MICHAEL WALSH CORRESPONDENT The International Monetary Fund (IMF) often hits the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Leaving aside the sexual peccadilloes of its former boss, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, there is an air of charity about this organisation. Is this malevolent body as deserving of respect as it seems?

Far from being a ‘A helping Hand’ benevolent bank helping distressed economies the IMF by taking over and mismanaging national banks plunges its client countries into further distress.

Not according to Christine Ahn, policy and research analyst with the Global Fund for Women. In her scathing analysis, she charges the IMF with systematically raping the earth, the poor, and violating the rights of women.

Alluding to the former head’s indiscretions she says the IMF’s methods are consistent with the gender bias inherent in the IMF’s institutional policies and practice.

The IMF was established immediately following World War 2. The intention was to promote international trade and fiscal cooperation by acting as a banker for nations and assisting those experiencing difficulty balancing the books.

With 184 registered nation members the organisation seems to be broadly representative but as with NATO, the United Nations and many other ‘broadly representative’ bodies this is window dressing.

The truth is somewhat different. Five nations control 50 per cent of the IMF’s votes: The United States, France, Germany, Japan, and Britain.

The IMF’s charity is likewise a myth. Yes, it does provide loans to struggling economies but in return the most draconian austerity measures are imposed. These are known as Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs).

Typically, the borrowing country is encouraged to diversify essential agricultural needs to exportable commodities, which undermines a nation’s self-sufficiency.’ Does it work? To raise foreign currency and ensure the survival

l of the USSR dictator Josef Stalin sold the Ukraine’s wheat during the 1930s. As a consequence, an estimated 7 million Ukrainian people died of disease and starvation. Lenin said: “Three-quarters of mankind may perish so that the rest experience Communism.”

The IMF obliges creditor nations to lower import tariffs and savagely cut government services. The net result is poverty affecting all classes; in particular, the women who make up 70 per cent of the world’s poor.

The IMF does not bail out countries; it toxically ensnares them and the harsh conditions imposed benefit directly the international banking cartels and speculators of the five most powerful nations.

The IMF is no less than a self-serving loan shark no different from credit brokers that infest working class estates.   

When the IMF pounced on Tanzania with a $5.8 billion loan of bankers’ credit, such was the savagery of cuts in public services the population’s death rate spiked sharply, especially among pregnant women.

From there on many women paid for their education or health bills by selling their bodies. The international bankers became more bloated as a consequence of their ruinous usury. Not much altruism there, except to themselves.

The IMF’s only good point is that it is not racist; it treats every nation’s people as though they were plantation workers. A $57 billion loan to South Korea had strings attached; as a consequence, millions lost their jobs.

For every man made redundant seven women lost their jobs. Is there an end in sight? Today the Koreans work the longest hours. Those working in the informal economy increased from 40 percent to 60 percent.

IMF policies privatise nationalised industries. The effect is that foreign speculators, encouraged by the banks, plunder a borrowing nation’s assets.

Many of these assets are water, land, forests and fisheries upon which the people depend. Henk Hobbelink of GRAIN, an international organisation that promotes sustainable agriculture and biodiversity says,

“This is one of the main factors in the current food crisis, for which the IMF is directly to blame. There have been demands that Austria sell its mountains, Argentina the Patagonian region and Greece its islands. There is nothing benevolent about the IMF. It is far more Shylock than Santa.  TELL US WHAT YOU THINK

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