#dropthedebt — Public Fediverse posts

Nicaragua and the USA

,> The highest per capita debt in the region is Nicaragua’s, currently $6.4 billion and clearly unpayable. The human costs of the IMF programs designed to ensure that lenders are compensated many times over are incalculable. About $1.5 billion is from the Somoza years, hence clearly “odious debt,” of no standing. Another $3 billion is from the post-1990 period when the US regained control over Nicaragua; also odious debt. The remainder is the direct responsibility of the United States, which was conducting brutal economic warfare and a murderous terrorist war against Nicaragua, for which it was condemned by the World Court, which ordered the US to pay reparations, variously estimated in the range of $17 billion. Accordingly, the highly conservative principle of adhering to international law, as determined by the highest international judicial body, would suffice to eliminate Nicaragua’s debt, with a good deal left over. Were elementary moral principles even to be imaginable in elite Western culture, similar conclusions would at once be drawn far more broadly throughout Europe and the US, even without World Court judgments. But that day remains very distant.  [Patricia Adams, Odious Debts (Earthscan, 1991); Lissakers, Banks, Borrowers. Witness for Peace, A Bankrupt Future: The Human Cost of Nicaragua’s Debt (WFP, 2000); Envio (Managua, Nicaragua: UCA), 18.220, Nov. 1999.]
  
   - Noam Chomsky in Rogue States Jubilee 2000

Haiti and France (and the USA...)

.> ... The French king agreed to recognise Haiti’s independence only if the new republic paid France an indemnity of 150 million francs and reduced its import and export taxes by half. The ‘debt’ that Haiti recognised was incurred by the slaves when they deprived the French owners not only of land and equipment but of their human ‘property’.
.> The impact of the debt repayments – which continued until after World War Two – was devastating. In the words of the Haitian anthropologist Jean Price-Mars, ‘the incompetence and frivolity of its leaders’ had ‘turned a country whose revenues and outflows had been balanced up to then into a nation burdened with debt and trapped in financial obligations that could never be satisfied.’ ‘Imposing an indemnity on the victorious slaves was equivalent to making them pay with money that which they had already paid with their blood,’ the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher argued.
...
.> Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ... should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles.
.> Still, Aristide kept up the pressure. The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’... [ Paul Farmer in "Who removed Aristide? Paul Farmer reports from Haiti" ]

.> A complementary approach might invoke the old-fashioned capitalist idea that those who borrow are responsible for repayment, and those who lend take the risk.
...

.> The banks were eager to lend and upbeat about the prospects. On the eve of the 1982 disaster Citibank director Walter Wriston, known in the financial world as “the greatest recycler of them all,” described Latin American lending as so risk-free that commercial banks could safely treble Third World loans (as proportion of assets). After disaster struck, Citibank declared that “we don’t feel unduly exposed” in Brazil, which had doubled bank debt in the preceding 4 years, with Citibank exposure in Brazil alone greater than 100% of capital. In 1986, after the collapse of the international lending boom in which he was a prime mover, Wriston wrote that “events of the past dozen years would seem to suggest that we [bankers] have been doing our job [of risk assessment] reasonably well”; true enough, if we factor in the ensuing socialization of risk, welcomed by Wriston and others famous for their contempt of government and adulation of the free market.
...


.> Jeffrey Sachs, “International Economics: Unlocking the Mysteries of Globalization, “Foreign Policy (Spring 1998); Paul Krugman, “Cycles of Conventional Wisdom on Economic Development,” International Affairs 71:4 (Oct. 1995). Joseph Stiglitz, “Some Lessons from the East Asian Miracle,” World Bank Research Observer 11:2 (Aug. 1996). Stiglitz was soon to be appointed chief economist of the World Bank. For his reflections on the East Asian crisis, see his WIDER Annual Lectures 2, UN University, 1997; “An Agenda for Development in the Twenty-First Century,” Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 1997, IBRD, 1998.

Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ... should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles.

Still, Aristide kept up the pressure. The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’. On 1 January this year, during the bicentennial celebrations, Aristide announced he would replace a 21-gun salute with a list of the 21 things that had been done in spite of the embargo and that would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went wild. The French press by and large dismissed his comments as silly, despite the legal merits of his case. Many Haitians saw Aristide as a modern Toussaint l’Ouverture, a comparison that Aristide did not discourage. ‘Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’ Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ‘and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outside interference.’

On the night of 28 February, the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced from power. He claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of Africa’. He found himself in the...

Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ... should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles.

Still, Aristide kept up the pressure. The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’. On 1 January this year, during the bicentennial celebrations, Aristide announced he would replace a 21-gun salute with a list of the 21 things that had been done in spite of the embargo and that would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went wild. The French press by and large dismissed his comments as silly, despite the legal merits of his case. Many Haitians saw Aristide as a modern Toussaint l’Ouverture, a comparison that Aristide did not discourage. ‘Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’ Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ‘and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outside interference.’

On the night of 28 February, the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced from power. He claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of Africa’. He found himself in the...

"Debt service is absorbing 41.5% of budget revenues, 41.6% of spending, and 8.4% of GDP on average across 144 developing countries" 📊

- #quote The Guardian

#DeathisDebt <> #DebtisDeath
#DropTheDebt <> #BlackMastodon

"Debt service is absorbing 41.5% of budget revenues, 41.6% of spending, and 8.4% of GDP on average across 144 developing countries"

The West does not require this money.

#DropTheDebt
#BlackMastodon

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/21/developing-countries-face-worst-debt-crisis-in-history-study-shows

"Debt service is absorbing 41.5% of budget revenues, 41.6% of spending, and 8.4% of GDP on average across 144 developing countries"

The West does not require this money.

#DropTheDebt
#BlackMastodon

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/21/developing-countries-face-worst-debt-crisis-in-history-study-shows

The article where I learned the key concepts capital flight and odious debt, in 1998!!

.> The Latin American debt that reached crisis levels from 1982 would have been sharply reduced by return of flight capital — in some cases, overcome, though all figures are dubious for these secret and often illegal operations. The World Bank estimated that Venezuela’s flight capital exceeded its foreign debt by 40% in 1987....
.> A recent Council on Foreign Relations study points out that “defaults on foreign bonds by U.S. railroads in the 1890s were on the same scale as current developing country debt problems.” Britain, France and Italy defaulted on U.S. debts in the 1930s: Washington “forgave (or forgot),” the Wall Street Journal reports. After World War II, there was massive flow of capital from Europe to the United States. Cooperative controls could have kept the funds at home for postwar reconstruction, but policy makers preferred to have wealthy Europeans send their capital to New York banks, with the costs of reconstruction transferred to U.S. taxpayers....
.> When the U.S. 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 “odious debt” 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. Rejecting a British challenge to Costa Rican laws cancelling the debt of the former dictator to the Royal Bank of Canada, the arbitrator — U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft — concluded that the Bank lent the money for no “legitimate use,” so its claim for payment “must fail.” The logic extends readily to much of today’s debt: “odious debt” with no legal or moral standing, imposed upon people without their consent, often serving to repress them and enrich their masters.

Il #debito è il doppio cappio del nuovo colonialismo https://valori.it/crisi-debito-africa-cina-mercati/ da @[email protected]
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