>Well, I hope our Euro creditors will remember the Marshall Plan and
>not U.S. conduct in 1918. The following is from Jane Ridley's
>review in The Spectator of _1918: War and Peace_ by Gregor Dallas:
>
>"The quarrel at the Paris peace conference, vividly described here,
>was about war loans. The Americans had made loans to Britain and
>Britain made loans to the Allies. When the Americans obstinately
>refused to accept the burden of Britain's Allied loans, Keynes
>minuted, 'It almost looks as if they took a satisfaction in reducing
>us to a position of complete financial helplessness and dependence.'
Excuse me if my sympathy for the British is limited. I just started reading Mike Davis' latest, Late Victorian Holocausts. The first chapter is about the Indian famine of the 1870s, caused by a malignant combination of El Nino-related drought and British savagery. As is usually the case, the problem wasn't really the shortage of food, but the means to pay for it; India, like Ireland several decades earlier, was exporting food to Britain in the midst of starvation. British officials objected to any effort to resist market forces; high prices would stimulate production and reduce demand. "Free market economics [was] a mask for colonial genocide," Davis writes. The British decreed that Indians could perform heavy labor on a daily ration of about 1600 calories, less than the Nazis supplied to the residents of Buchenwald. Those applying for relief were forced to walk long distances or perform labor - as a test to see if they were fit, which they weren't because they were little more than "animate skeletons," as one contemporary observer put it. Colonial officials not only refused to give aid - fiscal discipline had to be maintained! - they actually stepped up tax collections in the face of the economic collapse caused by the famine. The challenge, they claimed, was how to get more work out of the corrupt and lazy natives.
Tariq Ali's blurb is right - this is the black book of capitalism.
Doug