2) The scandal of American debtors

The USA is by far the largest indebted nation in the world, says a new NEF report�but they are being bankrolled by some of the poorest nations on earth.If you look a little closer at the so-called debt crisis, you find that the USA has a total foreign debt that makes that of, say, Benin, look like the crumbs left over from a midday meal.Less than 300m people in the USA owe a total of $2.2 trillion�almost equal to the $2.5 trillion owed by the whole of the developing world. In other words, each US citizen owes the rest of the world $7,333, while each citizen of the developing world owes only $500.What is worse, the US debt has been spiralling further and further out of control in recent years. US imports are now more than twice their exports. US consumers have been getting high on Cartier watches and Nintendo Playstations, without generating the resources to pay for it.Their total current account deficit�or exports minus imports and interest payments on foreign debt, are now the largest ever, at a whopping $445bn, or four per cent of their GDP.The iniquity of the richest country on earth sucking in the savings of the rest of the world to finance her excessive consumption is bad enough. But worse, according to the Jubilee Research report The US as a HIPC: How the Poor are Financing the Rich, billions of dollars of flight capital are leaving the developing world every year and flooding towards the USA. "In fact, we find that if accumulated capital flight over the past few decades is taken into account, Argentina and at least 25 African countries are net creditors of the West," says report co-author Romilly Greenhill. "In other words, instead of bleeding their economies dry through debt service payments, these countries should be sitting back and waiting for the money to roll in."In fact, while the USA only pays $20bn a year to service its debt, the poor countries are paying more than $300bn to service an almost equivalent amount.And while the US is free to pursue any macroeconomic policy it chooses, the poor world must succumb to being 'structurally adjusted' by the IMF and her rich-world financers.

www.jubileeplus.org

A full copy of the report can be found at: http://www.jubileeplus.org/analysis/reports/usa190402.htm

The Civil Commons

Joseph Stiglitz on the Death Economy

John McMurtry

Professor Joseph Stiglitz has become a very important voice. He is awaking official culture from the fanatical financial program benignly called �the Washington consensus.� When a professional economist who has risen to very the top of the Church of the Global Market can think his way out of this deranged mind-set, there is still hope for the world. Stiglitz now joins George Soros in recognizing from the inside that there is something very rotten in the ruling paradigm which emanates from the US Treasury.

Learning to Think Past the Wall Street Mind-Lock

In my 1999 book, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, I criticized a very different Stiglitz. �As Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President (and now the World Bank�s Chief Economist),� I wrote, �Joseph Stiglitz declares to American society: �If people are not living up to their potential, then the economy cannot live up to its potential.� Deconstructed, Stiglitz�s exhortation means that society�s sovereign is the �the economy� (that is, the money-valued growth of the market), while the means of �its potential� is society�s people. They must become what serves it � (They must) serve the world machine of money-to-more-money circuits for money investors to which all societies �must adapt or not survive.��1

Stiglitz�s position reflected a general pathological inversion of value-set regulating US policy makers and therefore the world. Society is construed as the instrument of the money capitalist economy rather than the other way round. Humanity is, at whatever cost in life security, made to be the servant of its economic system, bowing down before its instrument as its ruler. No fetishism has, in fact, ever been so dominant. The market is God, and all nations must ever more frenetically compete to serve it. Stripping social infrastructures and environments to appease the ever mounting demands of investors for money for themselves is not a choice, but a necessity. This is a jealous God that tolerates no alternatives. It is a God that has failed all but the very rich.

So it is an encouraging sign of social immune recognition that Joseph Stiglitz has woken up. It is just as encouraging a sign that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics since he publicly spoke out against the IMF last Spring in the most lacerating critique of its Wall-Street-driven program that I�ve read. The Nobel Prize in Economics is an ersatz Nobel laurel set up by banking interests against the Nobel family�s wishes. But it has, apparently, begun a strong turn towards sanity. After the acute philosopher-economist, Amartya Sen, was awarded the prize in 2001 to break a long string of market ideologues as recipients, the selection of Stiglitz stands as something of a sign of things to come. The long overdue paradigm shift may be underway within the ranks of the market Church itself.

Because the former Chief Economist of the World Bank has exactly revealed the pathology of the program from within, we need to register clearly just what he has said. With the corporate media structured to serve salable images and sound-bites instead of argument as the diet of mind for even readers of The New York Times, Stiglitz�s analysis is almost certain to be selectively silenced in the reports you read in your daily paper. So I anatomize the inner logic of its argument here. It is not pretty. Stiglitz, in fact, reveals the mechanisms of a US policy for the eco-genocide of nations across the world. The means are financial, and they consist in international banking prescriptions to hollow out entire societies to ensure compounding money tribute to dominant foreign banks with no commitment to any life-host. The lead invasive