Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: La bufala del "Cancella il Debito"

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/earticle/1662/
Remember last year when Bob Geldof, Bono, Blair and others excitedly
declared that they had liberated poor African countries from crippling
international debt?
In June 2005 the finance ministers of the G8 industrialised nations
struck a deal worth a seemingly whopping US$72billion that cancelled
the debt of 18 of the poorest countries in the world, 14 of them in
Africa. Geldof described it as a 'victory for millions'. At his
subsequent Live 8 jamboree - where the Great and the Good of the pop
world banged out tunes in the name of winning further debt relief and
aid commitments from the West - Geldof declared that 'all the debt
must be written off'. At the G8 meeting in Gleneagles from 6 to 8
July, the big powers copperfastened their commitment to debt relief and
agreed to double overseas aid commitments by 2010. 'Tomorrow,
280million Africans will wake up for the first time in their lives
without owing you or me a penny from the burden of debt that has
crippled them and their countries for so long', Geldof said (1).
So how's that working out for those on the receiving end, for those
who live in the poor African countries that have been liberated from
debt? 'It is rubbish. It stinks. This debt relief is making things
worse.' DeRoy Kwesi Andrew doesn't mince his words. He is a science
teacher and BA student in his twenties who lives in Accra, the capital
of Ghana, one of the countries whose debt was written off. Over the
past year he has been working on the film Damned by Debt Relief, a
scathing critique of the economic and political straitjacket imposed on
the poor countries that signed up for debt relief, produced by the
youth education charity WORLDwrite and which will be premiered at the
Battle of Ideas in October. 'Debt relief has given us nothing,
nothing', he says. 'But it has taken away very much: our
independence, our ability to develop, our self-respect. My message is:
"Take away your debt relief. Bob Geldof, get off our backs".'
'Debt relief' is one of those buzzphrases - like 'sustainable
development' or 'diversity' - that everyone agrees is a Good
Thing. After all, who could be for unsustainable development? Who could
possibly be against the cancellation of African and other countries'
debts? It was always ridiculous that a country like Ghana should have
been in debt to the tune of $6billion to institutions like the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Most people will think
it's good that, after Gleneagles, Ghana has been awarded multilateral
relief of $4.2billion, writing off a sizeable chunk of its earlier,
crippling debt. Andrew says the truth is a lot less rosy. For a country
like Ghana, debt relief has meant nothing in terms of increased
investment or more resources, but it has meant the country being forced
to submit to more stringent international regulation of its spending
habits and priorities. 'This is the fact about debt relief', says
Andrew. 'It does not deliver development and it also denies us the
freedom to pursue development. Do you expect people in Ghana to jump up
and down for that?'
'Debt relief has done nothing for the poor', he says. For a start,
it does not mean any new money, investment or resources whatsoever. The
G8 governments agreed to pay off the monies owed to the World Bank and
others by the worst-hit debt-ridden nations - a total of $72billion.
All of that will be deposited into the vaults of international banks,
not invested into poor countries. The money will be transferred from G8
treasuries to the coffers of international banks in stages over the
next 40 years. Andrew says: 'You know what happened? The G8 nations
helped out their friends in the international banks. They bailed them
out. It was a transaction between the G8 and their banks. It was
nothing to do with me, or Ghanaians, or Africans.'
Worse, while providing nothing in terms of new resources or investment,
the post-G8 debt relief programme ties poor countries into a
relationship of child-like dependency with international institutions.
The new debt-relief initiatives allow for massive increases in Western
intrusion into virtually every area of life and politics in developing
nations, especially relating to development policy itself. In the 1980s
and 90s, international institutions imposed notorious structural
adjustment programmes on to debt-ridden Third World countries, forcing
these nations to adopt austerity measures and privatisation policies in
return for some debt alleviation (2). Such programmes were criticised
by NGOs and liberals in the West. Now, however, the new debt-relief
programmes celebrated by some of those same NGOs and liberals as a
great breakthrough for history and humanity push conditionality even
further, and make it even stricter. They tell Third World countries how
to run their affairs, prioritise their investments and they insist on
regular check-ups to make sure these countries are adhering to 'good
policy performance' (3).
As Kewsi Pratt Jnr, a Ghanaian editor and journalist interviewed for
Andrew's film Damned by Debt Relief, argues: 'What has the G8 done?
The G8 has said they are going to wipe off 100 per cent of our debt.
What are they saying in real terms? What they're telling us is that
you owe us so much we are not going to take the money from you. You
generate the money yourself, through taxation, through your productive
activities and so on - don't pay it to us, keep it, but we are
going to tell you how to invest that kind of money. It's incredible.
No country in the West would accept that another country or another
institution in a foreign land should be determining its priorities and
how it spends its money. It is arrogant, insulting. It is repugnant.'
(4)
In the 1980s and 90s debt relief was a cover for monetarist economics
and structural adjustment programmes. Today it comes with
'pro-poor' and 'poverty reduction' conditions attached; these
might sound more palatable and PC than the conditions that went before,
but they amount to the same thing - a situation where the West says
what is best for the Third World. Indeed, today's debt-relief
conditions - which are more likely to be enforced by worthy charity
heads from Islington than by cocky World Bankers from New York or
Chicago - are even more intrusive than yesterday's. In order to win
debt repayment or relief today, Third World countries must agree to
mould their political and economic life - the very lifeblood of
sovereign states - around the diktats of Western governments and
banks. At the meeting of the G8 finance ministers in London last June,
it was decreed that 'in order to make progress on social and economic
development, it is essential that developing countries put in place the
policies for economic growth, sustainable development and poverty
reduction: sound, accountable and transparent institutions and
policies; macroeconomic stability; the increased fiscal transparency
essential to tackle corruption, boost private sector development, and
attract investment; a credible legal framework; and the elimination of
impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign.' (5)
Andrew points out that such demands are really about 'surveillance'
of the Third World: 'They want to keep a check on everything we do,
all our records, all our transactions. There is no independence here at
all.' And considering that debt-relief today is based on a
Performance-Based Allocation system - where countries have to
demonstrate 'good policy performance' in order to avoid having
further monies deducted by the World Bank - these states had better
toe the line, or else (6).
For Andrew, the worst thing about the new debt-relief programmes is
that they expressly forbid developing countries from investing in the
productive base of their economies - instead they must concentrate on
small-scale, 'pro-poor' policies that are designed to alleviate
(only ever incrementally, if at all) the harsh conditions of the
country's poorest people. 'It says "pro-poor" and that sounds
nice', says Andrew. 'But for us it means we cannot decide what to
do with our money and our economy, and it means we can never have real
development, real factories, real industry.' As Mohammed Issah of the
SEND Foundation, another interviewee in his film, argues: 'If there
is this condition which does not allow the government to invest
resources into the production base of the economy, then we have a
problem.' (7)
It isn't really surprising that debt relief has ended up
'strangling' Third World countries in this way - after all, it is
the branchild of the World Bank and the IMF, and was only subsequently
taken up by Third-World charities, the Make Poverty History campaign,
celebs and the Live 8 lot. With the harsh-world realisation that some
poor countries simply could not afford to repay their debts, in the
1990s the World Bank and IMF set about finding new ways to relate to
and manage the economic affairs of these countries. Motivated by a
desire both to deepen their influence on developing nations and to
boost their flagging moral authority, they launched the Highly Indebted
Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative in 1996. In 1999, they launched the
'enhanced HIPC', which eased some of the fiscal criteria of the
first-phase HIPC while introducing some of today's new, stringent
conditions based on the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy. For
all Geldof and co's claims that their concert and their march to
Gleneagles 'forced' debt relief on to the agenda, what really
happened at the G8 meeting last year was that the debts of those
countries that had signed up for and agreed to the strict conditions of
the HIPC initiatives were written off. What was widely celebrated as
people power forcing faceless bureaucrats to 'do something' for
poor Africans was in fact the final stage in a process of repackaging
austerity that was kickstarted by the World Bank and the IMF themselves
in the mid-1990s. Live 8 merely provided a radical-sounding soundtrack
to the World Bank's agenda.
What is most refreshing about DeRoy and WORLDwrite's film is that it
is packed with interviews with the kind of people we don't normally
hear from - with Ghanaian journalists, academics, activists and
workers, all questioning the dubious 'benefits' of debt relief and
expressing their desire to make Ghana a fully developed, industrialised
nation. But then, why should we need to hear from these people, when
Bono declared last year that, 'I represent a lot of people [in
Africa] who have no voice at all... They haven't asked me to
represent them. It's cheeky but I hope they're glad I do.' (8)
'He doesn't represent us', says Andrew. 'Neither does Geldof or
Blair. My message to them is: "You are not our messiah. We don't
need you."'
Andrew is most concerned about the message today's debt-relief
programmes send: that full-scale industrial development must be off the
agenda. 'Why should we accept this blueprint from the West, this
blueprint of sustainable development? We do not want sustainable
development. We do not want mud huts. We want concrete houses with
slate roofing. We want cars. We want everything you in the West have,
and even more than that.' Andrew grew up in Yiwabra, a village in the
Aowin Suaman district in the Western Region of Ghana. His parents were
peasant cocoa farmers who used axes, hoes and machetes to farm the
land. 'You should see what it did to them', he says. 'They became
old, injured, tired, because they were living "sustainable" lives.
What they really needed was a combine harvester. We are sick of being
told we must live simply because it is our cultural heritage. If Bob
Geldof wants to come and live in a mud hut and do my mother's
farming, he is welcome.'
Andrew performed well at various local schools and later went to study
in Accra - a city he describes as 'full of high expectation, full
of the colours of life, but also full of drudgery and stress', and
where he now argues with people, 'at every opportunity I get', for
less debt relief and more development. For him, the most poisonous part
of recent debt-relief and 'poverty reduction' campaigning is the
idea that a certain level of poverty is acceptable. 'They talk about
raising people's incomes from one dollar a day to two dollars a day.
Who wants two dollars a day? Do you? We should not graduate poverty
like this. Poverty is not acceptable in any form, anywhere. So please,
leave us to develop our way out of poverty.'
DeRoy Kwesi Andrew is introducing the film Damned by Debt Relief at the
Battle of Ideas on 28 October. The film is produced by WORLDwrite


(non e' un modo per attaccare quello che hai scritto, visto che non
l'ho letto)
Visto che fai dei copia incolla, non potresti almeno prenderti la briga
di tradurlo? Questo e' un NG per comunicare in italiano, non in inglese
(direi lo stesso se fosse francese o latino o cinese, a scanso di
equivoci).

Ok, avrò capito male io.
http://xoomer.alice.it/barcapi/giara/index.html

but we are going to tell you how to invest that kind of money.
Puttanata.
Taglio il resto delle stronzate.
-Stefano

 relationship of child-like dependency with international institutions.
Se cancellare i debiti non basta dovremmo regalargli i soldi, cioč fare 
l' elemosina (che č stato amche fatto in passato).
Ma cosa piů di questo metterebbe quei paesi in una relazione child-like 
con quelli che gli fanno l' elemosina?

 Juza scendi dalle nuvole e impara una lingua straniera!
Io ci vivo in un paese straniero (dove si parla guarda caso inglese) ma
non vado a scrivere in italiano sui gruppi in inglese

 non vado a scrivere in italiano sui gruppi in inglese
Be', vatti a leggere il manifesto del NG. E' previsto. Magari uno strano 
presentimento su quella che sarebbe stata la lingua diplomatica 
contemporanea.
Am.
-- 
Ovviamente hanno esagerato (oltretutto sbagliato anche i tempi)
ma non vedo nulla di scandaloso.
Tutti si danno del nazista o fascista reciprocamente (Capt. Kirk)

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Ma io ti do anche ragione, solo che questi imbecilli cercano di
metterti in difficoltà perchè non hanno argomenti.


 wrote in message
news:1158607730....@m7g2000cwm.googlegroups.com...
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#_SeNZa polemiche, ne fraintesi, ma solo per curiosita`; in quale paese
anglofono vivi?
Giano

 anglofono vivi?
Repubblica d'Irlanda