2024-02-16 18:15:21
Thursday February 15: The opening march
The opening march brought together nearly 15,000 people who marched to demand another world. The slogans demanded ecological, climate and social justice. They demanded the abolition of the World Bank World Bank
BM The World Bank brings together two organizations, the IBRD (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and the AID (International Development Association). The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) was created in July 1944 in Bretton Woods (United States), at the initiative of 45 countries gathered for the first Monetary and Financial Conference of the United Nations.
In 2022, 189 countries are members.
Click for more details. and the IMF IMF
International Monetary Fund The IMF was created in 1944 at Bretton Woods (with the World Bank, its sister institution). Its aim was to stabilize the international financial system by regulating the movement of capital.
To date, 190 countries are members (the same as the World Bank).
Click for more details. , as well as the cancellation of illegitimate debts, among multiple other demands. The parade brought together many Nepalese people. The most exploited sectors of the working classes were strongly present and very demanding.
Friday February 16: A great success for the first two CADTM workshops at the World Social Forum
New international debt crisis Debt
Multilateral debt : Debt owed to the World Bank, the IMF, regional development banks like the African Development Bank, and other multilateral institutions like the European Development Fund.
Private debt : Loans taken out by private borrowers regardless of the lender.
Public debt : All loans contracted by public borrowers. : The first conference organized by the CADTM brought together nearly 100 people. It focused on the new international debt crisis. Concluded by Éric Toussaint with the slogan: “There is life without the IMF”, this conference was led by CADTM delegates whose countries are hard hit by this new crisis.
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Aman Rahman (Bangladesh), vice-president of the Democratic Budget Movement (DBM) opened the conference by emphasizing the conditionalities Conditionalities Set of neoliberal measures imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on countries which sign an agreement, in particular to obtain an adjustment repayment of their debt. These measures are supposed to promote the “attractiveness” of the country for international investors but severely penalize the populations. By extension, this term designates any condition imposed for the granting of aid or a loan. imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on the population of Bangladesh which numbers 170 million inhabitants.
Amali Wedagedera (Sri Lanka) explained the emblematic situation of Sri Lanka, stifled by the IMF since its payment default in spring 2022, followed by an exceptional social movement which resulted in the flight of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, before he manages to come back and get his country to sign a harmful agreement with the IMF.
Another country hit hard by IMF programs is Pakistan, represented among the speakers by Abdul Khaliq, head of CADTM Pakistan. After the floods of summer 2022, Pakistan, which has 230 million inhabitants, signed new agreements with the IMF for an amount of 3 billion dollars. As in the case of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, these agreements rhyme with cuts in social budgets, reductions in subsidies on basic necessities, privatizations, etc.
Then, David Otieno (Kenya) spoke about the situation of his country which was held up as an example by international financial institutions in the past. This country of 53 million inhabitants, which has fully integrated into globalization Globalization (see also Globalization)
(extract from F. Chesnais, 1997a)
Until recently, it seemed possible to approach the analysis of globalization by considering it as a new stage in the process of internationalization of capital, of which the large transnational industrial group was both the expression and one of the most active agents.
Today, it is clearly no longer possible to stop there. The “globalization of the economy” (Adda, 1996) or, more precisely the “globalization of capital” (Chesnais, 1994), must be understood as being more – or even something completely different – than an additional phase in the process. internationalization of capital committed for more than a century. It is a specific – and in many respects important, new – mode of operation of global capitalism that we are dealing with, the driving forces and direction of which we should seek to understand, in order to characterize it.
The inflection points in relation to the developments of the main economies, internal or external to the OECD, require to be approached as a whole, starting from the hypothesis that they are likely to form a “system”. For my part, I believe that they reflect the fact that there was – referring to the theory of imperialism which was developed within the left wing of the Second International almost a century ago -, passage within the framework of the imperialist stage to a phase differing greatly from that which predominated between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the 1980s. I designate this one for the moment (with the hope that I will be will help to find a better one through discussion and, if necessary, controversy) with the somewhat complicated name of “global accumulation regime with financial dominance”.
The differentiation and hierarchization of the contemporary world economy of planetary dimension result both from the operations of concentrated capital and from the relationships of domination and political dependence between States, whose role has in no way been reduced, even if the configuration and the mechanisms of this domination have changed. The genesis of the predominantly financial globalized accumulation regime is as much a matter of politics as of economics. It is only in the neo-liberal vulgate that the State is “external” to the “market”. The current triumph of the “market” could not have been achieved without the repeated political interventions of the political authorities of the most powerful capitalist states (first and foremost, the members of the G7). This freedom that industrial capital and even more financial capital, valorized in the form of money, have regained to deploy globally as they have not been able to do since 1914, is of course also due to the strength that it has recovered thanks to the long period of uninterrupted accumulation of the “glorious thirty” (one if not the longest in the entire history of capitalism). But capital could not have achieved its ends without the success of the “conservative revolution” of the end of the 1970s. neoliberalism, finds itself trapped in a serious debt crisis. David Otieno, member of the CADTM International network and Via Campesina, particularly insisted on export monocultures which are a disaster for farmers and for the country’s food sovereignty.
Solange Koné also spoke of the situation in Côte d’Ivoire (27 million inhabitants), emphasizing the need to continue and amplify the fight for the abolition of illegitimate debts and the urgent and imperative need to repairs.
Abusive microcredit and exploitation of the poor: This workshop, which brought together around 50 people, dealt with abusive microcredit. Amali Wedagedara, who works daily with women victims of microcredit, explained the mechanisms behind abusive microcredit. Some women, suffocated by abusive rates and impossible to repay, are driven to suicide. Interest rates Interest rate When A lend money to B, B repays the amount loaned by A (the capital), but also an additional sum called interest, so that A has an interest in carrying out this financial transaction. The higher or lower interest rate is used to determine the amount of interest.
Let’s take a very simple example. If A borrows $100 million over 10 years at a fixed interest rate of 5%, it will repay in the first year one tenth of the capital initially borrowed ($10 million) and 5% of the capital owed, i.e. $5 million, so in total 15 million dollars. The second year, he repays another tenth of the initial capital, but the 5% only concerns $90 million remaining due, or $4.5 million, so in total $14.5 million. And so on until the tenth year when he repays the last 10 million dollars, and 5% of this remaining 10 million dollars, or 0.5 million dollars, so in all 10.5 million dollars. Over 10 years, the total repayment will be $127.5 million. In general, the repayment of capital is not made in equal installments. In the first years, repayment mainly concerns interest, and the portion of capital repaid increases over the years. Thus, in the event of a cessation of repayments, the remaining capital due is higher…
The nominal interest rate is the rate at which the loan is taken out. The real interest rate is the nominal rate minus the inflation rate. rose up to 220% in Sri Lanka in 2018. Out of a population of 22 million inhabitants, 2.4 million women fell into the trap of microcredit, and some of them defaulted on their debt. On this occasion, the Sri Lankan state came to the aid of microcredit companies. It is therefore public money which financed the payment defaults caused by the microfinance vultures.
Sushovan Dhar then developed the situation in India, the most populous country on the planet with more than 1,400 million inhabitants. In India, the microcredit sector is not regulated at all. He called for the establishment of social security and a public banking sector lending at low interest rates, recalling that over-indebtedness is only a reflection of the withdrawal of the State and the vulnerability of populations.
A participant insisted on the fact that at present, it is men who decide to go into debt through microcredit, but it is women who repay the borrowed money. Another of the participants, from Tamil Nadu in India, insisted that women spend their time dealing with problems related to debt repayment and no longer become politicized.
In the next 2 days, CADTM is organizing 5 additional public activities in Kathmandu which we will report on soon.
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