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Brazilian Catholic magazine, Cidade nova |
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LaRouche-inspired Italian Parliamentarians' New Bretton Woods motion featured in Brazilian Catholic magazine. Cidade nova, the magazine of the Brazilian branch of the Focolarini movement (an international Roman Catholic movement active in social projects), published in its July 2023 issue a four-page spread on the Italian Parliamentarian NBW initiative, under the title, "A System To Be Rethought." Lengthy extracts (over a page) of the text of the Italian motion were published, including the six measures which Argentina must take to defend its national sovereignty--measures which Brazilians will recognize as pertinent to Brazil today.
The periodic economic crises of the developing countries, including that of Argentina today, "demand a profound reflection on the role of the IMF and the international financial institutions," the authors wrote. The IMF and World Bank were created in 1944, out of the Bretton Woods conference called by then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to lay the bases for post-war reconstruction. Their tasks were defined as largely related to the European nations. "For the economist, Lyndon LaRouche, they were dealing with totally different conditions than those of the developing countries, which were barely beginning to take the first steps towards industrialization," they wrote. After 1977, the IMF stopped lending money to stabilize the industrialized countries. "‘The reason for which they had been founded ceased to exist,' LaRouche added in his magazine, [Nuevo] Solidariedad." Cidade nova describes what happened: After the explosion of the debt crisis in 1982 in Mexico, the IMF began to transform itself into the "principal axis of a perverse system.... And its financial intermediation activities also began to feed that vicious circle: loans--adjustment plans--recession--more loans--more foreign debt." Reductions in government spending, changes in laws to favor foreign investment, credit restrictions and increases in interest rates; elimination of subsidies, privatization of public companies, deregulation and flexibilization of the labor market were imposed upon the Third World countries. And this resulted in greater impoverishment, and increased debt. "The necessity of a new Bretton Woods is ever more evident," the article concludes. Two cartoons were included, both illustrating what EIR has named "bankers' arithmetic." One, for example, depicts a smiling banker handing a Latin American a bag marked US$ 259 billion in debts in 1980. An even-more-smiley banker is depicted receiving a MUCH bigger bag of $628 billion in "payments made" from the Latin American. And, in the end, the Latin American walks off in 1999, nearly bent over under the weight of a even BIGGER bag of $793 billion in debts left to be paid. -30- Return to the Home Page |