A Different View: New IMF Rules To Isolate China and Russia?

[The IMF has, says Congress and the NYTimes, become more inclusive of China and Russia (see previous Frontlines post, https://revolutionaryfrontlines.wordpress.com/2015/12/29/ny-times-on-the-liberalizing-of-the-international-monetary-fund/).  But others, looking deeply, see the new IMF rules as counter-attacks on Chinese and Russian other-imperialist initiatives.  See this lengthy article for more details. — Frontlines ed.]

The IMF Changes its Rules to Isolate China and Russia

by Michael Hudson, CounterPunch, December 15, 2015

The nightmare scenario of U.S. geopolitical strategists seems to be coming true: foreign economic independence from U.S. control. Instead of privatizing and neoliberalizing the world under U.S.-centered financial planning and ownership, the Russian and Chinese governments are investing in neighboring economies on terms that cement Eurasian economic integration on the basis of Russian oil and tax exports and Chinese financing. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) threatens to replace the IMF and World Bank programs that favor U.S. suppliers, banks and bondholders (with the United States holding unique veto power).

Russia’s 2013 loan to Ukraine, made at the request of Ukraine’s elected pro-Russian government, demonstrated the benefits of mutual trade and investment relations between the two countries. As Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov points out, Ukraine’s “international reserves were barely enough to cover three months’ imports, and no other creditor was prepared to lend on terms acceptable to Kiev. Yet Russia provided $3 billion of much-needed funding at a 5 per cent interest rate, when Ukraine’s bonds were yielding nearly 12 per cent.”[1]

NY Times on the “Liberalizing” of the International Monetary Fund

[The IMF and the World Bank are key instruments of the finance/montary/credit-debt management of the entire world.  Enacted at the end of WWII to establish US leadership of the world imperialist system, both IMF and WB have come under endless criticism and challenges over the decades, but the emergence of new imperialist powers from post-socialist Russia and China has posed historically-contending  blocs-in-formation as unprecedented dangers to the once-presumed “permanent” US hegemony.  Both IMF and WB have become increasingly tattered and less effective instruments, as challenges have grown.  Congressional reforms aimed at a more durable structure for the IMF are hailed by the media-of-empire NY Times in the following editorial, which writes, strategically, ‘If the fund and the World Bank are to remain relevant and be truly global organizations, they cannot be seen as European and American fiefs.’ — Frontlines ed.]

Congress Gets Out of the I.M.F.’s Way

By The New York Times EDITORIAL BOARD, December. 22, 2015

The House went into holiday recess after passing a measure that included ratification of International Monetary Fund reforms.

After five years of Republican foot-dragging, members of Congress last week ratified an agreement that will increase the capital of the International Monetary Fund and give developing countries like China and India a greater say in the organization.

This should strengthen the fund at a time when its expertise is needed to help revive a slowing global economy. In 2010, the Obama administration negotiated an agreement with other countries to double the I.M.F.’s capital to about $755 billion, so it could lend more money to troubled countries like Greece and Spain. The changes also gave more voting power in the fund’s management to China, India, Brazil and Russia while slightly reducing the clout of European countries and the United States.

World Bank: Massive Displacements with “Development” Masks

[The World Bank, an instrument of the US-led reorganization of the world imperialist system since World War II, has enabled the maintenance of neocolonial systems with successions of comprador and puppet regimes around the globe.  The suffering brought under the “development” slogan in the mis-named “developing nations” has brought displacement to hundreds of millions who, in response to such oppression, have continually and repeatedly rebelled.  Even the superficial credibility of present-day World Bank has been challenged, and so, the World Bank aims to put lipstick on the pig. — Frontlines ed.]

CounterView, Wednesday, December 23, 2015

World Bank decides action on “sweeping failures” in rehabilitating people affected by projects funded by it

Fishing community in Gujarat “affected” by World Bank power project

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a powerful group of cross-border journalists, has appreciated that, after years of delay, the World Bank has initiated “action to address sweeping failures in its oversight of development projects that force people from their land or harm their livelihoods.”

False Claims Exposed: World Bank Is No Solution

Investigation Tears Veil Off World Bank’s “Promise” to Eradicate Poverty

by Kanya DAlmeida (united nations), Inter Press Service, Thursday, April 16, 2015

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 16 (IPS) – An expose published Thursday by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its media partners has revealed that in the course of a single decade, 3.4 million people were evicted from their homes, torn away from their lands or otherwise displaced by projects funded by the World Bank.

Nearly 50 percent of the estimated 3.4 million people who were physically or economically displaced by World Bank-funded projects in the last decade were from Africa and Asia. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

Over 50 journalists from 21 countries worked for nearly 12 months to systematically analyse the bank’s promise to protect vulnerable communities from the negative impacts of its own projects.

Reporters around the world – from Ghana to Guatemala, Kenya to Kosovo and South Sudan to Serbia – read through thousands of pages of World Bank records, interviewed scores of people including former Bank employees and carefully documented over 10 years of lapses in the financial institution’s practices, which have rendered poor farmers, urban slum-dwellers, indigenous communities and destitute fisherfolk landless, homeless or jobless.

US Empire: Crusty, Hulking, Feet of Clay, Short of Breath and Challenged

[It is rare to see the New York Times and other Western imperialist media write so bluntly about the decline of the US hegemonic controls over the world imperialist system.  This article draws a stark picture, although their claim that a big part of the cause is the infighting in Washington fails to focus on the several-decades  accumulation of crisis and contradictions within the post-WW2 capitalist system, exacerbated by endless wars and shifting production, trade, and resource alliances and contentions, not to mention the waves of mass resistance.  And only briefly mentioned is the huge challenge by the other major imperialist power, China.  That is a subject more deeply explored in the pathbreaking “Is China an Imperialist Country?” by NB Turner (available at  http://www.red-path.net/analysis/is-china-an-imperialist-country or in pdf at http://www.red-path.net/images/RP-paper-IsChinaAnImperialistCountry.pdf).  —  Frontlines ed] 

At Global Economic Gathering, U.S. Primacy Is Seen as Ebbing

By JONATHAN WEISMAN, New York Times, APRIL 17, 2015

[The clock is ticking uncomfortably fast, apparently–Frontlines} Janet L. Yellen, chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, checking the time after a financial ministers and governors photo on Friday. Credit Gary Cameron/Reuters

WASHINGTON — As world leaders converge here for their semiannual trek to the capital of what is still the world’s most powerful economy, concern is rising in many quarters that the United States is retreating from global economic leadership just when it is needed most.

The spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have filled Washington with motorcades and traffic jams and loaded the schedules of President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew. But they have also highlighted what some in Washington and around the world see as a United States government so bitterly divided that it is on the verge of ceding the global economic stage it built at the end of World War II and has largely directed ever since.

“It’s almost handing over legitimacy to the rising powers,” Arvind Subramanian, the chief economic adviser to the government of India, said of the United States in an interview on Friday. “People can’t be too public about these things, but I would argue this is the single most important issue of these spring meetings.”

Development finance helps China win friends and influence American allies

[Each day brings news of the every-sharpening contention between imperialist powers, who have long cooperated but are now more-ready to seize advantage at the expense of each other, and place burdens of more aggressive exploitation and more oppressive conditions on working people inside the imperialist countries (from US/EU to Chinese/Russian and others scrambling to expand their profits at each others expense).  One day, it is the seizure of energy resources, then it is trade routes and shipping, then monetary dominance, then credit dominance and wars, then military eyeball face-offs and surrogate/proxy hotspots, then it is digital battles and cyber wars.  There is no stopping this contention, nor any way for the people to see it but to raise the people’s struggles against all imperialism and all reaction.  Between these imperialists, working people have no horse in this race.  —  Frontlines ed.]

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

Mar 21st 2015 | SINGAPORE | From The Economist

 

STRATEGIC rivalry between America and China takes many forms. Rarely does a clear winner emerge. An exception, however, is the tussle over China’s efforts to found a new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). China has won, gaining the support of American allies not just in Asia but in Europe, and leaving America looking churlish and ineffectual. This month first Britain and then France, Germany and Italy said they hoped to join the bank as founding shareholders. China said other European countries such as Luxembourg and Switzerland are thinking of joining the queue.

Yet America has been sceptical about the AIIB. Its officials claim they have not “lobbied against” it, but merely stressed how important it is that it abide by international standards of transparency, creditworthiness, environmental sustainability, and so on.

US moving to block China’s challenge to World Bank

[Chinese imperialism is moving rapidly, knitting new alliances of trade, investment, security, intel-surveillance, and other challenges to the “traditional” US domination of these world relations.  Finance is one of the most active arenas of this inter-imperialist contention, as this fidgety New York Times article describes, from US perspective.  Significantly, the article, while focusing on the challenge to the US-dominated World Bank, does not go into the parallel challenge (to the US dollar standard) that China is making on the monetary systems of trade, investment, and credit — raising the yuan/renminbi as the significant “alternate” currency/monetary system.  The Wall Street Journal reported, “The U.K. government moved a step closer on Thursday to becoming the first country other than China to issue bonds in China’s yuan.” Revolutionary people everywhere are beginning to note that the contradictions within and between imperialists are sharpening, and becoming more muscular. It won’t do to focus on the US as the only imperialist to oppose.  —  Frontlines ed.]

U.S. Opposing China’s Answer to World Bank

By JANE PERLEZ, New York Times, OCT. 9, 2014

BEIJING — For almost a year, China has been pitching an idea to its neighbors in Asia: a big, internationally funded bank that would offer quick financing for badly needed transportation, telecommunications and energy projects in underdeveloped countries across the region.

With the public backing of President Xi Jinping and a pledge from Beijing to contribute much of the $50 billion in initial capital, the plan could be seen as an answer to critics who have long argued that China should take on greater responsibilities as a world power. But the United States, perhaps the most vocal of such critics, especially on issues such as climate change and arms proliferation, has not embraced the Chinese proposal.

Instead, in quiet conversations with China’s potential partners, American officials have lobbied against the development bank with unexpected determination and engaged in a vigorous campaign to persuade important allies to shun the project, according to senior United States officials and representatives of other governments involved.

Beware ‘social justice’ promises by international bankers

by Patrick Bond

2011-10-13, Issue 552, Pambazuka

‘In these days of dire economic and environmental crisis, with political elites under attack from Athens to Washington, the establishment is desperate for legitimacy. Even International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff now publicly endorse ‘social justice’ at the same time they tighten austerity screws,’ writes Patrick Bond. Someone needs to hold them to account.

In these days of dire economic and environmental crisis, with political elites under attack from Athens to Washington, the establishment is desperate for legitimacy. Even International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff now publicly endorse ‘social justice’ at the same time they tighten austerity screws.

China outdoes World Bank in lending to developing world

[The role of the World Bank in shaping the network of debt and dependence for the world imperialist system (and for the dominant US hegemonic role within it) is recently being challenged by the emerging imperialist rival, China, which is constructing its own global network of investment, trade, debt and dependence.–Frontlines ed.]

Beijing, Jan 18 : China has loaned more money to developing countries than the World Bank in the past two years, the Financial Times reported Tuesday.

Two state financial institutions, the China Development Bank and Export-Import Bank, loaned governments and companies in developing countries at least USD 110 billion in 2009 and 2010, surpassing the World Bank’s outlays of USD 100 billion from mid-2008 to mid-2009, which was a record for the world lending institution, the newspaper said, citing its own research.

The loans were an indication of China’s economic influence, its drive to secure raw materials and its efforts to diversify its economy away from a reliance on exports to Western developed countries, the Times said.

The money went to such projects as loans-for-oil agreements with Russia, Venezuela and Brazil; infrastructure projects in Ghana and Argentina; and power equipment for an Indian firm.

Africa: World Bank Unsure About Land Grab

Africa: World Divided Over New Scramble for African Land

Paul Redfern

4 October 2010

Nairobi — A World Bank report has confirmed that 45 million hectares of land in developing countries were bought in 2009, a tenfold jump from the previous decade.

Moreover, two-thirds of these controversial “land grabs” have been in Africa where critics say public and governmental institutions offer weak defences against western multinationals and Far Eastern state companies seeking farm land for food and biofuels.

While many development agencies and African campaigners are aghast at the latest news some believe that good land development projects are exactly what the world needs to solve the food crisis as they bring investment, knowhow, and transport links, as well as creating jobs.

But the morality of the global land rush is finely balanced and even the World Bank appears deeply torn.