Well I debated this matter on a panel in Ottawa six weeks ago with Jack Boorman, head of policy at the IMF. With guys like him around, totally resolute in sticking to the Washington Consensus and totally opposed to anything more than the pathetic, counterproductive HIPC (highly indebted poor country) debt relief, forget about kinder and gentler. Forget it, it's a dream. Or again, enlighten me, what potential for progress over there? Stiglitz explained to me what we all know, that the Treasury-Fed-IMF guys are a mafia who are sticking to their guns no matter all evidence to the contrary.
And again, Brad, go through why your argument that the South needs IMF loans trumps Keynes who argued for keeping finance domestic.
> Aha. Now the real agenda becomes clear: to have another Great Depression.
> The last Great Depression wasn't a very good thing for "progressive" forces
> worldwide.
Brad you didn't read it carefully. What I said was that we need a shift in power relations. Right? How do you do that without some serious resistance to bearing the cost of financial devalorization? By that I mean that the ways your ex-colleagues are trying to fend off a great depression (if indeed they can be said to be trying) have the effect of moving the crisis around, displacing it a bit across time through adding more debt, or visiting the costs on some defenseless part of the world. So, would you just have us continue down the track we're on, with each opportunity for reform dogmatically opposed by Clinton-Rubin-Summers? Jeez, these bastards can't even pony up $500 million for Central America debt relief after Hurricane Mitch.
> It's one thing for events in world history to happen, as it were, twicee.
> It's quite another thing to actively try to make them happen twice--both
> times as tragedy.
Sorry man, just come to Africa. We've been doing the Great Depression for about a quarter-century now. I guess that's not a tragedy in your book. Your people's money market accounts and hedge funds have done well by our unwanted sado-monetarism. Time for some changes in power relations, big changes.
P.