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Comment by slantedview | Hacker News Reader

It's worth pointing out that debt trap diplomacy was pioneered by the US backed IMF. While China has been exploitative, it goes without saying, that the US has been even moreso.

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Since you went ahead and said what "goes without saying", how about you go further and actually demonstrate/document/prove what you say?

In case you don't see the comment above, a few books that I know cover this topic include "Superimperialism" (Hudson), "Silent Coup" (Kennard), and "The Divide" (Hickel).

"Confessions of an economic Hitman" is a first-person account of a man involved in these schemes.

As an educated member of a developing country, I know that many so called "foreign investments" from the West are preceded (in fact, it is a requirenment) by huge loans from IMF and the World Bank.

This money is then wired to the investor, who is paid in 10s of thousands euroes for each employee. Every large state-backed loan eventually ends up in the pockets of western investors.

Really? What record does the US have leveraging aid for UN votes, political concessions, or just seizing ports and land?

Leveraging aid packages for UN votes and political concessions is standard geopolitics. For example, just a few weeks ago, it was discovered that the US leveraged an IMF deal to get Pakistan to back the war in Ukraine:

https://theintercept.com/2023/09/17/pakistan-ukraine-arms-im...

Aid for pro-democracy or pro-US policies is standard practice, of course.

But has the US threatened countries if they don't vote with them at the UN, or seized their land and/or assets for non payment of debt?

Of course. Even a tertiary google search will get you details, if you care to find and read them.

Influencing other countries, which again everyone does. Have they ever specifically threatened to, say withhold vaccines if a vote doesn't go their way?

https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-china-europe-ukrai...

Have they ever put countries into debt then stolen land based on that debt?

Your example btw was about raising arms for a third party conflict, not for something that directly benefits the US. Which weakens your argument.

I wish it got the same attention. I heard only vague rumors about it. You can take this as an open invitation for stories about it.

Any quick sources to back that up? IMF appears to set some conditions to put the economy back on track before lending.

David Graeber: Oh, absolutely. After all, the alter-globalization movement grew out of a broad global reaction to the Washington consensus, which was never any sort of consensus, but rather, a vision of the world forcibly imposed on the global South through the third world debt crisis. I was involved in “drop the debt” campaigns of various sorts since at least 2000. What got me interested in some of the philosophical issues I ended up ex- ploring in the book was the peculiar moral power of the notion of debts. So many oth- erwise sympathetic people, even when told of the terrible, almost unimaginably inhu- man suffering inflicted on people in the global South because of the depredations of the IMF, would still respond, “well, that’s terrible that so many children died slow and painful deaths, but still—surely one has to pay one’s debts!

https://davidgraeber.org/wp-content/uploads/debts-history-im...

Sure: two somewhat recent books that cover this are "Silent Coup" by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard, and "The Divide" by Jason Hickel. Another that covers this topic is "Superimperialism" by Michael Hudson.

The purpose of the IMF is not to help countries out of some kind of benevolence, it's to use debt as a control mechanism over other countries.

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