[stop-imf] WPost Editorial: "A Cartoon Protest"

[Robert Weissman]

A cartoon editorial from the Washington Post parodies the demands from the
Mobilization for Global Justice -- but at least they address the
substance of the demands, more or less (and not counting the openness
demand). Responses to this will follow in the next several days --
happily, it appears that in contrast to last year, the Post will give some
space to the MGJ to explicate its own views.

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Robert Weissman=09<rob@essential.org>
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22141-2001Aug30.html

A Cartoon Protest

Friday, August 31, 2001; Page A22

THE STREET protests that now haunt meetings of global financial
institutions are not only growing larger; their message is also becoming a
little more focused. For the demonstrations planned in Washington next
month during the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and
World Bank, one of the several organizing coalitions, the Mobilization for
Global Justice, has prepared a four-point program summing up what was once
a cacophony of disparate demands. That's a good thing, in the sense it
makes possible a more serious public debate about the agenda of the
anti-globalization movement. The bad news is, the protesters' program
remains shallow enough that the group was able to explain it with a comic
strip. The message to the financial institutions about their engagement in
the developing world is telegraphed in the titles over the pictures:
"Cancel. End. Stop."

As we have often said, the World Bank and IMF are both imperfect
institutions that have had decidedly mixed results in shepherding the world
-- and in particular developing countries -- through the era of rapidly
expanding global trade and investment during the past dozen years. Some
countries in Asia, Latin America and post-Communist Europe have benefited
enormously from this economic tidal wave, which has been driven not so much
by the international financial elite as by the combination of exploding
private international investment and the spread of democratic governments
that have chosen to match free markets with free politics. But many of the
poorest countries have not benefited from globalization, and the efforts of
the World Bank and IMF to help those nations, or bail out others that have
attracted investment only to plunge into crisis, have sometimes backfired.
This is not a controversial critique; it is shared by many people inside
the institutions, as well as the Bush administration.

What's distinctive about the protesters' rhetoric is not its target or its
radicalism but its curiously stale, dated air. In assailing the World Bank
for backing "socially and environmentally destructive projects, such as
oil, gas and mining activities," the Mobilization for Global Justice sounds
a lot like the critics who attacked the bank on those grounds 20 years ago.
Those were good criticisms at the time, but since then, the bank has
dramatically altered its lending policies; since 1980 the percentage of
loans going to the power sector has fallen by 90 percent, and almost all
projects go through an environmental audit. Some bad projects still get
through -- like the protesters, we have raised concerns about the bank's
current sponsorship of an oil pipeline in Chad. But the impression lingers
that the protesters haven't paid much attention to what is really going on
at the bank; these days the cutting-edge critiques point to the fact that,
in its zeal to take all views into account and avoid white elephants, the
bank is missing opportunities to fund the projects that could help most.

Similarly, the Mobilization's demand for an unconditional cancellation of
impoverished countries' debt, its denunciation of privatization and IMF
"economic austerity programs" for developing countries and its scorn for
the allegedly sinister designs of multinational corporations parrot the
rhetoric that used to be heard from the military dictatorships and corrupt
populists who governed much of Latin America and Africa in the 1970s and
'80s. The juntas and "Big Men," too, claimed their people would be better
off without foreign investment and banks or the IMF; but what they
delivered was a "lost decade" of chaos and hyperinflation that eventually
led to their overthrow. The democrats who mostly replaced them in Latin
America, as well as the new democratic governments of Europe and Southeast
Asia, looked around the world; they saw that the only nations that have
succeeded in rising from poverty since World War II have been those, like
South Korea and Taiwan, that have embraced the private sector and trade.
The results of open-market policies since then, as we said, have been
mixed. But to many people who actually live in the developing countries
serviced by the World Bank and IMF, the program of the Washington
protesters will sound like a return to policies they have repeatedly -- and
democratically -- repudiated.

=A9 2001 The Washington Post Company