-based MNCs. IMF-mandated financial measures force the abandonment of health, education and social programs and allow public assets such as infrastructure to be acquired by American or European multinationals and bankers for a fraction of their true worth. "The net effect of all this is that, contrary to the carefully nurtured myth, developing nations have transferred far more wealth to the US than has been transferred to them, and that, of course, is the whole idea." In his article Empire of Capital, George Monbiot made appropriate points when he noted that these institutions and the large powers that control them forced Asian nations to liberalise their currencies only so that financial speculators like George Soros and Goldman Sachs could attack them. Americans read about the "Asian financial crisis" presented as some accidental act of god, without being told that it was deliberately planned and executed. All prescriptions from the IMF are intended to drain developing nations and maintain income disparity. Monbiot wrote that they are instruments of financial power for the rich Westerners who did not end their colonial controls until they had established other means of subjugation.
I am uncertain of the source of this quote, but it bears repeating:
"Weak countries are forced into the privatisation of their most valuable assets and resources, always at fire-sale prices, thus imposing an inescapable destitution on the entire undeveloped world whose populations are little more than disposable irritants in the quest for money. The stories are all similar; bankers and their industrialists smell profit in a nation, and begin by using the IMF and World Bank to plunder these small nations of their resources and infrastructure. This is such a large industry that the European Rothschilds were reported to have established a separate bank simply to hold all the assets that were forcibly divested by these nations. On occasions when the financial destruction fails, the US, being controlled by these same people, and using its military as the bankers' private army, uses its military power to open the doors and clear away all obstacles to unhindered plundering, most often at enormous human cost. This march to global tyranny appears almost unstoppable.”
And it doesn't stop with the bank accounts of the nations or their corporations; the people must be looted as well, this process popularly known as "austerity". William Blum stated the situation precisely when he wrote, "It was under Reagan administration influence that the IMF and World Bank began widely imposing the policy package known as structural adjustment - featuring deregulation, privatization, emphasis on exports, cuts in social spending - that has plunged country after country in the developing world into economic destitution. The IMF chief at the time was honest about what was to come, saying in 1981 that, for low-income countries, 'adjustment is particularly costly in human terms'."
The bankers are not only willing, but eager, to make loans they know are unrepayable, then force a national "restructuring" of privatisation that permits them to seize basic infrastructure and millions of acres of land in compensation, and to force the abandonment of most social services including education and health care. Nations weak enough to capitulate to these demands, and there are many of them, are doomed to perpetual poverty and slavery in the worst colonial tradition. Those refusing to capitulate are invaded or have their government overthrown by the CIA, to install a puppet dictator who will comply with the wholesale looting of his own country. This latter has occurred in more than 50 poor nations.
If you recall the financial crisis in Cyprus not too long ago, that nation didn't have sufficient infrastructure assets to cover the debt, and had insufficient scope in terms of cutting social services, so the predatory bankers demanded - and received - confiscations from the bank accounts of the population itself. All individual bank accounts were stripped to an extent of as much as 30% to 60% of their holdings, to provide a cash payment to the bankers on the government's debt. The bankers were almost delirious with joy since they were able to simultaneously accomplish a separate political objective - that of punishing Russia one more time. A great many Russians had many billions of dollars stored in Cyprus, and it was these accounts that were especially targeted and drained - to the extent of 90% - with the Russians helpless since this action was taken under the umbrella of the IMF and World Bank, and therefore following "the rule of law".
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts wrote in an article that "The Greek economic crisis is the result of austerity policies forced on the Greek people in order to prevent the private banks from making losses on their loans to Greece. The purpose of the austerity policy was to establish that the Greek people are responsible for the bankers' mistakes, not the bankers themselves. The austerity policy was created by the elite in order to make ordinary people cover the bankers' losses by accepting cuts in pensions, employment, public services, and by selling off public assets at bargain prices to the clients of the banks. IMF loans and conditionality programs are the mechanism by which countries are looted. No country has ever benefitted from an IMF program, only the creditors of the country benefit." He noted that one of the hoped-for results would be a revolution and overthrow of the government that sold out the Greek people, to be replaced by an oligarch appointed by the bankers, as has happened in other nations. Roberts also noted that at the beginning of the economic crisis, the Greek Orthodox Church suffered fierce attacks by the Western media, in retaliation for the church's vocal defense of the poor.
Something similar occurred with Ireland where these same European bankers so effectively terrified the Irish government that it assumed the entire liability for the losses of these bankers, guaranteeing repayment of the enormous bank liabilities from the public purse. In other words, the Irish government promised to extract from the population the many tens of billions of dollars necessary to cover the losses of the international bankers. If the people of Ireland fully understood that event, there would have been a popular revolution and Irish politicians would have been hung in the streets.
So, we now have four pillars of the house of privatisation: (1) direct military invasion, (2) externally-incited and financed internal overthrow of government, (3) the imposition of a privately-owned central bank, and (4) bankers' loans, made directly or through the services of the World Bank and the IMF, and through manipulation of the US dollar and interest rates by the FED.
A fifth pillar, driven less obviously but just as seriously by bankers' greed, depends for its success on the pernicious linkage between neo-liberal capitalism and American Christian morality, preaching that no state has any legitimate part to play in anything that could possibly produce a revenue stream. In this vein, China's state-owned enterprises are an abomination in the sight of god and, to avoid divine retribution, must immediately be sold off to Goldman Sachs and Blackstone. In the name of "increasing competition", of course. This new capitalism is not only anti-social but forceful to the point of being brutal, the Americans and their banker friends virtually demanding that all nations sell off their physical infrastructure, usually at 50% or less of its real value, on the moral theology that an inherent right of private enterprise is to eliminate government involvement in anything where a profit can be made. The rhetoric relies heavily on a fabricated and cruelly- twisted Judeo-Christian morality, twisted in presentation as 'the right thing to do'. Political and military pressures come to bear as well, to convince nations that to refuse to sell out their assets to the vultures would justify severe economic sanctions and/or potential invasion. It was this philosophy that forced the sale of Britain's railways, the Royal Mail, and much more, to this small group. This Judeo-Christian capitalist liberalism is responsible for Canada selling off all its airports and leasing its toll highways, and for the massive privatisations in the US that include everything from prisons to schools.
There is a sixth pillar that we don't often associate with an image of privatisation but is most important nonetheless, and consists of what we see as mergers and acquisitions of prominent firms in non-Western countries. This one appears superficially as the least malignant but has the same objectives as the others - which is full economic control of an economy. This is the reason US multinationals in particular are so extremely predatory in nature, searching out and buying up every significant national brand in every nation, and killing it. The end purpose is to have these same small groups of bankers and industrialists control the entire significant industrial capacity of a nation, from food to personal care goods, from automobiles to consumer products. As already noted, control of about 30% of the market share of a product is sufficient to control the cultural values of that product, and so market share translates to cultural as well as commercial domination. Sitting in our homes and offices, this seldom occurs to us. We read of one foreign company purchasing a large domestic competitor and think little of it. We read of a Goldman Sachs and friends purchasing the largest meat suppliers in China or some 'hedge fund' buying control of virtually all the cooking oil production and distribution in China. We see a Proctor & Gamble buying and killing dozens of treasured Chinese brands, or a Coca-Cola or Pepsi doing the same and achieving a dominant market share in the process, but we view these as unconnected events and don't link all the small dots. But they aren't unconnected; the group of people behind these corporate purchases, mergers and acquisitions is not a large one, and consists primarily and often exclusively, of precisely the same bankers responsible for the destruction of Iraq and Libya and the financial crises in countries like Greece. They are the same people responsible for the current economic sanctions on Russia, and the coup in the Ukraine, and for the same reasons.
So pillars (5) and (6) above consist of the 'voluntary' disposition of both public and private assets to this same group of privatisation vampires. When this privatisation program reaches its ultimate conclusion, the ownership of a nation's central bank, its entire significant physical infrastructure, most of its arable land, its social infrastructure including health care, education and social services, and all of its significant commercial enterprises, will all be beneficially owned by the same small group of international bankers and industrialists. That's the long-term plan, but this plan has one weakness: the vampires may own everything of commercial value in a country, but the government still retains ultimate control through its powers of legislation, regulation and taxation. It doesn't help to own a profitable business if a government taxes away all my profits, nor does it help to own all the airports and railways if the government sets the fares and schedules. For a disposable country (read non-white), we can always resort to military invasion, and for the more important nations, those too large and powerful to easily invade, we can quote from the Bible, use political, diplomatic and military pressure, apply economic sanctions, attempt to incite civil unrest and promote riots, revolutions and civil wars, and perhaps eventually get our way.
But the last category, those nations that are supposedly our friends, present a difficult problem. How do we deal with a Canada, an Australia, a Japan, a Britain or an Italy, if they don't want to sell their souls to us? And this is the reason the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the European TTIP are so important. These agreements, presented as trade agreements, are no such thing and only a small portion of their contents relates to trade in any sense. What they are, is sovereignty transfers, a way to obtain from 'friendly' nations by subterfuge that which cannot be obtained by direct negotiation and which the bankers are (at least temporarily) unwilling to achieve through military force.
In a Huffington Post article in early 2015, Robert Kuttner wrote so perfectly "the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is not really a trade deal at all but a series of measures intended to promote further deregulation of economic, financial, health, labor, safety, privacy, and environmental protections on both sides of the Atlantic. TTIP was designed by corporations to weaken labor and government." The core issue in these so-called partnerships is Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) procedure, in which sovereign nations (those who sign the documents) willingly abdicate their sovereignty over virtually all commercial, property and social rights to an international extra-judicial body with 'judges' appointed by the same vampires I've been referencing. When a nation signs these TPP documents, it freely turns over the bulk of its judicial power to an invisible third party with only the interests of the international bankers in its heart. The TPP ISDS supersedes and trumps even the supreme court of a nation. Its rulings are final, and each nation signatory to the agreements must abide by those rulings. The ISDS is essentially a totally separate and completely new supra-national judicial system that, like NATO, reports to no one but the secret cabal of European bankers who created it. In every country, this tribunal will have absolute judicial power above that of the courts of the nations.
Now, the weak governments that sell off their infrastructure to private owners will have effectively lost their powers of 'legislation, regulation and taxation', since the TPP tribunal can over-rule the local government and force it to drain both its own and the public's bank accounts to pay the International bankers and industrialists all the money they would have made if there had been no local government at all to hinder their greed. If a country wants to legislate a prohibition on smoking, it will have to pay these firms all the money they would have made selling tobacco if there had been no government at all. This is in fact happening with Australia and other nations today. National laws to protect citizens in areas like food safety, the environment or health care, will automatically incur enormous costs of reimbursement for the neo-liberal capitalists who have their profits shrink from these laws. The UK Guardian noted in an article that "Countries like the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland who are in trade agreements which include this kind of investor-state relationship have been sued 127 times and lost the equivalent money that could have employed 300,000 nurses for a year". Under this system, nations would no longer be sovereign states, but merely controlled vassals of the international bankers.
In early 2015, Reuters reported European investment bankers being in ecstasy from apparently willing decisions by Australia's government to sell off much of that nation's infrastructure "to pay down debt", items including ports, toll highways, electricity networks and generating stations and more. Certainly the Australian public are unaware of this impending calamity, but it seems to not have occurred to the nation's politicians that a one-time disposal of assets at far below market value will leave the nation not only temporarily debt-free but also perpetually asset-free, to say nothing of perpetual increased public expense to subsidise the inevitable cuts in services and increased prices that will soon be beyond the ability of both the general public and its corporations to support. One really wonders what these people think about, if indeed they think at all, and of what kinds of pressure, money or propaganda led to these decisions.
In a speech in 1983, Jacob Rothschild stated that in the future there would be "Two types of institutions, the worldwide financial service company and the international commercial bank with global trading competence". George Ball, an undersecretary of State for Kennedy and Johnson and an executive of the Lehman Brothers bank, stated that there would ultimately be serious conflicts between Rothschild's vision of worldwide multinational corporations (all owned by the banks) and nation-states. Ball said,
"The Multinational Enterprise is a modern concept evolved to meet the requirements of the modern age. The Nation-State, a very old-fashioned idea, is poorly adapted to serve the needs of our present complex world."
And there we are. The international bankers mean to replace the "old-fashioned" nation or the state with their supranational TPP and ISDS, both accountable to no one but these bankers, entirely outside the reach of national governments, laws or populations, and eventually enforced by the military power of NATO when the US becomes disposable. The governments who sign these treaties are willingly surrendering virtually their entire national sovereignty to these few European bankers, and doing so without the knowledge of the people. This is the death of the religion of democracy, the removal of the last vestige of public influence over government, yet few seem to realise this.
George Monbiot wrote that "Post-democracy refers to our politics in which the old structures, such as elections and parliaments, remain standing, but are uninhabited by political power. Power has shifted to other forums not amenable to public challenge: "small, private circles where political elites do deals with corporate lobbies"." He also stated a most important point, being that the creation of these supra-national agencies "don't reduce or eliminate state power, (but) relocate it from civil to corporate control." In other words, national governments will transfer most of their power to a small group of international bankers whose names they don't even know and whose ultimate purposes they haven't the cynical imaginations to visualise. Rob Urie wrote in Counterpunch that it is not widely understood that the recent changes to the Western political economy "could best be described as a neo-liberal (fascist) coup ... giving civil decision-making authority to supranational agencies." Someone wrote that "This concentration of unseen private power to a point where it is stronger than nation-states is fascism", what governance professor Colin Crouch defined as "post-democracy in its purest form". Again, pure fascism as foretold by Alexander Tytler and others, who stated that democracy always collapsed into fascism from its vulnerability to external control by the rich, powerful and greedy.
Let's return for a moment to our list of these pillars of privatisation. We have: (1) direct military invasion, (2) externally-incited coup, (3) privately-owned central bank, (4) manipulated bankers' loans, (5) voluntary disposition of public assets, and (6) voluntary disposition of private assets.
We often hear about category (6) dispositions, the takeover of large domestic firms by foreigners, defined simply as 'mergers and acquisitions', without ever being given sufficient detail of either the background of these takeovers or the long-term consequences of them. To us, a Proctor & Gamble or a Pepsi buys another world-leading detergent or cola brand, but we see no cause for concern. We never hear about the events that led to what may have been an extorted and dishonest takeover, nor do we hear of these brands being quietly killed off and thousands of people left unemployed. Nobody tells us the eventual effects on the victim society or commercial environment of the increased market share, and nowhere will we find the names of the ultimate beneficiaries of these events.
We sometimes hear about category (5) dispositions - the sale of public assets - for instance, the recent sale of Britain's Royal Mail to a group of these 'private' investors, but with almost no background information except some temporary complaints that the assets were sold off at 50% of their value. No information is ever provided about how the politicians were coerced into selling off vital national assets at sometimes ridiculous prices, as with Canada's busiest toll highway at 10% of its cost. Nor are we ever supplied with the resulting negatives of these purchases in a context that would permit intelligent assessment of the magnitude of these crimes - and they are crimes, make no mistake. Britain's railway system was not only sold off far below its intrinsic value but the new owners arranged for the politicians to provide massive public subsidies in the billions of dollars to what were now private businesses. Then, after sucking billions from the public purse while cannibalising the private rail company to bankruptcy, it was sold back the UK government and, once refinanced and placed on a sound footing, was "privatised" again, giving our vampires another free kick at the can. Nor are we ever given detailed assessments of the huge increases in fares and reductions in service that inevitably follow these dispositions. If all this pertinent information were presented to the public at one time and in comprehensible form, we would see a revolution before morning and more than a few politicians (and bankers) would either be imprisoned or hung from the nearest tree.
Occasionally we hear about category (4) privatisations, resulting from bankers' betrayals, but only in the briefest general terms. The media contain some accounts of privatisation programs being imposed on nations, ostensibly in order to repay outstanding loans, but never with any detail on the infrastructure or corporations involved in these disposals. We are never provided with figures on the actual values of disposed assets, of the names of the bidders, of the bidding process, of the actual prices paid or the names of the purchasers. As with category (5), we never learn of the fire-sale prices, the subsequent subsidies and the reductions in service. We also never learn the names of the bankers behind the scenes who force through these dispositions, nor do we ever learn the terms on which they obtain these assets, and we almost never know precisely which assets were stripped from these victimised nations. When we do learn of these category (4) privatisations, the situation is described to us as analogous to someone being indebted to his bank, lacking immediate cash to repay the loan, so selling off a second car he doesn't really need anyway, and squaring accounts. Nothing could be further from the truth. The assets that are demanded by the vampires are those with the highest value and greatest long-term revenue stream, and almost always those most critical for the maintenance of sovereignty and for the economic development of a nation - items like the transportation and communications systems, for example - without which a nation cannot develop but which development is now entirely in the hands of a foreign vulture uninterested in local development but in the maximum extraction of wealth from that country. Hence, perpetual poverty for the population and untold riches for the banker.
Due to the excessive media control by this same group of people, public perception of these category (4) dispositions is badly flawed and exceedingly dim, bearing no relation to their extraordinarily criminal reality. It often occurs that a nation, like Greece today, virtually bankrupted by these predatory bankers, will be forced to dispose of their infrastructure and other national assets, not through any bidding process, but simply in a grab by the involved bankers sharing the riches widely with friends unrelated to the process. In fact, with Greece, the bankers demanded the government place more than $50 billion of the nation's most valuable public assets into a 'trust fund' that was "entirely outside the reach" of the Greek government. These same bankers will then take possession of these assets at a small fraction of their value, with the Greek government having no authority to intervene nor to demand a fair price, nor even to know the final result. The banker is not only demanding the debtor sell his car directly to the banker rather than on the open market, but selling it at a fire-sale price, and demanding further that the debtor sell his home and other car to some of the banker's close friends. The assets confiscated through this process often include things we wouldn't expect, like vast tracts of arable land, and the ownership of water aquifers. You can see the plan behind this: through a succession of two or three of these category (4) crises, an undeveloped nation can find most of its arable land permanently in the hands of a small group of predators who will control in perpetuity most of the food supply of that nation. That is the price countries pay for dealing with the World Bank and the IMF.
We are almost never told about pillar (3), the imposition of a privately-owned and foreign-owned central bank, though these exist in many countries, all owned by the same European Jewish banking families like the Rothschilds. Many, as in Iraq and Libya, have been forcibly imposed upon a vanquished country so depleted by a recent 'war of liberation' as to have no ability to resist. Coincident with the creation of this new bank is the looting of all the gold and foreign exchange of the old one, but this information almost never reaches public ears, and the public in most cases hasn't the knowledge to appreciate the travesty this represents. In the cases of both Iraq and Libya, the existing central banks were looted of about US$30 billion each in gold alone, to say nothing of the perpetual looting that will now be possible by the owners of the new banks. Even with a 'protectorate' like Ukraine, the first step by these bankers was to empty Ukraine's treasury of the $25 billion in gold it contained, taken away for "safekeeping" and never to be seen again. These bankers weren't protecting Ukraine from Russia; they were setting it up to be looted.
To round out this summary, we are never told of the existence, much less the circumstances, of privatisation dispositions in categories (1) and (2), those resulting from military aggression (wars of liberation) or externally-incited and financed overthrows of government, but the looting here is truly astonishing. The perpetrators of this vast "privatisation" program are not only ambitious and patient but engage in extreme long-term planning. This process has been in operation and execution for 100 years or more. I mentioned earlier that 100 years ago the US United Fruit Company owned most of Guatemala, including 70% of all the arable land, the communications facilities, the only railroad and shipping port, and controlled most of the nation's exports through its ownership of most major corporations. I provided some information above on Iraq, and Bremer's all-powerful laws giving these bankers perpetual control of virtually every sector of the Iraq economy, and some information on what others have called 'the dismemberment' of the Ukraine. This is what has happened in every one of the more than 50 nations where the bankers have used the US military as their tool of economic conquest, but the bitter truths of economic dismemberment almost never reach the public, the reason being that freedom of speech is available only to he who holds the microphone, and these same people hold the microphone.
The George Bush family purchased 300,000 acres of land on South America’s (and the world’s) largest aquifer, which runs beneath Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. While on a supposed mission to Paraguay for UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, Jenna Bush, George Junior's child-daughter, purchased 100,000 acres in 2006 apparently with the involvement of the US State Department, the local US Embassy, and negotiated directly with the puppet President. The reason this assumes importance is that many are warning that future battles will be fought not for oil but for water. Another reason is that these same bankers and their friends, partly in the person of Nestlé, have declared that "water is not a human right", that it is "an extreme belief" to think that humans have a right to water, and that drinking water is "a raw material and a foodstuff" that should be "privatised and commercialised". Nestlé's Jewish Chairman and former CEO Peter Brabeck caused a major explosion on the Internet when a video was circulated in which he made these claims. The blowback was so severe he eventually softened his public statements but we shouldn't expect his philosophy to change. The conclusion to the video displayed a segment of one of Nestlé's factory operations which was meant to lead us to believe we should cheer the Nestlé group as the saviors of mankind while planning to obtain beneficial ownership of the world's supply of drinking water.
Let's take another look at Madeline Albright, the woman who holds the Guinness World Record as the most prolific baby-killer in the history of the world. She was also deeply involved - with a few close Jewish friends - in the destruction of Jugoslavia, having strongly promoted, planned and organised the bombing of Serbia. Madeline and her White House associates engineered 78 days of non-stop bombing of Serbia's cities and infrastructure, the longest continuous bombing campaign in the history of the world. The Yugoslav Federation dissolved in a flood of death and misery, ethnic cleansing, and untold brutalities by the US-led Western coalition. Of course, in the midst of all the chaos, it also became a prime candidate for privatisation. As part of the process, they separated Kosovo from Serbia, Kosovo being a tiny parcel of land, nothing in itself, but holding one of the most strategic locations in all Europe from an American geopolitical standpoint. It will enable US control over potential oil and gas pipeline routes into the EU from the Caspian and Middle East as well as guaranteeing CIA control of the multi-billion dollar heroin trade since Kosovo and Albania have for decades been major heroin transit routes into Europe.
Albright's involvement in the destruction of Serbia and the excision of Kosovo was a sensitive topic the White House tried hard to bury, but which became public and quite controversial when it was revealed that Kosovo's state-owned telecom and postal company was being pushed into a forced "privatisation", and that Albright's investment firm, Albright Capital Management, was taking ownership of it, an asset with a value that Bloomberg Businessweek estimated at almost 800 million US dollars. As I noted earlier with Julia Tymoshenko in Ukraine, US government jobs pay very well indeed. Albright is also a co-investor with Jacob Rothschild and George Soros in a $350 million investment firm planning to take over thousands of mobile phone towers in Africa. We can recall George Soros as being the person who financed out of his own pocket the kangaroo court trial of Slobodan Milosovic, President of Serbia, whom the international Jewish bankers wanted dead, and succeeded through the so-called International Criminal Court. Albright also founded the Albright Group, an "international strategy consulting" firm based in Washington, with Coca-Cola and Merck Pharmaceutical as two of her clients.
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Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Larry Romanoff is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney's new COVID-19 anthology ''When China Sneezes''.
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Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai, 2020
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