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"According to PROUT, economic exploitation involves the unrestricted plunder of the physical and psychic labour of a particular community together with the natural resources in their local area. In PROUT’s view, exploitation is not confined to only economic exploitation, but includes psychic and spiritual exploitation as well. The final and most dangerous form of economic exploitation is fascist exploitation. In order to canvass national support to justify their exploitation, the imperialists popularize the theory of nationalism. They portray their exploitation as rational and constitutional and based on the national interest. The British imperialists, in order to legitimize their exploitation, embraced nationalist theory. Following the example of the British, Mussolini of Italy and Hitler of Germany moved along the same path.

When communist imperialism was established after the Second World War, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin propagated the concept of the Slavic supremacy. Likewise, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong built up Chinese superiority. As soon as an imperialist power is transformed into a fascist power, it spreads out its tentacles to psychically and culturally oppress a vanquished people. To perpetuate unhindered economic exploitation, psychic exploitation starts almost simultaneously. Where psychic exploitation is used to further economic exploitation, it is called “psycho-economic exploitation”.

At the very outset, the fascist exploiters select a weak community which inhabits a region rich in natural resources. The fascists socially and culturally uproot the victimized community by imposing a foreign language and culture on them. Because the local people cannot easily express their individual and collective feelings and sentiments in a foreign language, they develop a defeatist psychology and inferiority complex with respect to the exploiters. This defeatist psychology destroys the natural spiritedness and will to fight of the local people, and the fascists skillfully utilize this golden opportunity.

The primary interest of the fascist exploiters is to gradually suck the vitality of the local community so that they can pillage and plunder their natural resources, but if necessary they will even obliterate the local community from the face of the earth." ~ Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar

This article will be published in an Asia Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, publication entitled The Tenth Anniversary of the Asian Financial Crisis: Lessons Learned, Critical Assessments, and Charting the Path Forward.

The article argues that the most important long-term impact of the East Asian financial crisis, a decade later, has been that it began a process that led to the collapse of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) influence over middle-income countries. This was partly a result of the Fund's role in the crisis, detailed in the article, which was widely seen as a major failure. Partly as a result of this experience, the middle-income Asian countries have accumulated large reserve holdings and largely removed themselves from IMF influence. The IMF's authority and credibility was further undermined in the Argentine crisis of 1998-2003. In recent years the availability of alternative sources of credit, especially in Latin America, have led to the collapse of the IMF's "creditors' cartel" in that region and among middle-income countries generally. The author argues that this is the most important change in the international financial system since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in 1973. For the foreseeable future, any positive financial reforms will be made at the national and regional level - e.g., with the extension of such arrangements of the Chiang Mai Initiative. This is because the high-income countries are not significantly closer to supporting reforms at the level of the international financial system or institutions than they were a decade ago. It will also be important for low-income countries, where the IMF still retains its role as "gatekeeper" for official credit, to become independent from the Fund so they can pursue more effective macroeconomic and development policies.

RIO DE JANEIRO (IPS) - The largest movement fighting for the distribution of unproductive rural property to landless peasant farmers in Brazil complains that the "euphoria" over the production of biofuels from sugar cane and other crops is aggravating the concentration of land ownership and driving up land prices.

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or Landless Workers Movement (MST) argues that the biofuel boom is just another manifestation of the growing strength of agribusiness in Brazil, Latin America's giant.

Joao Pedro Stedile, a member of the MST national leadership, told IPS that biofuel production forms part of the "agricultural model of the dominant classes, the big capitalists who have built up an alliance of vested interests, comprised of transnational corporations on one hand and large Brazilian landowners on the other."

This alliance, he said, is based on export-oriented production on vast tracts of land, and heavy use of toxic agrochemicals that damage the environment.

The MST advocates a different model, one that is "focused on the needs of the people, and is based on keeping peasant farmers in the countryside and on multi-crop production that puts a priority on food production, without the use of agrotoxics," said the activist.

MOSCOW (IPS) - The industrialised nations of the Group of Eight are failing on the promises made in their previous summits to help Africa's economic development and to push for poverty alleviation for those struggling to survive on less than a dollar per day, say World Bank experts and development activists.

"It's obvious to the whole world that G8 member countries are not fully delivering on their promises to Africa and nobody holds them accountable for those lapses," Eric Kilongi Mgendi, regional spokesperson for the development campaign group ActionAid, told IPS in an interview from Nairobi, Kenya.

"African countries badly need technology and investment capital to help them adapt to all kinds of environmental hazards, including the changing climate. It needs the G8 to steer development to an appreciable level for the growing population," he said.

While aid would help develop much of the infrastructure, harness energy resources and improve social services, African leaders should also take progressive steps to strengthen intra-regional trade, said the activist.

"Jobs in South Africa's footwear factories that were once considered permanent have turned casual since its government introduced free trade policies........."

BRUSSELS (IPS) - When European campaigners suggest that a free trade deal could harm the poor, they typically encounter a frosty reaction from civil servants in Brussels. Still, no one tries to muzzle them.

Yet when a Namibian trade analyst insinuated that the European Union was trying to browbeat southern African governments into signing an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) before they had a chance to analyse its consequences, he found himself out of a job.

Wallie Roux, a market researcher for the Namibian meat firm Meatco, spoke out against EPAs in a speech to the Labour Resource and Research Institute in April when he claimed the EU is trying to enter the Guinness Book of Records for the most rapidly negotiated trade agreement in history.

His remarks were reported in Namibian newspaper New Era on April 18. Meatco responded to his claim by suspending him on May 11.

HAVANA (IPS) - Like other Latin American countries, Cuba is focusing on the development of renewable energy sources. But unlike Brazil, a leader in biofuels, this Caribbean island nation has ruled out the production of ethanol fuel based on sugarcane, because of President Fidel Castro's opposition to using food crops to produce biofuel on a large scale.

BUJUMBURA (IPS) - Several months ago, residents of the Burundian capital, Bujumbura, were struggling with disposal of household waste. The Municipal Technical Services (Services techniques municipaux, SETEMU) weren't able to deal with all the refuse -- and health conditions in the city were deteriorating.

Fast forward to June 2007, and matters have taken a turn for the better -- thanks to a waste management process imported from neighbouring Rwanda, and put into effect by the recently-created Association for Development and the Fight Against Poverty (Association pour le développement et la lutte contre la pauvreté, ADLP).

This organisation stepped forward after authorities decided to open the collection and treatment of household refuse to outside contractors, becoming the first privately-owned organisation to get involved in waste management in the city.

Alidi Hakizimana, a resident of the Nyakabiga community in the centre of Bujumbura -- where the ADLP is most extensively involved -- notes that health conditions "have clearly improved since the organisation took responsibility for waste" in the area.

But, ADLP doesn't only collect waste -- it also transforms it into fuel.

The central banks are the source of the majority of the world's problems. They are unelected and the majority of their activity is hidden from the public like that of any dictatorship. The Federal Reserve for example is composed of private bankers who are given free rein to organize the American economy to suit their business interests. This article relates that these banks are no longer able to control their economies due to globalization. This is why they are tightening the reins of all the world's economies by resorting to bombings and invasion not realizing that the reins are bound to break and the world's economies are bound to throw them off and in to the ditch of another depression.These bankers are unelected and unaccountable. The rapidly eroding facade of political democracy today reveals all to clearly the gaping void of democracy in the economy. ~ WPA

Communism as an economic model was tried in various parts of the world such as Russia and Eastern European countries, however it failed. Under communist economies the common people became even more impoverished than they were prior to communism. Communism is symbolized by state ownership and public enterprise. In essence, it is state capitalism. Capitalism is the economic model in vogue today in most countries of the world. The United States is the bastion of capitalism. In fact, many scholars and historians refer to it as the American Empire, which has replaced the British Empire of the 19th and 20th centuries. Capitalism is symbolized by individual ownership and private enterprise. We have today not merely capitalism but global capitalism, also referred to as globalization. In all these economic systems, i.e., communism, capitalism and global capitalism, the economic system is centralized with control being in the hands of a few persons. The question begs to be asked as to whether the common people have fared well in centralized economies, and whether they have been guaranteed an improved standard of living based on increasing purchasing capacity. According to economist Prabhat Sarkar, in a centralized economy exploitation cannot be eradicated nor can the poverty of the common people be removed. In the above economic paradigms, economic policies are formulated by a handful of men for the benefit of those men who are generally indifferent to the plight of the masses.

"Thousands of new jobs have been created in the last several decades in every major city that has experienced population growth. If creating jobs in a city reduced unemployment in the city, then each of these cities should now have an unemployment rate that is less than zero, whatever that means..." April 15, 2006