In The Shock Doctrine, journalist Naomi Klein highlights the ways big institutions exploit disaster stricken people and countries when they’re the most vulnerable, shackling entire populations to crippling debts.
Well, this just happened in Egypt. The IMF has given Egypt’s transitional government a $3 Billion dollar loan to help ‘revitalize the economy’.
Unfortunately, this money has just fallen into the corrupt hands leftover from the old regime, meaning the majority of the money will just be embezzled before stimulating the economy or doing the Egyptian people any good.
But that won’t stop the IMF from holding regular Egyptians accountable for the debt. Whatever new regime arises in the coming months, they will be on the hook for this $3 Billion taken on by a few corrupt officials in Cairo.
This is too bad. Now Egypt’s soon-to-arise fledgling democracy, and all the people of Egypt, will be forced to make concessions to a global loan-shark. It’s like they’ve moved from one dictator to another, only the new king is a bank instead of a body.
Unwilling to go out on a down note, let me just say these global dictators, like the mega-banks and the giant corporations, are precisely the forces to be toppled when humanity rises up together on a planetary scale.
