Policies and effects:
Cut Spending on health, education, etc.
Increased school fees force parents to pull children--usually girls--from
school. Literacy rates go down.
Poorly-educated generation not equipped for skilled jobs.
Higher fees for medical service mean less treatment, more suffering, needless
deaths.
Poor women, already overworked, must provide healthcare and caretaking for
family members.
Shrink Government:
Less enforcement of labor, environmental, and financial laws.
Sudden, massive government layoffs fill the labor market, make more people
compete for the same number of jobes, makes people desperate to work at any wage
Increase Interest Rates:
More money for wealthy investors. When a country lowers interest rates
investors will find it a profitable place to park cash, though they may pull it
out at any moment
Small farmers and businesses can't get loans to stay afloat. Workers cannot
get morgages or borrow money, slowing down the economy.
Small farmers sell land to rich landowners and corporations, work as tenants
or move to worse lands.
Small businesses shut down, leaving workers unemployed, making people willing
to work for less (see shrink government).
Eliminate Regulations on Foreign Ownership of Resources and Businesses
Multinational corporations can buy local industries easily.
Countries compete for foreign investment by offering tax breaks, low wages,
free trade zones, and promise not to enforce democratically-created labor and
environmental laws. (race to the bottom.)
Once in the country, corporations can turn to WTO for enforcement of "rights"
Control of entire sectors of economy can shift to foreign control. This puts
poor nations at the mercy of rich people in rich nations. Rich western bankers
can freeze the budgets of democratic nations and even stop wages to millions of
workers, as they did in Russia.
Eliminate Tariffs:
Makes luxury items cheaper for those in the country, rich can splurge more
and invest less.
Makes it harder for local producers to compete against better-equipped and
richer suppliers (who developed with tarriffs).
Leads to closure of businesses and layoffs.
Cut Subsidies for Basic Goods: Reduce government support to reduced cost
of bread, transportation, etc.
Raises cost of food and items needed to survive, making workers more
desperate to work under any conditions.
Poor instantly become much poorer, leading to riots. Just imagine what you
would do if you saw food prices rise 75% in 3 days, as they did in Indonesia
under "reform".
Re-orient Economies from Subsistence to Exports:
Give incentives for farmers to produce cash crops (coffee, cotton, etc.) for
rich nations instead of food for the poor nations, encourage low-pay, low-skill
manufacturing to send to rich nations, instead of developing and training poor
nations. Encourage mining, drilling, clearcutting, and other displacing,
destructive exploitation that helps rich nations but does nothing to develop
poor ones.
Produces hard currency to give rich their interest payments .
Law of supply and demand pushes down price of commodities as more countries
produce more of what the rich already have, letting the rich pay less to the
poor for the same amount of wood etc. Low prices mean local businesses lose
money, cut wages and lay off workers.
Best lands devoted to cash crops; poorer land used for food crops, leading to
soil erosion.
Food security threatened - poor depend on the whims of the rich for survival.
Right now the world grain market is under the control of just three
corporations: Dreyfus, of France, and the US-based Cargill and Bunge.
Already overworked women often have to gather food for family while men work
for cash.
Monoculture
Diversity and creativity are just too innefficient for neos.
"Im looking to be entertained, not be taught anything" said Ontario
premier Mike Harris, who cut his own arts council while spending taxpayers money
on handouts to the blood-and-boobs billionaires of Hollywood, which likes to
film movies about New York in Toronto.
Privatisation of government-run industries
Massive lay-offs, loss of services to remote or poor areas (not profitable
enough). Wages lowered, less spending to power economy. Often the businesses go
to the corrupt ("crony capitalism" - see Russia).
Deregulation of monopolies such as water, communications, power etc.
Monopolies gouge customers with high prices and low quality. This hits the
poor, especially water privatization.
Less aid, let them eat lies
Despite a promise made by rich nations in 1990 to give .2 percent of their
GNP to the world's poorest countries, the amount of foreign aid sent to poor
Nations has fallen 30 percent during the 90s. The average donation is .05
percent (The equivalent of giving a nickle for a tip after a hundred dollar
meal.)
Military
There is one exception to the less-government pattern. Government that helps
people is reduced, but death and destruction is still considered worth spending
on.
In desperately poor Zambia, military spending went from 23% in the early 80s
to 50% in 1987. Nigeria bought 80 battle tanks from the UK at a cost that could
have immunized two million children. While tanks are acceptable, immunization
would have been "misguided" "overambitious" and not "disiplined". During the 80s
Ethiopia, with a GDP of 110$ per person, spent 13$ each per year on the military
but only 7$ on health and education combined.
Welfare Kings
IMF "bailouts" give millions of taxpayer dollars to millionaire bankers to
"restore their confidence". Since this money adds to the debt, which means more
interest payments to bankers, governments are actually paying bankers twice with
the same handout! Wonder if it hurts their work ethic...
Loss of democracy
All of these policies are unpopular, so opposition has to be crushed. In
wealthy nations corporations "shout down" debate by spending millions and
millions of dollars on propaganda to sell neoims via Public Relations firms,
think tanks (whos reports are always found worthy of publishing - by
corporate-owned media), advertising, and lobbying and bribing politicians. In
Canada, the leading think tank is the Frasier Institute, which produces wisdom
like: "We must cast away the myth that popular elections are...leading to an
improvement in the freedom of Canadians" People unlikely to vote for neos
(such as blacks in Floridia) are taken off voter lists and disenfranchised in
other ways. Protestors are arrested en masse and freed after they have been
photographed and identified - so that they can all be rounded up later, when an
excuse is found.
A few photos
from the past few months alone
In other nations, neoism is simply spread by brute force and terrorism.
Thousands of protestors have been killed in "IMF riots" in the third world, this
trend is spreading to rich nations as well.
Some of the most spectacular oppression by neoism was in Chile, the Acteal
massacre in Mexico, the assassination of thousands of Colombian union and
popular-sector leaders over the past several years, the raping to death of
American nuns by US-funded "freedom fighters" in El Salvador, and the savage
assassination of Bishop Gerardi of Guatemala. Many of these terrorist campaigns
are funded, armed and trained by the USA, justified by the "war against drugs".
The IMF-WB and other bankers have a history of "loaning" to the tax-haven
fortunes of corrupt dictators and leaving their citizens to pay. Suharto in
Indonesia, Houphouet-Boigny in Ivory Coast, Moussa Traore in Mali, Marcos in the
Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, the Videla regime in Argentina and
"Founder-President-Helmsman-Godking-Messia" Mobutu in Zaire are some examples.
Double standard Justice
While neoism imposes LAW on the poor, neos insist that corporations should be
able to write their own "guidelines".
For example, Charlotte Observer Page 17A November 22, 1996:
"Don't deny indigent children legitimate labor
...Many manufacturers want to use foreign subcontractors, but they don't want
to exploit children." Why they want higher labor costs is not explained.
"They are trying to develop reasonable guidelines for doing business. Labor
leaders and child advocates should not sabotage such efforts by demanding that
the United Nations and U.S. companies set standards higher than other
countries."
Now imagine someone saying that laws against murder are "sabotaging" the
"reasonable guidelines" being written by murderers.
(Not much later the "family-values" republican Congress dutifully killed the
ChildLabor Deterrance Act)
Orwell spinning in his grave:
"Lean concept of synchronour organizational structures" (GM)
"Normal payroll adjustment" (Wal-Mart)
"Strengthening global
effectiveness" (Procter and Gamble)
"Involuntarily separated from the
payroll" (Bell Labs)
- Corporate words for "unemployment"
Not practicing what they preach
The effects of neoism are biggest in poor nations, because neos tend not to
practise what they preach.
For example UNCTAD estimated that the rich nations that promote neoism spend
nearly a billion dollars a day on subsidies to agriculture, most of which goes
to rich agribusiness corporations. These corporations then use this money to
bribe politicians to urge the third world to cut subsidies. Since the Uruguay
round, farm subsidies in rich nations have actually increased.
Oxfam, the British-based anti-hunger network, notes that while the average
tarrif in rich nations is 5%, goods from poor nations are 300% more likely to be
hit by tarrifs over 15%.
A recent study of the top 100 transnational corporations in the Fortune list
found that "virtually all appeared to have sought and gained from industrial
and/or trade policies [of their home government] at some point," and "at
least 20...would not have survived as independent companies if they had not been
saved in some way by their governments." Ruigrok, W. (1996) FT,
Jan. 5. McQuaid, K. (1994) Uneasy Partners Baltimore-London, Johns Hopkins
University Press
NAFTA happily protects Floridias Everglade-destroying sugar industry against
cheap sugar from Mexico (or someday, Cuba).
