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May 13, 2002
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
May 10, 2002
Lisa Taraki
In Defense
of Sanctions
Against Israel
Jack McCarthy
Snitch Envy: Hitchens, Brock and
Whitaker Chambers
John Jonik
Tobacco
and Teens: Criminalizing the Victiims
Vijay Prashad
Fettered Histories:
Tariq Ali and Ahmed Rashid
on Islam
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Analyst Details
The Disastrous Foreign
Policies of the United State
Omar Barghouti
Israel's Best Interest
May 9, 2002
Alex Lynch
American
Mainstream Media:
Institutionalized Subjectivity
Alexander Cockburn
The Armey Plan:
Palestine to Ft. Worth?
May 8, 2002
James
Masterson
Hysteria
and Panic
About France
Robert Fisk
The Solution to this Filthy War: Foreign
Occupation
Edward
Hammond
and Jan van Aken
Pentagon
Pushed for Offensive BioWeapons Development
David Vest
From Ground Zero to the Bronx
May 7, 2002
Patrick
Cockburn
Bone
Apart:
The Graveyard of Napoleon's Defeated Army
Philip
Farruggio
Muffler
Shop Medicine
Norman
Madarasz
French
Elections:
Pandora's Ballot
Tom Turnipseed
A Travesty of Justice
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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by James Ridgeway
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May 13,
2002
IMF and World
Bank
Out of Control
by Russell Mokhiber
and Robert Weissman
The International Monetary Fund and World Bank
are institutions out of control.
For evidence, consider the institutions'
feeble and fatally flawed debt relief program. Under their Highly
Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative, the world's poorest
countries can receive reduction of approximately one third of
their current payments to overseas creditors -- if they endure
six years of closely monitored, extremely intrusive "structural
adjustment."
Structural adjustment is the policy package
that includes such  measures as indiscriminate
privatization, labor market deregulation, government spending
cuts, trade and financial liberalization, economic deregulation,
an emphasis on exports and charges ("user fees") for
people to attend clinics for basic healthcare.
HIPC is the institutions' most important
fig-leaf, a program designed to obscure the view of the harm
they are doing to poor countries. The World Bank and IMF regularly
tout HIPC as a sign of their responsiveness to the poor.
But now the HIPC initiative is beginning
to collapse, even on its own terms. In April, during their spring
meetings, the IMF and Bank announced that several of the countries
that have qualified for debt relief by suffering through the
first three years of mandated structural adjustment are about
to lose their debt relief eligibility. The charge: they have
failed to implement structural adjustment conditions with sufficient
vigor.
Apparently, the Bank and Fund cannot
control themselves. They want to exact more blood from the world's
poorest countries, even when they must know it will sabotage
their public relations campaign.
There is, however, now an opportunity
to rein in the Bank and Fund.
This year, the World Bank is seeking
new monies for its International Development Association (IDA),
the arm of the Bank that lends to the poorest countries.
Getting the U.S. contribution to IDA
will require a vote by the U.S. Congress.
A broad coalition of U.S. environmental,
development, religious, labor and global justice organizations
has formed to demand that if the United States decides to contribute
to IDA -- a near certainty -- that it also work for policies
that will reduce the IMF and Bank's power. (Essential Action
is part of this coalition.)
The coalition is drawing on a successful
initiative of the year 2000, when the Congress enacted a law
requiring the U.S. representatives to the World Bank and IMF
to vote against projects or loans that included user fees for
primary education or healthcare.
The Treasury Department, which manages
U.S. policy at the Bank and Fund, invented a duplicitous reading
of the legislative language to avoid carrying out Congressional
intent, especially on healthcare user fees.
But the passage of the law helped force
a reconsideration of education user fees. Now the World Bank,
which for 15 years has encouraged school fees, is actively working
to help countries remove such charges. In Tanzania, the recent
elimination of school fees enabled 1.5 million children, who
otherwise would have been locked out, to go to school.
The coalition is now urging the United
States to oppose loans or projects that include a range of harmful
provisions, including restrictions on labor rights, increased
water charges for the poor, environmentally hazardous practices
such as aggressive pesticide use, privatization without safeguards
for workers and protections against corruption, and privatization
of tobacco enterprises. (For details on the proposals, click
here.)
The coalition is also proposing the IDA
appropriation be accompanied by new U.S. support for debt cancellation
for the poorest countries. social and environmental assessments
of structural adjustment -- conducted before such policies are
put into place -- and requirements that the World Bank measure
the effectiveness of its project loans.
Some set of these proposals will appear
in an IDA authorization bill, which will be considered by the
House financial services committee and the Senate foreign relations
committee over the summer, as well as in the foreign operations
appropriations bill, which is sure to pass by the end of the
Congressional term.
It is sad and pathetic that these reforms,
limiting the ability of the World Bank and IMF to do harm, must
come from the U.S. Congress. Sad, because institutions that claim
to be devoted to eradicating poverty should not need such external
discipline. Pathetic, because it is not people in affected countries
who have the ability to influence the institutions' policies,
but uniquely the citizens of the United States.
With that power and influence comes obligation.
The Treasury Department will oppose the coalition's proposals,
if for no other reason than it does not like Congress trying
to direct policy toward the Bank and IMF. It will take an expression
of citizen concern to overcome the Treasury Department's obstruction.
Russell Mokhiber
is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter.
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational
Monitor, and co-director of Essential Action. They are
co-authors of Corporate
Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy
(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999.
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
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