 17th May 07 - Noam Chomsky, The International News The chaos that derives from the so-called international order can be painful if you are on the receiving end of the power that determines that order’s structure. Even tortillas come into play in the ungrand scheme of things. Recently, in many regions of Mexico, tortilla prices jumped by more than 50 per cent.
In January, in Mexico City, tens of thousands of workers and farmers rallied in the Zocalo, the city’s central square, to protest the skyrocketing cost of tortillas. In response, the government of President Felipe Calderon cut a deal with Mexican producers and retailers to limit the price of tortillas and corn flour, very likely a temporary expedient.
In part the price-hike threat to the food staple for Mexican workers and the poor is what we might call the ethanol effect — a consequence of the US stampede to corn-based ethanol as an energy substitute for oil, whose major wellsprings, of course, are in regions that even more grievously defy international order. |
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 10th May 07 - Naomi Klein, The NationIt's not the act itself, it's the hypocrisy. That's the line on Paul Wolfowitz, coming from editorial pages around the world. It's neither: not the act (disregarding the rules to get his girlfriend a pay raise) nor the hypocrisy (the fact that Wolfowitz's mission as World Bank president is fighting for "good governance"). First, let's dispense with the supposed hypocrisy problem. "Who wants to be lectured on corruption by someone telling them to 'do as I say, not as I do'?" asked one journalist. No one, of course. But that's a pretty good description of the game of one-way strip poker that is our global trade system, in which the United States and Europe--via the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization--tell the developing world, "You take down your trade barriers and we'll keep ours up." From farm subsidies to the Dubai Ports World scandal, hypocrisy is our economic order's guiding principle. |
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 1st May 07 - Jorge Rueda, Associated Press Writer / The Boston Globe
CARACAS, Venezuela --President Hugo Chavez announced Monday he would pull Venezuela out of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, a largely symbolic move because the nation has already paid off its debts to the lending institutions. "We will no longer have to go to Washington nor to the IMF nor to the World Bank, not to anyone," said the leftist leader, who has long railed against the Washington-based lending institutions. Venezuela, one of the world's top oil exporters, recently repaid its debts to the World Bank five years ahead of schedule, saving $8 million. It paid off all its debts to the IMF shortly after Chavez first took office in 1999. The IMF closed its offices in Venezuela late last year. |
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 28th April 2007 - Johann Hari, The Independent (UK) While the world’s press has been fixated on the teeny-weeny scandal over whether the World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz helped to get his girlfriend a $300,000-a-year gig next door, they have been ignoring the rancid stench of a far bigger scandal wafting from Wolfie’s Washington offices. This slo-mo scandal isn’t about apparent petty corruption in DC. It’s about how Wolfowitz’s World Bank is killing thousands of the poorest people in the world, and knowingly worsening our worst crisis - global warming - every day. |
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 18th April 07 - Soren Ambrose, Counterpunch.org As International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank officials engage in their joint semi-annual meetings in Washington, the Fund has a nettlesome new task: convincing its shareholders (most of the world's governments, represented at the meeting by Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors) that the institution should continue to exist. After some 30 years of making "bail-out" and "structural adjustment" loans to indebted and impoverished countries in return for their adherence to a long list of neo-liberal economic reformstrade and investment deregulation, privatization, tightening access to credit, and rapid budget cuts and public-sector layoffs, to name a fewthe IMF has been confronting a crisis of confidence for the past two years. Demand for its services has been shrinking. Its reputation has never recovered from its disastrous interventions in the East Asian and Argentinean financial crises (1997-1998 and 2001-2002 respectively). |
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 12th April 07 - Dean Baker, CommonDreams.org
Shortly after protests in Seattle nearly shut down a round of negotiations for the World Trade Organization (WTO), a group of academics, trade negotiators and business people met in Washington to figure out a way to reduce the hostility to their trade agenda. A former Clinton administration official suggested giving the critics “another sandbox to play in,” so that they wouldn’t continue to obstruct a new WTO agreement. Specifically, he suggested that those who were concerned about labor and environmental standards could focus their attention on the International Labor Organization (ILO). From the standpoint of the assembled honchos, the ILO was an appropriate “sandbox” because it has no enforcement powers. |
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 23rd March 07 - Pascal Fletcher, ReutersThe best way Europeans and Americans can make reparations for their past role in the slave trade is to end unfair trade policies that keep Africans shackled in poverty, a U.S. historian said. Adam Hochschild, whose 2005 work "Bury the Chains" charts the anti-slavery movement that led Britain to abolish the trade 200 years ago this Sunday, said more global campaigns were needed to end many forms of injustice persisting in the world. In an e-mail interview with Reuters, Hochschild said apologies by nations which had participated in the slave trade were "fine", but were no substitute for action against abuses. "The current global trading system, for instance, is really arranged for the benefit of multinational corporations and the wealthy countries, not the poor nations," he said. "If North America and Europe dropped the tariffs and subsidies that prevent African farmers from competing fairly on the world market this would probably do more for Africa than any imaginable form of reparations," he said. Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, from where by 1867 at least 10 million people had been shipped as slaves by European traders to the New World to work in sugar and tobacco plantations, say U.S. and European agricultural subsidies are keeping their farmers poor and robbing their countries of millions of dollars. |
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