The Washington Peace Letter is published monthly for the social justice community of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. It's purpose is to support local, national and international struggles against oppression. It seeks to present a radical analysis of current events, covering information not readily available in the corporate media.

The Peace Letter welcomes submissions of calendar announcements, articles, letters to the Editor , and artwork from the progressive community. Articles may be from 300-1200 words, but may be edited for space considerations. Preference is given to materials that cover actions or organizing campaigns in the D.C, metropolitan area.

We reserve the right to select or reject any submission.

Except as noted, Peace Letter items are copyright free and may be reproduced. Please give credit and send us a copy if you do use something.

We told them so!

The world financial crisis, Russia’s collapse in particular, has provoked a rush of proclamations by experts that the neo-liberal consensus may not be perfect.

Critics like the 50 Years is Enough Network have been saying this for years, but there’s nothing like some pain for the powerful to drive the reality home to the pundits. Over a year after the crisis in East Asia began, the “tigers”—Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia—are still staggering despite the over $110 billion in rescue packages received from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). And the Russian decision in August to default on some debts and devalue the ruble—despite multiple IMF programs and loan packages—panicked world investors and sent the U.S. stock market into its second-biggest point-drop ever. Suddenly, Wall Street looked as vulnerable to the IMF’s miscalculations as poor people around the world have been for decades.

President Clinton’s stated goal of crafting new approaches to the international economy is a dramatic admission that existing financial institutions, the IMF in particular, no longer command the confidence of the most powerful political leaders.

This year may mark the beginning of the end for the extremist neo-liberal economic model that has beset the world for some 20 years. The obsession with free markets, cuts in social spending, privatization, and the dismantling of trade and investment regulations may finally have been broken. This is potentially one of the most significant turning points in many years. While the work by groups like the 50 Years is Enough Network has been vital, we have most of all to thank the “other side,” the IMF and its friends, for their single-minded pursuit of the “trickle-down” dogma which kept them from slightly humanizing their programs and thereby postponing the debacle.

But it would be unseemly to gloat when the celebrated reversals signal continuing and aggravated suffering for East Asians and Russians, possibly the rest of the world too. Indonesians are no doubt glad to be rid of Suharto, but the new government suggests they contribute to the country’s recovery by not eating two days a week. The number of Indonesians living below the poverty line has soared from 22.5 million to 118.5 million since the crisis began. That’s an increase from 11.2% of the population to 60.6%. Over a million Koreans have been laid off and about 800,000 Thais have lost their jobs. Suicide rates have leapt. Not exactly the news that economic justice advocates can be enthusiastic about.

However, I would suggest that it is important for us to gloat even in the face of such news. We should at least be vigorous in pointing out precisely what has happened and who is responsible. The disasters East Asians and Russians are enduring can be partly redeemed if we ensure that they are known and understood. When more people thoroughly understand the arrogance, immorality, and incompetence of the IMF, we can then end the reign of terror the institution has imposed on Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe.

If we don’t gloat, some people might assume that these crises were unavoidable, like natural disasters, or that the victim countries are at fault. We must point out that the results of IMF intervention in East Asia and Russia parallel exactly the catastrophic circumstances documented in other countries where the IMF has been active. We can finally reverse the IMF’s accumulation of power, stop it from expanding, and begin returning to the world’s peoples some measure of control over their economic fate.

Now that the world model, widely accepted as the only possibility, has been thrown into doubt, we hear more questions on the possible alternatives. I think we would be mistaken to believe that we must propose an alternative with equal pretenses of comprehensiveness to the IMF model. Our critique of globalization, after all, rests in large part on the absurdity of trying to impose a monolithic economic model on widely divergent cultures, geographies, and conditions.

Our emphasis should instead rest on ridding the world of the sort of arrogance displayed by the IMF, which believes the answers are provided by a divine science of economics and by restoring political and economic sovereignty to the peoples of the world. We would by no means advocate closing down international trade. We suggest dismantling the ideologies and institutional structures that have concentrated privilege and power among a small number of people. A world with less exploitation need not be a world with less cooperation. The world we should foresee is neither chaotic nor divided but richer in variety, freer interactions, and greater equity. And we may finally be taking significant strides toward such a world.

Soren Ambrose is a staff member of the Alliance for Global Justice. This article is excerpted from an artilce to be published in the forthcoming issue of the Economic Justice News, the newsletter of the 50 Years Is Enough Network. To contact , 50 Years Is Enough, call (202) IMF-BANK.

Back to Top