by Greg Palast and Mark Phillips  2002 from UnityPublishing Website Deutsch version The World Bank-IMF is owned and controlled by Nathan Mayer Rothschild and 30 to 40 of the wealthiest people in the world. For over 150 years they have planned to take the world over through money. The former chief economist of the World Bank, Joe Stiglitz, was fired recently. He pointed out to top executives that every country the IMF/World Bank got involved in ended up with, a crashed economy a destroyed government sometimes in flames with riots Jim Wolfensen, the president of the World Bank would not comment on his dismissal. Before Joe Stiglitz was fired he took a large stack of secret documents out of the World Bank. These secret documents from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund reveal the 4 steps that the IMF required from nations: to sign secret agreements of 111 items   in which they agreed to sell off their key assets - water, electric, gas, etc.   in which they agreed to take economic steps which are really devastating to the nations involved   in which they pay off the politicians billions of dollars to Swiss bank accounts to do this transfer of a countries fixed assets If they do not agree to these steps they are cut-off from all international borrowing. Today if can't borrow money in the international marketplace, no one can survive, whether you are people or corporations or countries. If that does not work they overthrow the government and plant lies about the former government and/or even rewrite history.   The Argentina Plan Inside documents from Argentina show the secret Argentine plan. This is signed by Jim Wolfensen, the president of the World Bank. Argentina has had six presidents in five weeks because their economy is completely destroyed. This happened because they started out in the end of the 80s with orders from the IMF and World Bank to sell-off all their assets, public assets, like their water system. Then they taxed the people. They created big government and big government handed it off to the private IMF/World Bank. They pay off the politicians billions in Swiss bank accounts.   The Enron Connection The water system of Buenos Aires was sold off for a song to a company called Enron. A pipeline was sold off, that runs between Argentina and Chile, was sold off to a company called Enron. Then the globalists blow out Enron after transferring the assets to another dummy corporation. They come in, pay off politicians to transfer the water systems, the railways, the telephone companies, the nationalized oil companies, gas stations - the politicians then hand it over to the IMF for nothing. The Globalists pay them off individually, billions a piece in Swiss bank accounts. The plan is total slavery for the entire population. Enron is a dummy corporation for money laundering, drug money, etc.   IMF Planed Riots The IMF/World Bank are systematically tearing nations apart, whether it's Ecuador or Argentina. It's not privatization. They steal it from the people and hand it over to the IMF/World Bank. They hand it over, generally to the cronies, like, Citibank grabbed half the Argentine banks British Petroleum grabbed pipelines in Ecuador Enron grabbed water systems all over the place The problem is that they are destroying these systems as well. You can't even get drinking water in Buenos Aires. It is not just a question of the theft. You can't turn on the tap. It is more than someone getting rich at the public expense. And the IMF just got handed the Great Lakes. They have the sole control over the water supply now. The IMF and the World Bank is 51% owned by the United States Treasury. Indonesia is in flames. Every country IMF/World Bank meddling in they destroyed their economy and they ended up in flames. They even plan in the riots. They know that when they squeeze a country and destroy its economy, you get riots in the streets. And they admit that it an IMF riot. Because you have riot, all the capital runs away from your country and that gives the opportunity for the IMF to then add more conditions.   California Utilities & Enron It is really an imperial economy war to implode countries and now they are doing it here with Enron. They are getting so greedy - they are preparing it for America. The chief investigators of Enron for the State of California said that that it's not just the stockholders that got ripped off. They sucked millions, billions of dollars out of the public pocket in Texas and California in particular. Where are the assets? See, everybody says there are no assets left since Enron was a dummy corporation - from the experts I've had on and they transferred all those assets to other corporations and banks. You did pay California's electric bills according to the investigations, they are telling me that they were pumped up unnecessarily by 9 to 12-billion dollars. And I don't know who they are going to get it back from now. Well they actually caught the Governor buying it for $137 per megawatt and selling it back to Enron for $1 per megawatt and doing it over and over and over again.   Enron's Auditor - Lord Wakeham The men who designed the system in California for deregulation then went to work for Enron right after. Lord Wakeham, who was on the audit committee of Enron, is the head of NM Rothschild. There isn't anything that he doesn't have his fingers in. He's on something like fifty Boards. And he was supposed to be head of the audit committee watching how Enron kept the books. In fact, they were paying him consulting fees on the side. He was in Margaret Thatcher's government and he's the one who authorized Enron to come into Britain and take over power plants in Britain. Enron owned a water system in the middle of England. This is what Lord Wakeham approved and then they gave him a job on the board. On top of being on the board, they gave him a huge consulting contract. Lord Wakeham is supposed to be in charge of the audit committee to see how they were handling their accounts, but he is also the head of the board to regulate the media. Lord Wakeham is trying to pass laws in England where you can't own your own water. He can't be touched because he regulates the media.   Rothschild and the Illuminati Burrow into NM Rothschild, you'll find it all there. The IMF/World Bank implosion, four points, how they bring down a country and destroy the resources of the people. First you open up the capital markets. That is, you sell off your local banks to foreign banks. Then you go to what's called market-based pricing. That's the stuff like in California where everything is free market and you end up with water bills no one can pay. Then open up your borders to trade - complete free marketeering. Its like the opium wars. This isn't free trade; this is coercion trade. This is war. They are taking apart economies through this. China has a 40% tariff on the USA, but the USA has a 2% on them. That's not free and fair trade. It's to force all industry into a country that the globalists fully control, and they control China.   Wal-Mart The Illuminati owns Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart has 700 plants in China. There is almost nothing in a Walmart store that comes from the United States of America, despite all the eagles on the wall. They have big flags saying "Buy American" and there's hardly anything from America in their stores. What's even worst is they will hire a factory and right next to it will be the sister factory which is inside a prison. You can imagine the conditions of these workers producing this lovely stuff for Walmart.   Briberization Sell off the water company and that's worth, over ten years, let's say about 5 billion dollars, ten percent of that is 500 million. A Senator from Argentina said that he got a call from George W. Bush in 1988 saying give the gas pipeline in Argentina to Enron. Enron was going to pay one-fifth of the world's price for their gas and he said how can you make such an offer? The answer was that if they only pay one-fifth that leaves quit a little bit for you to go in your Swiss bank account. This is the same George W. Bush who said he didn't get to know Ken Lay of Enron until 1994. Now they are having these white-wash hearings. Bill Clinton, to get even with Bush's big donor, cut Enron out of the California power market. He put a cap on the prices they could charge. They couldn't charge more than one-hundred times the normal price for electricity. That upset Enron. So Ken Lay personally wrote a note to Dick Cheney saying get rid of Clinton's cap on prices. Within 48 hours of George W. Bush taking office, his energy department reversed the clamps on Enron.   Step Two Argentina is an example of step two of the IMF. A fifth of the population of Argentina (2002?) is unemployed, and they said cut the unemployment benefits drastically, take away pension funds, cut the education budgets. Now if you cut the economy in the middle of a recession (created by the IMF), you absolutely demolish the nation. You don't start cutting the budget in a recession, you start spending money to stimulate the economy. You don't raise taxes, you cut them. But they tell these countries you've got to cut, and cut, and cut. And why, according to the inside documents, it's so you can make payments to foreign banks - the foreign banks are collecting 21% to 70% interest. This is loan-sharking. If fact, it was so bad that they required Argentina to get rid of the laws against loan-sharking because any bank would be a loan-shark under Argentine law.   Step 3 and Step 4 Then they open up the borders for trade, that's the new opium wars. They destroy an economy so that it can not produce anything, and then open the borders to sell their own goods. They force nations to pay horrendous amounts for things like drugs - legal drugs. That's how you end up with an illegal drug trade. What's there left to survive on except sell us smack and crack. And so, drive the whole world down, blow out their economies and then buy the rest of it up for pennies on the dollar. What's Step 4 of the IMF/World Bank Plan? In Step 4, they take apart of the government by the coup d'état and they install their own corporate government. In Venezuela where they have an elected president of the government, the IMF has announced that they would support a transition government if the president was removed. They are not saying that they are going to get involved in politics - they would just support a transition government. What that effectively is saying, we will pay for the coup d'état, if the military overthrows the current president, because the current president of Venezuela has said NO to the IMF. He told those guys to go packing. They brought their teams in and said you have to do this and that. And he said, I don't have to do anything. He said what I'm going to do is double the taxes on oil corporations because we have a whole lot of oil in Venezuela. And I'm going to double the taxes on oil corporations and then I will have all the money I need for social programs and the government - and we will be a very rich nation. Well, as soon as he did that, they started fomenting trouble with the military and watch this because the President of Venezuela will be out of office in three months or shot dead. They are not going to allow him to raise taxes (2002) on the oil companies... The Globalizer ...Who Came In From The Coldby Greg PalastOctober 10, 2001 from GregPalast Website The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are eye-popping - including how the IMF and US Treasury fixed the Russian elections "It has condemned people to death," the former apparatchik told me. This was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old agent comes in from the cold, crosses to our side, and in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors committed in the name of a political ideology he now realizes has gone rotten. And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War spy. Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a great extent, the new world economic order was his theory come to life. I "debriefed" Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge University, in a London hotel and finally in Washington in April 2001 during the big confab of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But instead of chairing the meetings of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept exiled safely behind the blue police cordons, the same as the nuns carrying a large wooden cross, the Bolivian union leaders, the parents of AIDS victims and the other 'anti-globalization' protesters. The ultimate insider was now on the outside. In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet retirement; US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I'm told, demanded a public excommunication for Stiglitz' having expressed his first mild dissent from globalization World Bank style. Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of exclusive interviews for The Observer and BBC TV's Newsnight about the real, often hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US Treasury. And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of documents marked, "confidential," "restricted," and "not otherwise (to be) disclosed without World Bank authorization." Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a "Country Assistance Strategy." There's an Assistance Strategy for every poorer nation, designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But according to insider Stiglitz, the Bank's staff 'investigation' consists of close inspection of a nation's 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank staff meeting some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a 'restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for his 'voluntary' signature (I have a selection of these). Each nation's economy is individually analyzed, then, says Stiglitz, the Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step program. ●  Step One is Privatization - which Stiglitz said could more accurately be called, 'Briberization.' Rather than object to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank's demands to silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water companies. "You could see their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion off the sale price of national assets. And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. "The US Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don't care if it's a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin" via kick-backs for his campaign. Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet as Chairman of the President's council of economic advisors. Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.   ●  After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all rescue-your-economy plan is 'Capital Market Liberalization.' In theory, capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%. "The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money tidal waves in Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates demolished property values, savaged industrial production and drained national treasuries.   ●  At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three: Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, "The IMF riot." The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up," as when the IMF eliminated food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia exploded into riots, but there are other examples, the Bolivian riots over water prices last year and this February the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World Bank You'd almost get the impression that the riot is written into the plan. And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the States, BBC and The Observer obtained several documents from inside the World Bank, stamped over with those pesky warnings, "confidential," "restricted," "not to be disclosed." Let's get back to one: the "Interim Country Assistance Strategy" for Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states - with cold accuracy - that they expected their plans to spark, "social unrest," to use their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames. That's not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the US dollar Ecuador's currency has pushed 51% of the population below the poverty line. The World Bank "Assistance" plan simply calls for facing down civil strife and suffering with, "political resolve" - and still higher prices. The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it's bright side - for foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices. Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia 'subsidizing' food purchases, "when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the market) is welcome." The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to save Indonesia's financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks from which they had borrowed. A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethiopia's new president in the nation's first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at 12% to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to the US Treasury's vault in Washington.   ● Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their "poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider likens free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. "That too was about opening markets," he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa, while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture. In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial blockade just as effective - and sometimes just as deadly. Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO's intellectual property rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on that in the next chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has "condemned people to death" by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines. "They don't care," said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, "if people live or die." By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank loan for a school 'triggers' a requirement to accept every 'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation - laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official WTO rules. Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised in secrecy and driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for discourse or dissent. Despite the West's push for elections throughout the developing world, the so-called Poverty Reduction Programs "undermine democracy." And they don't work. Black Africa's productivity under the guiding hand of IMF structural "assistance" has gone to hell in a handbag. Did any nation avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, identifying Botswana. Their trick? "They told the IMF to go packing." So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack at the heart of "landlordism," on the usurious rents charged by the propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a tenant's crops. So I had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why didn't the Bank follow your advice? "If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of the elites. That's not high on their agenda." Apparently not. Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the failure of the banks and US Treasury to change course when confronted with the crises - failures and suffering perpetrated by their four-step monetarist mambo. Every time their free market solutions failed, the IMF simply demanded more free market policies. "It's a little like the Middle Ages," the insider told me, "When the patient died they would say, "well, he stopped the bloodletting too soon, he still had a little blood in him." I took away from my talks with the professor that the solution to world poverty and crisis is simple: remove the bloodsuckers.   A version of this was first published as "The IMF's Four Steps to Damnation" in The Observer (London) in April and another version in The Big Issue - that's the magazine that the homeless flog on platforms in the London Underground. Big Issue offered equal space to the IMF, whose "deputy chief media officer" wrote: "...I find it impossible to respond given the depth and breadth of hearsay and misinformation in [Palast's] report." Of course it was difficult for the Deputy Chief to respond. The information (and documents) came from the unhappy lot inside his agency and the World Bank. Award-winning reporter Palast writes Inside Corporate America for the London Observer.   Return to The BIS-IMF-World Bank - World "Smart" Governance