On 23 Oct 99, at 23:59, Chris Burford wrote:
> ... there are various politicised charities in the UK
> who want a bigger type of reform than just annulment of the debt. Nor are
> they any longer restricting themselves to calling for advantageous trade
> deals.
Oxfam Int'l's people endorsed the IMF's turn to poverty reduction
last month. The progressive South groups rejected it
wholeheartedly (see below). Who are you going to support, Chris?
> I am not trying to persuade you not to campaign as effectively as you can,
> but I cannot see that third world countries have much leverage. What do you
> think progressives in first world countries should do?
Get with the programme?
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date sent: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 22:02:32 -0200
From: "wb50years" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (by way of
Marcos Arruda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>)
Subject: Opposed to IMF Sign-on Letter
-----------------------------
Dear Activists/Friends,
We are sending this letter out to gather more sign-ons!
Please circulate this to all networks you have access to!
Please send your sign-on to my email address. This letter is to be
the cornerstone of a major IMF campaign internationally. Focus on
the Global South (Thailand) and Freedom From Debt Coalition
(Philippines) are spearheading a major effort on this campaign
Thank you for your support and for circulating it far and wide!
In Solidarity,
Njoki Njoroge Njehû
50 Years Is Enough Network
=================================================
===================
8 October 1999
TO: Leaders of the G-7 Countries
International Monetary Fund Executive Directors
International Monetary Fund Management
We, representatives of civil society organizations gathered in
Taegu, South Korea to consider strategies to counter the damage
done by unregulated capital flows and the programs of the
international financial institutions, take note of the International
Monetary Fund's recent announcement that its structural
adjustment programs will henceforth adopt a focus on "poverty
reduction" and will be designed in conjunction with the World Bank,
through a new facility to be known as the Poverty Reduction and
Growth Facility.
We welcome the IMF's acknowledgment, implicit in this news, that
its programs have had a negative impact on impoverished peoples
in the countries where it has imposed structural adjustment. We
note, however, that this acknowledgment comes very late:
organizations like ours have been pointing out the devastation
caused by the IMF for over 15 years.
We are alarmed, also, that despite the apparent admission of its
incompetence in designing economic programs that will promote
the welfare of the greatest part of countries' populations, this
announcement indicates the following:
(1) that the IMF does not intend to withdraw from its involvement
with impoverished countries, but that, on the contrary, it will now
expand its mandate by designing and implementing poverty
reduction programs;
(2) that the IMF has taken no steps to acknowledge the impact of
its policy impositions in the countries of East Asia forced to accept
"bailout" packages in 1997 and 1998; and
(3) the World Bank has apparently been chosen as the guarantor of
the rights of the impoverished, although we know that its structural
adjustment programs differ hardly at all from the IMF's in terms or
impact, and despite the confirmation of this in a recent internal
Bank report that finds the institutions paid no heed to the impact of
its own structural adjustment loans on the poor populations they
effect.
Recognizing the disastrous impact of the IMF around the world, we
make the following demands:
1. That the IMF immediately cease imposing structural adjustment-
style conditions in conjunction with any of its loans or programs.
2. That consequently the proposal for the new Poverty Reduction
and Growth Facility (as successor to the Enhanced Structural
Adjustment Facility) be immediately withdrawn as irrelevant.
3. That the assets of the ESAF/PRGF be used to cancel the
debts the countries defined by the World Bank as heavily indebted
poor countries owed the IMF, and that any remaining funds be
used to cancel the debts owed the IMF by the additional countries
appearing on Jubilee 2000 U.K.'s list of 52 countries in need of debt
cancellation.
4. That the IMF structural adjustment/stabilization programs
imposed on the East Asian economies in the aftermath of the
Asian financial crises be immediately discontinued.
5. That Michel Camdessus, the IMF's Managing Director for over
ten years, and his top staff, including Deputy Managing Director
Stanley Fischer, express a new spirit of accountability at the IMF
by immediately resigning.
6. That moves to amend the IMF's Articles of Agreement to
require member countries to liberalize their capital accounts be
explicitly abandoned as incompatible with the lessons of several
recent financial crises.
7. That a global commission with over half its members
representing civil society organizations (with others from
governments and the United Nations) be immediately convened to
determine whether the IMF shall continue to exist and, if so, what
role it should play.
Signed in Taegu by the following, with the understanding that
organizations not able to be in Taegu will be asked to endorse the
statement in the following weeks.
Focus on the Global South * Bangkok, Thailand (Walden Bello)
ECONIT Advisory Group * Jakarta, Indonesia (Arif Arryman)
International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INFID) *
Jakarta,
Indonesia (Tony Waworontu / Arif Arryman)
Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) * Quezon City, Philippines
(Jean
Enriquez)
50 Years Is Enough Network * Washington, USA (Soren Ambrose)
APRO-FIET (International Federation of Commerical, Clerical,
Professional &
Technical Employees) * Singapore (Christopher Ng)
Third World Network * Penang, Malaysia (T. Rajamoorthy)
World Economy, Ecology & Development (WEED) * Bonn,
Germany (Peter Waldow)
Korean Federation of Bank & Financial Labor Unions (KFBU) *
Seoul, South
Korea (Lee Yongdeuk)
APRO-FIET (International Federation of Commerical, Clerical,
Professional &
Technical Employees) - Korea Liaison Council * Seoul, South
Korea (Jay
Choi)
Association pour une Taxation des Transactions financières pour
l'Aide aux
Citoyens (ATTAC) * Paris, France (Christophe Aguiton)
Pacific-Asia Resource Center (PARC) * Tokyo, Japan (Yoko
Kitazawa)
SOLAGRAL * Paris, France (Elsa Assidon)
People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD) * Seoul,
South Korea
(Hee-Yeon Cho)
Korean Federation for Environmental Movement (KFEM) * Seoul,
South Korea
(Kim Choon-y / Choi Yul)
Endorsers not present at Taegu:
Preamble Center * Washington, USA (Mark Weisbrot)
Just Act: Youth Action for Global Justice * San Francisco, USA
(Colin
Rajah)
Committee for Health Rights in the Americas * San Francisco,
USA (Shannon
Coughlin)
Eighth Day Center for Justice * Chicago, USA (Mary Kay
Flanigan/Kathleen
Desautels/Dolores Brooks)
NICCA * Berkeley, USA (Diana Bohn)
Casa Baltimore/Limay * Baltimore, USA (Barbara Larcom)
Michigan Coalition for Human Rights * Detroit, USA (Joanette Nitz)
Nicaragua-U.S. Friendship Office * Washington, USA (Rita Clark)
Development VISIONS * Lahore, Pakistan (Khalid Hussain)
Rainforest Information Centre * Lismore, Australia (John Seed)
Partizans * London, UK (Roger Moody)
Humanitarian Law Project * Washington, USA (Patricia Krommer)
Campaign for Labor Rights * Washington, USA (Trim Bissell)
Nicaragua Network * Washington, USA (Chuck Kaufman)
Individuals:
Patrick Bond * University of the Witwatersrand * Johannesburg,
South Africa
Frieder-Otto Wolf * Ex-Member, European Parliament (Green
Group) * Germany
Stefano Monti & Katheryn H. Seiders * Pittsburgh, USA
Mark M. Giese * Racine, Wisconsin, USA
Paul Kesler * Bridgeport, Pennsylvania, USA
***
Jubilee as Social-Movement Model
by Patrick Bond
for Land and Rural Policy Digest, November 1999
The most important accomplishment of the
Jubilee 2000 movement to date has not been
the series of minor debt relief concessions
from G-7 powers since around 1996 (HIPC, the
Cologne Initiative, Clinton's Bilateral Debt
Cancellation, etc). Nor has it been the
resounding success of J2000-North chapters
in finding allies such as the Pope, Harvard
economist Jeffrey Sachs, and a series of
entertainers (Bono from U-2, Mohammed Ali,
Netaid) who together make vocal, trendy but
ultimately unsatisfying appeals to northerners'
sense of charity.
Instead, in this article I insist that the J2000
chapters across the Southern Hemisphere--
and similar movements working on trade,
investment, labour rights, human rights,
environmental protection, the landmine ban
and many other issues--have made a much
greater contribution to social progress:
innovative analysis, ideology and strategy.
They have by and large analysed problems
of debt and development from a structural
perspective, not stopping with superficial
explorations for debt, but looking at the entire
development model associated with the
discredited "Washington Consensus." This is
a term that describes the neoliberal, free-
market economic strategy pushed by
Washingtonians like Bill Clinton, the US
Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve,
and of course the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund (IMF).
From the early 1980s, World Bank and IMF
macroeconomic and social policy advice has
overwhelmed organic priorities and strategies
in indebted Third World countries. Critics
argue that Washington's advice is both
immoral--in that it typically seeks export-led
growth at the expense of the poor, workers,
women and the environment--and incompetent,
in that it rarely is rooted in local realities, it
relies too much on unreliable markets, and
virtually always promises more than it can
deliver.
The World Bank's modelling role in the
failed Growth, Employment and Redistribution
strategy is a good example of that
incompetence. The values underlying Bank
advice were unveiled in an unusually frank
sentence in a 1991 memo by then-World Bank
chief economist Lawrence Summers (now
head of the US Treasury Department and one
of the world's main economic managers): "The
economic logic of dumping a load of toxic
waste on the lowest-wage countries is
impeccable and I think we should face up to
that."
Ideologically, as a result, the Jubilee
movement has identified Washington's world-
view as central to the Third World's problems.
The Jubilee South groups therefore refuse to
let Washington structure the terms of debt
relief. A common analogy is to question
whether it is wise to ask the arsonist how to
put out the fire!
Strategically, the Jubilee South and many
allied forces are also now reconsidering the
apparently utopian strategy of reforming the
embryonic World State (i.e., the main
Washington institutions plus the World Trade
Organisation), and instead have pursued two
different strategies: weakening the power of
Washington, and strengthening the
sovereignty of nation-states.
The World Bank, for example, has been
subject to ongoing campaigns over the past
two decades, resulting in a somewhat more
green, more gender-friendly, more transparent,
and more participatory-oriented institution. The
rise of the reformist "Post-Washington
Consensus" ideology associated with the
current Bank chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz,
partially reflects the clout and credibility of
this tendency. Likewise in the arena of trade,
Northern labour and environmental
movements have played a role in amending
international agreements to incorporate worker
and environmental rights.
Today, however, Jubilee and allied activists
are fed up with the lack of results. After fifteen
years or so of advocacy, the result is the
apparent worsening of North-South domination
associated with these reforms. The World
Bank may have reformed in some ways that
are relatively marginal to its operation, but the
hard-core commitment to brutal structural
adjustment programmes, privatisation, cuts in
state spending, high interest rates, free trade
and liberalised finance remains intact.
Instead, the more grassroots-oriented
social movements who bear the full brunt of
Washington's malevolence and incompetence
now argue, increasingly, for WB/IMF
defunding and nation-state delinking from
international finance. (This is consistent with
opposition to the Multilateral Agreement on
Investment or further World Trade
Organisation rounds, as well as tough controls
on what multinational corporations can do.)
In short, the goal here is to promote the
globalisation of people and halt or at minimum
radically modify the globalisation of capital.
How radical is this? Surprisingly, this was the
common-sense argument that elite economist
(and capitalist-reformer) John Maynard Keynes
advanced in a 1993 article in Yale Review: "I
sympathise with those who would minimise,
rather than with those who would maximise,
economic entanglement among nations. Ideas,
knowledge, science, hospitality, travel--these
are the things which should of their nature be
international. But let goods be homespun
whenever it is reasonably and conveniently
possible and, above all, let finance be
primarily national."
Concretely, what might this mean? I think
in the first instance it suggests that
movements like South Africa's J2000 chapter
and its allies in the SA NGO Coalition, trade
unions, rural development organisations and
the like, should consider it necessary, if
insufficient, to help restore control over
national finances.
That means amplifying several campaigns
already underway: more J2000 pressure to
repudiate the $25 billion South Africa foreign
debt inherited in 1994; more pressure from
Cosatu on behalf of capital controls to prevent
wealthy white people and big corporations
running away with apartheid-era capital; more
pressure by unions and community groups
against privatisation (especially around
municipal services, where foreign water firms
are already causing great damage); and more
pressure from environmentalists, trade
unionists and development activists against
free-trade deals which pollute, deindustrialise,
and often underdevelop communities.
But these are defensive struggles, which
then require amplifying other ongoing
campaigns which cut against the grain of
Washington's advice: lower interest rates; a
clear industrial development policy; specific
attention to the development needs of women,
disabled people and rural areas; and concrete
demands such as cross-subsidies for free,
basic supplies of water and electricity, from
hedonistic consumers who should pay more,
to everyone else.
These are some of the directions that the
J2000 movement is pushing logically towards,
in part through some of its key cadres'
participation in an "Africa Consensus" process,
alongside leading African NGOs, churches,
women's groups and labour. The Africa
Consensus--which is still a process, requiring
full elaboration based on a myriad of
grassroots and national development
experiences and struggles--rejects both the
Washington and Post-Washington Consensus,
and in particular rejects illegitimate loans that
maintain exploitative power relations. As
expressed in the May 1999 "Lusaka
Declaration,"
Debt is one of the most important
instruments of Northern domination over
the South, and the domination of
financiers over people, production and
nature everywhere. As part of our
struggle to liberate ourselves from this
bondage, we make demands for the
cancellation of debt as part of a broader
struggle to fundamentally transform the
current world economic order and
transfer power from the political
leadership of the rich countries and the
economic power of Transnational
Corporations and international
financiers, and their instruments,
notably the International Monetary Fund,
World Bank and World Trade
Organisation. Likewise, these forces
have instruments in the South, namely
some of our own technocratic, political
and commercial elites who are in the
tiny minority of Africans who continue to
promote the Washington Consensus.
In the same spirit, we will make
reasonable, rational demands for
reparations to compensate for the
economic, social and environmental
damage which affect our people. These
reparations will not be allowed to trickle
into our elitesþ pockets, but must be
directed into rebuilding our societies
and environments, and in the process to
restoring our human dignity, and
especially that of women.
Africa's leading economist, Samir Amin, has
long argued for this kind of strategy, but
warns that there are terribly important
international implications:
The response to the challenge of our
time imposes what I have suggested
naming "delinking"... Delinking is not
synonymous with autarky, but rather
with the subordination of external
relations to the logic of internal
development... Delinking implies a
"popular" content, anti-capitalist in the
sense of being in conflict with the
dominant capitalism, but permeated with
the multiplicity of divergent interests.
The implication is simple: Washington must
be weakened, because any single country
aiming to delink will come under enormous
pressure not to. This largely explains the fear
that Trevor Manuel and his Finance
Department colleagues regularly express
about the J2000 arguments. Demands for
repudiation of and reparations for apartheid-
era lending might "send the wrong signals to
the market," in particular to New York, London,
Frankfurt and Zurich banks.
The simple lesson, therefore, is that these
banks and their Washington promoters must
be weakened. Here again, J2000 and its
network of allies from other social movements,
are making enormous progress in expanding
the scope of their analysis, ideology and
strategy. Jubilee South Africa made the
following statement to a group of like-minded
allies from Haiti, Nicaragua, Brazil, Thailand,
the Philippines and the US and Europe:
At our National Executive meeting on
September 10, Jubilee 2000 South
Africa formally endorsed efforts by our
international allies--especially PAPDA in
Haiti, and Focus on the Global South in
Bangkok--to deny further funding to the
International Monetary Fund and World
Bank. We suggest this tough course of
action in view of continuing
conditionality on HIPC relief, the growth
of austere ESAF programmes, and
structural adjustment "Washington
Consensus" ideology more generally.
Thanks to Bank and Fund programmes
in Southern African countries as
impoverished as Mozambique and as
wealthy as South Africa, poverty and
inequality--and social, environmental
and economic degradation more
broadly--have intensified.
Hence a much stronger message
must now be sent to the Fund and Bank,
including denying them funding through
either no new recapitalisation, or
through requesting of conscientious
investors that they sell bonds issued by
the World Bank, or through other means
still to be developed. We give our
endorsement to the existing strategies
of defunding, and hope to work with you
to develop others that appeal to all
people of conscience around the world.
As you know, South African liberation
movements pioneered the divestment
tactic in our struggle for racial equity,
and we will look to our solidarity
networks to remind them of the
continuing need for activism of this sort,
aimed at further socio-economic justice.
It is that spirit, and accompanying capacity to
globalise powerful tactics, which are making
the J2000 South chapters a model for new
kinds of social movements that think globally,
act locally, and act globally.
Patrick Bond
(Wits University Graduate School of Public and Development Management)
home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094, Johannesburg
office: 22 Gordon Building, Wits University Parktown Campus
mailing address: PO Box 601 WITS 2050
phones: (h) (2711) 614-8088; (o) 488-5917; fax 484-2729
emails: (h) [EMAIL PROTECTED]; (o) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
