>I can almost guarantee that people who self-identify as socialists and
>probably Marxists wrote the damn statement.
Yeah, yeah, Nathan, Marx spent a lot of time critiquing other socialisms (esp. the sentimental and statist types) and he himself was no Marxist. You may be interested in Paul Mattick Sr's piece Karl Kautsky: From Marx to Hitler in Anti Bolshevik Communism. I doubt any of these people are as smart or ever have been as revolutionary as Kautsky once was.
>So do you want a WTO where there is no such coercion? Where every
>multinational has free choice to locate anywhere and any government action
>requiring local production is automatically barred by the WTO?
That's not the aspect of the WTO the AFLCIO is fighting. It is against mandating technology transfer in fact. So this AFLCIO/WTO polarity is a myth. Sweeney wants to reform it to his advantage, not abolish it. I'm not for the WTO as much as multilateral trade opportunties for the southern countries.
>Rakesh, you sound a bit nuts when you interpret AFL-CIO calls for debt
>relief (i.e. less need for hard currency)
Calling me nuts doesn't change the fact that you simply dropped my question about why is there a need for debt relief in the first place? TRIPS, TRIMS, Northern protection despite substantial capital flight, repatriation of profit, lack of commodity stabilization mechanisms, etc--that's part of the answer, and it's NOT what Sweeney is fighting. Show me proof otherwise.
So you want to relieve debt after it has already sunk some third world country? Then after it's deeply in debt, you don't want it to export for hard currency but only produce for the domestic market?
I just don't get this. A country goes into debt; it's being cut off by intl creditors. Under the Nathan plan, The IMF gives them a loan or organizes debt reduction only insofar as production is now geared to domestic consumption (that is they turn inward, go away as I put it earlier); and if they don't, the AFL CIO will raise trade barriers to prevent any import surge if the country instead tries to export its way out of crisis.
And you think that under this new IMF strategy, the country won't be cut off forever from international credit (which is what happen if they don't retain some substantial export orientation which the AFL CIO will deny) and cast into the darkness of socialism in one third world country?
My comments may seem bizarre, but I don't understand at all what you are recommending here should be done for crisis stricken countries (including before they are flat on their back) other than debt relief and more internal production.
But the domestic market in very poor countries simply can't be big enough to allow for any economies of scale and industrialization. So under the Nathan plan, they have been consigned to permanent poverty.
Maybe I missed something, but the
>major struggle against the IMF has been that it imposes narrow export-led
>commodity production on countries in place of diverse internal industries
>and subsistence agriculture.
You want to repeasantize people? Subsistence agriculture? And yes there needs to be diverse industries but simply for internal consumption. Diversifying the industrial base through some mixture of protection, technology transfer and economies of scale from big markets abroad--that's the goal. And in that way escaping dependence on a single export commodity whose relative value may be falling on the intl market.
. And we will ask Congress to put a higher
>priority on development aid. It is shameful that the United States—the
>wealthiest country in the world—has not hit the United Nations' modest
>target of devoting seven-tenths of one percent of GDP to development aid.
Have you missed the discussion on the effects of Japanese development aid on Cambodia? JC Helary even suggested that development aid can be a burden on a poor country. How crazy.
>Linda Chavez-Thompson said in a speech "On April 9, we will join with people
>of faith from all over the country during the Jubilee 2000 call for debt
>relief for developing countries. Many developing country governments'
>ability to meet their citizens' basic needs and fund the building blocks of
>strong development—education, health care, and infrastructure—have been
>crippled by an enormous burden of debt."
Everyone knows that some of the debt has to be relieved if any of it is going to repaid. So what? The most important question is what are we going to do to prevent it from crippling countries in the first place? Prevent technology from being transferred. Keeping Northern barriers up. Letting the TRIP/TRIM regime stay in place. Yeah, that's the ticket.
>You are basing this whole "embrace of imperialist technology policy" on a
>pretty thin reed.
Bullshit. The point is made twice.
>The AFL-CIO doesn't have a technology policy. I wish they did. But if we
>are going to imply a policy where there is none, I could cite the AFL-CIO
>resolution to "Provide more technical and legal support to developing
>countries so their participation in negotiations is not hampered by lack of
>resources or technical expertise" as a call for massive technology transfer
>to create an even playing field.
No, it's a call to give more jobs to Western LEGAL and other experts to advise Southern govts in negotiations. It's not a call for tech transfer. Your interpretation is nuts, if not self serving.
Yours, Rakesh