[P2P-F] IMF (an excellent article)

Sat Jun 25 09:29:25 CEST 2011

thank you Mike!

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 2:09 PM, mike stagman <artemesium at yahoo.co.uk>wrote:

>  Published on Friday, June 3, 2011 by the Independent/UK<http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-its-not-just-dominique-strausskahn-the-imf-itself-should-be-on-trial-2292270.html>
> It's Not Just Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The IMF Itself Should Be On Trial
> Imagine a prominent figure was charged, not with raping a hotel maid, but
> with starving her, and her family, to death
> by Johann Hari <http://www.commondreams.org/johann-hari>
>
> Sometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7
> news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding
> beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed.
>
> So the fact that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the
> International Monetary Fund (IMF), is facing trial for allegedly raping a
> maid in a New York hotel room is – rightly – big news. But imagine a
> prominent figure was charged not with raping a maid, but starving her to
> death, along with her children, her parents, and thousands of other people.
> That is what the IMF has done to innocent people in the recent past. That is
> what it will do again, unless we transform it beyond all recognition. But
> that is left in the silence.
>
>
> To understand this story, you have to reel back to the birth of the IMF. In
> 1944, the countries that were poised to win the Second World War gathered
> in a hotel in rural New Hampshire to divvy up the spoils. With a few
> honorable exceptions, like the great British economist John Maynard Keynes,
> the negotiators were determined to do one thing. They wanted to build a
> global financial system that ensured the money and resources of the planet
> were forever hoovered towards them. They set up a series of institutions
> designed for that purpose – and so the IMF was delivered into the world.
>
>
> The IMF’s official job sounds simple and attractive. It is supposedly there
> to ensure poor countries don’t fall into debt, and if they do, to lift them
> out with loans and economic expertise. It is presented as the poor world’s
> best friend and guardian. But beyond the rhetoric, the IMF was designed to
> be dominated by a handful of rich countries – and, more specifically, by
> their bankers and financial speculators. The IMF works in their interests,
> every step of the way.
>
>
> Let’s look at how this plays out on the ground. In the 1990s, the small
> country of Malawi in Southeastern Africa was facing severe economic problems
> after enduring one of the worst HIV-AIDS epidemics in the world and
> surviving a horrific dictatorship. They had to ask the IMF for help. If the
> IMF has acted in its official role, it would have given loans and guided the
> country to develop in the same way that Britain and the US and every other
> successful country had developed – by protecting its infant industries,
> subsidizing its farmers, and investing in the education and health of its
> people.
>
>
> That’s what an institution that was concerned with ordinary people – and
> accountable to them – would look like. But the IMF did something very
> different. They said they would only give assistance if Malawi agreed to the
> ‘structural adjustments’ the IMF demanded. They ordered Malawi to sell off
> almost everything the state owned to private companies and speculators, and
> to slash spending on the population. They demanded they stop subsidizing
> fertilizer, even though it was the only thing that made it possible for
> farmers – most of the population – to grow anything in the country’s feeble
> and depleted soil. They told them to prioritize giving money to
> international bankers over giving money to the Malawian people.
>
>
> So when in 2001 the IMF found out the Malawian government had built up
> large stockpiles of grain in case there was a crop failure, they ordered
> them to sell it off to private companies at once. They told Malawi to get
> their priorities straight by using the proceeds to pay off a loan from a
> large bank the IMF had told them to take out in the first place, at a 56 per
> cent annual rate of interest. The Malawian president protested and said
> this was dangerous. But he had little choice. The grain was sold. The banks
> were paid.
>
>
> The next year, the crops failed. The Malawian government had almost nothing
> to hand out. The starving population was reduced to eating the bark off the
> trees, and any rats they could capture. The BBC described it as Malawi’s
> “worst ever famine.” There had been a much worse crop failure in 1991-2, but
> there was no famine because then the government had grain stocks to
> distribute. So at least a thousand innocent people starved to death.
>
>
> At the height of the starvation, the IMF suspended $47m in aid, because the
> government had ‘slowed’ in implementing the marketeeing ‘reforms’ that had
> led to the disaster. ActionAid, the leading provider of help on the ground,
> conducted an autopsy into the famine. They concluded that the IMF “bears
> responsibility for the disaster.”
>
>     {By the way, ActionAid has written that 2/3 of PATENTS are never
> marketed.  Patents are a nice part of the whole problem of Slavery by
> corporations and their bought-governments.-- M.S.}
>
>
> Then, in the starved wreckage, Malawi did something poor countries are not
> supposed to do. They told the IMF to get out. Suddenly free to answer to
> their own people rather than foreign bankers, Malawi disregarded all the
> IMF’s ‘advice’, and brought back subsidies for the fertilizer, along with a
> range of other services to ordinary people. Within two years, the country
> was transformed from being a beggar to being so abundant they were supplying
> food aid to Uganda and Zimbabwe.
>
>
> The Malawian famine should have been a distant warning cry for you and me.Subordinating the interests of ordinary people to bankers and speculators
> caused starvation there. Within a few years, it had crashed the global
> economy for us all.
>
> \
>
> In the history of the IMF, this story isn’t an exception: it is the rule.
> The organization takes over poor countries, promising it has medicine that
> will cure them – and then pours poison down their throats. Whenever I travel
> across the poor parts of the world I see the scars from IMF ‘structural
> adjustments’ everywhere, from Peru to Ethiopia. Whole countries have
> collapsed after being IMF-ed up – most famously Argentina and Thailand in
> the 1990s.
>
>
> Look at some of the organization’s greatest hits. In Kenya, the IMF
> insisted the government introduce fees to see the doctor – so the number of
> women seeking help or advice on STDs fell by 65 per cent, in one of the
> countries worst affected by AIDS in the world.
>
>
> In Ghana, the IMF insisted the government introduce fees for going to
> school – and the number of rural families who could afford to send their
> kids crashed by two-thirds. In Zambia, the IMF insisted they slash health
> spending – and the number of babies who died doubled. Amazingly enough, it
> turns out that shoveling your country’s money to foreign bankers, rather
> than your own people, isn’t a great development strategy.
>
>
> The Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz worked closely with the
> IMF for over a decade, until he quit and became a whistle-blower. He told me
> a few years ago: “When the IMF arrives in a country, they are interested in
> only one thing. How do we make sure the banks and financial institutions
> are paid?... It is the IMF that keeps the [financial] speculators in
> business. They’re not interested in development, or what helps a country to
> get out of poverty.”
>
>
> Some people call the IMF “inconsistent”, because the institution supports
> huge state-funded bank bailouts in the rich world, while demanding an end to
> almost all state funding in the poor world. But that’s only an inconsistency
> if you are thinking about the realm of intellectual ideas, rather than raw
> economic interests. In every situation, the IMF does what will get more
> money to bankers and speculators. If rich governments will hand banks money
> for nothing in “bailouts”, great. If poor countries can be forced to hand
> banks money in extortionate “repayments”, great. It’s absolutely consistent.
>
>
> Some people claim that Strauss-Kahn was a “reformer” who changed the IMF
> after he took over in 2009. Certainly, there was a shift in rhetoric – but
> detailed study by Dr Daniela Gabor of the University of the West of England
> has shown that the substance is business-as-usual.
>
>
> Look, for example, at Hungary. After the 2008 crash, the IMF lauded them
> for keeping to their original deficit target by slashing public services.
> The horrified Hungarian people responded by kicking the government out, and
> choosing a party that promised to make the banks pay for the crisis they had
> created. They introduced a 0.7 per cent levy on the banks (four times higher
> than anywhere else). The IMF went crazy. They said this was “highly
> distortive” for banking activity – unlike the bailouts, of course – and
> shrieked that it would cause the banks to flee from the country. The IMF
> shut down their entire Hungary program to intimidate them.
>
>
> But the collapse predicted by the IMF didn’t happen. Hungary kept on
> pursuing sensible moderate measures, instead of punishing the population.
> They imposed taxes on the hugely profitable sectors of retail, energy and
> telecoms, and took funds from private pensions to pay the deficit. The IMF
> shrieked at every step, and demanded cuts for ordinary Hungarians instead.
> It was the same old agenda, with the same old threats. Strauss-Kahn did the
> same in almost all the poor countries where the IMF operated, from El
> Salvador to Pakistan to Ethiopia, where big cuts in subsidies for ordinary
> people have been imposed. Plenty have been intimidated into harming their
> own interests. The US-based think tank the Center for Economic and Policy
> Research found 31 of 41 IMF agreements require ‘pro-cyclical’ macroeconomic
> policies – pushing them further into recession.
>
>
> It is not only Strauss-Kahn who should be on trial. It is the institution
> he has been running. There’s an inane debate in the press about who should
> be the next head of the IMF, as if we were discussing who should run the
> local Milk Board. But if we took the idea of human equality seriously, and
> remembered all the people who have been impoverished, starved and killed by
> this institution, we would be discussing the establishment of a Truth and
> Reconciliation Commission – and how to disband the IMF entirely and start
> again.
>
>
> If Strauss-Kahn is guilty, I suspect I know how it happened. He must have
> mistaken the maid for a poor country in financial trouble. Heads of the IMF
> have, after all, been allowed to rape them with impunity for years.
>
>
> © 2011 Independent/UK
>  [image: Johann Hari] <http://www.commondreams.org/johann-hari>
> Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent<http://www.independent.co.uk/>.
> He has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African
> Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in
> publications all over the world.

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