An expert on the neo-liberal rape of Russia, as well as on international finance in general, Anne Williamson testified before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the U.S. House of Representatives, on Sept. 21, 1999.  The testimony is well worth reading through today. It shows how precisely the situation in the 1990s during the various financial crises parallels the crisis today in the US. Even the actors are the same  – from Harvard to the IMF to Goldman Sachs.

This is why I’ve consistently argued against any policy prescribed by this government. Anything suggested by such a corrupt group of actors should be suspect.  There’s no point criticizing a Summers or a Geithner or a Paulson alone, when those who oppose them also accept the underlying premises of their arguments; they merely split the difference over a solution that is in essence no different. That is, their “differences” are essentially cosmetic.

I had the privilege of talking at length to Anne and found that her own experiences with the media and publishers were much like mine, only worse. The reasons for that are obvious.  Ask for reform of the IMF or of the World Bank or of the Fed and you will get a sympathetic ear. Ask for the abolition of these institutions and you have questioned the entire system and the credibility of the functionaries and apparatchiks who run it. That’s unforgivable.

“Some governments — especially those with an election on the horizon — actually want to devalue since national exporters, their goods now being cheaper, sell more goods. Global lenders like the IMF are also fond of devaluations because a rising national income from bargain exports leave plenty in the national kitty for principal and interest payments to them. (Global direct investors — the “good guys” — fear devaluations, because their profits calculated in a devalued domestic currency buy fewer dollars for repatriation.)

But when exchange rates depreciate rapidly the specter of capital flowing out of a country appears. Foreigners and residents put their savings elsewhere. The currency goes into free fall, its value plummets, more investors flee and at the end of the cycle, interest rates skyrocket. This is exactly what happened in Asia in 1997, in Russia in 1998 and will soon happen in both Brazil and China.

Yet to curse the speculators is useless; since the 1972 collapse of Bretton Woods that broke the international link between the dollar and gold, the fear of the syndrome described above is the only remaining bit of discipline in the international system. How much better, the globalists reason, if there were to be one central bank and one fiat currency for everyone so that then national leaderships (and the financial oligarchies they sustain) could inflate and rob their own populations in unison, thereby perpetually enserfing all the world’s people….”

And on the role of the IMF:

“In mid-July 1994 — at the very moment dollar-based Mexican tesobonos were being oversold to prosperous clients of Goldman Sachs and other U.S. investment banks, which, in turn, would lead to the 1995 Mexican bailout and the introduction of moral hazard into the world’s financial system — Michel Camdessus told a press conference that he intended to press for the creation of a new IMF facility to give members resources with which to defend themselves against speculative attacks in financial markets.

In other words, long before bailouts of entire countries became routine Camdessus wanted a new loan program to feed the last disciplinarians in the world’s financial system — currency speculators — so that national governments might become even more unaccountable to their citizens. At the time, The Economist slammed the proposal, saying it was “absurd and almost certainly unworkable,” since Camdessus “bizarrely” was assuming the IMF would know more about economic fundamentals than the markets. And that assumption, The Economist noted, was the very assumption which had been the undoing of the USSR’s centrally planned empire. But Camdessus’ 1994 plan is the very one the U.S. President proposed just this week!”

Read the rest of her testimony here.