340 sats \ 2 replies \ @SwearyDoctor 7 Oct \ on: Bitcoin, The IMF, and El Salvador bitcoin
tip of the iceberg!
"started out as pretty benevolent entities.. doing benevolent things like financing the reconstruction of japan.. these were the original funcions .. then quickly captured and subverted (to) lining the pockets of the elites, ... to use debt addiction to siphon the pockets of the poorer countries"
yeeeah.... no. There was no capture, it was always the financial division of the empire. What's missing in this analysis is an nuderstanding of how exactly imperialism works, and what it structurally needs.
The basic point is that corporations will expand in their home territories, gobbling up resources and competitors there, squeezing consumers there, until there's no more juice in the home territory (or, too little juice to keep growing, or juice that would kill your consumers if you suweezed it).
Then it will financialize, seeking profits in financial instruments and bank services (Volkswagen, the German automaker, makes much more money loaning out the prices of its cars than from making cars, nowadays).
Then, it will seek foreign lands to squeeze. this is the basis, in the end, of both world wars, which were fought over imperial possessions (or, better said, germany's lack thereof, which put walls around its profit growth potential). It needs cheap resources, also and mainly work, to fuel its protis at home (side effect: the local consumer population isn't killed; the colonial population is. literally.)
After the second world war, the US took over the role of imperial hegemon. to secure its profits, it needs a constant supply of near-free resources and work.
The IMF is there to make sure of this. The IMF and World Bank force countries to submit to US demands to get credit - which mostly is making sure wages stay low, resources stay exploitable for cheap, and the countries in question stay dependent on US/Northern capital to an extent that they can't really do anything locally that would benefit the population, i.e. raise their standrads of living and give them control over their own resources. This is not a later capture. This is the original intent.
I think that's largely correct. The empire will want to allow the economies it's exploiting to grow wealthier, though, as long as that's translating into greater ability to enrich the center. They may engage in win-win outcomes, but they'll never do something that benefits the recipient at the expense of the empire.
There's also an interesting propaganda angle where many of the people who implement IMF policies are drinking their own Kool-Aid. It's much easier to run a scam when the people on the ground believe in what they're doing.
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yes, they used to do this also a a means to enlarge the consumer base, though in global south countries, that was usually only a thin layer of the local rich, who consider themselves "Westerners". If local governments try to do things that benefit the larger parts of the population, this is seen as detrimental to imperial interests (as it will inevitably raise the price of work), and the leaders will be couped, as happened more often than you can count.
And yeah, the propaganda angle is real and visible, though it comes with different levels of bribery. there is the indirect bribery of the local well-off, wo will sincerely simp for empire (I've met plenty), though the higher-up bribery is more open and clear. They're openly being paid for their subservience, and allowed to engage in local corruption to amass wealth from local sources unimpeded (like Zelensky, now a literal billionaire, or Uribe in Colombia, not a billionaire - he didn't quite slaughter all his people, or Fukuyama, or the Emirs, Sheikhs and Kings in West Asian comprador regimes)
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