Plutocrats push financial management at confab

• Fresh from the Summit of the Americas, the global elite are gearing up for more internationalist talks in Washington, D.C.

Internationalists rushed from the Summit of the Americas in Quebec to the meeting of the International Monetary Fund and world Bank in Washington where a Bilderberg plan for new global financial rules were advanced at both sessions.

Both at Quebec April 20-22 and in Washington April 27-30, internationalists echoed Bilderberg's call for new and stronger global bureaucracies under the United Nations to control the world's financial systems.

Bilderberg will meet near Gothenburg, Sweden May 24-28, followed by the annual economic summit of the world's industrialized nations.

At a briefing on the IMF-World Bank sessions attended by Karin Lissakers, former U.S. executive director of the IMF, constant calls for stronger international financial controls were heard.

Stronger "monetary enforcement activities by international institutions" are necessary to prevent future economic crises, said Ralph Bryan, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. Brookings is one of the many arms of the Bilderberg-Trilateral clique.

A "new financial architecture" must be established, Bryant said, "an infrastructure with oversight" of nations for the "management of crisis," because "monetary and enforcement activities by international institutions" can prevent crises.

Carol Graham, also a senior fellow in economic studies at Brookings, called for "social insurance" for people made jobless in poor nations by globalization. She said "permanent institutions" should be established to administer "permanent safety nets."

The IMF's Lissakers, nodding approval through all this, said President Bush had given "every indication he would work with the IMF and World Bank." She said the global financial institutions must "streamline conditionalities," which is bureaucratese for telling sovereign nations how they must behave to receive big (mostly American) bucks.

Carol Graham, also a senior fellow at Brookings, hailed the benefits of globalization for the world's poor while unsympathetically acknowledging the concern for job losses in industrialized nations.

"Is there a looming backlash against globalization?" she asked in a paper distributed at the briefing. "In the United States and most industrialized economies, the main opposition to globalization and free trade stems from fears about job displacement."

She was referring to the fact that, under NAFTA, hundreds of thousands of American jobs already gone to Mexico, China, etc., where international corporations exploit cheap labor and are relieved of the huge costs of health insurance, vacations and other "fringe benefits" and of expensive environmental requirements.

But "what do people in developing countries think? She asked. "Globalization has brought substantial benefits and opportunities for upward mobility for large numbers of low-income individual in the emerging economies."

She did not mention the massive benefits brought to international plutocrats and corporations by exploiting cheap labor overseas and driving down the quality of life for most Americans.