The global financial crisis has discredited the financial institutions that played a part in causing it. Discussions of radical alternatives are beginning to flourish, with the world’s governments rushing to consult experts who previously found themselves out in the cold.
The International Development Association (IDA), the arm of the World Bank that makes grants and interest-free, long-term loans to poor countries around the world, lacks effective safeguards against corruption, according to a report by the Bank’s own Independent Evaluation Group (IEG). The report concluded that IDA, which currently lends and grants about $10 billion annually to governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, doesn’t protect its funds adequately from theft and diversion.
Will China be the "growth pole" that will snatch the world from the jaws of depression?
Tapping into a long tradition of politicized science fiction, the young, New-York-based filmmaker Alex Rivera has brought to theaters a movie that reflects in new ways on the disquieting realities of the global economy. Sleep Dealer, his first feature film, has opened in New York and Los Angeles, and will show in 25 cities throughout the country this spring.
It’s still there nestled in a box as a painful keepsake: the “none blacks” placard I stole as a toddler from the door of a café in Durban, where my mother — who easily passes for a European — met a white friend for coffee. “My four-year-old daughter did that for fun,” the café owner explained. “They know not to come here,” That wasn’t strictly true: the flapping kitchen door revealed a black woman wearing a hairnet, gloves, and an apron: less a human being than a human resource.
Corruption isn’t an issue that Jacob Zuma, the current president of the African National Congress — South Africa’s liberation party — is particularly enthusiastic about. Until prosecutors dropped charges in early April, Zuma stood accused of 18 counts of corruption, graft, fraud, and racketeering related to a rigged multibillion-dollar arms deal. He was alleged to have accepted 783 payments from French arms multinational Thint via his financial advisor Shabir Sheik, who was later convicted for graft, fraud, and corruption. Sheik has since emerged from prison, serving just 28 months of his 15-year term.
The leaders of the G20 will meet on April 2 in London. One item on their agenda will be to consider enhancing the International Monetary Fund’s role in international financial governance. This can only be successfully achieved if the IMF undergoes substantial reforms that require either difficult political compromises or amendments to the Fund’s Articles of Agreement, the formal international treaty that created the IMF and that has only been amended three times since the organization’s inception in 1946.
The Group of 20 (G20) is making a big show of getting together to come to grips with the global economic crisis. But here’s the problem with the upcoming summit in London on April 2: It’s all show. What the show masks is a very deep worry and fear among the global elite that it really doesn’t know the direction in which the world economy is heading and the measures needed to stabilize it.
Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. Sameer Dossani interviewed him about the global economic crisis and its roots. His first interview with Chomsky can be found here.
It’s not easy to make the International Monetary Fund look like a beacon of progressive enlightenment. But the Bush administration managed to do just that by letting ideology blind them to lessons from the Asian financial crisis that even doctrinaire IMF economists couldn’t ignore.