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     Lenin Side Hero Username: Lenin Post Number: 3020 Registered: 02-2014 Posted From: 122.107.192.235 Rating: N/A |
ammanamma ga bidda ga putti kevalam 2 ekarala tho life start chesi e subject ni ardam cheskuni world bank tho cheekati oppandalu cheskunna Maha goppa leader okayana unandu state lo | ||
| Zamindar Side Hero Username: Zamindar Post Number: 4000 Registered: 10-2013 Posted From: 172.56.21.186 Rating: N/A |
Dineema intha subject ardam avaali ante Rajanna bidda ga anna puttali lekapthey Jaganisam lo master degree anna chesi vundali ..  Hyderabad State lo Telangana State Party ki enti sambandam. | ||
| Lenin Side Hero Username: Lenin Post Number: 3013 Registered: 02-2014 Posted From: 122.107.192.235 Rating: N/A |
World Bank vs World Poor The World Bank is helping Third World governments cripple their economies, maul their environments, and oppress their people. Although the bank started with the highest ideals some 40 years ago, it now consistently does more harm than good for the world's poorest. The World Bank's raison d'etre in its early years was to encourage development. Now, the bank exists largely to maximize the transfer of resources to Third World governments. And by so doing, the bank has greatly promoted the nationalization of Third World economies and has increased political and bureaucratic control over the lives of the poorest of the poor. Bank officials are now leading a rhetorical crusade in favor of the private sector. Yet every time the bank loudly praises the private sector, it silently damns its own record. More than any other international institution, the bank is responsible for the rush to socialism in the Third World--the rise of political power over the private sector--and the economic collapse of Africa. Although the bank has been very effective at expanding government control of Third World economies, it has been extremely ineffective at encouraging private-sector-oriented reform. A 1986 confidential bank report found little or no evidence that the bank's lending has caused significant movement toward greater reliance on markets.[1] The World Bank is seeking new U.S. funding this year, almost a billion dollars for the International Development Association, which provides zero-interest 50-year loans to the poorest, usually worst-managed countries. The bank also is expected to request a major increase in its capital next year, requiring another commitment of some $10 billion from American taxpayers, to allow it to greatly increase its lending to Third World governments. Yet the bank's operations present a classic illustration of failure being its own reward. The bank is notorious for giving bad advice. In the 1970s it helped to lay the groundwork for the Ethiopian government's current murderous resettlement program.[2] Bank aid has helped many countries build unneeded steel factories, underused airports, and roads that crumble as soon as they are completed. The World Bank is currently run like a Soviet factory, concerned only with meeting its quantitative production goals. Bank president Barber Conable, in a recent interview with Le Monde, declared, "The 1986-87 fiscal year, which ended on June 30, was a success: our commitments represented $14.2 billion as against $13 billion the previous fiscal year."[3] It is surprising that the bank would consider itself a "success" simply because oppressive governments in Ethiopia and Mozambique and inept governments around the globe accepted more zero-interest 50-year loans or other bank-subsidized aid. According to the bank's own auditors, bank projects have suffered from "unseemly pressure" to lend more money.[4] Bank officers have pressured Third World governments to borrow more than they wished to borrow, a practice having dire results for the country, as unnecessary bank projects have turned out to be prize boondoggles. A Congressional Research Service study concluded in 1980, "The Bank is seen as presiding over the buildup of debts which will ultimately be defaulted."[5] In 1986 the Economist noted, "The Bank failed to anticipate the debt crisis that erupted in 1982."[6] Despite the fact that 56 Third World countries have now fallen behind in their debt repayments, the bank continues to push for ever greater lending--both by itself and by commercial banks--to Third World governments.[7] It wasn't always like this. From the bank's creation in 1946 until the late 1960s, the bank was a conservative institution that primarily funded infrastructure and other basics in less developed countries (LDCs). In 1968, Robert McNamara became bank president and dedicated the bank to achieving ever higher loan levels. Between 1968 and 1981, when McNamara resigned, the bank's lending levels increased twelvefold, from $883 million to over $12 billion, and they have continued soaring since then. The only thing the bank has left is the nobility of its original mission: to lift the poor nations of the world out of poverty. But it provides far more help to Third World politicians and bureaucrats than to Third World citizens. And most of all, the bank continues helping itself by doling out ever larger amounts of money. The World Bank vs. Human Rights The World Bank has a long and dismal record of getting entangled in human rights atrocities. Despite its humanitarian image, the bank often shows little or no concern for the welfare of poor citizens. When McNamara began boosting lending in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the bank lowered the standards for its loans. McNamara's favorite foreign leader was Julius Nyerere, ruler of Tanzania, which has received more bank aid per capita than any other country. The bank's unconditional support of Nyerere's dictatorial regime is a major cause of the Tanzanian people's current misery. In the early 1970s, with bank aid and advice, Nyerere implemented his ujamaa, or villagization program. Nyerere sent the Tanzanian army to drive the peasants off their land, burn their huts, load them onto trucks, and take them where the government thought they should live. The peasants were then ordered to build new homes "in neat rows staked out for them by government officials."[8] Nyerere wanted to curb his countrymen's individualist and capitalist tendencies and make them easier to control.[9] He even outlawed people sleeping in their gardens at night, which meant that monkeys were free to help themselves to the crops. In many cases, the new government villages were far from the farmers' own lands, and so they simply gave up tilling the land, with the result that hunger has increased in Tanzania in recent years. The bank also helped finance the brutal policies of the Vietnamese government in the late 1970s that contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of boat people in the South China Sea. After North Vietnam invaded and conquered South Vietnam, there was widespread dissent in the south against the new government's forced collectivization policy. Yet the bank lent $60 million to the government of Vietnam in August 1978, even after widely circulated reports in the West of massive concentration camps and brutal repression. The bank announced that the loan would finance "an irrigation project that will boost rice production." A confidential bank report admitted, however, that "the main effort to deal with the employment problem [in the south] consists of the creation of New Economic Zones--agricultural settlements that are intended to resettle 4 or 5 million people by the end of 1980."[10] The report conceded that the project was risky because of the possibility of rebellion among farmers. Farmers who resisted the government's "reorganization" were sent out in leaky boats, and thousands drowned in the South China Sea. Despite the undeniable evidence of atrocities, the bank planned to give five more loans to Vietnam until it encountered angry resistance in Congress.[11] The bank has lent the government of Indonesia over $600 million to remove--sometimes forcibly--several million people from the densely populated island of Java and resettle them on comparatively barren islands. Despite widespread reports of violence, the bank continues to laud the project as "the largest voluntary migration" in recent history.[12] Indonesia's transmigration policy offers another example of the bank's hypocrisy. Official World Bank policy states that the bank will assist projects "within areas used or occupied by tribal people only if it is satisfied that best efforts have been made to obtain the voluntary, full and conscionable agreement of the tribal people." But Indonesian law states that tribal people's right to their lands and autonomy "may not be allowed to stand in the way of the establishment of transmigration settlements."[13] The government has jailed people who have abandoned their new homes and returned to Java to "prevent them [from] spreading negative reports and reducing the enthusiasm of others to transmigrate," according to an Indonesian newspaper.[14] The Indonesian minister of transmigration proclaimed on March 20, 1985, "We will try to realize what has been pledged, to integrate all the ethnic groups into one nation--the Indonesian nation. . . . The different ethnic groups will in the long run disappear because of integration and there will be one kind of man."[15] As one Australian critic noted, transmigration is largely "the Javanese version of Nazi Germany's lebensraum."[16] The London-based Anti-Slavery Society for Human Rights reported to the United Nations that at least one supposedly vacant island given to the migrants was already inhabited and that the Indonesian army cleared the island by setting fire to the original inhabitants' crops.[17] Forty environmental and human rights groups recently convened an international conference in Amsterdam to discuss the problems with transmigration in Indonesia. Yet despite widespread and undeniable human rights violations and an almost complete lack of economic viability, the bank continues to support transmigration there. The World Bank is also providing huge sums to the Ethiopian Marxist regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam. In the midst of the 1984-85 famine, when starvation reportedly threatened seven million Ethiopians, the government launched a massive resettlement program to forcibly deport hundreds of thousands of people in northern Ethiopia to the south. According to Doctors Without Borders, a French medical assistance group, the resettlement program may have killed more people than the famine itself.[18] Thousands of the resettlees are being kept in concentration-camp-type facilities, where death rates are reported to be quite high, until the government decides where to put them.[19] In 1986, the Economist cited Ethiopia for the worst human rights record in the world.[20] The Ethiopian government recently announced that it intends to continue the resettlement program, despite international criticism, with the goal of forcibly resettling seven million people.[21] Moreover, the government has launched a program that may have even more devastating economic effects than the resettlement program. Mengistu is committed to a villagization program wherein the government forces people to abandon their privately held land and live in government-controlled villages, complete with guard towers. Three million Ethiopians have already been forcibly removed this way, and the government claims that it will eventually resettle 33 million people (75 percent of the population) in villages. The villagization program is reminiscent of the Tanzanian scheme of the 1970s but far more brutal. Ethiopian refugees in Somalia recently reported that "Ethiopian soldiers seized their land, destroyed their mosques, burned copies of the Koran and tried to force them to live in villages and give their produce to a collective, in return for standard food rations."[22] By forcing people to live in villages, the government makes it more difficult for anti-Mengistu rebels to hide in the countryside. The villagization scheme is also tied closely to the government's plan to nationalize all agriculture. Throughout this period, the bank has provided large amounts of aid to the Mengistu regime. Bank commitments to Ethiopia in 1985 equaled roughly 16 percent of the government's budget.[23] In 1985, the bank gave the government $4 million to improve its "management of the economy," and last summer, the bank gave it another $45 million to expand state farms producing timber.[24] The bank was not deterred by its own report admitting that Ethiopian "agricultural sector public enterprises are almost universally criticized as especially poor performers."[25] A May 1987 handout of $39 million went for "Ministry of Agriculture institutional development," among other projects, even though the agriculture ministry is heavily involved in the brutal villagization program.[26] When Ethiopia asked the bank for a drought relief loan in 1985, the government explicitly stated that it planned to use part of the money for resettlement. The World Bank granted the loan but stipulated that the money not be used for resettlement. In the past, the bank has often had poor control over how its money is spent. According to Yonas Deressa, president of the Ethiopian Refugees Education and Relief Foundation, "They just take the money and laugh. Over the past two decades the World Bank has contributed as much to agricultural disaster in Ethiopia as the governments themselves."[27] Ethiopia will soon be receiving 100 trucks purchased with a 1985 World Bank loan, and it is very likely that some of the trucks will be used as human cattle cars. One disgruntled bank employee described the bank's Ethiopian policy as "genocide with a human face."[28] According to the Congressional Research Service, "Any loan from the World Bank provides some measure of support for the borrower country's economy."[29] Even when World Bank funds do not directly support oppression by supplying large amounts of capital, they free up other scarce government resources to be used for oppressing the populace. The bank is financing the Ethiopian government while the government is herding the people into concentration camps and collective farms that doom the country's prospects for feeding itself and avoiding recurrent famines. Throughout India, South America, and elsewhere, the bank is creating thousands of "development refugees," as Environmental Defense Fund attorney Bruce Rich calls them. In a bank-financed project in Singrauli, India, "200,000 to 300,000 of the rural poor have been subject to forced relocation twice, three times, in some cases four or five times in 25 years, each time with little or no compensation. Their livelihood was the land, which has now been destroyed and resembles scenes out of the lower circles of Dante's Inferno," Rich recently told the House Banking Committee.[30] The same violations of the rights of citizens through forcible resettlement have often occurred in Brazil.[31] The bank is not opposed to human rights; many bank employees and officials are outstanding individuals with high moral codes. Nevertheless, the institution is driven to meet its lending goals, even if that means bankrolling oppression . A Record of Incompetence If one looks at but one year's loans and press releases, one may think that the bank has done a wonderful job. But a closer examination of bank documents shows that the bank itself is aware of its pervasive failures in many areas. The bank's 1987 annual review of its project performance, published by the Operations Evaluation Department (OED), noted the following examples: -- Seventy-five percent of World Bank African agricultural projects were failures.[32] -- Despite endless pleading by the bank, many Latin American and African governments still refuse to make available sufficient money to maintain bank-financed roads and infrastructure. As the operations evaluation report asked, "Does the ready availability of (external) funds to rebuild illmaintained roads in any way sway the decision on maintenance funding?''[33] -- The majority of small-enterprise borrowers from bank- financed development finance companies (DFCs) are in arrears in their debt repayments.[34] -- Bank projects to encourage increased credit activity in Third World countries are routinely sabotaged by government regulations that hold interest rates below inflation rates, thereby destroying any possibility of a self-propelled credit market.[35] -- The cost of "new jobs created" under bank loan programs is occasionally as high as $500,000 per job. This is extremely capital intensive and is particularly inappropriate for Third World countries with labor surpluses and capital shortages.[36] -- The push for more and bigger loans has diminished the quality of lending. The audit of Madagascar's Morondava Irrigation and Rural Development Project, for example, highlighted the lack of consensus between the bank and the borrower and stated that "the new government was pressured by the Bank to accept the project so that it could be immediately submitted to the Executive Directors. . . . It was clear, however, that the new government had serious reservations about the project." A recent special study attributed the poor performance of smallholder livestock projects in part to the pressure of the lending program and concluded that "it is neither in the Bank's nor in the individual borrower's interests, to embark on non-viable undertakings on the basis of lending targets. . . . These projects offer instances where an unseemly pressure to lend was detected at evaluation. Such pressure is not normally so detectable and is seldom documented."} | ||
| Emc2 Megastar Username: Emc2 Post Number: 27767 Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 108.48.4.211 Rating: N/A |
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| Lenin Side Hero Username: Lenin Post Number: 3012 Registered: 02-2014 Posted From: 122.107.192.235 Rating: N/A |
World Bank criticisms:- The World Bank has long been criticized by non-governmental organizations, such as the indigenous rights group Survival International, and academics, including its former Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz, Henry Hazlitt and Ludwig Von Mises. Henry Hazlitt argued that the World Bank along with the monetary system it was designed within would promote world inflation and "a world in which international trade is State-dominated" when they were being advocated. Stiglitz argued that the so-called free market reform policies which the Bank advocates are often harmful to economic development if implemented badly, too quickly ("shock therapy"), in the wrong sequence or in weak, uncompetitive economies. One of the strongest criticisms of the World Bank has been the way in which it is governed. While the World Bank represents 186 countries, it is run by a small number of economically powerful countries. These countries (which also provide most of the institution's funding) choose the leadership and senior management of the World Bank, and so their interests dominate the bank.:190 Titus Alexander argues that the unequal voting power of western countries and the World Bank's role in developing countries makes it similar to the South African Development Bank under apartheid, and therefore a pillar of global apartheid.:133-141 In the 1990s, the World Bank and the IMF forged the Washington Consensus, policies which included deregulation and liberalization of markets, privatization and the downscaling of government. Though the Washington Consensus was conceived as a policy that would best promote development, it was criticized for ignoring equity, employment and how reforms like privatization were carried out. Joseph Stiglitz argued that the Washington Consensus placed too much emphasis on the growth of GDP, and not enough on the permanence of growth or on whether growth contributed to better living standards.:17 The United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations report criticized the World Bank and other international financial institutions for focusing too much "on issuing loans rather than on achieving concrete development results within a finite period of time" and called on the institution to "strengthen anti-corruption efforts". Criticism of the World Bank often takes the form of protesting as seen in recent events such as the World Bank Oslo 2002 Protests, the October Rebellion, and the Battle of Seattle. Such demonstrations have occurred all over the world, even amongst the Brazilian Kayapo people. Another source of criticism has been the tradition of having an American head the bank, implemented because the United States provides the majority of World Bank funding. "When economists from the World Bank visit poor countries to dispense cash and advice," observed The Economist, as Jim Yong Kim said in 2012, "they routinely tell governments to reject cronyism and fill each important job with the best candidate available. It is good advice. The World Bank should take it." Jim Yong Kim is the most recently appointed president of the World Bank. | ||
| Lenin Side Hero Username: Lenin Post Number: 3011 Registered: 02-2014 Posted From: 122.107.192.235 Rating: N/A |
The IMF hurts workers The IMF and World Bank frequently advise countries to attract foreign investors by weakening their labor laws -- eliminating collective bargaining laws and suppressing wages, for example. The IMF's mantra of "labor flexibility" permits corporations to fire at whim and move where wages are cheapest. According to the 1995 UN Trade and Development Report, employers are using this extra "flexibility" in labor laws to shed workers rather than create jobs. In Haiti, the government was told to eliminate a statute in their labor code that mandated increases in the minimum wage when inflation exceeded 10 percent. By the end of 1997, Haiti's minimum wage was only $2.40 a day. Workers in the U.S. are also hurt by IMF policies because they have to compete with cheap, exploited labor. The IMF's mismanagement of the Asian financial crisis plunged South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand and other countries into deep depression that created 200 million "newly poor." The IMF advised countries to "export their way out of the crisis." Consequently, more than US 12,000 steelworkers were laid off when Asian steel was dumped in the US. The IMF's policies hurt women the most SAPs make it much more difficult for women to meet their families' basic needs. When education costs rise due to IMF-imposed fees for the use of public services (so-called "user fees") girls are the first to be withdrawn from schools. User fees at public clinics and hospitals make healthcare unaffordable to those who need it most. The shift to export agriculture also makes it harder for women to feed their families. Women have become more exploited as government workplace regulations are rolled back and sweatshops abuses increase. IMF Policies hurt the environment IMF loans and bailout packages are paving the way for natural resource exploitation on a staggering scale. The IMF does not consider the environmental impacts of lending policies, and environmental ministries and groups are not included in policy making. The focus on export growth to earn hard currency to pay back loans has led to an unsustainable liquidation of natural resources. For example, the Ivory Coast's increased reliance on cocoa exports has led to a loss of two-thirds of the country's forests. The IMF bails out rich bankers, creating a moral hazard and greater instability in the global economy The IMF routinely pushes countries to deregulate financial systems. The removal of regulations that might limit speculation has greatly increased capital investment in developing country financial markets. More than $1.5 trillion crosses borders every day. Most of this capital is invested short-term, putting countries at the whim of financial speculators. The Mexican 1995 peso crisis was partly a result of these IMF policies. When the bubble popped, the IMF and US government stepped in to prop up interest and exchange rates, using taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street bankers. Such bailouts encourage investors to continue making risky, speculative bets, thereby increasing the instability of national economies. During the bailout of Asian countries, the IMF required governments to assume the bad debts of private banks, thus making the public pay the costs and draining yet more resources away from social programs. IMF bailouts deepen, rather then solve, economic crisis During financial crises -- such as with Mexico in 1995 and South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil, and Russia in 1997 -- the IMF stepped in as the lender of last resort. Yet the IMF bailouts in the Asian financial crisis did not stop the financial panic -- rather, the crisis deepened and spread to more countries. The policies imposed as conditions of these loans were bad medicine, causing layoffs in the short run and undermining development in the long run. In South Korea, the IMF sparked a recession by raising interest rates, which led to more bankruptcies and unemployment. Under the IMF imposed economic reforms after the peso bailout in 1995, the number of Mexicans living in extreme poverty increased more than 50 percent and the national average minimum wage fell 20 percent. | ||
| Lenin Side Hero Username: Lenin Post Number: 3010 Registered: 02-2014 Posted From: 122.107.192.235 Rating: N/A |
The IMF has created an immoral system of modern day colonialism that SAPs the poor The IMF -- along with the WTO and the World Bank -- has put the global economy on a path of greater inequality and environmental destruction. The IMF's and World Bank's structural adjustment policies (SAPs) ensure debt repayment by requiring countries to cut spending on education and health; eliminate basic food and transportation subsidies; devalue national currencies to make exports cheaper; privatize national assets; and freeze wages. Such belt-tightening measures increase poverty, reduce countries' ability to develop strong domestic economies and allow multinational corporations to exploit workers and the environment A recent IMF loan package for Argentina, for example, is tied to cuts in doctors' and teachers' salaries and decreases in social security payments.. The IMF has made elites from the Global South more accountable to First World elites than their own people, thus undermining the democratic process. The IMF serves wealthy countries and Wall Street Unlike a democratic system in which each member country would have an equal vote, rich countries dominate decision-making in the IMF because voting power is determined by the amount of money that each country pays into the IMF's quota system. It's a system of one dollar, one vote. The U.S. is the largest shareholder with a quota of 18 percent. Germany, Japan, France, Great Britain, and the US combined control about 38 percent. The disproportionate amount of power held by wealthy countries means that the interests of bankers, investors and corporations from industrialized countries are put above the needs of the world's poor majority. The IMF is imposing a fundamentally flawed development model Unlike the path historically followed by the industrialized countries, the IMF forces countries from the Global South to prioritize export production over the development of diversified domestic economies. Nearly 80 percent of all malnourished children in the developing world live in countries where farmers have been forced to shift from food production for local consumption to the production of export crops destined for wealthy countries. The IMF also requires countries to eliminate assistance to domestic industries while providing benefits for multinational corporations -- such as forcibly lowering labor costs. Small businesses and farmers can't compete. Sweatshop workers in free trade zones set up by the IMF and World Bank earn starvation wages, live in deplorable conditions, and are unable to provide for their families. The cycle of poverty is perpetuated, not eliminated, as governments' debt to the IMF grows. The IMF is a secretive institution with no accountability The IMF is funded with taxpayer money, yet it operates behind a veil of secrecy. Members of affected communities do not participate in designing loan packages. The IMF works with a select group of central bankers and finance ministers to make polices without input from other government agencies such as health, education and environment departments. The institution has resisted calls for public scrutiny and independent evaluation. IMF policies promote corporate welfare To increase exports, countries are encouraged to give tax breaks and subsidies to export industries. Public assets such as forestland and government utilities (phone, water and electricity companies) are sold off to foreign investors at rock bottom prices. In Guyana, an Asian owned timber company called Barama received a logging concession that was 1.5 times the total amount of land all the indigenous communities were granted. Barama also received a five-year tax holiday. The IMF forced Haiti to open its market to imported, highly subsidized US rice at the same time it prohibited Haiti from subsidizing its own farmers. A US corporation called Early Rice now sells nearly 50 percent of the rice consumed in Haiti. | ||
| Lenin Side Hero Username: Lenin Post Number: 3009 Registered: 02-2014 Posted From: 122.107.192.235 Rating: N/A |
What is the IMF? The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were created in 1944 at a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and are now based in Washington, DC. The IMF was originally designed to promote international economic cooperation and provide its member countries with short term loans so they could trade with other countries (achieve balance of payments). Since the debt crisis of the 1980's, the IMF has assumed the role of bailing out countries during financial crises (caused in large part by currency speculation in the global casino economy) with emergency loan packages tied to certain conditions, often referred to as structural adjustment policies (SAPs). The IMF now acts like a global loan shark, exerting enormous leverage over the economies of more than 60 countries. These countries have to follow the IMF's policies to get loans, international assistance, and even debt relief. Thus, the IMF decides how much debtor countries can spend on education, health care, and environmental protection. The IMF is one of the most powerful institutions on Earth -- yet few know how it works. |
