Today’s Good News: IMF “No Longer A Force” In Latin America
Naomi Klein writes in the Nation that Latin America is throwing off the shackles of the IMF and other institutions that long kept its politics and economy under US and corporate control. Â
This isn’t a one-time “yo mama” to the evildoers. Latins are building institutions of their own that, with any luck at all, will ensure that they never again suffer from the “shock therapy” of what Klein calls “extreme capitalism.”
A gleeful graphic shows Chavez, Correa, et al. dancing on Milton Friedman’s grave. It was Friedman who articulated the theory of how capitalism could install its “shock therapy” economic measures of privatization and deep cuts in social spending that devastated Chile and Argentina in the 70’s and 80’s.  Friedman mused, “Only crisis produces real change…when that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”
Outside forces provoked hyper-inflation and Pinochet’s overthrow of Allende in Chile, and people were in a state of shock.   So Friedman’s people, aided by a vicious police state, were able to enforce a sweeping, rapid-fire transformation there, followed by similar moves elsewhere in the region.
But the ideas lying around now are much better than his.  Now opposition to privatization is the defining issue of the new popular movements. Ortega re-elected in Nicaragua, opposing the sale of the country’s utilities to a Spanish company; Bechtel forced out of Bolivia, where gas fields and mines are nationalized. Morales opened a summit in late 06 by vowing to “close the open veins of Latin America.”
They are moving in many ways to protect themselves so that the past can’t be repeated. Movements are decentralized, making it harder to destroy them by picking off leaders. Countries are vowing to defend each other against US-backed coups.  Six countries have cut their ties with the SOA, and several plan to end leases on US military bases.
Cooperatives are stepping in to run companies abandoned by investors’ race to the bottom somewhere else. FTAA is being replaced by ALBA, the Bolivian Alternative for the Americas, for economic cooperation among Latin governments. They can set their own prices and build a wall against the foreign fluctuations that destroyed them before. And soon they will launch a “Bank of the South” to replace the IMF and World Bank.
The IMF is already done. In 2005 Latin America made up 80% of the IMF’s total lending portfolio; now it’s 1%.
Check out the whole article here.
Leave a Comment