Behind the IMF and World Bank
The role of the U.S. Goliath and its military machine
By Richard Becker
"For globalization to work, America can't be afraid to
act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden hand of
the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's
cannot flourish without McDonald-Douglas, the designer of the
F-15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon
Valley's technology is called the United States Army, Air
Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
--Thomas Friedman, New York Times, March 28, 1999
It is impossible, without mutilating reality and doing great
disservice to the people's movement, to separate the struggle
against the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the
World Trade Organization from the struggle against U.S.
imperialism, its military aggression abroad and repression at
home.
Big demonstrations against the IMF and the World Bank on
April 16-17 in Washington are now in the final planning stages.
Many organizations have poured time, energy and resources into
these actions, which are aimed at shutting down the semi-annual
meetings of the IMF and World Bank.
The opposition to these two predatory institutions--which
have wreaked such great suffering on the oppressed countries
and peoples of the world for more than a half-century--comes
from a wide range of organizations including progressive
religious groups, unions, anarchists, and solidarity and
political groups.
Some organizers have billed the DC protests as "Seattle
East"-- a follow-up to the mass actions that disrupted the
World Trade Organization in Seattle in late November/early
December of last year. The events on April 16-17 promise to be
the biggest manifestation of opposition to the IMF and World
Bank yet seen inside the United States.
As generally progressive and important as this mobilization
is, there is a glaring omission in much of the organizing
literature for A16, as it is being called. There is almost no
mention of the relationship between globalization and U.S.
militarism and repression. This is not a secondary or side
issue.
U.S. imperialist domination is the number-one problem, the
main obstacle to real development and progress for the people
of the world. And military superiority above all is what makes
the United States the leading imperial power.
From Washington's point of view, the aim of globalization--
breaking down all barriers to capital's worldwide
exploitation--is not just "corporate domination" in the general
sense, but U.S. corporate domination. To achieve this
domination, the ruling establishment often uses economic,
political, diplomatic and military means in an integrated
strategy, as they have against Iraq and Yugoslavia.
Maximizing profit is, of course, what drives the system. But
maintaining its dominant position in the world economic and
political order is the guiding principle of U. S. strategic
doctrine. Globalization yes, but globalization with U.S.
capital in the driver's seat.
In its drive to maintain global hegemony, the IMF, World
Bank and WTO are instruments of U.S. policy. The enforcing arm
is the Pentagon.
IMF & World Bank set up
by the U.S.
From their very beginnings in 1944 at Bretton Woods, N. H.,
Washington saw the International Monetary Fund and World
Bank--originally called the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development--as a means to facilitate U.S.
world economic domination.
World War II was coming to an end. The Bretton Woods
agreement creating the IMF made the U.S. dollar the standard to
which all other countries' currencies were pegged. The IMF and
World Bank headquarters were established in Washington, where
they have remained until today.
The IBRD/World Bank's original priority was to extend
reconstruction loans to countries that would become importers
of U.S. goods. The idea was to help rebuild war-shattered,
non-profit-making infrastructure like roads and ports with
government-backed loans, so that later they could serve as the
means for private-sector trade and profit.
The aim, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau said at
that time, was "a world in which international trade and
international investment can be carried on by businessmen on
business principles." Morgenthau and other government officials
made it clear that they were referring first and foremost to
U.S. "businessmen." (Kolko, The Politics of War, 1990, Pantheon
Books, p. 257, footnote)
Establishing the IMF and World Bank was part of the
re-ordering of the world economic system by the United States
in the aftermath of World War II. They were designed to assure
U.S. global domination. This new order also involved the United
States becoming the dominant power in the declining empires of
its wartime allies--Britain, France, Netherlands, etc.--as well
as of its enemies Italy, Germany and Japan.
The imperialist allies/rivals were cut in on the new
post-war arrangement as distinctly junior partners of the
United States. Today they make up the G-7 group: United States,
Germany, Japan, Britain, France, Italy and Canada.
At the same time, the United States and its class allies
were fighting to stop the revolutions rising across Asia,
Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Seeking to roll back the revolutionary tide and secure its
new status and possessions, the United States never demobilized
its military after World War II. On the contrary, it embarked
on a vast military build-up of all types of high-tech and
conventional weaponry including nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons.
Since 1940, Washington has spent the unimaginable sum of $20
trillion ($20,000,000,000,000!) on the military--enough money
to have provided for adequate nutrition, clean water,
electrification, housing, literacy, and basic health care for
the world's entire population.
In the next four years alone an additional $1.2 trillion
will go down the military rathole.
Today the U.S. military budget is bigger than that of the
rest of the United Nations Security Council members combined.
This bloated military establishment exists to protect and serve
U.S. capital--not only to extend and maintain its domination in
what used to be called the Third World, the oppressed
countries, but also vis-a-vis its imperialist allies and
rivals.
The IMF and the Pentagon
U.S. strategy employs economic, financial, diplomatic,
political and military means to achieve its ends. As Thomas
Friedman, a leading mouthpiece for U.S. imperialism, put it in
his New York Times column, the military is the indispensable
"hidden fist" making imperialist globalization work. Friedman
wrote this column four days after the start of the 1999 bombing
war against Yugoslavia.
In the early 1980s, Yugoslavia was one of the first
countries to have a Structural Adjustment Program imposed on it
by the IMF. The country had taken major development loans
beginning in the 1950s. The worldwide economic recession of
1979 hit Yugoslavia hard and it needed to re-finance its
loans.
The economic austerity that the IMF demanded as a condition
for refinancing the country's loans played a major role in
heightening the tensions between the different republics and
provinces of Yugoslavia and exacerbating widely varying levels
of living standards within the federal state. This development
had the effect of strengthening nationalist and secessionist
elements from Slovenia to Kosovo.
The threat of trade sanctions, a credit cut-off and other
penalties by the United States and the European Community was
used to support the secessionist movements in Yugoslavia in
1991 and 1992 when civil war broke out. In 1992, the United
States forced economic sanctions, a total blockade of the
country, through the UN Security Council, and threw Yugoslavia
out of the UN and all other international bodies.
The sanctions blockade was enforced by military means, as
all blockades--including the current one against Iraq--must be
if they are to be effective. The U.S. Navy, along with its NATO
allies, began patrolling the Adriatic Sea and Danube River,
stopping all vessels that might be bound for Yugoslavia.
NATO jets prevented any air traffic to and from Yugoslavia,
and in the summer of 1995 launched a major bombing campaign in
Bosnia. In late 1995, Yugoslavia signed the Dayton Accords.
Even after Dayton, Washington maintained an "outer wall of
sanctions" against Yugoslavia--i.e. blocking credit and loans.
This meant preventing Yugoslavia from receiving new loans from
international institutions and banks, which the country badly
needed.
But the United States, while securing control of much of the
former Yugoslavia, had still not fully achieved its objective
of subjugating the entire region. So in 1999 came the 78-day
U.S./NATO bombing war, the occupation of Kosovo province,
followed by new sanctions and an oil embargo against
Yugoslavia.
The 10-year war against that country continues, using, as it
has since the beginning, the IMF, World Bank, UN and Pentagon
as elements of an integrated strategy.
To be effective, the movement resisting imperialist
domination must fight against U.S. wars and intervention
everywhere, at the same time that it struggles against the IMF,
World Bank and WTO.
It also must resist any attempt to line the movement up with
one faction or another in the U.S. ruling class in its struggle
against the People's Republic of China. This emerging movement
would be disoriented and eventually demobilized if it supported
the call to exclude China from the WTO or deny it normal trade
status.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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