bs2Sep 16, 2022
> The #Jubilee2000 call for debt cancellation is welcome and merits support, but is open to some qualifications. The debt does not go away. Someone pays, and the historical record generally confirms what a rational look at the structure of power would suggest: risks tend to be socialized, just as costs commonly are, in the system mislabelled “#FreeEnterpriseCapitalism.”
https://chomsky.info/19980515/
#NoamChomsky in 1998 on the #Jubilee #DropTheDebt campaign.
Jubilee 2000

The Noam Chomsky Website.

Show threadbs2Sep 16, 2022
> When the #USA took over Cuba 100 years ago it cancelled Cuba’s debt to #Spain on the grounds that the burden was “imposed upon the people of #Cuba without their consent and by force of arms.” Such debts were later called “#OdiousDebt” by legal scholarship, “not an obligation for the nation” but the “debt of the power that has incurred it,” while the creditors who “have committed a hostile act with regard to the people” can expect no payment from the victims.
https://chomsky.info/19980515/
#Chomsky
Jubilee 2000

The Noam Chomsky Website.

Show threadbs2
> The #debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact. Furthermore, as understood long ago, liberalization of capital flow serves as a powerful weapon against #SocialJustice and #democracy. Recent #PolicyDecisions are choices by the powerful,.. not mysterious “#EconomicLaws.”.. institutions that design the national and global systems are no more exempt from the need to demonstrate their #legitimacy than predecessors that have thankfully been dismantled. #NoamChomsky
Sep 16, 2022 at 11:01amWeb
Show threadbs2Sep 16, 2022
The 1998 article quoted above gave me important #ThresholdConcepts to think with. Besides inconsistencies on how Debt is seen and handled: The dangers of #CaptialFlight, the importance of the control of finance for development are developed in other writings by #Chomsky. Didn't Korea have the death penalty for the rich that tried to take their money out of the country? If the State hadn't been stronger than the rich, there'd be no Samsung Galaxy gadgets. Japan controlled its rich too...
Show threadbs2Sep 16, 2022
> .. the #Britannia docked.. #LloydsBankInternational.. had done.. more than.. arrange private financing: it had helped Davy win the bid in Mexico and win government support back home. Neither the supplier, its banker, nor the #UK government intended to let #Sicartsa slip away. #QueenElizabeth came to silence any murmurings of this possibility in #Mexico or elsewhere.. not many steel mills in backwaters..[get] a defense by the #British #RoyalFamily.. devoid of.. sense.
https://journal.probeinternational.org/odious-debts/read-odious-debts-the-book/introduction-the-queen-comes-to-sicartsa/
Introduction – The Queen Comes to Sicartsa

Probe International
Show threadbs2Sep 16, 2022
> A recent book from the #HarvardBusinessSchool interviewed executives from #Sicartsa and the major bidding firms and their banks in #Britain, #France, #Germany, #Japan, and the U.S. It found that “neither the sellers, the lenders, nor the exporting government officials would assert that the mill made economic sense. They pursued the transaction, not because of #Mexico’s needs, but because of their own needs at home…. Few players carefully analyzed the economics.”
in #Debt for bad projects...
Show threadbs2Sep 16, 2022
A quick search And #Sicartsa provides an example:
> A.. [decent] approach might invoke the old-fashioned idea that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. The money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from the borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects. But they are to bear the burdens of repayment, along with taxpayers in the West — not the banks who made bad loans or the .. elites..