Re: Ashish' post dated November 21 ---One version of free trade

[Venkat Kesaraju <kevenkat@yahoo.com>]

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IPI_Marker

Once again Mr.VenuGopal asked the right questions.

Yes- we need to deal with  issues case by case
and always need to keep our interests in mind.

There is no cure-all method or "ism".We need not
sacrifice ourselves for the sake of cause or "ism" -
all kinds of them.
"Pure" Communists/socialists and whole lot of others
tried to do just that- upholding only the "pure"cause
while destroying everything else (including
themselves).

Are votaries of capitalism leading us in to the same
path too?
I can only pray that free trade-ism should not gain
ground like other isms.

"Free trade" does not do good for all people.Some
people are always going to get hit, very badly- the
weak.

As a student of history, I haven't come across any
reference - where the weak nation/people benefitted
from "free trade".

 Still the debate goes on....as it should...for our
benefit :)

Thanks
Venkat



--- venugopal <gvvs@nird.ap.nic.in> wrote:
>
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> Please help make the Manifesto better, or accept it,
> and propagate it!
>
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> IPI_Marker
> Hello Ashish,
> Are you suggesting opening up imports while the
> developed countries
> continue
> giving huge agricultural subsidies to their farmers?
> What about the
> TRIPS?
> How would these things possibly promote free trade?
> Which are the stupid
>
> regulations? Can you identify some of them? Perhaps
> they can be dealt
> with
> case by case. In this post, I want to quote from an
> article about
> Stiglitz.
> Of course, all this may or may not be applicable to
> India's situation.
> Nevertheless, it gives some idea of the picture:
>
> Nobel Prize winning economist Stiglitz, who was
> earlier Chief Economist
> of
> the World Bank is reported to have admitted that
> before prescribing
> country-specific strategy, the World bank team
> conducted thorough
> investigations. These investigations " consist 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"
> It is also interesting that each Nation's economy is
> individually
> analysed.
> But the same set of 4 prescriptions are given to
> everybdoy. 1)
> Privatisation: " 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."
> 2)"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"
> 3."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 by
> riots
> I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by bullets,
> tanks and
> teargas...) "
> 4."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."
> The quotes above are from an article by Greg Palast
> published in the
> 10th
> October, 2001 issue of The Observer, London.
> Following is the link:
> http://www.zmag.org/noblestiglitz.htm



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