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Refusal to hand over Venezuelan gold means end of Britain as a financial center – Prof. Wolff
Published time: 30 Jan, 2019 13:01
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The Bank of England is seen in the financial district during rainy weather in London © Reuters / Henry Nicholls
The freezing of Venezuelan gold by the Bank of England is a signal to all countries out of step with US interests to withdraw their money, according to economist and co-founder of Democracy at Work, Professor Richard Wolff.
He told RT America that Britain and its central bank have shown themselves to be “under the thumb of the United States.”
“That is a signal to every country that has or may have difficulties with the US, [that they had] better get their money out of England and out of London because it’s not the safe place as it once was,” he said.
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The Bank of England is currently withholding $1.2 billion in gold from Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government, but is being urged by Washington to release it to the chairman of the National Assembly, Juan Guaido. Last week, the US backed Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, after he declared himself interim president.
According to Professor Wolff, control of Venezuela’s oil has always been an urgent issue for Washington.
He also said that the collapse of Britain as a global power, which was accelerated by Brexit, is now about to take another step.
“One of the few things left for Britain is to be the financial center that London has been for so long. And one of the ways you stay a financial center is if you don’t play games with other people’s money,” he said.
The economist added that it is for the Venezuelans who put the money into the care of the British bank to determine what is done with it, and not for the Bank of England.
“You can be sure that every government in the world is going to rethink putting any money in London, as they used to do, when they are watching this political manipulation with the money that they entrusted to the British. It is very dangerous for the world but for Britain particularly,” said Wolff.
He explained: “What the British are showing is that they can’t continue apparently to be the neutral place where you can safely put your money.”
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Mystery of the Venezuelan gold: Bank of England is independent of UK govt – but not of foreign govt
George Galloway
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Gold ingots © Global Look Press / Bundesbank
Pirates don't have to look like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. They can fly the Union Jack rather than the skull and crossbones. They can be called the Bank of England rather than the Jolly Roger.
The 'Old Lady of Threadneedle Street' is a port in a stormy world for all kinds of countries in which to moor their national wealth. And it's not even necessarily voluntary.
After the fall of the communist regime in Albania, I had a brief tenure as joint chairman of the Britain-Albania Society with the Tory MP Steve Norris. He and I had to move mountains to try and persuade the British government (which then entirely controlled the Bank of England) to give the Albanians back their gold, which had been seized by the British during Second World War.
This week's brigandry – unnoticed by any commentator I read – took place in an era when the Bank of England is officially independent of government control. And yet it was triggered by a phone call from a foreign government official.
The bank's decision to seize – a polite word for steal – more than a billion dollars' worth of Venezuelan gold was reported to have been ordered by the governor after a call from US National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – not even the president himself.
If I'm right, then this decision to damage – hopefully irreparably – the safety of deposits in the Bank of England was taken by an unelected, unaccountable Canadian citizen (who only got his British citizenship in November). He is here today but gone tomorrow as the governor of the Bank of England. The foreign policy of the state – whose bank it is – was thus at least anticipated if not usurped by Bolton, a minor official of a foreign country. Was that what the Tory champions of Brexit had in mind when they campaigned for Britain to "take back control"?
Of course the governor, Mark Carney, will have known that Bolton was pushing at an open bank vault door and that Britain is no more independent from the United States than the Bank of England is independent from the British government.
In addition, no Caribbean crocodile could shed tears more insincere than those currently being shed by British politicians for the "poor suffering people" of Venezuela. After all, what kind of monster could seize a billion dollars from "poor and suffering people"?
In around 72 hours last week, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was transformed from somebody hardly anyone in Britain had ever heard of, into the new "Hitler on the Nile."
This appellation was first applied in post-war Britain to President Nasser of Egypt when he nationalized the Suez Canal. Unfortunately for the imperium, this was actually in Egypt, the country of which he was the president. After all, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, it wasn't Britain's fault that God put Britain's canals in other people's countries.
And there have been many since: Yasser Arafat, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar Assad, Slobodan Milosevic, Vladimir Pilingui, and more.
The transformation has been astonishing to watch, even for me, who has been active in politics for 50 years.
All the carefully tended gardens of NGOs, "independent journalists," and experts all flooded forward with their long-husbanded narratives about the perfidy of the Chavez revolution in Venezuela. They did universally suffer two disadvantages however: none of them could even pronounce the name of the man in a street in Caracas whose self-proclaimed presidency they were recognizing. And none of them appeared to know that the US had been imposing a medieval siege of sanctions, sabotage and subversion against Venezuela. At least none of them mentioned it.
None of them, like in every other foreign regime-change operation they'd pushed for, had the remotest idea of what would happen in Venezuela if they succeeded, not least how the many millions of armed Chavez supporters might take to their government being overthrown by foreigners. It is hard to work out whether these journalists and politicians demanding civil war on the world's biggest oil-fields are incivil insane, just incivil, or whether they can plead diminished responsibility on the grounds they didn't actually know what had already peine in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Ukraine, etc.
The demonization of Venezuela across even those Western countries which scarcely have functioning governments themselves has been a tidal wave. The pitiful resources Venezuela has invested in solidarity work in Britain – or if they did invest it no-one can explain where it went – was summed up by the complete refusal of the Venezuelan Solidarity Campaign to put someone up for my RT show Sputnik last week, referring me to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign next door.
They, in turn, suggested the Englishman who ably edits the British newspaper, the Morning Star. Seldom can a big and important oil-rich country – vulnerable to Western invasion as it has predictably turned out to be – have bothered to make so few friends.
Events on the ground in Venezuela will decide what happens next, however. In my view, there will be many cutlasses flashing and slashing before this is through. And just like in all the other cases I've referred to, the outcome will prove to be the opposite of what the hirelings of the imperium now imagine.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
