Comrades, is this at all helpful?

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
>From:          "Michael Albert" <sysop@zmag.org>
>Here is today's ZNet Commentary Delivery from Patrick Bond.
>
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>Here then is today's ZNet Commentary...
>
>-------------------
>
>Run on the Bank
>by Patrick Bond
>
>"We can't REALLY aim to shut down the International Monetary Fund and 
>World Bank, you know, Patrick. What would we do without them? What 
>would take their place?"
>
>I hear this too much in the run-up to the mid-April Mobilization for 
>Global Justice in Washington, DC. Are activists getting the detailed 
>information needed to take on the IMF and Bank with the militancy 
>that Seattle-East deserves?
>
>Even some well-intentioned, smart progressives involved in defining
>international movement strategy don't have the imagination to think of a
>world free of an enemy they have grown perhaps a bit too comfortable with,
>or alternatively too fearful of to consider life without. Worse, some in the
>Jubilee 2000 US movement view the current debate as an opportunity to lobby
>for a greater, not lesser role, for the IMF, Bank, their discredited "Highly
>Indebted Poor Countries" debt relief initiative, or the new IMF "poverty
>reduction" scam.
>
>The comradely criticism below is meant to bolster the folk who'll be on the
>streets of Washington and who may want, in contrast, a few good reasons to
>shut down the IMF and World Bank--not just for a couple of days, but for
>good.
>
>For the specter haunting the Bank was remarked upon by its president, James
>Wolfensohn, in a speech to Western Hemisphere finance officials in Mexico
>last month: "Let us not let radicals in Seattle scare us from the task of
>adjusting to globalization and giving greater opportunities to our people."
>
>
>_Fix it or nix it?_
>
>Should we adjust the IMF/Bank, or instead seek to abolish these big,
>undemocratic, inefficient, corporate-oriented dinosaurs? While retaining
>unity in the upcoming mass protest, it's still useful to clarify strategic
>differences, so that lines of demarcation don't occur over trivia such as
>whether or where to break windows, but instead over the arguments we deploy,
>and the demands we make.
>
>The right is also mulling this over. A gaggle of conservative economists in
>the congressional Meltzer Commission pronounced, earlier this month, that
>the IMF, Bank and three regional development banks in Asia, Africa and Latin
>America are so badly warped that they must shrivel, quite dramatically,
>before being straightened out.
>
>On the left, the choices have been reduced-- crudely but helpfully, I'd
>say--to the slogans "fix- it" versus "nix it."
>
>Fixers correctly argue that the IMF and Bank have been pressured to adopt
>reforms over the past 15 or so years. Nixers rebut that these must be
>measured against the worsening scale of eco-socio-economic damage done by
>the terrible twins over the same period.
>
>In five areas--environmental protection, gender awareness, 
>transparency, community participation and post-Washington Consensus 
>economics--the reformers can claim victories, yes. But those very 
>wins have allowed the Bank, especially, to whitewash itself, 
>disguising a thorough-going commitment to hardcore neoliberalism with 
>happy talk about sustainability, in the process dividing opponents 
>and hiring famous ex-critics. Empowered by the Bank's plagiarism of 
>NGO rhetoric, some inside-Beltway policy wonks are even suggesting 
>that Wolfensohn switch the focus of lending to sectors like basic 
>education. The slogan invoked from time to time--"Public funds for 
>public good"--is fundamentally misguided, I will conclude below.
>
>How far can reform go? Reflecting the realpolitik of institutional
>constipation, it is now widely acknowledged that late last year, maverick
>Bank chief economist Joe Stiglitz--who during his 1997-99 term was roundly
>despised by IMF and US Treasury bigwigs-- got pushed overboard. (Stiglitz
>diplomatically claimed to have jumped ship, in order to have more freedom to
>launch his critiques.)
>
>According to a reliable Bank insider quoted in the February issue of Doug
>Henwood's Left Business Observer, "Summers made it clear that if Wolfensohn
>wanted a second term as World Bank president--to start on June 1,
>2000--Stiglitz had to go."
>
>Serious campaigners acknowledge the point: reforms won to date are 
>deeply unsatisfying. But matters get more complicated yet.
>
>
>_Inside-Beltway strategy_
>
>Straddling the reform/abolition fence is a "fix-it or nix-it" faction, who
>make demands on the international institutions that are going to be awfully
>difficult, if not impossible, to meet--and if after a year they're not,
>pressure will be ratcheted up towards abolition. In a letter last week from
>the indefatigable Public Citizen and its allies to the WTO, the latest
>version calls for the enemy to "shrink or sink."
>
>Although this might be a wise baby-step, tactically, so as to 
>solidify alliances (especially with AFL-CIO heavies) before 
>attempting more rapid progress, the danger is that both as a slogan 
>and a strategy, it confuses the grassroots base.
>
>The base militants, after all, lack the time and patience to follow the
>latest public relations gambits and fake reforms, and have every good reason
>to mistrust some of the Washington-based strategists, especially in the debt
>relief movement (for the Jubilee South network's powerful critique of the
>weakness of Northern debt campaigning to date, see the link at
>http://www.aidc.org.za).
>
>I admit to having a hard time keeping up, myself, with the continual
>permutations on reform that flit through my e-mail inbox. What I do know,
>however, is that highly questionable deals regularly get done between
>international NGOs and the Bank's sophisticated NGO flack-catching unit (led
>by former Oxfam anti-Bank guru John Clark).
>
>Fixers should acknowledge that power relations don't yet afford the
>possibility of real reform through a negotiated surrender (as was achieved
>here in Johannesburg against apartheid officials in talks that lasted from
>1990-94). Under current conditions, it is delusional for environmental,
>developmental and human rights NGOs, and organised labor, to formally meet
>their 18th and H Street foes during the mid- April IMF/Bank sessions, in the
>expectation of realising meaningful concessions.
>
>Recognising this, the excellent "50 Years is Enough Network" is asking
>colleagues for a moratorium on backroom consultations because of the
>likelihood of "`divide and conquer' or `good' NGO/`bad' NGO tactics on the
>part of Bank and Fund officials."
>
>Perhaps Mobilization organizers like Njoki Njehu and Soren Ambrose 
>(both based at 50 Years, and extremely well regarded throughout the 
>world movement) can continue keeping reformers and abolitionists 
>marching in step. But once the Washington dust settles, this debate 
>is worth settling conclusively.
>
>
>_Do we need the Bank and IMF?_
>
>It revolves around competing visions of a democratic global state, on the
>one hand, and on the other, the reality that the economic institutions
>operating at world scale (IMF, Bank, WTO) will in the foreseeable future be
>rigidly controlled by malevolent economists. The man running the show, after
>all, Summers, signed a memo with the most famous sentence in
>development-industry history, when he was Bank chief economist in December
>1991: "I think the economic logic of dumping a load of toxic waste on the
>lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."
>
>I'll return to the world state theme in a later Z-Net column, drawing on
>academic debates which are gravitating towards the same conflict. Meantime,
>the abolitionist position emerging especially from South sources should be
>given maximum credence. Third World movements are struggling under very
>difficult conditions, even for the freedom to simply demand, without fear of
>persecution, that the IMF/Bank leave their countries.
>
>Personally, I speak for no one in particular, except to say that the key
>institutions in my own activist circuits--the Campaign Against Neoliberalism
>in South Africa, Jubilee 2000 SA and the Alternative Information and
>Development Centre (CapeTown and Jo'burg)--are adamant, first, that Bank
>staff must leave Pretoria immediately, given the awesome damage they've done
>over the past decade; and second, that progressive northern allies should be
>working to lift the boot of the IMF/Bank off southern necks. That means, in
>short, that the Bretton Woods Twins must be delegitimized, defunded and
>decommissioned.
>
>Experience in post-apartheid South Africa has provided three 
>universal reasons for nixing the IMF/Bank (there are also reasons 
>drawn from specific project experiences too numerous to explore 
>here):
>
>* virtually all possible core value reforms in key areas of
>eco-socio-economic advocacy have been explored, and their profound
>limitations unveiled;
>
>* there is a greater urgency to restore economic sovereignty to
>nation-states, mainly through releasing IMF/Bank pressures, than 
>there is time to convince several tens of thousands of hardened  
>economists to change the Washington Consensus policy advice that has 
>defined their worldview since grad school; and
>
>* the hard-currency component of Bank and IMF lending is generally 
>not required, and indeed is damaging to balanced development.
>
>
>_In what currency can you measure development?_
>
>It may be useful to justify the latter argument, and in the process answer
>the opening question. Consider the viewpoint of the African National
>Congress in its 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), in a
>sentence won only after much left-wing lobbying: "The RDP must use foreign
>debt financing only for those elements of the programme that can potentially
>increase our capacity for earning foreign exchange." (The ANC broke more
>than one such promise, but it is the principle here that is worth careful
>consideration.)
>
>The motivation for rejecting hard-currency loans for "development" was the
>ANC left's fear of the rising cost of repayment on foreign debt, once the
>currency declines, and the use of hard currency not to pay for a basic
>education project but instead to a) repay illegitimate apartheid debt, b)
>import luxury goods for the rich, and c) replace local workers with
>inappropriate job-killing technology from abroad. In sum, why take a US
>dollar loan for building and staffing a small rural school with virtually no
>foreign input costs?
>
>This point was conceded even by former Bank chief economist Anne Krueger (an
>arch-neoliberal) in her Meltzer Commission input: "Questions also arise as
>to the `foreign exchange component' of some of the social sector (and other)
>projects." Citing the 1998 Bank Annual Report, Krueger queried "the foreign
>exchange expenditures associated, for example, with a Bank loan of $5
>million, described as a `learning and innovation loan... [to] test and
>promote community-based child care and reintegrating Bucharest's street
>children more fully into society'."
>
>If real development comes from local resources (only a tiny fraction of
>basic-need inputs in most developing countries require foreign loans), and
>if the hard currency needed to import petroleum or other vital inputs can
>usually be supplied by export credit agencies, the basic rationale for the
>World Bank begins to fall away. We don't need a World Bank and IMF, and
>without them, financial markets should and can finally be tamed (and
>development finance provided) within national borders, using tried-and-
>tested exchange controls.
>
>
>_Bankrupt the Bank_
>
>That is why, in addition to defunding the IMF/Bank through pressure on
>Congress (and indeed all parliaments) to deny them further resources (the
>AFL- CIO inexplicably backed the last IMF recapitalisation), the Bank's
>extreme dependency upon international bond markets--where it raises most of
>its funds for onlending--is now the most compelling pressure point we have
>for the medium-term struggle.
>
>Hence, a "World Bank Bond Boycott" initiated by Haitian, South African,
>Brazilian and many other activists and debt campaigners across the world,
>will be launched during the mid-April protests. All investors of
>conscience--pension funds, churches, university endowments, individuals--are
>being asked not to profit from poverty and ecological destruction through
>their portfolio's World Bank bond holdings. There's a clear echo, here, of
>targeting companies active in South Africa for disinvestment during the
>1960s-90s anti-apartheid campaign.
>
>If A-16 gives activists an initial opportunity to run on the Bank and IMF,
>the nix-it challenge afterwards will be to keep the institutions running,
>until they drop of exhaustion.
>
>***
>
>Patrick Bond's "Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South
>Africa," was published this month by Pluto Press 
>(http://www.plutobooks.com), and contains two chapters on the 
>important Bank/IMF role in denying the country a fully-fledged 
>liberation.
>
>Patrick Bond
>email:  pbond@wn.apc.org * phone:  2711-614-8088
>home:  51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa
>work:  University of the Witwatersrand
>Graduate School of Public and Development Management
>PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa
>email:  bondp@zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za
>phone:  2711-488-5917 * fax:  2711-484-2729




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