Momin replied on Thursday, July 9, 2009 10:54 AM
Pakistan and other lesser developed countries? especially their elites and corrupt rulers? are not free of guilt when it comes to the issue of the debt that they have accumulated. At the same time, if they did not borrow and get in debt, pressure would definitely be put on them to do so.
Debt keeps Third World countries under control. Dependent on aid, loan reschedulings, and debt rollovers to survive? never mind actually develop? they have been forced to restructure their economies and rewrite their laws to meet conditions laid down in IMF structural adjustment programs and World Bank conditionalities.
Source:(Steven Hiatt, ed. A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2007)Hiatt, p. 23.)
Noreena Hertz has an excellent chapter in her work, The Debt Threat: How debt is destroying the developing world. and threatening us all, delineating many of the dangers that the massive debt?and, again, which would not be as massive without the ever-growing aspect of interest?poses for the world today. She details the dangers of extremism, terrorism, depletion of the world’s natural resources, and more. To cite just one aspect, she writes:
Debt’s ugly progeny?poverty, inequality, and injustice?are also called upon to justify, and even legitimize, acts of the greatest violence. Only a few weeks after the World Trade Center was attacked, leading African commentator Michael Fortin wrote: “We have to recognize that this deplorable act of aggression may have been, at least in part, an act of revenge on the part of desperate and humiliated people, crushed by the weight of the economic oppression practiced by the peoples of the West.” Fortin’s language?”crushed,” “oppression,” “desperate,” “humiliated”?is deliberately evocative. And it is manifestly clear that there is an audience with whom such words powerfully resonate. |
