US Economic Terrorism

When it comes to sponsoring, carrying out, and engaging in acts of terror of any kind, the US stands alone as the undisputed leader.

One of the worst types of abuse that the US subjects other nations to comes from its control (albeit diminishing) of the key levers of financial authority worldwide.

From controlling the SWIFT system for global financial transactions, the IMF, World Bank, as well as having control over foreign banks and corporations by allowing them to operate in the US market, the US exerts a strong influence on monetary and economic matters, and has the power to use all of these organs to make or break countries that don’t want to conform to US political, economic, and strategic demands.

The US engages in nothing short of international financial terrorism to get its way.

Back in 2014, the US strong-armed the EU to put sanctions on Russia over the mess that the US/EU and NATO stirred up in Ukraine.  Any country that refused suddenly found itself sued or ‘under investigation’ by the US Treasury Dept. or some other US regime outfit, accused of engaging in some shady dealings, and YIKES, the so-ever evil ‘support for terrorism’ charge, and threatened with huge fines.

Also recall when France was involved in the Mistral ship sale to Russia. After the EU passed sanctions on Russia, the Obama regime demanded that France scrap the sale.

At first, France refused, but suddenly found its banks under scrutiny by the US government. France later relented, and broke the deal with Russia, which put a further dent in the French economy already ailing from the effects of Russian counter-sanctions on the EU.

But there are more extreme instances of US economic terrorism which have destroyed other countries’ economies, and more may follow.

The TTP and TTIP trade agreements currently being pushed by the US behind closed doors, and without any public scrutiny, would put the interests of US-based financial institutions and corporations above other nations’ sovereignty.

These agreements will make national governments subordinate to the whim and will of private enterprise. Democracy and the will of the people would be relegated to window-dressing. No longer would elected representatives have any power to legislate, and any laws they try to pass that primarily benefit the interests of their citizens will be immediately struck down and nullified if those laws in any way, shape, or form hamper US corporate profit-making.

These ‘free trade’ agreements are a desperate, last ditch attempt by the US regime to turn the world into a US-owned plantation, staffed by foreign slaves. The US is doing this to hold on to its waning influence, abnormally high living standard fueled by cheap credit, stave off other countries’ attempts to move away from the US-imposed financial order, the petrodollar, and from forming alternate institutions and ways of doing business that are more cooperative and multi-lateral, and ones over which the US doesn’t have control over.

Many, if not all of these countries which are currently involved in these ‘free trade’ negotiations know that these deals are inherently bad. But they are afraid that if they don’t sign on to them, the US will later use its influence to lock them out of its economy, the economies of other member states, or purposefully make their economies suffer until these countries relent and become US plantations.

To be fair, the EU plays the same way. It bombards the continent with propaganda that there is no other way than the EU way; that the EU is synonymous with a ‘prosperous Europe’ regardless of any and all evidence to the contrary; that the EU IS Europe, that if countries don’t join in they’ll crash, burn, and die horrible economic deaths; that they’ll be left behind by prosperity, and that there is NO other way for these countries to go on, except within the EU.

This is pure and utter bunkum, whether preached by the EU for its own selfish interests or by the US for its own. Of course, all this doomsday EU propaganda agitation is a cruel, self-fulfilling prophecy of the EU’s own making.

For if any country resists EU subjugation, the EU deliberately locks them out of economic trade and other opportunities by default, thereby creating the false perception that only the EU can offer those countries economic salvation, and that left to themselves those countries stand no chance.

No country should ever be forced into doing anything under the threat of having its economy ruined if it doesn’t comply with some other country's demands and diktat. But this is the very tactic that the US and other western countries have been using for a long time to high-jack other nations’ economies and governments.

This is all another example of economic terrorism by extortion. It’s the same old mafia tactic of ‘do this, or else . . .’

These kinds of economic terror tactics used to be applied to poorer, non-western countries by wealthy western ones.

But in the last 20 years or so this has changed, for the worse. These tactics are now being applied to the citizens, cities, and institutions within the countries doing the extorting.

Bail-outs, bail-ins, bankrupting cities and appointing un-elected managers who sell off anything of value, stagnant wages and increased rent payments are all recent, local examples of economic terrorism that has been unleashed on the rest of the world for nearly a century.

In the past, the US gained control of other nations by concocting phony and inaccurate economic studies in order to shove billions of dollars of unnecessary, counterproductive loans down the throats of poor countries that couldn't even afford to take them. The US, IMF, World Bank then promised those countries fairy tales of economic prosperity, and how these loans would more than pay for themselves after the proposed improvements are made.

But this was just a ruse; a con. Those loans were not meant to improve those countries, but to turn them into perpetual debt slaves. Then the countries who took on these loans found themselves unable to pay them back.

It is at that point that the extortion racket truly kicks into high gear: in order to pay back the loans, the countries are forced to sell off their public assets like water, sewage, electricity grids and generating stations, public lands, mines, etc. to the west for pennies.

Those countries are also required to adopt laws and policies that favor the loan-givers; laws which cause further chaos, economic misery, and which may undermine national security.

Any country that resists these economic hit-men finds its leaders assassinated, governments overthrown, and itself bombed and invaded. A modern example would be Ukraine, Iraq, Honduras in 2009, Russia and Iran today. None of these countries wanted to remain subservient to US wishes, and were either destabilized or sanctioned, or both.

It is recommended that anyone who wants to get a more personal testimony about this US-driven international economic extortion racket read the book by an ex-economic hit-man John Perkins, titled ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit-man.’ The book originally came out twelve years ago, but an updated version of it was recently released.

Whatever crafty, pleasant-sounding names any US-inspired trade deals go by, NAFTA, CEFTA, TPP, TTIP-and whatever feel-good cuddly propaganda is rolled out to pitch it, they are all nothing less that US economic terrorism that will inevitably make the lives of the people in the countries whose leaders are naïve enough to sign up to them undeniably worse in the long-run.

There was, is, and never will be such a thing as ‘free trade.’ Everything has its costs.