Web of Debt - eBook by Ellen Brown

Author:Ellen Brown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Published: 2008-03-05T17:24:32+00:00

Chapter 29

BREAKING THE BACK OF

THE TIN MAN:

DEBT SERFDOM FOR

AMERICAN WORKERS

“I worked harder than ever; but I little knew how cruel my enemy could be. She made my axe slip again, so that it cut right through my body.”

– The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,

“The Rescue of the Tin Woodman”

The mighty United States has been in the banking spider’s sights for more than two centuries. This ultimate prize too may finally have been captured in the spider’s web, choked in debt spun out of thin air. The U.S. has now surpassed even Third World countries in its debt level. By 2004, the debt of the U.S. government had hit $7.6 trillion, more than three times that of all Third World countries combined. Like the bankrupt consumer who stays afloat by making the minimum payment on his credit card, the government has avoided bankruptcy by paying just the interest on its monster debt; but Comptroller General David M. Walker warns that by 2009 the country may not be able to afford even that mounting bill. When the government cannot service its debt, it will have to declare bankruptcy, and the economy will collapse.1

Al Martin is a retired naval intelligence officer, former contributor to the Presidential Council of Economic Advisors, and author of a weekly newsletter called “Behind the Scenes in the Beltway.” He observed in an April 2005 newsletter that the ratio of total U.S. debt to gross domestic product (GDP) rose from 78 percent in 2000 to 308

percent in April 2005. The International Monetary Fund considers a 277

Chapter 29 - Breaking the Back of the Tin Man

nation-state with a total debt-to-GDP ratio of 200 percent or more to be a “de-constructed Third World nation-state.” Martin wrote: What “de-constructed” actually means is that a political regime in that country, or series of political regimes, have, through a long period of fraud, abuse, graft, corruption and

mismanagement, effectively collapsed the economy of that

country.2

Other commentators warn that the “shock therapy” tested in Third World countries is the next step planned for the United States.

Editorialist Mike Whitney wrote in CounterPunch in April 2005:

[T]he towering national debt coupled with the staggering trade deficits have put the nation on a precipice and a seismic shift in the fortunes of middle-class Americans is looking more likely all the time. . . . The country has been intentionally plundered and will eventually wind up in the hands of its creditors . . . . This same Ponzi scheme has been carried out repeatedly by the IMF

and World Bank throughout the world . . . . Bankruptcy is a fairly straight forward way of delivering valuable public assets and resources to collaborative industries, and of annihilating national sovereignty.

After a nation is successfully driven to destitution, public policy decisions are made by creditors and not by representatives of the people. . . . The catastrophe that middle class Americans face is what these elites breezily refer to as “shock therapy”; a sudden jolt, followed by fundamental changes to the system. In the near

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