Re(2): [ox] 7 Thesen zum "Krieg gegen Amerika"
- From: "Franz J. Nahrada" <f.nahrada magnet.at>
- Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 12:15:56 +0200
HR schreibt:
Was ich hier nicht rüberbringe (eine Aufforderung zum Mißverstehen)
ist, daß C.S. hier USA-Verbrechen scheinbar ursächlich gegenaufrechnet.
Die Verbrechen beider Seiten sind aber "nur" ein Gegensatzpaar mit
gemeinsamer
Ursache, nähmlich der globaisierten Barbarei des Kapitals.....
Wer ist das? So ganz ohne Subjekte wird diese Barbarei ja wohl nicht
zu machen sein....?
Darf man also die Subjekte, die die Barbarei des Kapitals durchsetzen,
nicht mehr beim Namen nennen?
F
-------------------------------------------------
in diesem Zusammenhang ein Cross-Posting.
Matthias Reichl hat folgende interessante Analyse über die
Strategie des ökonomischen Terrors gepostet. Von einem, der
es wirklich wissen muß.
"Joseph Stiglitz, einer der heurigen Nobelpreisträger für
Wirtschaftswissenschaften ist zwar kein radikaler Ökonomie-Reformer, aber
zumindest ein scharfer Kritiker der Auswüchse. Siehe auch anschließend
seinen "Kommentar der Anderen" im "STANDARD" v. 13./14.10.!
M.R."
Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank,
says that the World Bank "condemned people to death."
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 14:29:50 -0400 (EDT)
To: adhoc-L undp.org
Subject: [mai] Joe Stiglitz: The Globalizer Who Came In From The Cold
X-From: Greg Palast <www.gregpalast.com>
From: Mark Ritchie <mritchie iatp.org>
Organization: Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy <www.iatp.org>
By-way-of: Information Habitat <ecology2001 mindspring.com>
Sender: owner-adhoc-l undp.org
The World Bank's former Chief Economist's accusations are
eye-popping - including how the IMF and US Treasury fixed the
Russian elections
by Greg Palast
The Observer, London
October 10, 2001
"It has condemned people to death," the former apparatchik told
me. This was like a scene out of Le Carre. The brilliant old
agent comes in from the cold, crosses to our side, and in hours
of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors committed in the
name of a political ideology he now realizes has gone rotten.
And here before me was a far bigger catch than some used Cold War
spy. Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist of the World Bank. To a
great extent, the new world economic order was his theory come to
life.
I "debriefed" Stigltiz over several days, at Cambridge
University, in a London hotel and finally in Washington in April
2001 during the big confab of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. But instead of chairing the meetings
of ministers and central bankers, Stiglitz was kept exiled safely
behind the blue police cordons, the same as the nuns carrying a
large wooden cross, the Bolivian union leaders, the parents of
AIDS victims and the other 'anti-globalization' protesters. The
ultimate insider was now on the outside.
In 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz. He was not allowed quiet
retirement; US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, I'm told,
demanded a public excommunication for Stiglitz' having expressed
his first mild dissent from globalization World Bank style.
Here in Washington we completed the last of several hours of
exclusive interviews for The Observer and BBC TV's Newsnight
about the real, often hidden, workings of the IMF, World Bank,
and the bank's 51% owner, the US Treasury.
And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a
cache of documents marked, "confidential," "restricted," and "not
otherwise (to be) disclosed without World Bank authorization."
Stiglitz helped translate one from bureaucratise, a "Country
Assistance Strategy." There's an Assistance Strategy for every
poorer nation, designed, says the World Bank, after careful
in-country investigation. But according to insider Stiglitz, the
Bank's staff 'investigation' consists of close inspection of a
nation's 5-star hotels. It concludes with the Bank staff meeting
some begging, busted finance minister who is handed a
'restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for his 'voluntary'
signature (I have a selection of these).
Each nation's economy is individually analyzed, then, says
Stiglitz, the Bank hands every minister the same exact four-step
program.
Step One is Privatization - which Stiglitz said could more
accurately be called, 'Briberization.' Rather than object to the
sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders - using
the World Bank's demands to silence local critics - happily
flogged their electricity and water companies. "You could see
their eyes widen" at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to
Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion off the sale
price of national assets.
And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the
case of the biggest 'briberization' of all, the 1995 Russian
sell-off. "The US Treasury view was this was great as we wanted
Yeltsin re-elected. We don't care if it's a corrupt election. We
want the money to go to Yeltzin" via kick-backs for his campaign.
Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters.
The man was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet
as Chairman of the President's council of economic advisors.
Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs
stripped Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that the
corruption scheme cut national output nearly in half causing
depression and starvation.
After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank
one-size-fits-all rescue-your-economy plan is 'Capital Market
Liberalization.' In theory, capital market deregulation allows
investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in
Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out.
Stiglitz calls this the "Hot Money" cycle. Cash comes in for
speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first
whiff of trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days, hours.
And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a
nation's own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise
interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%.
"The result was predictable," said Stiglitz of the Hot Money
tidal waves in Asia and Latin America. Higher interest rates
demolished property values, savaged industrial production and
drained national treasuries.
At this point, the IMF drags the gasping nation to Step Three:
Market-Based Pricing, a fancy term for raising prices on food,
water and cooking gas. This leads, predictably, to
Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls, 'The IMF riot.'
The IMF riot is painfully predictable. When a nation is, "down
and out, [the IMF] takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of
blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the
whole cauldron blows up," as when the IMF eliminated food and
fuel subsidies for the poor in Indonesia in 1998. Indonesia
exploded into riots, but there are other examples - the Bolivian
riots over water prices last year and this February, the riots in
Ecuador over the rise in cooking gas prices imposed by the World
Bank. You' d almost get the impression that the riot is written
into the plan.
And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that, while in the
States, BBC and The Observer obtained several documents from
inside the World Bank, stamped over with those pesky warnings,
"confidential," "restricted," "not to be disclosed." Let's get
back to one: the "Interim Country Assistance Strategy" for
Ecuador, in it the Bank several times states - with cold accuracy
- that they expected their plans to spark, "social unrest," to
use their bureaucratic term for a nation in flames.
That's not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to
make the US dollar Ecuador's currency has pushed 51% of the
population below the poverty line. The World Bank "Assistance"
plan simply calls for facing down civil strife and suffering
with, "political resolve" - and still higher prices.
The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations
dispersed by bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked
flights of capital and government bankruptcies. This economic
arson has it's bright side - for foreign corporations, who can
then pick off remaining assets, such as the odd mining concession
or port, at fire sale prices.
Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless
adherents to market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped
Indonesia 'subsidizing' food purchases, "when the banks need a
bail-out, intervention (in the market) is welcome." The IMF
scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to save Indonesia's
financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks from
which they had borrowed.
A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but
one clear winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the
big bucks off this crazy new international capital churn.
Stiglitz told me about his unhappy meeting, early in his World
Bank tenure, with Ethopia's new president in the nation's first
democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered Ethiopia
to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury,
which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US
dollars at 12% to feed its population. The new president begged
Stiglitz to let him use the aid money to rebuild the nation. But
no, the loot went straight off to the US Treasury's vault in
Washington.
Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call
their "poverty reduction strategy": Free Trade. This is free
trade by the rules of the World Trade Organization and World
Bank, Stiglitz the insider likens free trade WTO-style to the
Opium Wars. "That too was about opening markets," he said. As in
the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today are kicking down
the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa, while
barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.
In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open
markets for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can
order a financial blockade just as effective - and sometimes just
as deadly.
Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO's intellectual
property rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on
that in the next chapters). It is here, says the economist, that
the new global order has "condemned people to death" by imposing
impossible tariffs and tributes to pay to pharmaceutical
companies for branded medicines. "They don't care," said the
professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, "if
people live or die."
By the way, don't be confused by the mix in this discussion of
the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a
single governance system. They have locked themselves together by
what are unpleasantly called, "triggers." Taking a World Bank
loan for a school 'triggers' a requirement to accept every
'conditionality' - they average 111 per nation - laid down by
both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF
requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the
official WTO rules.
Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised in
secrecy and driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for
discourse or dissent. Despite the West's push for elections
throughout the developing world, the so-called Poverty Reduction
Programs "undermine democracy."
And they don't work. Black Africa's productivity under the
guiding hand of IMF structural "assistance" has gone to hell in
a handbag. Did any nation avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz,
identifying Botswana. Their trick? "They told the IMF to go
packing."
So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how
would you help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land
reform, an attack at the heart of "landlordism," on the usurious
rents charged by the propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically
50% of a tenant's crops. So I had to ask the professor: as you
were top economist at the World Bank, why didn't the Bank follow
your advice?
"If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the
power of the elites. That's not high on their agenda." Apparently
not.
Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the
failure of the banks and US Treasury to change course when
confronted with the crises - failures and suffering perpetrated
by their four-step monetarist mambo. Every time their free market
solutions failed, the IMF simply demanded more free market
policies.
"It's a little like the Middle Ages," the insider told me,
"When the patient died they would say, 'well, he stopped the
bloodletting too soon, he still had a little blood in him.'"
I took away from my talks with the professor that the solution
to world poverty and crisis is simple: remove the bloodsuckers.
*
A version of this was first published as "The IMF's Four Steps to
Damnation" in The Observer (London) in April and another version
in The Big Issue - that's the magazine that the homeless flog on
platforms in the London Underground. Big Issue offered equal
space to the IMF, whose "deputy chief media officer" wrote:
"... I find it impossible to respond given the depth and breadth
of hearsay and misinformation in [Palast's] report."
Of course it was difficult for the Deputy Chief to respond. The
information (and documents) came from the unhappy lot inside his
agency and the World Bank.
At http://www.GregPalast.com you can read more about
globalization - and view Palast's reports for BBC Television's
Newsnight, including his broadcast interview with Joe Stiglitz
(Meirion Jones, Producer). We will soon post a complete
transcript of the 90-minute interview.
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Der Standard 13./14.10.2001:
Nobelpreisträger Joseph Stiglitz warnt vor WallStreet-Hörigkeit und
Isolationspolitik
Amerikas fatale Prioritäten" - ein Kommentar der Anderen
Joseph Stiglitz, Professor für Wirtschaftswissenschaften an der Columbia
Universität, war früher Vorsitzender des Wirtschaftssachverständigenrates
von US-Präsident Clinton und ehemaliger Chefökonom und Vizepräsident der
Weltbank; er wurde diese Woche zusammen mit den Professoren George A.
Akerlof und A. Michael Spence mit dem Wirtschaftsnobelpreis ausgezeichnet.
© Project Syndicate, Prag 2001
Wochen nach den Terroranschlägen auf New York und Washington sind die
Amerikaner anhaltend von einer derartigen Unruhe erfasst, wie das seit den
dunkelsten Momenten des Kalten Krieges - Kuba-Krise, Berlin-Blockade -
nicht mehr der Fall gewesen ist. Die US-Wirtschaft taumelt offenbar von
einer Flaute in eine ausgewachsene Rezession. Der unilaterale
Selbstverständnis der US-Außenpolitik wird in Frage gestellt.
Darüber hinaus gibt es noch zwei weitere Veränderungen, deren Tragweite
ähnlich bedeutend sein könnte: Seit Jahrzehnten gab es kein so starkes
Gefühl des sozialen Zusammenhaltes, und vor dem Hintergrund dieses neuen
Gemeinschaftsgefühls kommt es zu einer längst überfälligen Überprüfung der
Rolle der Regierung. Zunehmend werden Zweifel laut, dass wir vielleicht
von
unserem Weg abgekommen sind, zu viel Wert auf Materielles gelegt haben und
zu wenig auf gemeinsame Interessen.
Sinnlose Privatisierung
Tatsächlich erscheinen rückblickend einige der unter den Regierungen
Bush
und Clinton getroffenen Maßnahmen besonders absurd, indem sie den
Auffassungen der Marktfundamentalisten nicht nur entsprechen sondern sie
sogar noch übertrumpfen. So war es etwa völlig widersinnig, einen derart
lebenswichtigen Bereich des öffentlichen Interesses wie die
Flughafensicherheit zu "privatisieren": Die niedrigen Löhne, die
Privatunternehmer in diesem Bereich zahlen, führten zu hoher
Peronal-Fluktuation. Kurzfristig konnten die Fluggesellschaften und
Flughäfen zwar höhere Gewinne erzielen, aber langfristig haben sie - und
die amerikanische Bevölkerung - große Verluste erlitten, wie wir zu
unserem
Schrecken mittlerweile wissen.
Es ergab auch keinen Sinn, dass Präsident Bushs Finanzminister Paul
O'Neill das Übereinkommen über Geldwäscherei der Organisation für
wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (OECD) zurückgewiesen hat.
Was auch immer Mr. O'Neill gesagt haben mag, die wahren Gründe für seine
Einwände waren offenkundig: der Schutz finanzieller Interessen. Die
Offshore-Banken waren nämlich kein Zufallsprodukt. Sie existieren, weil
die
Wall Street und andere Finanzzentren weltweit sichere Zufluchtsstätten
(ohne Vorschriften und Steuern) wollten, während sie gleichzeitig im Zuge
der Krise in Ostasien lauthals nach mehr Transparenz für die Märkte der
Schwellenländer riefen. Ein Akt parteiübergreifender Scheinheiligkeit!
Andere Maßnahmen, die heimlich oder fast ohne öffentliche Diskussion
durchgeführt wurden, sind ähnlich beunruhigend. Im Jahre 1997 hat Amerika
die US Enrichment Corporation (USEC) privatisiert. Nur die wenigsten
wissen, was sich hinter diesem unschuldig anmutenden Namen verbirgt: Die
USEC produziert durch die Anreicherung von Uran die Kernelemente für
Atombomben und Atomkraftwerke und trägt auch die Verantwortung für die
Beschaffung nuklearen Materials aus Russland. Die alten sowjetischen
Sprengköpfe werden in gering angereichertes Uran für Kraftwerke
umgewandelt.
Nach der Privatisierung hatte die USEC natürlich allen Grund, das
russische Material von den US-Märkten fern zu halten, um so die Preise und
Gewinne des Unternehmens hoch halten zu können. Als Vorsitzender des
Wirtschaftssachverständigenrates stufte ich den Verbleib des Materials in
Russland wegen der Gefahr der unkontrollierten Weitergabe als enormes
Risiko ein. Doch die Versuchung für private Firmen, den Profit über das
allgemeine Interesse zu stellen, ist beinahe unwiderstehlich.
Prompt wurden meine Bedenken auch bestätigt: Wir deckten eine stille
Vereinbarung zwischen der USEC und Minatom (der russischen Stelle, die für
das nukleare Material zuständig ist) auf. Inhalt dieser Vereinbarung war
die Antwort der USEC auf das russische Angebot, weiterhin nukleares
Material zur sicheren Aufbewahrung in die USA zu schicken: Die USEC sagte
"Nein, danke" und zahlte 50 Millionen Dollar Schweigegeld, damit die
Russen
das Angebot nicht öffentlich werden lassen. Gleichzeitig versuchte die
USEC
durch wiederholte Aussagen, dass sie kein weiteres Material in die
Vereinigten Staaten bringen würde, wenn sie nicht zusätzlich Geld dafür
bekäme, den amerikanischen Steuerzahler zu erpressen. Was hat die
Regierung
nur bewogen, mit einer derart absurden Privatisierung fortzufahren?
Mag sein, dass die Privatisierungsideologie eine Rolle gespielt hat,
finanzielle Interessen aber nicht minder: Das für die Abwicklung der
Privatisierung zuständige Unternehmen an der Wall Street hat viel
Überzeugungsarbeit geleistet und saftige Gewinne eingestrichen. Einmal
mehr
hat das US-Finanzministerium so die Interessen der Wall Street über das
nationale Wohl gestellt. Die Gier nach einer zusätzlichen Milliarde Dollar
an Haushaltseinnahmen in einem Jahr hat den Deal besiegelt.
Globale Verantwortung
An diesen Beispielen sollte hinlänglich klar geworden sein, dass solche
hinter verschlossenen Türen getroffene Entscheidungen nicht nur die Wall
Street und auch nicht nur die USA tangieren sondern die ganze Welt.
Amerika hat die Globalisierung verkündet. Jetzt sollte es auch
anerkennen, dass mit der Globalisierung wechselseitige Abhängigkeiten
entstehen - und damit die Notwendigkeit kollektiver Entscheidungsfindung
in
jenen Bereichen, die uns alle betreffen. (DER STANDARD, Print-Ausgabe, 13.
/ 14. 10. 2001)
Nachbemerkung von Matthias Reichl:
Nicht "Amerika" sondern die die Regierungs- und Wirtschaftsinstitutionen
der USA "hat die Globalisierung verkündet". Daher richtet sich unsere
Kritik und der gewaltfreie Widerstand - in Solidarität mit
inneramerikanischen Bewegungen - gegen diese und nicht gegen "Amerika" als
Gesamtes (von Chile bis Kanada).
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