Gephardt on IMF (fwd)

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

APPOINTMENT OF CONFEREES ON H.R. 3579, 1998 EMERGENCY SUPPLEMENTAL 
APPROPRIATIONS ACT (House of Representatives - April 23, 1998)

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Mr. GEPHARDT. Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to vote for this motion to 
instruct. I obviously reject the Speaker's categorization of some of us as 
protectionists. I voted for Fast Track when George Bush was President. I 
voted for the WTO. I stand ready to vote for Fast Track for President 
Clinton if we can have the proper provisions to recognize the rights and the 
needs of workers and the environment. I was ready to vote for a NAFTA that 
had sufficient teeth in the side agreements.

To refresh everybody's memory, it was not long ago that the Speaker and I 
were called to the White House with then Majority Leader Dole and Mr. 
Daschle, and the President and Bob Rubin and Allen Greenspan told us that 
there was a crash happening in Mexico, this was after NAFTA was passed, and 
that we needed to replenish funds for the IMF so that Mexico could be bailed 
out.

We all said that we thought it was necessary to do that because there was no 
good for America in Mexico going bankrupt. But after we came back to the 
House and consulted on both sides of the aisle, we found there was not a 
good deal of support for doing that. And so the President, using a Justice 
Department opinion, decided to go ahead with that loan.

One of the reasons they felt it was important to do that was because while 
Mexico was going down, something was happening that none of them had ever 
seen before. That was, developing countries' economies all over the world, 
Thailand, Indonesia, were going down.

Mr. Speaker, we are in a new world. And in that new world, technology has 
put us at a point where when one developing country has a horrible problem 
it begins to invade the economies of all the developing countries in the 
world. I believe the President did the right thing in using the IMF and 
Treasury funds to do something to help Mexico. As a result of that, the 
problem was stemmed across the world. Mexico is paying that loan off. In 
fact, most of it is already paid off with interest.

The problem we face now is greater than the problem we faced with Mexico 
because it is not just one country that is experiencing trouble, it is six 
or seven or eight in Asia.

Now, the Speaker says there is no rush and that he thought people were kind 
of overstating the problem a few months ago. Well, I do not think they were 
overstating the problem. But they were able, because they had funds 
available to commit, to go to these countries and to keep them from going 
into bankruptcy. So because of the existence of the IMF and the ability to 
do this, we have avoided tremendous problems.

There is no good for any worker or any business in the United States to have 
any of these countries fail. Even with that in place, they may fail. And 
when we criticize the IMF, and I am sure there is a lot to criticize, I 
think we have to keep in our mind a little bit of humility about what is 
going on here. Let us face it, nobody at the IMF, nobody at Treasury, nobody 
at the World Bank, and I dare say nobody in the world really knows how to do 
what we are trying to do.

We are literally trying to build a new architecture in our world for world 
trade. The truth is crony capitalism is not consistent with capitalism. And 
I now believe we cannot really have capitalism unless we ultimately have 
democracy and human rights. But we also know we cannot get those things to 
be achieved overnight, and so we have got to have a little bit of humility 
about what we know will work and what can bring these countries back to 
economic health.

Mr. Speaker, it is great to have a pledge that we may get to vote on this 
before the year is out. We could wake up tomorrow morning or next month or 
the month after that and be in a world of trouble. The IMF, the truth is, 
does not have the ability to deal with these problems now. We have a chance 
tonight to vote to instruct the conferees to try to pull some of this 
funding into this bill. We may be sorry, we all may be sorry, if this bill 
does not contain the monies that the IMF needs.