by Stephen Lendman
April 07, 2013
from
SJLendman Website
On March 29 (2013), New York Times editors headlined "Strengthening
the IMF."
What demands abolition, they support. It doesn't
surprise.
Longstanding Times policy supports wealth, power and privilege. Populist
interests are spurned. Unmet human needs are ignored. Managed news
misinformation is featured. Wrong over right is endorsed. It's been so from
inception.
Times editors admit IMF policies aren't widely loved.
It "forced countries in financial distress
to adopt counterproductive austerity policies, and it failed to
anticipate the financial crisis."
No matter.
It "helped stabilize the global economy,
most recently by providing loans to troubled European countries like
Greece and Ireland."
It's "the world's primary defense against global financial disasters."
"Increasing the fund’s resources will ensure that it can respond quickly
to another wave of turmoil in Europe or elsewhere that would inevitably
hurt the American economy."
It's hard imagining more twisted thinking.
Times editors endorse doubling the fund's
capital. Doing so assures twice as much damage. IMF policies reflect
financial terrorism. Abolish the fund now and end it.
It's hugely exploitive. It's the loan shark of last resort. It makes
neighborhood ones look saintly by comparison. It doesn't solve problems. It
exacerbates existing ones. It creates new ones. It debt entraps nations.
Bondage suffocates them.
Public wealth shifts to private hands. Western bankers and other corporate
favorites profit hugely. Ordinary people suffer.
Indebted nations are obligated to take new loans. They're needed them to
service old ones. Doing so increases indebtedness. Structural adjustment
harshness follows. It's force-fed. Debtor nations have no choice.
IMF diktats demand:
-
privatizing state enterprises
-
selling them at a fraction of their real
worth
-
mass layoffs
-
deregulation
-
deep social spending cuts
-
wage freezes or cuts
-
unrestricted free market access for
Western corporations
-
corporate-friendly tax cuts
-
tax increases for working households
-
trade unionism crushed or marginalized
-
harsh repression against non-believers
Democratic values don't matter.
Human needs go begging. Countries forfeit their
material wealth and resources. Freedom's lost. A race to the bottom follows.
Workers become serfs. Economies are financialized into debt bondage. Doing
so transforms them into dystopian backwaters.
IMF shock therapy takes no prisoners. Debt service overrides national
sovereignty. Poverty, unemployment and deprivation follow. Numerous examples
explain.
Chileans under Pinochet suffered. Inflation skyrocketed. Unemployment
exceeded 20%. About 45% of Chileans became impoverished. Output fell 12.9%.
Cheap imports flooded the country. Social safety net protections ended.
Trade unionist crackdowns became policy. Local businesses closed. Severe
repression targeted non-believers. Democracy under Allende died.
Wealth shifted up to the top. Much of Chile's middle class disappeared.
Out-of-control corruption and cronyism replaced it. For privileged insiders,
Chilean society was paradise. Most others suffered Great Depression
deprivation.
Chile's model spread cross border. Through the early 1990s, Latin American
debt rose exponentially. In 1980, it was $110 billion. In 1992, it reached
$473 billion. Interest payment grew from $6.4 billion to $18.3 billion.
That's how debt entrapment works.
Worker livelihoods, health and welfare suffer. Those likely enough to have
jobs endure low-income to sub-poverty wages. Foreign predators profit
enormously. They do so on human misery.
IMF diktats facilitate it. Pain replaces prosperity. Nations are strip-mined
for profit. Millions of jobs are lost. Western brands replace local ones.
IMF policy statements don't explain. They perpetuate the myth about helping
as a lender of last resort. Loans come with strings. Force-fed austerity
follows.
Debt service matters most. Banker bottom line priorities override national
sovereignty. Worker gains disappear. Ordinary people suffer hugely. Human
welfare and economies are sacrificed on the alter of paying bankers first.
That's how predatory IMF diktats work.
Don't expect New York Times editors to
explain.
According to Paul Craig Roberts, IMF loans don't help world
economies.
They shield,
"private banks from their own mistakes at
the expense of the world economy."
IMF policy mandates stabilizing exchange rates
linked to the dollar and bridging temporary payment imbalances.
Article I of its Articles of Agreement says it
lends:
"to give confidence to members by making the
general resources of the Fund temporarily available to them under
adequate safeguards, thus providing them with opportunity to correct
maladjustments in their balance of payments without resorting to
measures destructive of national or international prosperity."
It claims it provides loans to reduce poverty
and increase economic development.
"In difficult economic times," it says, it
"helps countries to protect the most vulnerable in a crisis."
It never operated as mandated. Its policies are
polar opposite. They're ruthlessly exploitive. They've been that way from
inception.
During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Pat Buchanan urged,
"No more Bailouts - Abolish the IMF."
Asia's crisis was,
"man-made, the work of corrupt and
incompetent political elites, crony capitalists and idiot-investors who
deserted their own countries to chase hot profits in Asia."
IMF bailouts,
"put Western taxpayers on the hook for $100
billion."
"The Global Economy is like a high-stakes poker game, where the big
players pocket their winnings, while the "house" - i.e., the taxpayers -
makes good their losses at the end of a bad night."
"(A)bolish the IMF"
Conservative economist Steve Hanke
agrees.
IMF "policies don't generate prosperity or
alleviate poverty," he says.
"The only cure for the IMF’s ills is to pull the plug on that
international bureaucracy."
Global Exchange co-founder Kevin Danaher
urges abolishing
the IMF,
and World Bank. His book "10 Reasons to
Abolish the IMF & World Bank" explains why.
It covers "globalization for dummies." It exposes common myths. It urges
ending decades of predatory injustice.
It gives 10 reasons why.
-
Mandates were violated. Promises made
were broken. The "rising tide that (lifts) all boats" never
happened. Free-market diktats "demonstrably and significantly
increased inequality."
-
GDP inaccurately measures economic
wellbeing. People matter more. Their needs are ignored. IMF/WB
diktats mandate it.
-
Free-trade isn't fair. Unelected
technocrats run things. Government officials are pressured, bullied
and bribed to go along. They do so for benefits they derive.
-
Unelected IMF/WB/WTO policy makers are
interlinked. Conflicts of interest corrupt them. Monied interests
control them. Checks and balances are absent. Public scrutiny's
avoided.
-
Force-fed austerity causes enormous
harm. No "success stories" exist.
-
Real ones,
Measures include,
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"land reform, tight control of
trade, state enterprises, government-funded research and
infrastructure, high tariff barriers to protect infant
industries from foreign competition, and favoring certain
sectors of the economy through subsidies and state-directed
investment."
-
Predatory capitalism's environmentally
destructive. Ecological sustainability becomes impossible.
-
Wealthy nations lose out. America
"suffered the decimation of our manufacturing sector, declining
average wages, growing inequality, an increase in the average work
week, a ballooning deficit in the US balance of trade, and a growing
mountain of debt (government debt, consumer debt, corporate debt)."
-
Predatory capitalism's "ethically
bankrupt." Profits alone matter. Human needs go begging.
-
Popular resistance shows promise. Global
justice supporters demand change. Responsible alternatives exist.
It's high time mass activism demanded them.
It's way past time predatory international lending agencies were abolished.
Saving humanity depends on it...