Tag: IMF

IMF’s pinkwashing has multifold effects on women’s health

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Thursday, 3 November 2022 — Peoples Dispatch

Roos Saalbrink talks about the different ways that IMF programmes undermine women’s right to health and the rights of women health workers

IMF healthcare

ActionAid and Public Services International recently published a new report – The Care Contradiction – looking into how the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs are impacting women workers. The report shows that although the IMF has recently come up with a Gender Mainstreaming Strategy, its actions in the field of building gender justice essentially add up to throwing sand in the observers’ eyes.

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‘The Canary in the Coal Mine’: Sri Lanka’s Crisis is a Chronicle Foretold

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Tuesday, 16 August, 2022 — Socialist Project

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Sri Lanka’s acute economic crisis and sovereign debt default, along with its people’s uprising in 2022, has drawn attention across the world. It is described as the ‘canary in the coal mine’, that is, a harbinger of the likely future for other global south countries. Eric Toussaint, spokesperson for the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM) interviewed via email Colombo-based Balasingham Skanthakumar of the Social Scientists’ Association of Sri Lanka and the CADTM’s South Asia network. The responses in draft were improved by Amali Wedagedera’s review and finalized on 5th August.

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What Was Covid Really About? Triggering A Multi-Trillion Dollar Global Debt Crisis.”Ramping up an Imperialist Strategy”?

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Thursday, 7 July 2022 — Global Research

Covid, Capitalism, Friedrich Engels and Boris Johnson

“And thus it renders more and more evident the great central fact that the cause of the miserable condition of the working class is to be sought, not in these minor grievances, but in the capitalistic system itself.” Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) (preface to the English Edition, p.36)  

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All That Glitters Is Not Necessarily Russian Gold

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Thursday, 17 March 2022 — Strategic Culture Foundation

Pepe Escobar

The “rules-based international order” – as in “our way or the highway” – is unraveling much faster than anyone could have predicted.

The Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and China are starting to design a new monetary and financial system bypassing the U.S. dollar, supervised by Sergei Glazyev and intended to compete with the Bretton Woods system.

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Why Comparing Chinese Africa Investment to Western Colonialism Is No Joke

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Monday, 31 January 2021 — FAIR

Daily Show: China Is Colonizing Africa

Trevor Noah (Daily Show, 12/16/21)

“Why China Is in Africa” (12/16/21) is a question Trevor Noah took up last month for Comedy Central‘s Daily Show. As with many of the topics taken up by the Daily Show, the issue is no joke: China has a large and growing economic presence in many African countries. The China/Africa deals cry out for analysis: Are they different from the deals on offer from Western countries like the US, Britain or France?

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IMF and debt: a new consensus?

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15 April 2021 — Michael Roberts Blog

by michael roberts

There is much talk among ‘progressive’ economists that the IMF and the World Bank have turned over a new leaf.  Gone are the days of supporting fiscal austerity, demanding that national governments get public debt levels down and insisting on conditions for countries borrowing IMF-WB funds that their governments privatise their state assets, deregulate markets and reduce labour rights.

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Ecuador: reversing the pandemic slump?

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8 February 2021 — Michael Roberts Blog

by michael roberts

The leftist candidate Andrés Arauz took the lead in the first round of the presidential elections in Ecuador.  Arauz won 31.5 per cent of the vote, putting him about 11 percentage points clear of his nearest rivals. It was unclear who Arauz would face in the run-off. Indigenous leader Yaku Pérez and Guillermo Lasso, a wealthy ex-banker, were in a technical tie for second place, with Perez on 20.04 per cent to Lasso’s 19.97 per cent.  The second run-off round will be in April but if Arauz runs against the pro-business Lasso, he is likely to win; it’s less sure against Perez.

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Modi’s Farm Produce Act Was Authored Thirty Years Ago, in Washington D.C.

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A Telugu translation is available as a pdf.

The kisan agitation at the gates of Fortress Delhi has forced even the corporate media to take note of the corporate drive to capture control of the remaining non-corporate sectors of the country’s economy, including its agriculture; the phrase “Ambani-Adani” is now a popular term for this process.

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Indian Farmers on the Frontline Against Global Capitalism

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1 February 2021 — Global Research

In a short video on the empirediaries.com YouTube channel, a protesting farmer camped near Delhi says that during lockdown and times of crisis farmers are treated like “gods”, but when they ask for their rights, they are smeared and labelled as “terrorists”.

He, along with thousands of other farmers, are mobilising against three important pieces of farm legislation that were recently forced through parliament. To all intents and purposes, these laws sound a neoliberal death knell for most of India’s cultivators and its small farms, the backbone of the nation’s food production.

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US Hits “Search and Destroy” Against China’s New Silk Roads

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10 December 2020 — Asia Times

By Pepe Escobar

Seven years after being launched by President Xi Jinping, first in Astana and then in Jakarta, the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) increasingly drive the American plutocratic oligarchy completely nuts.

The relentless paranoia about the Chinese “threat” has much to do with the exit ramp offered by Beijing to a Global South permanently indebted to IMF/World Bank exploitation.

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The IMF smokescreen

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24 October 2020 — The Next Recession

By Michael Roberts

In its latest World Economic Outlook report, the IMF again tackled the issue of climate change, global warming and what to do about it.  As it did last year, the IMF recognised that climate change was a burning issue for humanity and the planet.  But this time it claimed that there were policy options that could stop any further heating to a tipping point beyond which there was no turning back. Continue reading →

China’s Belt and Road (BRI): Investment and Lending Practices in Developing Countries. Is There a “Debt Trap”?

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25 August 2020 — Global Research

China’s One Belt One Road project has been a great source of speculation for some time since its announcement by the Communist Party of China and China has since fielded a barrage of endless accusations that they are seeking to assert “global hegemony” and consequently engaging in imperialism since then.

Corona Tyranny – and Death by Famine

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8 May 2020 — Global Research

By the end of 2020 more people will have died from hunger, despair and suicide than from the corona disease. We, the world, is facing a famine-pandemic of biblical proportions. This real pandemic will overtake the “COVID-19 pandemic” by a long shot. The hunger pandemic reminds of the movie the Hunger Games, as it is premised on similar circumstances of a dominant few commanding who can eat and who will die – by competition.

This hunger pandemic will be under-reported or not reported at all in the mainstream media. In fact, it has started already.

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Ecuador’s Austerity Measures, Repression Based on Lies AP Happily Spread

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23 October 2019 — FAIR

by Joe Emersberger

AP: Ecuador deal cancels austerity plan, ends indigenous protest AP piece in the LA Times (10/14/19)

Bernie Sanders tweeted an Associated Press article in the LA Times (10/14/19) about Ecuador’s recent protests, in which eight protesters were killed in 11 days. “Economic elites keep pushing austerity worldwide, making life unbearable for working people,” Sanders declared. Unfortunately, that AP piece was itself a good example of how elites push for austerity.

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Burn, Neoliberalism, Burn By Pepe Escobar

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23 October 2019 — Strategic Culture Foundation

Neoliberalism is – literally – burning. And from Ecuador to Chile, South America, once again, is showing the way. Against the vicious, one-size-fits-all IMF austerity prescription, which deploys weapons of mass economic destruction to smash national sovereignty and foster social inequality, South America finally seems poised to reclaim the power to forge its own history.

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General Strike Against the IMF Shuts Down Ecuador

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10 October 2019 — Left Voice

By 

On Wednesday, thousands of people across Ecuador took to the streets and walked out of their workplaces on the seventh day of a national uprising against the austerity policies of President Lenín Moreno and the IMF. The national strike was coordinated by indigenous groups in conjunction with Ecuador’s biggest trade unions and the student movement, and was heavily repressed by military and police forces.

PHOTO: DAVID DIAZ ARCOS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

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Around the world in 8 Minutes Ep 58: Ecuador fights back against IMF

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10 October 2019 — Peoples Dispatch

What has happened in the week of protests in Ecuador against the neoliberal economic policies of Lenín Moreno? Why are people on the streets?

In this episode of Around the World in 8 minutes, we look at the mounting resistance of the people of Ecuador to the neoliberal policies of Lenin Moreno. The struggle of Ecuadorians in the face of intense repression marks another moment in the Latin American outburst against the far-right whose policies have wreaked great havoc on the lives and livelihoods of all sections of the people.
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Defying repression, tens of thousands of Ecuadorians take part in national strike

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10 October 2019 — The Peoples Dispatch

The heavy-handed response of the Ecuadorian police and military to the massive mobilizations in the country has already cost eight lives with hundreds suffering grave injuries

Tens of thousands of protesters mobilized in Quito on October 9 against the neoliberal ‘package’ announced by President Lenín Moreno. Photo: Ecuador Today

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