This was heard on the BBC programme Pick of the Week as a
repeat of a show earlier in the week.
repeat of a show earlier in the week.
Just when we need Peston to keep his composure,
he goes all googley over
he goes all googley over
The Moneybags Lady
The over-baked bagette with floss on top
He said something like, "she's a very charismatic lady",
and then lost the plot completely.
He was supposed to press her for solutions to the crisis
and instead he was watching her cross her legs.
did that creep you out?
I let out a long eeeeeeeooooooow
Unfortunately, the Beeb doesn't keep recordings online for long, lord knows why.
and I'm busy, so what can we do?
So, the address with the damning evidence is/was
IshitUnot: sturdyblog
Christine Lagarde’s “tough love”
By urging Greeks to pay up without whingeing the IMF
chief has revealed her deep historical and cultural ignorance.....
In an interview for the Guardian, Christine Lagarde
did exactly that. She chose to tell Greece it was payback time. “That’s right”,
she said calmly, “Yeah.” She chose to talk about starving babies in sub-Saharan
Africa to strengthen her call to Greece to stop whingeing and pay
up. She chose to pinpoint
tax evasion by a fraction of the population of a country which accounts for
less than 0.5% of the world’s GDP as the sole source of the world’s
economic woes. She chose to bury her head in the sand.
But, while her argument has been loudly lauded as
“tough love” in many a luxurious Northern European dinner-party, over a glass
of cheeky Beaujolais Nouveau, the most rudimentary scrutiny reveals it to be
strategically, economically and intellectually flawed....
There are very few ways one could make such a move
even more cack-handed. One could choose, as the vessel of such sentiments, an
ex-Finance Minister
of a Eurozone country; perhaps
someone who left France
with its highest deficit in 60 years. One could choose someone currently
under investigation for
not just one but two cases of fraud in shady financial deals. One could
even accompany this interview with a pictorial which showed her dispensing thrift advice, while displaying
a deep tropical tan, heavy jewellery and expensively tailored clothes.
And from such a throne of non-credibility, came the attractively
packaged but intellectually hollow arguments.
First, the insidious idea that the misery engulfing
the people of any nation is to be ignored, on the basis that there is even worse misery elsewhere. That in some way
helping Greece – a member of
the European Union for thirty years – is a direct alternative to helping
“little kids from a school in a little village in Niger”. There is no such proposed
programme to help little kids in Niger, you understand. This is a
fictional programme, part of the IMF’s varied portfolio of fictional charitable
work, that could, possibly, maybe happen, if only Greeks stopped being so
selfish.
The hollow nonsense continued to flow freely. Faced with the question of women without
access to a midwife when they give birth, patients dying without access to
drugs, the elderly dying alone for lack of care and children starving,
Lagarde’s response is simply to say that it is very easy for them to help
themselves. How? "By all paying their tax. Yeah."
That’s right. Because, plainly, it is the same mothers
without access to midwives, the elderly without care, the sick who cannot
afford the newly introduced €5 hospital
admission fee, the children without food, who have hoards of taxable income
and are busily trying to
send it to banks in Switzerland,
while starving. Greece
as one homogenous, tax-dodging mass responsible for its own downfall.
Which all enforces the grand illusion that all this is
nothing to do with a global financial
crisis, brought about by the very interests that the IMF represents.
Instead, it was a Greek time-bomb waiting to explode. This, however, creates
some difficulty in explaining the IMF’s
assessment of Greece
in May 2008. It boasted headlines like; “The Greek economy has been buoyant for
several years and growth is expected to remain robust for some time”; “The
Greek banking sector appears to be sound and has thus far remained largely
unaffected by the financial market turmoil”; and “in view of Greece’s
membership in the EMU, the availability of financing for the external deficit
is not a concern”.
Presumably, what is implicit in Lagarde’s comments is:
We got it wrong then, but you should take our advice now. We’re definitely,
definitely right this time. The IMF is, after all, the forensic scientist of
the world’s financial woes. “It's not either austerity or growth, that's just a
false debate”, Lagarde explains. “Nobody could argue against growth. And no one
could argue against having to repay your debts. The question and the difficulty
is how do you reconcile the two, and in which order do you take them? I would
argue that you do it on a country by country case.”
I invite Christine Lagarde to name one example, one country, one case where the IMF decided that
repaying a debt came second to growth.
It certainly was not Malawi – ordered by the IMF to sell its grain reserves
in 2001 to private companies in order to repay a debt with 56% interest
(which it had been advised to take by
the IMF); a move which directly caused hundreds of people to die the next year.
It certainly was not Argentina which, having been the
busty centrefold of IMF policies throughout the 1990′s sticking religiously to
all IMF advice – privatising everything
but their anthem, liberalising industries, lowering corporation taxes while tightening public spending, suffered one of the
most catastrophic economic collapses in 2001. The IMF demanded it got paid
first and actively lobbied against discounts to creditors.
As a matter of fact, there appears to be not a single
example of the IMF’s Structural Adjustment policies applied to a crisis
situation where they haven’t brought
more misery and stagnation. Its obsession with austerity has recently been described as
“dangerous” for European recovery, by the OECD.
Nobel-winning Joseph Stiglitz, put it at its bluntest: “When the IMF arrives in a country, they are interested in only one
thing. How do we make sure the banks and financial institutions are paid?...
It is the IMF that keeps the speculators in business. They’re not interested in
development, or what helps a country to get out of poverty.”....
what is being advocated,
then do precisely the opposite.
Many Greek voters
certainly plan to. That’s right. Yeah.
