Coruscating criticism of the free market ideology of the IMF

10 Years on & the IMF are as prominent in the control of nations as ever,

27/4/01

GREG PALAST:
It's quiet now, but all police leave in the capital has been cancelled. They're taking no chances after last week's anti-globalisation protests in Quebec and the street wars on this spot during the same meeting last year of the IMF and World Bank. So what's their complaint? The protesters say that what we have here is a conspiracy - the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation don't help the poor of the world, they crush them. Well, the bosses are here today, let's ask them. Mr Wolfensohn, the protesters say you are the chief of a secretive, undemocratic world government which has made poverty worse worldwide. How do you respond?

JAMES WOLFENSOHN:
PRESIDENT, WORLD BANK
Well, I think it's nonsense. I've been accused of many things but I didn't know that was one of the accusations. I'm not sure where this government exists, but if I can answer the question more seriously, what I think is behind it, is that I'm very proud of the record of the bank.

PALAST:
But that's not what the insider says.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ:
FORMER CHIEF ECONOMIST, WORLD BANK
You shouldn't take advantage of someone who is down and out and squeeze the last blood out of them.

PALAST:
Joseph Stiglitz was chief economist of the World Bank - he should know. He was in the meetings when the World Bank and IMF met to decide the fate of nations.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ:
They were making the countries worse off.

PALAST:
And he charges the IMF actually encouraged corruption.

STIGLITZ:
They'll take a strong position on petty larceny and petty theft, but on grand larceny, they'll look the other way.

PALAST:
The insider says there's a "one-size-fits-all" plan. Every nation gets the same exact four-step programme to the free market paradise.

Step one - freedom for hot money.
Step two - freedom to increase prices.
Step three - free trade for all.
Step four, where it all begins, freedom to privatise everything.
Insiders saw how it worked in Russia.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ:
That was the extreme case. You turned over these assets to these oligarchs at a time when the government didn't have enough money to pay pensions to old people. It turned over billions of dollars to a few oligarchs for a fraction of the value of those assets.

PALAST:
How could the IMF let this happen in their privatisation programme?

STIGLITZ:
When it comes to corruption in Russia, they were willing to turn the other way. The IMF and the US Treasury actually almost encouraged it. There was a real commitment to a particular set of leadership - to Yeltsin. There was a fear that if he didn't get re-elected, who knows what would happen. So, the belief was the means justified the ends.

PALAST:
Stiglitz charges the US government used the IMF to fix the Russian elections. Stiglitz isn't guessing. At the time he was in Clinton's cabinet as the president's chief economist.

STIGLITZ:
The US Treasury's view was that this was great because they wanted Yeltsin re-elected. "We don't care if it is a corrupt election, we want the money to go to Yeltsin to be re-elected because he's our friend."

PALAST:
Step two is what the World Bank calls a poverty reduction strategy. In Tanzania, the bank's idea of a poverty reduction strategy was to require the government to raise the price of medicine during an AIDS epidemic. In Bolivia, the bank's poverty reduction strategy was to demand increases in the price of water. That strategy produced riots. In Ecuador, the poverty reduction strategy included increasing the price of cooking gas by 60%. The nation exploded. The riots in Ecuador came as no surprise to the World Bank. We've obtained some confidential documents from inside. This one's the master strategy for Ecuador. It says the bank knew that their plans pushed down real wages and shoved 51% of the population below the poverty line. They even scripted in riots. They said their plans would lead to social unrest. The insider heard the same story about Indonesia.
STIGLITZ:
They'd been warned if the policies of austerity were continued, the economy would go down. The probability of social and political turmoil was very high. They've been warned and the unfortunate thing is those predictions came out to be true. Finally, the whole cauldron blew up and did enormous damage, from which the country has still not recovered.

PALAST:
What got Indonesia was step three of the IMF assistance programme - ending all controls on capital. This left Indonesia's fate to the mood of speculators and what Stiglitz calls "hot money". In Asia, it was the nations that refused the IMF medicine that escaped the financial flames.

STIGLITZ:
Both of them weathered the global financial crisis very well. India's been having growth rate over the past decade of over 5%. China's growth rate has been faster. Neither of them followed the dictum of having capital market liberalisation.

PALAST:
Step four - free trade. According to the insider, the World Trade Organisation just makes the rich richer.

STIGLITZ:
So much so, that after the last round of trade negotiations - the Uruguay round in 1994 - calculations of the World Bank showed that sub-Saharan Africa - the poorest region of the world - was actually worse off by more than 2%. While the USA was bragging about how many billions and billions of dollars better off it was.

STIGLITZ:
Stiglitz says the WTO operates like the British Empire in the Opium Wars, when Britain forced China at gunpoint to "open its markets" to British narcotics. The new drug wars are over the WTO's intellectual property treaty. Until this month, British and American drug companies used WTO rules to prevent AIDS victims in South Africa getting cheap medicine.

STIGLITZ:
South Africa said, "We want to produce that drug and sell it at a cost the people can afford." The drug companies said, "If you do that, you are violating intellectual property rights." We don't care if people die, intellectual property rights are really supreme." People heard about this and they were outraged. And the protesters put such pressure that today, the drug companies have backed down.

PALAST:
One lost skirmish for the drug companies, but the deadly WTO rule still survives. And back at the IMF and World Bank spring meeting today, World Bank chief, Jim Wolfensohn, is still musing about world domination.

JAMES WOLFENSOHN:
We've done a lot of things well. We've made a lot of mistakes, but no more or no less than any other well-meaning group of people in a most difficult area. In some cases, I wish I was president of a world government, because then I could make sure everything worked - knowing, as you all do, of my great skill as an administrator!

Source

Letter written to the Irish Times by my father - 26/12/2010

We have had about a month of extraordinary weather, the likes we have not seen before and many previous records have been smashed.

While looking out my window on Christmas morning at the whitest Christmas i have ever seen, i noticed a jet with its white trail crossing the sky at about 11.30 am. i said to my self that will involve Christmas dinner in the skies.

It made me think that praise must be heaped on everyone in the transport business for doing everything they could for unfortunate commuters.

Bus Eireann staff facilitated a Christmas day service to main destinations up until 9 p.m. to get stranded passengers home in atrocious conditions. The snow plough workers and de - icers at Dublin Airport as well as the indoor staff who worked around the clock and on one day alone, 140,000 tons of snow was shifted from the runways.

The army that helped clear our footpaths and other works and I heard many a person saying that they were proud of their Army.

Local authority ordinary workers who have been out day and night gritting and salting roads up on the back of a lorry in arctic conditions, you could almost feel the numb fingers and toes that affected them all combined with being away from their loved ones for long periods of time.

The waterworks personnel who worked long hours out doors ensuring we have what we take for granted. We saw ordinary citizens at dangerous point on roads helping motorists along their way. Taxi men and women doing a very difficult job and going out of their way to help get people home safe and sound with the odds stacked against them. The ambulance crews who risked their lives to help others and save lives. Hospital staff that ensured a full service was maintained and I am sure that lives were saved and they were assisted by the Army in getting to and from work. There was and still are many voluntary organisations through the country working quietly behind the scenes helping the least well off of our citizens and the homeless.

I am sure there are many others also not mentioned. All these are our unsung heroes and what can we do to thank them?

We simply remember them when their jobs are got rid of, their pay slashed and unfounded criticism heaped against them while they and their family’s face into a New Year of uncertainty. What will we do without them when things get this bad again?

Perhaps the I. M.F. and the Euro Bosses together with their friendly Bond Holders will get out with their Hi visibility vests and shovels etc .to help our citizens.

We will wait and see.

Letter i wrote to the Irish times - 17/11/2010

The ruling elite have ruined our country by feathering their own nests & their cronyism; this is not in dispute & was certainly not by accident. The blatant corruption for years fuelling an unsustainable property boom leaves country now awash with property & government toying with the notion now of a property tax!!!!! (How convenient). This example that has been highlighted again & again around the property boom that ran away with itself is perhaps the most poignant of all as it epitomizes the fundamentals of capitalism, The perceived price being driven upwards by a fictitious demand for said product resulting ultimately in an over abundance of said product worth no where near what it was being portrayed as all the while the elitist are sitting pretty having had their accounts balance awarded credits from the sale of the properties at inflated fictitious prices.
It’s easy to write that but what does that translate into for the common man? A negative equity mortgage, mortgage coming from the Latin originally meaning ‘dead’ ‘Pledge’ & unfortunately the name is now very befitting for most, as the debt will most likely follow them to the grave.
Bailing out the PRIVATE companies (banks) that lost their Shirt on the ‘free trade’ markets on the back of the tax payers & allowing the top brass at these banks to walk away scott free with huge bonus, severance & pension packages all the while your average man & woman are having their utilities cut off & creditors breathing down their necks is a crime against the ordinary people of this state, what really is happening there is that the capitalist’s are not allowing their failed system to run its course, instead the capitalist problem of an unsustainable upwards growth only of profitability is being solved with socialist ideas, by borrowing at extortionate rates of interest more ‘credit’ (credit not being actual) from the same elites that have creamed it during the upwards growth on the back of the common man & he now being nominated as the guarantor for this credit.
Its win win for the elites in times of growth & recession for the masses.
Allowing the PRIVATE companies that are the ECB & IMF in to run the show who's primary obligations are to its funders & shareholders seeing that they are PRIVATE companies is nothing short of a Bond of slavery that is being proposed as we as a nation are being sold to the highest private lender, the end game is & has always been the privatisation of the world & the ‘free market’ capitalists have almost succeeded. This may sound absurd but the fact is that the three most banded about names in the news today, ‘The federal reserve’, ‘The ECB’ & ‘The IMF’ are PRIVATE companies, funding from any of these leaves entire nations in debt to a privately owned company & as with any private company policies are driven & ultimately decided by its funders & shareholders in the interests of said funders & shareholders. This also is no accident but has been engineered masterfully to eventually bring us to this end game.
We are in reality being forced into a modern third world style national debt situation so that it will be kept at the highest price for as many years feasible by the capitalist elite.
One of the more recent suggestions of ‘Political consensus’ is nothing more than the desperate last throw of the dice by the capitalist’s to try & maintain the grip on power as they see the inevitable rise of the left across Europe & the world to take the rights of people back as, ‘human beings’, that are now suffering from the failed capitalist model & not the ‘Consumers’ that we are told we are & reminded of in business language every day.
The greatest con ever is the falsehood that is pedaled that their is somehow at the heart of capitalism the principle that peoples liberty & dignity is paramount, the very name is self explanatory 'Capitalism' meaning its primary function & concern is the promotion of an environment that allows the accumulation of capital!!!!!
People are no longer referred to as people first rather are 'Consumers' in the first instance, I am not a 'Consumer', I am a person (first) that consumes (second) certain items, this shows in its clearest form how the capitalist perceives us, nothing more than ‘Target markets’ to be monitored, graphed & exploited for profit/capital, now more than ever being made easier by the likes of facebook leaking info on its users to corporations & Google sucking your information out of your wifi as it passes.
The left needs to keep the need for the torch to be shone on the wealthy in Ireland that have €160 billion guaranteed by the working man in the failed PRIVATE companies that are Irish banks.
The cuts that are proposed in the coming budget could be halved with a 2% tax on the most wealthy that have their money guaranteed by us, that could have disappeared into the ether along with our pension's was it not for our generous government protecting it on our backs.
The time of capitalism has come to its inevitable end & change is coming for the common man for the better, the more equal distribution of how wealth is taxed is where we need to go for a fairer more equitable society & challenge now is to never let sight of this be diminished once we have a left led government in power & the memory of how corrupt & criminal the forces that have brought this to bear on us all kept to the fore.