Obama's New World Order

by Stephen Lendman
10 Apr 2009

This article addresses Washington's financial coup d'etat in the context of discussing Michael Hudson's important, very lengthy and detailed April 5 Global Research.ca one titled: "The Financial War Against Iceland - Being defeated by debt is as deadly as outright military warfare." It reviews its key information in advance of Hudson's April 15 scheduled appearance on The Global Research News Hour to discuss.

What's true for Iceland holds everywhere, including the developed world, the idea being to enrich finance capitalism through state-sponsored debt bondage and neo-feudal impoverishment. The global economic crisis was no accident. It was long ago hatched, and has been brewing for years, gestating, percolating, then bubbling into the 2000 tech crash, a mere prelude for today's greater one spreading everywhere like a cancer but hitting the developing world and most indebted nations hardest.

Hudson: "Iceland is under attack - not militarily but financially."

Like many others, "It owes more than it can pay" and is bankrupt. It was planned that way, and the idea is to strip-mine the nation and its people of their resources, enterprises, assets, land, homes, jobs and futures through perpetual debt bondage. Bankers get enriched. Nations and people, however, are discarded like trash, with the IMF as enforcer, to be reinvigorated with an additional (G 20-pledged) $750 billion, quadrupling its resources to $1 trillion if fulfilled.

Wall Street and Western European bankers planned it and now ordered the government "to sell off the nation's public domain, its natural resources and public enterprises to pay (its) financial gambling debts." Also, raise permanent taxes at the worst possible time, then suck the maximum wealth from the country leaving behind an empty hulk and impoverished, desparate population. It's called dystopia Merriam-Webster defines as: "an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives," the opposite of utopia under conditions of deprivation, poverty, disease, violence, oppression, and terror, much like in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Permanent debt bondage "is as deadly as outright military" defeat. Loss of livelihoods and assets leave people vulnerable to sickness, despair, and early deaths, much like what happened to post-Soviet Russia under Washington-imposed "shock therapy:"

-- 80% of farmers went bankrupt;

-- around 70,000 state factories closed;

-- unemployment became epidemic;

-- a permanent underclass was created;

-- poverty rose from two million in 1989 to 74 million by the mid-1990s, and in half the cases it was desperate;

-- alcoholism and drug abuse soared;

-- so did HIV/AIDS 20-fold;

-- suicides also and violent crime four-fold; and

-- the population declined by 700,000 a year; by 2007 it was 10% lower than in 1989 because of sharply reduced life expectancies.

Iceland, the developing world, and the West take note. This cancer is heading everywhere, courtesy of banker-imposed diktats, mainly from America and the UK. They insist Iceland "impoverish its citizens by paying debts in ways (they'd) never follow" even though the government has no way to do it.

No matter. "They are quite willing to take payment in the form of foreclosure on the nation's natural resources, land and housing, and a mortgage on the next few centuries of its future" - perpetual debt bondage no different than the spoils of war under permanent occupation.

However, in this case, debtors are convinced to pay voluntarily "to put creditor interests above the economy's prosperity (and) national interest." Their indebtedness comes at a huge cost - "chronic currency depreciation (and) domestic price inflation for many decades to come."

Contrast this to how developed countries, like America, handle debt - by inflating (not deflating) their way out to pay it off with cheap (reduced purchasing power) money because inflation erodes its value. It's simple - by printing money and running budget deficits the way Washington did after Nixon closed the gold window in August 1971, ended the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, and no longer let dollars be backed by gold or converted into it in international markets. A new monetary system creates money like confetti, and lets us spend and live beyond our means, then have developing and indebted nations pay the price.

In recent years, dollar weakness and price inflation "wiped out much of the US international debt." The Iceland model turns "this inflationary solution inside out....in violation of traditional credit practice." Instead of currency inflation, Iceland "inflate(d) its way into debt, not out of it, (by) indexing (it) to the rate of inflation," thus guaranteeing "a unique windfall for banks at the expense of wage earners and industrial profits." The result: destruction of its traditional way of life.

Iceland must "repudiate this debt bomb" to escape. It's indexed to inflation and "will never lose value." It's caught in a destructive whirlpool creating economic shrinkage, falling assets and wages in the face of perpetually burgeoning debt, the same global model needing to be exposed and renounced "now." Otherwise, economies will be hollowed out, "capital formation will plunge," people will be impoverished, and many won't survive.

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