{UAH} Fwd: LIVING OUR LIVES INSIDE A TRAGEDY THE SIZE OF THE PLANET: THE THIRTY-EIGHTH NEWSLETTER (2018).

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From: Vijay Prashad <vijay@thetricontinental.org>
Date: 16 November 2018 14:41:28 GMT
To: <bobbyalcantara94@gmail.com>
Subject: LIVING OUR LIVES INSIDE A TRAGEDY THE SIZE OF THE PLANET: THE THIRTY-EIGHTH NEWSLETTER (2018).
Reply-To: Vijay Prashad <vijay@thetricontinental.org>

View this email in your browser LIVING OUR LIVES INSIDE A TRAGEDY THE SIZE OF THE PLANET: THE THIRTY-EIGHTH NEWSLETTER (2018).        Dear Friends,   Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.   After fifteen years in the cold, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) returned to Argentina this May. President Mauricio Macri promised to attract foreign direct investment and to make his country the 'supermarket of the world'. Instead, Argentina's economy went into a tailspin. The IMF entered with its shop-worn prescriptions, a recipe that it has effectively sold for the past four decades: structural adjustment. We will promise to give you funding and to help you attract investment, the IMF says, if you cut back on State spending on social infrastructure (education and health) and increase measures that are attractive to monopoly capitalism. Target inflation, say the IMF economists, not joblessness and desolation.   The effect of these policies has been increased social inequality across the planet. The Credit Suisse Global Wealth Database and the UBS Wealth Report are chilling. UBS shows that the world's 'ultra-high net worth individuals' – those who hold more than US$30 million – are 0.004% of the world's population but they control 12.8% of global wealth. Credit Suisse shows that in the past two decades, the top 1% of global wealth holders have increased their share of household wealth from 45.5% to 50.1%. You don't need a Thomas Piketty to tell you what is evident around the world. These numbers carry within them policies – what makes this inequality happen – and feelings – how this terrible situation has to be lived by ordinary people.   The IMF has made a career of making political interventions look like economic policy. To slash social spending and to guarantee a rate of return to banks is not science. It is class warfare. The very prescription written by the IMF to solve Argentina's social and economic problem will precipitate further crises. Neoliberal policies do not seek to solve crises, but they seek to create a situation of permanent crisis. Argentina Goes Back to the IMF That is the basic argument of our Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Dossier no. 10: Argentina Goes Back to the IMF. You can download this dossier, written by our office in Buenos Aires, free from here (for a short summary of the dossier, written by our researcher Nate Singham, go here, and watch the little video on the dossier above). The dossier contains superb photographs by Barbara Leiva and Tristán Basile, as well as original art by Wacha (see above).   A small window opens from the suffocation of Macri and the IMF. In Villa 21-24 in Buenos Aires – a working-class community – a left-leaning alliance Tierra, Techo y Trabajo (Land, Shelter and Work) has won the presidency of the neighbourhood council. This will boost the confidence of the left. It needs every sliver of hope.   In Mexico, on 1 December, the left-leaning president – Andrés Manuel López Obrador – will take power. Already the IMF has interrupted his presidency before it began to say that he must make the imperialism of high finance happy rather than Mexico's citizens (as I argue in my column this week). When López Obrador cancelled an expensive airport and then when the legislators from his party tried to move a law to limit bank fees, the stock market and foreign investors went on strike. The ratings agency Fitch downgraded Mexico to 'negative'. This was a warning. López Obrador had to behave or else. The narrow framework for policy has been set by the IMF and by international banks. They do not care for Mexico's social development. The test is Mexico's oil industry. López Obrador knows that Mexico imports oil because its capacity to refine its own oil is insufficient. An IMF team left Mexico City with a rebuke. No investment should be made. Mexico must remain structurally dependent on monopoly oil firms and it must remain entangled with the United States. Any move to create sovereignty will be hit hard by the ratings agencies, the IMF and the banks. López Obrador is trapped. In our Notebook - Alternatives to Globalisation<