Word: imf
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...rhetoric but also some disturbing truths. Street protesters have it exactly right, for example, when they argue that the economic policies imposed on developing nations by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have hammered the poor. Using loans and the threat of default as levers, the IMF has pushed more than 90 countries to accept its brand of free-market shock therapy: lowering trade barriers, raising interest rates, devaluating currencies, privatizing state-owned industries, eliminating subsidies and cutting health, education and welfare spending. These "structural-adjustment programs"--a chilly bureaucratic euphemism if ever there was one--attract foreign investment...
...what you're for to know what you're against. And one thing they're against, it seems, is agreement itself. Too monolithic, too uniform, too global. The protesters prefer debate, diversity. They'd like to teach the world to sing in off-key counterpoint. To their minds, the IMF and the World Bank are tyrannical choirmasters with steel batons and a tin ear for cultural differences. They finance mammoth industrial projects that sweep up hundreds of workers from the countryside, decimating small farms and villages while swelling urban slums. They bottle up small streams into huge lakes contained behind...
...some ways, the IMF protest was a reunion. It wasn't a replay, though. In Seattle, organized labor ran interference for the ragtag groups assembled behind it, marshaling several thousand union members who feared that free trade might send their jobs abroad. In Washington, labor focused on lobbying Congress over the China-trade issue, leaving the IMF and the World Bank to the ad hoc Netocracy. Munson, the anarchist, thinks it's just as well. "The union heads are into a protectionist, nationalist agenda," he says. "They want to prevent China from entering the WTO. Our position is that...
...IMF and World Bank admit the problem while insisting that their policies will boost living standards over the long term. But people in the Global South have lost patience with such talk. In Bolivia this month, rioting broke out because the government and a multinational consortium planned to raise fees for drinking water. Eight people were killed. It was a reminder that the globalization protests in Washington aren't simply the product of a Web-connected U.S. counterculture but of an anger that's building around the world--the defining North-South issue of our time...
Consider a country that the IMF and World Bank regard as a success: Tanzania, the vast East African nation that is among the poorest places in the world. Best known to Americans for Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti Plain, it has been stable and relatively peaceful since it gained independence in 1961. For two decades, it steered a course of self-reliant socialism--a one-party government controlled the economy, taxed mightily and spent lavishly; its literacy rate was among the highest in Africa. But by the mid-1980s, Tanzania's economy was flat-lining, with hyperinflation, huge budget...