Wednesday, June 17, 2009
The House has passed a war funding bill which had tagged onto it a completely unrelated provision to hand over $5 billion to secure $108 billion in loans to the IMF.
The chamber voted 226 to 202 yesterday to forward the legislation to the Senate, which may take it up later this week, reports Bloomberg News.
The measure in the bill will also increase the U.S. member contribution to the IMF by $8 billion and authorize the United States to back the IMF’s plan to sell 400 tons (12.97 million ounces) of gold.
It was placed in the bill at the behest of the Obama administration in order to fulfill the president’s pledge to the G20 in April, to contribute toward a $500 billion boost for the IMF, which it says will go toward “helping poorer nations” during the economic downturn.
However, as we have previously reported, the proposal constitutes an international version of the Wall Street bailout; a $100+ billion bailout for the IMF, which amounts to a bailout for European banks facing big losses in Central and Eastern Europe.
“This will directly benefit Western Europe’s banks, ensuring that their CEE subsidiaries will receive the support they need to weather the recession and remain lucrative businesses.” a Banking Business Review report stated at the time.
Democratic leaders in the House needed 18 of the 51 rebels who previously voted against an earlier draft of the bill, most on anti-war platforms, to reverse their defection and vote yes in order to overcome an almost unanimous Republican opposition.
According to various reports emanating from Capitol Hill, Influential Democrats including Hillary Clinton, and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a former member of the House leadership, were among those making calls to the potential rebels in an effort to sweet talk them into changing their minds.It transpired that 19 Democrats dropped their anti-war principals and voted for the legislation.
In order to further woo the potential rebel Democrats, leaders dropped a provision from an earlier draft of the legislation aimed at blocking an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit seeking the release of photos showing American military personnel abusing prisoners.
The decision was made easier by the fact that president Obama announced that he would personally block any attempt to release the photos.
“Passing a $108 billion global bailout on the backs of our soldiers is just not right,” said Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, the chamber’s No. 3 Republican. “Emergency war funding bills should be about emergency war funding.”
Several other leading House Republicans – including the minority leader, John Boehner, and the whip, Eric Cantor – also referred to the IMF provision as a “global bailout”.
In addition to allocating about $80 billion to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through Sept. 30, the bill also proposes $1 billion to pay for “cash for clunkers” vouchers of $3,500 to $4,500 for people who turn in older gas-guzzling cars and buy new ones.
The bill also includes almost $8 billion to fight the flu pandemic.
Democrats will need 60-vote supermajorities in the Senate to see the bill passed into law.
We have previously highlighted the ongoing agenda to vastly empower the IMF and transform the institution into a “bank of the world” with the power to print its own currency.
This is not a “conspiracy theory”.
As the Washington Post highlighted, the agenda is laid out in publicly available internal IMF documents, interviews and think-tank reports.
It is part of an open move to empower a group of unelected central bankers with the authority to usurp state sovereignty by overseeing benchmarks for national economic governance and setting regulations for financial institutions all over the globe.
As we have also previously highlighted, both the IMF and the United Nations have thrown their weight behind proposals to implement a de-facto global financial dictatorship.
Both bodies have expressed support for new world reserve currency system to replace the dollar as part of the acceleration towards a new economic world order.
