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Nice IMF/WB article
Source Michael Perelman
Date 01/08/28/01:24

The Observer (London) August 21, 2001

IMF'S FOUR STEPS TO DAMNATION

How crises, failures, and suffering finally drove a Presidential
adviser to
the wrong side of the barricades

By Gregory Palast

It was like a scene out of Le Carré: the brilliant agent comes in
from the
cold and, in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors
committed in
the name of an ideology gone rotten.

But this was a far bigger catch than some used-up Cold War spy.
The former
apparatchik was Joseph Stiglitz, ex-chief economist of the World
Bank. The
new world economic order was his theory come to life.

He was in Washington for the big confab of the World Bank and
International
Monetary Fund. But instead of chairing meetings of ministers and
central
bankers, he was outside the police cordons. The World Bank fired
Stiglitz
two years ago. He was not allowed a quiet retirement: he was
excommunicated
purely for expressing mild dissent from globalisation World
Bank-style.

Here in Washington we conducted exclusive interviews with
Stiglitz, for The
Observer and Newsnight, about the inside workings of the IMF, the
World
Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US Treasury.

And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a
cache of
documents marked, 'confidential' and 'restricted'.

Stiglitz helped translate one, a 'country assistance strategy'.
There's an
assistance strategy for every poorer nation, designed, says the
World Bank,
after careful in-country investigation.

But according to insider Stiglitz, the Bank's 'investigation'
involves
little more than close inspection of five-star hotels. It
concludes with a
meeting with a begging finance minister, who is handed a
'restructuring
agreement' pre-drafted for 'voluntary' signature.

Each nation's economy is analysed, says Stiglitz, then the Bank
hands every
minister the same four-step programme.

Step One is privatisation. Stiglitz said that rather than
objecting to the
sell-offs of state industries, some politicians - using the World
Bank's
demands to silence local critics - happily flogged their
electricity and
water companies. 'You could see their eyes widen' at the
possibility of
commissions for shaving a few billion off the sale price.

And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the
case of the
biggest privatisation of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. 'The US
Treasury
view was: "This was great, as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We
DON'T CARE if
it's a corrupt election." '

Stiglitz cannot simply be dismissed as a conspiracy nutter. The
man was
inside the game - a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet, chairman of
the
President's council of economic advisers.

Most sick-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs
stripped
Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that national output
was cut
nearly in half.

After privatisation, Step Two is capital market liberalisation.
In theory
this allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately,
as in
Indonesia and Brazil, the money often simply flows out.

Stiglitz calls this the 'hot money' cycle. Cash comes in for
speculation in
real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of
trouble. A
nation's reserves can drain in days.

And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a
nation's own
capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates
to 30%,
50% and 80%.

'The result was predictable,' said Stiglitz. Higher interest
rates demolish
property values, savage industrial production and drain national
treasuries.


At this point, according to Stiglitz, the IMF drags the gasping
nation to
Step Three: market-based pricing - a fancy term for raising
prices on food,
water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to
Step-Three-and-a-Half:
what Stiglitz calls 'the IMF riot'.

The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, 'down
and out, [the
IMF] squeezes the last drop of blood out of them. They turn up
the heat
until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up,' - as when the IMF
eliminated
food and fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998.
Indonesia
exploded into riots.

There are other examples - the Bolivian riots over water prices
last year
and, this February, the riots in Ecuador over the rise in cooking
gas prices
imposed by the World Bank. You'd almost believe the riot was
expected.

And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that Newsnight obtained
several
documents from inside the World Bank. In one, last year's Interim
Country
Assistance Strategy for Ecuador, the Bank several times suggests
- with cold
accuracy - that the plans could be expected to spark 'social
unrest'.

That's not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to
make the US
dollar Ecuador's currency has pushed 51% of the population below
the poverty
line.

The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations
dispersed by
bullets, tanks and tear gas) cause new flights of capital and
government
bankruptcies This economic arson has its bright side - for
foreigners, who
can then pick off remaining assets at fire sale prices.

A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers but the clear winners
seem to be
the western banks and US Treasury.

Now we arrive at Step Four: free trade. This is free trade by the
rules of
the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank, which Stiglitz
likens to
the Opium Wars. 'That too was about "opening markets",' he said.
As in the
nineteenth century, Europeans and Americans today are kicking
down barriers
to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa while barricading our
own
markets against the Third World 's agriculture.

In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades. Today, the
World Bank
can order a financial blockade, which is just as effective and
sometimes
just as deadly.

Stiglitz has two concerns about the IMF/World Bank plans. First,
he says,
because the plans are devised in secrecy and driven by an
absolutist
ideology, never open for discourse or dissent, they 'undermine
democracy'.
Second, they don't work. Under the guiding hand of IMF structural

'assistance' Africa's income dropped by 23%.

Did any nation avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, Botswana.
Their trick?
'They told the IMF to go packing.' Stiglitz proposes radical land
reform: an
attack on the 50% crop rents charged by the propertied
oligarchies
worldwide.

Why didn't the World Bank and IMF follow his advice?

'If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the
power of
the elites. That's not high on their agenda.'

Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the
failure of the
banks and US Treasury to change course when confronted with the
crises,
failures, and suffering perpetrated by their four-step monetarist
mambo.

'It's a little like the Middle Ages,' says the economist, 'When
the patient
died they would say well, we stopped the bloodletting too soon,
he still had
a little blood in him.'

Maybe it's time to remove the bloodsuckers.

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