Robert Naiman posted: April 14, 2011 World Bank and I.M.F. Discuss Inequality in Middle East By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM WASHINGTON — The World Bank once hailed Tunisia’s economic reforms, noting the country’s increasing prosperity over the last decade.
-------------- I don't trust a word of this article. The WB is trying to re-invent itself and pretend to be a the good guy, after years of enabling the worse corporate exploitation possible. The revolutions we have been watching were explicitly an attack on those policies and the political corruption they caused. Now this is pretty well understood in Tunisia, and even better in Egypt. I say this after listening to hours of interviews with many of the groups spokespeople. I've heard less from the Libyans, which makes me highly suspicious. Benghazi needs to be a lot more open, hold news conferences, and get some articulate people from the street and discuss this. Hear, listen to this: ``Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced in February that the United States would set aside $150 million to provide assistance to Egypt.'' See? Set aside, is bullshit. They `set aside' millions for Haiti. Where the hell is it? This is even less opaque: ``The Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a federal agency that finances private projects in foreign countries, said in March that it would make up to $2 billion in new investments in the Middle East,'' I'd call that straight up financial imperialism and colonization. There was an interview this morning on Demcracy now featuring Nicholas Shaxson: ``One of the central messages of my book—and I explore the history of this in quite a lot of detail—is that tax havens have grown so fast in the era of globalization, since kind of the 1970s, that they have now become right—they are now right at the heart of the global economy and are absolutely huge. I mean, there are 10—anywhere between 10 and 20 trillion U.S. dollars sitting offshore at the moment. Half of world trade is processed in one way or another through tax havens. It’s all around us, and it’s absolutely huge.'' http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/15/offshore_banking_and_tax_havens_have I can't remember if he mentioned the WB and IMF, but they are obviously part of the core institutions of the global financial economies. I think the real issue is that these international finance systems are running scared because they are deeply linked to the financial mess and virtually all the vast economic inequalities in populations all around the world. That poverty ridden and exploited mass are beginning to wake up and some of the movements have figured this out. Certainly there are countries in Latin America who explicitly know what damage these neoliberal policies with their money as carrot, money as stick are doing their societies. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
