[Announce-DAN] Thursday N2: Walden Bello Speaks in Denver and Boulder

["David Martin" <p_hayze@hotmail.com>]

DEGLOBALIZATION: Toward an Internationalism that Supports Human 
Community and the Diversity of Life 
By Walden Bello
2000 Global Justice and Peace Award Winner
author of Dark Victory: The United States, 
Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty

Keynote Speaker at
The Denver Justice and Peace Committee's
16th Annual Awards Night Celebration
Thursday, November 2, 2000
6:30pm Reception
7pm Ceremony

First Mennonite Church
9th and Elati (South on Elati from the intersection of 11th and Speer
just east of West High School)

Note: Walden will also speak at CU Campus in Boulder on Thursday, 
Nov. 2 from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m. in the Old Main Building. This event 
is sponsored by Stop Hate on Campus, the Rocky Mountain Peace
and Justice Center) 
 
From Seattle to DC to Melbourne to Prague and Now Denver

Walden Bello is one of the most powerful speakers from the Global 
South in the growing movement for global economic justice and against 
corporate globalization. Walden unamsked the power of Transnational 
Corporations behind IMF, World Bank cum WTO policies.  He explained 
the connection behind Reagan cum Clinton policies at home and 
IMF/World Bank policies.  But Walden does more than analyze he 
organizes the resistance to these policies. Through his political 
activism, Walden has champion peace, nuclear disarmament, diversity 
of life, human community and economic justice.

Walden began this journey over 20 years ago when he and his 
colleagues obtained internal documents of the World Bank that exposed 
the corrupt relationship of the Bank to the Marcos dictatorship in 
the Phillippines. Since then Walden has not only built the evidence 
against IMF/World Bank cum WTO globalization but has built the 
movement for global economic justice. His voice inspired the 
protesters in Seattle, DC, Melbourne, and Prague. Now he will do the 
same for Denver.  You don't want to miss this!!!

Walden is Executive Director of Focus on the Global South and a 
Professor of Public Adminstration and Sociology at the University of 
the Philippines. He serves on the board of Food First, 50 Years is 
Enough Network, Geenpeace Southeast Asia, and the Transnational 
Institute. 

Walden is author of the following books: Development Debacle: The 
World Bank in the Philippines, Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle in 
Crisis, and Dark Victory: The United States and Global poverty. He 
has a Ph.D in political sociology from Princeton University. The 
website for Focus on the Global South is http://focusweb.org/.

In Solidarity,
David Martin
Executive Director
Denver Justice and Peace Committee
901 West 14th St, Suite 7
Denver, CO 80204
tel. 303-623-1463
fax 303-623-3492
e-mail: p_hayze@hotmail.com
website: www.djpc.org
 
The Prague Castle Debate: A Few Questions for Mr. Wolfensohn and Mr. 
Kohler
by Walden Bello

On September 23, 2000, President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic 
hosted an historic debate between the heads of the IMF and World Bank 
and their critics. The event took place at the historic Prague Castle—
immortalized in Franz Kafka's allegoric tale The Castle—a few days 
before the World Bank-IMF annual meeting in the Czech capital. 

The following is an edited composite version of the Walden Bello's 
two lengthy interventions during the debate:


I never thought I would be sitting so close to Jim Wolfensohn, 
President of the World Bank. I guess this is what you call combat in 
close.

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have avoided a 
real debate with their critics in civil society for a long time. 
Today, the representatives of these two institutions are here, partly 
because of President Havel's moral suasion, partly because they 
realize that, with their two institutions suffering an unparalleled 
crisis of legitimacy—the worst in their 56-year history, in fact—the 
old strategy of denial and non-confrontation no longer works.

In this brief presentation, let me tackle four myths propagated by 
the Bank and the Fund, and end with questions to Mr. Kohler and Mr. 
Wolfensohn:

Myth No. 1: The World Bank and IMF are proponents of "good 
governance."

Fact: For the greater part of the last 30 years, the Fund and the 
Bank have been intimately associated with very corrupt governments 
and human rights violators. What did the Brazilian military 
dictatorship, Ferdinand Marcos, Gen. Pinochet, the PRI government in 
Mexico, and the Suharto regime have in common?

They were all governments or heads of governments that were 
designated by the World Bank as "countries of concentration"--that 
is, countries to which the flow of Bank resources was greater than to 
other countries of similar size and income.

Over the last 30 years, over $30 billion in World Bank funds found 
its way to the Suharto dictatorship. According to several reports, 
including a World Bank internal report in 1999, the Bank tolerated 
corruption, accorded factual status to false government statistics, 
legitimized the dictatorship by passing it off as a model for other 
countries, and was complacent about the state of human rights and the 
economy. This happened under your watch, Mr. Wolfensohn, and the 
people of Indonesia will never forgive the Bank.

Myth No. 2: The IMF and the World Bank are concerned with the 
degradation of the environment.

Fact: Again and again, studies of the impact of IMF-World Bank 
structural adjustment programs have shown that, by institutionalizing 
stagnation and high poverty levels, they have been among the biggest 
contributors to environmental degradation in developing countries. In 
my country, the Philippines, for instance, so deep was the crisis 
triggered in the mid-1980's by structural adjustment in both the 
countryside and the cities that the population flow shifted away from 
the cities to open access forests, watersheds, and artisanal 
fisheries, severely destabilizing them in the process. Studies show 
that by the early nineties, the top 15 Third World debtors--all of 
which were subjected to structural adjustment--had tripled the rate 
of the exploitation of their forests since the late 1970s, a 
phenomenon that was undoubtedly caused by the adjustment program's 
pushing countries to rapidly increase their export earnings to pay 
off the foreign debt. 

It is not sensitivity to the environment that is demonstrated by Mr. 
Wolfensohn and the World Bank management's unyielding support for the 
Chad-Cameroon Pipeline, which will seriously damage ecologically 
sensitive rainforests like Cameroon's Atlantic Littoral Forest. It is 
not concern for the environment that was revealed by the World Bank's 
violation of its own rules on environmental assessment, involuntary 
resettlement, indigenous peoples, and environmental assessment in its 
failed attempt to push through the China Western Poverty Project that 
would have transformed an arid ecosystem supporting Tibetan and 
Mongolian sheepherders into land for settled agriculture for Chinese 
migrants.

A look at the Bank's loan portfolio would reveal the reality behind 
the rhetoric: loans for the environment as a total of the Bank's 
total loan portfolio declined from 3.6 per cent in FY 1994 to 1.02 
per cent in 1998; funds allocated to environmental projects declined 
by 32.7 per cent between 1998 and 1999; and more than half of all 
lending by the World Bank's private sector divisions in 1998 was for 
environmentally harmful projects like mining, roads, and power.

Indeed, so marginalized is the Bank's environmental staff within the 
bureaucracy that Herman Daly, the distinguished ecological economist, 
left the Bank staff because he felt he and other in-house 
environmentalists were having very little impact on Bank policy.

Myth No. 3: The Fund and the Bank are dedicated to combating poverty.

Fact: The opposite is true: the IMF and the Bank are central to 
creating poverty.

Structural adjustment programs imposed on over 90 developing and 
transition economies in the last 20 years have institutionalized 
economic stagnation, increased poverty, and exacerbated inequality in 
these areas. A recent World Bank study, in fact, admits that poverty 
worsened in the 1990's in Eastern Europe, Subsaharan Africa, Latin 
America and the Caribbean, and South Asia—all regions which have come 
under the sway of World Bank-IMF adjustment programs. Indeed, so bad 
was the record of adjustment programs that the IMF renamed the 
Extended Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) the Poverty Reduction 
and Growth Facility during the World Bank-IMF meeting in September 
1999. So devoid of success was the structural adjustment approach 
that Larry Summers, the US Treasury Secretary, who, as chief 
economist of the Bank in the early 1990's, was a partisan of 
adjusment, admitted to the US Congress last year that it was time to 
shelve the "IMF-centered" macroeconomic approach because it just was 
not working.

Recently, the IMF has been busy creating poverty in East Asia. There 
is now a consensus that the harsh program of high interest rates and 
budget cutbacks imposed by the Fund turned an economic crisis into a 
full-blown recession that saw negative growth rates in Thailand, 
Indonesia, and South Korea accompanied by a sharp rise in 
unemployment and the poverty rate. At least 1 million people fell 
into poverty in Thailand and 21 million in Indonesia. In Korea, the 
trend of declining poverty rates between 1975 and 1995 was sharply 
reversed in 1998, and the recession led to a suicide rate in 1998 
that was 59.4 higher than in 1997.

As for the World Bank, the truth about Mr. Wolfensohn's crusade to 
end global poverty was revealed by the findings of the bipartisan 
Meltzer Commission mandated by the US Congress to look at the record 
of the Bretton Woods institutions: 70 per cent of the Bank's non-
grant lending is concentrated in 11 countries, with 145 other member 
countries left to scramble for the remaining 30 per cent; 80 per cent 
of the Bank's resources are devoted not to the poorest developing 
countries but to the better off countries that have positive credit 
ratings and can raise their funds in private capital markets; the 
failure rate of Bank projects is 65-70 per cent in the poorest 
countries and 55-60 per cent in all developing countries.

So why does the Bank continue to pontificate about going about 
its "noble mission" to end poverty? Because it has learned from 
Joseph Goebbels that a lie repeated often enough eventually attains 
the status of truth.

Myth No. 4. The Fund and the World Bank are actively soliciting the 
help of civil society.

The truth is that the World Bank and IMF are mainly interested in 
using civil society to legitimize their unchanged approaches via 
consultations that are really monologues. The Bank and the Fund are 
more interested in splitting civil society opposition to their 
projects, and they do this by branding some civil society groups 
as "reasonable NGO's" and their more militant critics 
as "unreasonable NGO's" interested only in "closing down discussion." 
Certainly, dialogue with NGO's was not the intent of Mr.Wolfensohn 
when he avoided debate on the merits and demerits of the Chad 
Cameroon Pipeline in favor of a strategy of name-calling by branding 
opponents of the project as the "Berkeley Mafia."

Let me end by addressing the question: Are the Fund and the Bank 
capable of reform? I think we will know the answer from Mr. Kohler 
and Mr. Wolfensohn's answers to the following questions:

- Mr. Kohler, do you propose to give greater decisionmaking power in 
the IMF Board to the developing countries? Will you do this by 
diluting the voting power of the United States and the European Union 
countries that now dominate the board?

- Mr. Kohler, will you propose ending the medieval and non- 
transparent practice of the IMF always being headed by a European?

- Mr. Wolfensohn, will you advocate doing away with the equally 
medieval and non-transparent tradition of always having an American 
head the World Bank? I would like to remind the audience that had Mr. 
Wolfensohn not given up his Australian citizenship to become an 
American, he would never have become head of the Bank.

- Mr. Wolfensohn, why did you not stand by your chief economist Joe 
Stiglitz and allow that powerful voice of reform to be pushed out of 
his staff position and later from his advisory role by influential 
conservative forces both within and without the Bank?

- Mr. Wolfensohn, what about Ravi Kanbur, who headed the World 
Development Report Project? Why did you not stand by this advocate of 
reform and allow the conservative forces in the Bank to stonewall him 
and leave him no other option but resignation?

So far, what we have been told here today is that Mr. Wolfensohn 
feels good about going to work everyday and that Mr. Kohler also has 
a heart. This frothy stuff is not the response that we in civil 
society are looking for today. We want hard answers to hard 
questions. Please.



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