New depths of shamelessness and hypocrisy are reached every day with the U.S. response to the Ukrainian crisis. Secretary John Kerry fluttered into Kiev yesterday "with $1 billion in loan guarantees meant to support the country’s efforts to integrate with the West and offers of technical assistance." (NYT)
Are we supposed to choke up with tears at heart warming magnanimity of Amurka? Last we read, the Ukraine was something like 40 billion dollars in the hole. The Russian Federation offered in the vicinity of $15 billion. And now flieth in Washington's John Kerry doing a very weak parody of St. Francis with an offer of what amounts to little more than a pignata of dried fruit and nuts.
Actually, the U.S. gesture is far worse. It is a sordid ploy to hook the Ukraine on western credit. When Foreign Minister Hague took to the foyer the other day to announce the West's willingness to work with the IMF in providing loans to the Ukraine what he was promising was to turn the Ukraine into a debt slave.
Has anyone notice how IMF loans are never repaid but always rolled over? IMF loans are a pure and outright credit card scam. The borrower is enticed into the promised land of cornucopia only to find himself on a fees-and-interest treadmill. With each "rollover" more "austerity" and "privatisation" is demanded until the whole country is reduced to economic vassalage. And vassalage is a polite way of saying a slum surrounding glittering towers of corporate ownership and control.
This is what the word "integrate" means.
©barfo, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment