the world knows it..its just Americans don't know it!!
greg palasts "globalization" is a must read for americans..it was the test program for whats going on here now ...they destroyed argentina and robbed them blind with enron and jeb deals..to steal the weatlth if argentina..to put them in such debt with the IMF and world bank..and if you read this..and get the cd disk if you can to hear it..its much more powerful...then you will see whay * put Wolfowitz in charge of the world bank...
yes the argentina people know all about the bushes...its just americans don't know that argentina was the test program for the theft of the USA!
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http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=125&row=1snip:
AJ: This is like one of the biggest stories ever, Sir. I'm sorry, please continue.
GP: So what's happening is - this is just one of them. And by the way, it's not just anyone who gets a piece of the action. 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.
AJ: And then the globalists blow out the Enron after transferring the assets to another dummy corporation and then they just roll the theft items off.
GP: You've got it. And by the way, you know why they moved the pipeline to Enron is that they got a call from somebody named George W. Bush in 1988.
AJ: Unbelievable, Sir. Stay right there. We are talking to Greg Palast.
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http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=128&row=1Greg Palast On Globalization
Znet Global Economics Watch
Friday, March 8, 2002
snip:
AJ: We are talking to Greg Palast. He is an award-winning journalist, an American who has worked for the BBC, London Guardian, you name it, who has dropped just a massive bomb-shell on the Globalists and their criminal activity. There is no other word for it. You link through at inforwars.com, you can link to his web site - gregpalast.com, or any of the other great reports he has been putting out. He now has the secret documents. We have seen the activity of the IMF/World Bank for years. They come in, pay off politicians to transfer the water systems, the railways, the telephone companies, the nationalized oil companies, gas stations - they then hand it over to them for nothing. The Globalists pay them off individually, billions a piece in Swiss bank accounts. And the plan is total slavery for the entire population. Of course, Enron, as we told you was a dummy corporation for money laundering, drug money, you name it, from the other reporters we have had on. It's just incredibly massive and hard to believe. But it is actually happening. Greg Palast has now broken the story world-wide. He has actually interviewed the former top World Bank economist. Continuing Sir with all these points. I mean for the average person out there, in a nutshell, what is the system you are exposing?
GP: We are exposing that they are systematically tearing nations apart, whether it's Ecuador or Argentina. The problem is some of these bad ideas are drifting back into the U.S. In other words, they have run out of places to bleed. And the problem is, this is the chief economist, this is not some minor guy. By the way, a couple of months ago, after he was fired, he was given the Nobel Prize in Economics. So he is no fool. He told me, he went into countries where they were talking about privatizing and selling off these assets. And basically, they knew, they literally knew and turned the other way when it was understood that leaders of these countries and the chief ministers would salt away hundreds of millions of dollars.
AJ: But it's not even privatization. They just steal it from the people and hand it over to the IMF/World Bank.
GP: They hand it over, generally to the cronies, like Citibank was very big and grabbed half the Argentine banks. You've got British Petroleum grabbing pipelines in Ecuador. I mentioned Enron grabbing water systems all over the place. And the problem is that they are destroying these systems as well. You can't even get drinking water in Buenos Aires. I mean 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.
AJ: And the IMF just got handed the Great Lakes. They have the sole control over the water supply now. That's been in the Chicago Tribune.
more about globalization by greg palast:
Gregory Palast: The US Treasury has 51%, is a 51% percent shareholder in the World Bank. Which if the US were to use it for good, that's a hell of a lot of power. That's not such a bad idea. The problem is that it has been pushing an agenda, which is very very helpful to a few corporations in corporate America. And not necessarily America but corporate America which are two quite different things. So for example, you take a company like Enron which had supposedly 80 billion in sales but very few employees compared to their sales. This isn't creating employment. Under the World Bank rules, under IMF rules, under the conditionalities for borrowing. Every single nation, every single nation that borrows from the IMF and the World Bank is given the conditionality of selling off their water systems, selling off their electric utilities. Golly who does that benefit? Well a big subsidiary of Enron's was Azurex, which was a company created to absorb these newly privatized water systems. So some one wins in this game and some one loses. And of course we're beginning to see the big loser is now Argentina. The collapse of Argentina is a very serious business for the globalizers because they could not point to one single success for the Reaganite, Thatcherite plan except for Argentina. They kept saying, heres our big success story, we have reshaped this economy. We've gotten rid of the old Peronist labor unions and we've gotten rid of all the State enterprises and we sold off the state banks and this is a booming economy. Well it wasn't a booming economy. In 1995 the Economics Minister who also was the head of the of the central bank, a man named Cabio embarked on a program of selling off every thing in site to US and European corporations. Argentina was an oil exporting nation so it sold it's oil to Repsol of Spain. Buenos Aires' water went to Azurex a subsidiary of Enron, Vivendi of France bought up other water systems throught the country. All of the power lines were privatized. The labor unions were smashed and the currency was pegged to the US dollar. Which meant that the US treasury literally owned the currency of this nation, this was very costly to Argentina, because they had to literally borrow these dollars to maintain their currency. Every peso in Argentina had to be backed by a US dollar. But it looked like they were doing well. The reason they looked like they were doing well for two years, which is not a long time in economic life, is because they were selling everything in sight. Now if you sold your house, if you sold car, you could run out and say look how rich I am, look how successful I am. Well you've just sold your house and car, unless your going to live out in the rain and walk every where on the planet, your going to have to get your house and car back and your going to have to lease them now from some one else that owns them. So suddenly the water charges were doubled, suddenly the electricity charges went through the roof, suddenly they had to buy their money literally from the US treasury, buy the money at very high interest rates. While you may pay 4 percent, 5 percent and maybe 8 percent if you're a big corporation borrowing in us dollars. Argentina was paying 10, 20, 30 percent to borrow dollars. So it didn't take long if Argentina has to borrow at 20 percent and it has no assets because it sold them off, it didn't take long for this game to collapse. Pretty soon the so called riches of selling off all the nations assets quickly disappeared. And all that was left was the debt. Now Argentina which once fed Latin America, was the rancher for Latin America, exporting beef, was the bread basket for Latin America. Suddenly you've got millions people scouring the streets for garbage to eat. And that is the miracle case, that is the number one example of a success listed by the IMF and the World Bank. That was their answer to Joe Stiglitz, that was their answer to me. Look at Argentina. Well baby look at Argentina today.
Lloyd Hart: This water issue, being a Canadian myself, born and raised. I live in the US now but water has been an issue that the US and Canada have always debated about because the great lakes are on the border between the two countries. And of course in recent time conglomerates have made attempts to go in and wholesale comoditize Canada's fresh water resource. And Canada has the world's largest fresh water resources, 20% of the world's fresh water supply. So it makes it a player but it was so blatant a grab.
Gregory Palast: The take over of water systems is one of the great gold rush swindles of all time. And you can't separate the rush to grab water from the collapse of Enron because it is all part of the same game. Enron had set up the subsidiary Azurex to grab water but there has been a problem though. A lot of nations going from Argentina to Bolivia and else where and England too. People started rising up against the new water pirates. Water systems have been built by the public for years and all these guys did was buy what the public built. Their promise was that they would invest. Now there is a whole idea and if you listen to Jim Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank you can't get a more heart felt story, 'Oh we want to bring clean water to all the poor little people of the world who don't have clean water and these horrible bureaucratic governments that won't give them clean water, so we'll sell off the water systems to private companies who will then invest and they will expand the water systems'. And I even see this in one of Wolfensohn's private memos, that fell my way some how, which praises Argentina's privatizing of the water systems. Now what happened there? They ended up with Enron affiliates, Vivendi affiliates going into Buenos Aires and to Tucamon province. They raised water prices in some areas much as by 400 percent. They laid off workers, they didn't extend the system. They disinvested from the system. They took the money out of the country and so you ended up with systems that began to fall apart. Enron for example did this not just in the third world, because we're all the third world from Enron's view, from up in that tower in Houston we all look like the third world. It took over a water company called Wessex Water in Britain and you see after privatization that water charges in Britain went up to 250 percent of the price charged in the US. A third of the water leaks into the ground and the profits of the companies were astronomical, absolutely astronomical, running 35 percent after taxes a year. Just unbelievable profits, nobody makes that type of money. And they put up next to nothing because they borrowed the money locally anyway. So these guys actually put up no money. Enron never actually had any cash. It was a big hair ball, it was a big fur ball of financial gimmickry, So they never put up cash but they would grab assets anyway. What you ended up with is we could say 'well to bad for the stock holders' but the problem is in the middle of this are the water customers, in the middle of this are people who can't get water in Tucamon province in Argentina. And that's the come down to these things.
Lloyd Hart: This leads me to the situation with Oscar Olivera in Bolivia and how the hell did a water take over get turned into peasants rioting over not being able to grow coca leaf.
Gregory Palast: Well there is always two stories. There is the true story and then one as it is reported. What happened in Bolivia was an extraordinary and an important story. By the way, Bolivian peasants had a lot to do with the collapse of Enron because in Bolivia the game of water privatization basically came to a near halt. What happened was that the city of Cochabamba which is the second largest city in Bolivia, 70 percent of the people lacked piped water, it's horrible they had terrible diseases from the lack of water and from the existing system and people need water. The government didn't have the where with all to buy the pipe to expand or improve the system. So the World Bank said lets privatize the system. Instead of saying why don't we give a development loan which is what the world bank used to do in the good old days. They used to give development loans. They would say, okay, you need a water system, here's a loan at a reasonable interest rate and you pay us back when you start selling the water. They don't do that any more. They say, here's the money but oops, no no no, we won't give it to you, we will give it to a private contractor. Remember this is public money in the World Bank that goes to Private operators. They say, we won't give you any money for water unless you privatize. So they privatized the Cochabamba water system, sold it to International Water which is a fancy name for an affiliate of Bechtel a very powerful corporation out of San Francico, a large construction outfit. Bechtel's affiliate went and raised the price of water by 35 to 200 percent depending on who's counting. It's hard to know exactly because the expert economist that was working on it, who was raising questions on how the operation was going was arrested by the Bolivian government. So it was hard for me to ask him about the details but the last time I talked to him he said the price of water was rising about 200 percent and they weren't extending any of the lines to people who didn't have water in the city. They were also not expanding employment to get those lines extended. So people began to protest when their water bills went up and they had what they claim was a peaceful demonstration. It was led by the Arch Bishop of Cochabamba and a union leader named Oscar Olivera. Olivera and the ArchBishop and some other leaders, and some economists, and some professors, and some workers, and some peasant leaders went to meet with the government to negotiate. The government invited them into the government building and then arrested them and banished some into the deserts. They were finally released and there were further demonstrations. It was April 2000 and the Bolivian government called out the troops to put down those resisting to pay their water bills. The troops fired into the crowd killing four people. The people remained unarmed and would not shut down their protests. So Bechtel issued a statement out of San Francisco saying that the reason people were in the streets of Bolivia was not because they were over charging the public for water but because but because these people were trying to protect and support drug traffickers, the cocaine dealers. So I called the Archbishop in Bolivia and I asked him "How many kilos are you moving your excellency?" and he said "well I haven't really been touching a lot of cocaine lately" and so he said "It's really all about water." The government kept firing into the crowds but the people wouldn't give up. There was a general strike and eventually Bechtel was tossed out of the country. So it was a case in which the people in the streets using a general strike actually stopped the globalization process stoned dead. And that shook up the World Bank and at that point politicians all over the world heard all about Bolivia and they didn't want that there, so what happen was the whole water privatization process began to slow down and that hurt Enron which has to keep those investments churning and burning so that they could pretend they have assets somewhere. And so that slowed down. And the collapse of Argentina where they had water and a gas piplines, so globalization bit Enron in the behind. The Governor of California stood up to Enron and said enough with these games of trading and pretty soon the house of cards began coming down and when I say house of cards Enron is just the first card. But what I am really worried about is not even so much about the finances of Enron because I don't cry for the stock holders. They didn't cry when the stock was going through the roof, they weren't moaning then. What I am concerned about is what they did to their customers and their employees. And let me tell you in California they played games, in fact they used to have names for these games, they called them cramming, stacking, false scheduling and they were able to manipulate the power market to cause false shortages. What the experts who had to buy the power into the system grid politely called "Economic and physical with holding". What that meant is that they literally laid siege to the state of California. They literally would hold back power from the power lines, causing panic, causing a false shortage in the market, causing the prices to sky rocket, filling Enron's pockets. Unfortunately when you play that game your greed out strips your devious means to keep up with it and that is how they collapsed in on themselves. What I'm worried about of are the guys who are a step more cautious and don't collapse.
Lloyd Hart: Your looking into Enron at the present, can you discuss that subject a little bit.
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