NWO
Global Power Project: Bilderberg Group and the IMF
by Andrew Gavin Marshall, Occupy:
This is the ninth installment in a series examining the activities and individuals behind the Bilderberg Group.
Read the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth parts in the series.
In previous installments, this series has examined the historical role played by Bilderberg meetings in influencing major institutions and policies across North America and Western Europe over the past half century; the role of the meetings in supporting the rise of corporate and financial-friendly politicians to high office; the representation of interests from among the global financial elite, and the promotion of technocracy (particularly in Europe) and the representation of key technocratic institutions and individuals from Europe’s finance ministries and central banks, who’ve played important roles in the management of Europe’s financial and debt crises between 2008 and 2014.
This installment continues with an examination of Bilderberg’s role in facilitating the advancement of transnational technocracy in the EU, bringing in some of the top technocrats from leading European and international organizations to meet in secret with finance ministers, central bankers, politicians, corporate executives, bankers and financiers. The role of finance ministers and central banks has been the focus of the previous two installments in this series. Now we look at the IMF, which, together with the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission (EC), functioned as the “Troika” tasked with managing the international response to the debt crisis, organizing the bailouts and imposing harsh austerity measures and structural reforms upon the nations and people of Europe.
The IMF: It’s Mostly Fiscal
In 1992, the Financial Times published a feature article by James Morgan, the chief economic correspondent of the BBC, in which he explained that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the Group of Seven nations (specifically their finance ministries and central banks) and the International Monetary Fund have come “to rule the world and create a new imperial age.” Morgan wrote that the “new global system” ruled by the G7, the IMF, World Bank and other international organizations “worked through a system of indirect rule that has involved the integration of leaders of developing countries into the network of the new ruling class.”
The IMF is designed to come to the “aid” of countries experiencing financial and monetary crises, to provide loans in return for the nations implementing austerity measures and key structural reforms, and to promote easy access for foreign investors (ie. banks and corporations) to buy up large portions of the local economy, enriching both domestic and foreign elites in the process.
Thus, a nation which gets a loan from the IMF must typically dismantle its social services, fire public sector workers, increase taxes, reduce benefits, cut education and health care, privatize state-owned assets and industries, devalue its currency, and dismantle labor protections and regulations, all of which plunges the population into poverty and allows for major global banks and corporations to seize the levers of the domestic economy and exploit the impoverished population as cheap labor.
The IMF was created near the end of World War II, tasked with managing the global “balance-of-payments” between nations: that is, maintaining the stability of global deficits and surpluses (the borrowing, lending and trading) between countries. However, as the post-War international monetary system collapsed in the early 1970s, the IMF needed to find a new focus. In the late 1970s, the New York Times noted that the “new mandate” of the IMF was “nothing less than rescuing the world monetary system – and with it, the world’s commercial banks.”
– See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/global-power-project-bilderberg-group-and-international-monetary-fund#sthash.qWSGSLAO.dpuf
