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

[Ashish Hanwadikar <ashish_hanwadikar@yahoo.com>]

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Please help make the Manifesto better, or accept it, and propagate it!
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IPI_Marker

Fire the World Bank: Those Protesters Were Right
http://www.cato.org/dailys/09-25-00.html
Read the above article about failure of the World Bank. Cato
Institution is a world leading "free trade" think-tank. I have found
their analysis beyond narrow politics and much more honest than others.
If you go to their site and read some of the articles about US Govt.
itself you will be surprised how much US itself is screwed because of
protectionist policies including subsidies.

Regards,
Ashish
--- venugopal <gvvs@nird.ap.nic.in> wrote:
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Please help make the Manifesto better, or accept it, and propagate
> it!
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> 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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