'IMF, Go To Hell'

The People of Argentina have tried the IMF approach; now they want it their way.
Naomi Klein. Toronto Globe & Mail March 16, 2002 http://commondreams.org/views02/0316-01.htm

On Tuesday in Buenos Aires, only a few blocks from where Argentine President Eduardo Duhalde was negotiating with the

International Monetary Fund, a group of residents were going through a negotiation of a different kind. They were trying to save their home.

In order to protect themselves from an eviction order, the residents of 335 Ayacucho, including 19 children, barricaded themselves inside and refused to leave. On the concrete facade of the house, a hand-printed sign said: IMF Go To Hell.

What does the IMF, in town to set conditions for releasing $9-billion in promised funds, have to do with the fate of these people? Well, here in a country where half the population now lives below the poverty line, it's hard to find a single sector of society whose fate does not somehow hinge on the decisions made by the international lender.

Librarians, teachers and other public sector workers, who have been getting paid in hastily-printed provincial currencies (sort of government IOUs), won't get paid at all if the provinces agree to IMF demands to stop printing this money. And if deeper cuts are made to the public sector, as the IMF also is insisting, unemployed workers who account for between 20 and 30 per cent of the population, will have even less protection from the homelessness and hunger that has led tens of thousands to storm supermarkets demanding food.

And if a solution isn't found to the "medical state of emergency" declared this week, it will certainly affect an elderly woman I met recently on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. In a fit of shame and desperation, she pulled up her blouse and showed a group of foreigners the open wound and hanging tubes from a stomach operation that her doctor was not able to stitch up or dress due to lack of medical supplies.

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business as usual. "It is truly surreal", the author observes. He concludes that attempts to `speak truth to power' on the lines of the Quaker model is a waste of time. "As Chomsky said: `The audience is entirely wrong, and the effort hardly more than a form of self-indulgence." He further quotes Chomsky as suggesting we engage with:

an audience that matters - and furthermore, it should not be seen as an audience, but as a community of common concern in which one hopes to participate constructively. We should not be speaking to but with. (Emphasis original).

`We' are the producers and the consumers without whom global corporatism would not exist. We need to un-learn the notion that we can only think the "specialised thoughts" of a divided labour force, dismissing the wider scene as "beyond our field of expertise". Chomsky, the linguist, claims the right to speak on domestic politics and foreign affairs because "I am a human being". We all have the powerful right and duty to speak as generalists living in the real world. At present, as Cromwell observes: "The destruction of the Earth, apparently, is always someone else's business". However, if `we' are to speak out together, we require first to study the institutions which govern our lives. What was the McLibel case all about? Why is it that money is available to build nuclear missiles but not to provide aids for the disabled? What questions should we be asking about the food that ends up on our tables? Cromwell provides an excellent work of reference, citing examples of community action and key written works seeking to break down the barriers between narrow theoretical specialisms and single-issue campaigns, using carefully referenced examples. I can highly recommend this well-researched, accessible documentation of ideas and resources. The reader will have to weigh up for themselves why it is that, although they raised the same questions throughout the 20`h century, Douglas and social credit are not even mentioned throughout this work.