The news that England is in bad shape financially added to the list of the PIIGs is a bad omen. For one like myself who has no real knowledge of international finances, what can you do but speculate? How is it possible that so many governments are in deep, deep do? Not only that, but the timing of it is so strange. All of them, all at once? Or apparently so.
The little town in which I live just recently announced it was in a deep deficit, which did not, however, stop them from continuing the building of a very elaborate and massive recreation center which was practically on the verge of default. So what did they do? They raised a local tax to 3% which means when you buy groceries you pay that much to them, and this is the principal shopping center for a number of nearby small towns. We sport a super WalMart, of course, plus a Home Depot and three grocery centers.
Add to the mess the state of Arizona is in, Phoenix is in, along with a number of Phoenix subdivisions, and all of them have just one thought: taxpayers!
A few years ago I went to Phoenix to enter Arizona Heart Hospital which meant my companion and I checked into a nearby hotel. I only mention this because Jane, the friend that drove me down, stayed there a couple days to keep me company, and we were both shocked. It wasn’t the price of the hotel room but there was a tax on it besides all the other taxes designated especially for the Diamondbacks, the baseball team! A few months later there was a tv discussion about the wages paid to the athletes for playing a game, which are not just astronomical, but downright shocking! Yet if you look at the number of empty seats in the arena, that is also shocking!
That isn’t what I wanted to say, just wanted to put that on the record. What was on my mind, however, was the IMF which seems to have all kinds of clout despite its shabby origins – which no one ever seems to mention. Did you know it was an outgrowth of the plotting done at Bretton Woods, Dumbarton Oaks, and eventually San Francisco at which the notorious traitor Alger Hiss presided—only it is amazing how few people remember that name or why it is infamous! If you do know what went on then, you can only shake your head in wonderment that agencies created by people who were on the payroll of the United States’ State Department yet were agents of the Soviet Union could continue administering untold sums of money even to this day! The two who put their heads together and came up with the International Monetary Fund were John Maynard Keynes, a Fabian Socialist Brit, and Harry Dexter White, a Soviet agent to whom the then Treasurer of the U.S. Morgenthau, had given all authority to deal with the economies of other countries on behalf of the U.S.! When White was eventually unmasked, his counterpart, Frank Coe, succeeded him as head of the IMF for six years! The record according to former employees is 70% failure of all the projects sponsored by IMF!
I wrote quite a bit about it in my epic, In the Presence of Our Enemies, which is still available in re Amazon, for those who have any interest in who drives the world’s economies. And if you, like me, are wondering why all these countries are in dire financial straits even as we are – and asking, how do we get out of this mess?
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