Empat Langkah Strategi World Bank untuk Memperbudak Negara Berkembang

Dari komentar "JackManis" di Kaskus:

"Empat Langkah Strategi" World Bank untuk Memperbudak Negara Berkembang

Profesor Joseph Stiglitz, mantan Ketua Ekonom World Bank, dan mantan Ketua Penasehat Bill Clinton, mengakui di publik “Empat Langkah Strategi” World Bank untuk memperbudak negara demi keuntungan bankir.

Langkah Satu : Privatisasi. Pemimpin nasional akan ditawarkan 10% komisi untuk menjual aset-aset nasional. Uang akan disimpan dengan aman di rekening mereka di Swiss.

Langkah Dua : Liberisasi Pasar Modal. Stiglitz menyebutnya siklus uang panas. Dana dari luar negeri harus dibiarkan bebas masuk untuk berspekulasi di real estate dan mata uang. Saat keadaan tampak menjanjikan, uang ditarik keluar untuk menciptakan kekacauan ekonomi.

Negara bersangkutan kemudian akan meminta bantuan dari IMF dan IMF kemudian mensyaratkan untuk menaikkan suku bunga bank antara 30% sampai 80%. Ini terjadi di Indonesia, Brazil, dan juga negara-negara Asia dan Latin lainnya. Suku bunga tinggi ini menyebabkan kemiskinan bangsa, menurunkan nilai properti, menghancurkan produksi industri dan mengeringkan tabungan nasional.

Langkah Tiga : Penentuan Harga Pasar. Harga makanan, air, dan gas dinaikkan yang menyebabkan keresahan sosial yang berujung ke kerusuhan. Ini dikenal dengan istilah “kerusuhan IMF”. Kerusuhan akan menyebabkan pelarian modal dan kebangkrutan pemerintah. Ini menguntungkan korporasi luar negeri karena aset-aset negara tersebut sekarang bisa dibeli dengan harga amat murah.

Langkah Empat : Perdagangan Bebas. Ini adalah tahap di mana korporasi internasional akan memasuki pasar Asia, Latin Amerika, dan Afrika pada saat mereka sendiri tetap mengenakan tarif masuk bagi produk agrikultur negara dunia ketiga. Mereka mengenakan harga yang sangat tinggi untuk obat bermerek dan menyebabkan tingkat kematian dan penyakit yang sangat tinggi.

Akan ada banyak orang yang kalah dalam sistem ini, dan sangat sedikit pemenang, para bankir. Sesungguhnya penjualan utilitas seperti listrik, air, telepon, dan gas adalah prasyarat untuk mendapatkan pinjaman oleh negara berkembang. Aset-aset ini diperkirakan senilai 4 trilyun dolar.

Bulan September, Stiglitz diberikan hadiah Nobel bidang ekonomi.

http://www.kaskus.us/showthread.php?p=207803821#post207803821

Jubilee Plus publishes below a damning interview between Joseph Stiglitz ex-chief economist at the World Bank with the Observer, held over the weekend of the IMF's 2001 Spring meetings. In the interview he attackes the role of the US in stripping debtor nations of assets. He praised Botswana for defying the Bank and the Fund, and refusing a Structural Adjustment Programme.

IMF’s Four steps to Damnation

(UK) 29th April, 2001 by Gregory Palast

It was like a scene out of Le Carré: the brilliant agent comes in from the cold and, in hours of debriefing, empties his memory of horrors committed in the name of an ideology gone rotten. But this was a far bigger catch than some used-up Cold War spy.

The former apparatchik was Joseph Stiglitz, ex-chief economist of the World Bank. The new world economic order was his theory come to life. He was in Washington for the big confab of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. But instead of chairing meetings of ministers and central bankers, he was outside the police cordons. The World Bank fired Stiglitz two years ago. He was not allowed a quiet retirement: he was excommunicated purely for expressing mild dissent from globalisation World Bank-style.

Here in Washington we conducted exclusive interviews with Stiglitz, for The Observer and Newsnight, about the inside workings of the IMF, the World Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US Treasury. And here, from sources unnamable (not Stiglitz), we obtained a cache of documents marked, 'confidential' and 'restricted'. Stiglitz helped translate one, a 'country assistance strategy'. There's an assistance strategy for every poorer nation, designed, says the World Bank, after careful in-country investigation. But according to insider Stiglitz, the Bank's 'investigation' involves little more than close inspection of five-star hotels. It concludes with a meeting with a begging finance minister, who is handed a 'restructuring agreement' pre-drafted for 'voluntary' signature.

Each nation's economy is analysed, says Stiglitz, then the Bank hands every minister the same four-step programme.

Step One is privatisation. Stiglitz said that rather than objecting to the sell-offs of state industries, some politicians - 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 possibility of commissions for shaving a few billion off the sale price. And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest privatisation of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. 'The US Treasury view was: "This was great, as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We DON'T CARE if it's a corrupt election." ' Stiglitz cannot simply be dismissed as a conspiracy nutter. The man was inside the game - a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet, chairman of the President's council of economic advisers. Most sick-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia's industrial assets, with the effect that national output was cut nearly in half.

After privatisation, Step Two is capital market liberalisation. In theory this allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money often simply flows 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. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation's own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%. 'The result was predictable,' said Stiglitz. Higher interest rates demolish property values, savage industrial production and drain national treasuries.

At this point, according to Stiglitz, the IMF drags the gasping nation to 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] squeezes the last drop 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. 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 believe the riot was expected. And it is. What Stiglitz did not know is that Newsnight obtained several documents from inside the World Bank. In one, last year's Interim Country Assistance Strategy for Ecuador, the Bank several times suggests - with cold accuracy - that the plans could be expected to spark 'social unrest'. That's not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the US dollar Ecuador's currency has pushed 51% of the population below the poverty line. The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by bullets, tanks and tear gas) cause new flights of capital and government bankruptcies This economic arson has its bright side - for foreigners, who can then pick off remaining assets at fire sale prices. A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers but the clear winners seem to be the western banks and US Treasury.

Now we arrive at Step Four: free trade. This is free trade by the rules of the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank, which Stiglitz likens to the Opium Wars. 'That too was about "opening markets",' he said. As in the nineteenth century, Europeans and Americans today are kicking down barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa while barricading our own markets against the Third World 's agriculture. In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades.

Today, the World Bank can order a financial blockade, which is just as effective and sometimes just as deadly. Stiglitz has two concerns about the IMF/World Bank plans. First, he says, because the plans are devised in secrecy and driven by an absolutist ideology, never open for discourse or dissent, they 'undermine democracy'. Second, they don't work. Under the guiding hand of IMF structural 'assistance' Africa's income dropped by 23%. Did any nation avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, Botswana. Their trick? 'They told the IMF to go packing.' Stiglitz proposes radical land reform: an attack on the 50% crop rents charged by the propertied oligarchies worldwide. Why didn't the World Bank and IMF follow his advice? 'If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of the elites. That's not high on their agenda.

' Ultimately, what drove him to put his job on the line was the failure of the banks and US Treasury to change course when confronted with the crises, failures, and suffering perpetrated by their four-step monetarist mambo. 'It's a little like the Middle Ages,' says the economist, 'When the patient died they would say well, we stopped the bloodletting too soon, he still had a little blood in him.' Maybe it's time to remove the bloodsuckers.

http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk

http://www.jubileeresearch.org/analysis/articles/IMF_Four_steps_Damnation.htm

http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/209/42969.html