The People's Strike - Sept 2002 - Our Fight is Their Fight
from the People's Strike Newspaper
Washington DC, too, is struggling against a "structural adjustment program"
They call it the "Washington Consensus," and that's not just because the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have their headquarters here. For years, Washington, DC has lived under a fiscal regime that is identical to the racist, socially destructive, and authoritarian "solutions" the IMF and World Bank impose around the world. And the results are just as bad.
An IMF/World Bank "rescue" mission starts with a fiscal SWAT team traveling to the developing nation in question, holing up in a five-star hotel, and drawing up a long-term economic plan that's just like all the others the two institutions impose in every other country they visit. When they leave, they make clear that any "democratically" elected government that doesn't follow the "correct" economic policies in future will have its credit withdrawn and sink back into a sea of debt.
Washington, likewise, lived for five long years under a financial control board committed to carrying out a destructive fiscal policy developed by a group of white, suburban congresspeople who made sure never to be caught in the city after dark. When the board finally handed a degree of self-government back to the people of Washington two year ago, it was with the understanding that if we elected public officials who did not follow the "correct" economic policies, we would again have our credit withdrawn along with our basic right to govern ourselves.
The initiatives the IMF and World Bank put in place always include the same economic prescriptions, no matter how different a country's circumstances and needs
- drastic budget cuts,
- public sector layoffs,
- rapid privatization of government services,
- comprehensive trade deregulation,
- incentives to grow cash crops like coffee and cocoa instead of food crops
for local use, and
- a rejection of industrial diversification in favor of sweatshops producing
clothing and simple goods for wealthy countries.
Washington, DC's economic policies ever since the financial control board took over amount to much the same thing. Only instead of trade deregulation, we have lost any ability to tax commuters; instead of cash-crop incentives, we get banking policies that red-line poor communities, denying credit where it's most desperately needed; and along with sweatshops, we get low-paying jobs in downtown/Capitol Hill office buildings.
The IMF and World Bank have no use for economic activities that arise from the communities themselves, or for the education and health care they need. Instead, they favor big infrastructure projects - dams, oil fields, highways - that afford opportunities to multinational companies. And they don't like "expensive" educational and social services, preferring budget surpluses that keep the transnational bankers happy.
The fiscal regime that dictates DC government has no use for a community-based economy either - or for education and social services. While the city government pursues megaprojects like an Olympics and Grand Prix, it starves the services we need to better our lives, even shutting down the city's last municipally-run hospital. Our "fiscal responsible" city government has given us budget surpluses that never seem to translate into any programs that help the people.
In countries as diverse as Chad, Indonesia, Peru, and Argentina, the IMF's structural adjustment programs have been accompanied by thinly veiled statements urging the authorities to put some "resolve" behind their plans and crack down on anyone who dares to object. Last December in Argentina, police killed at least 30 people in 13 cities who were protesting IMF-mandated government measures.
In Washington, the only social service that has seen its budget grow in recent years has been the police force. Mayor Williams has become the overseer on the plantation, using his office to persecute any groups that attempt to expose his economic and political agenda. That includes engineering the eviction of Olive Branch House, which provides meals and other services for the homeless but that opposed the mayor politically.
Who benefits? In countries that accept the IMF/World Bank economic prescriptions, it's a small elite of already wealthy businesspeople and an international contingent of giant contractors, financial institutions, and manufacturers of cheap consumer goods. For the people, there are only low-paying, sweatshop jobs - or, if you're lucky, immigration. And with all meaningful political and economic decisions made for them by the IMF/World Bank, "democratic self-government" has become a joke.
In Washington, it's much the same. Downtown and the Beltway boom, benefiting an elite of lobbyists, bankers, and software barons who hardly needed the help to begin with. In the neighborhoods of our city, families are condemned to fill low-paying jobs working for the elite. No credit is available for us to build our own economy, and the city's fiscally straitjacketed government gives us no voice in any of the decisions that make this happen.
Whether it's the IMF/World Bank or the congressional DC subcommittee enforcing it, the Washington Consensus demands subservience and tolerates no alternative vision of how to build a healthy community. It operates on the racist assumption that a small group of white technocrats know best how to plan the future of any community, however diverse. And it demands that the government use every means - including the most severe repression - to enforce its dictates.
Here in Washington, we're not alone in our struggle for real self-government and for control of our economic future. We're fighting the same fight as the people of Chiapas, Soweto, and Ramallah. All over the globe, people are rising up against the insane economic demands and shameless, corporate-driven agendas of the IMF and World Bank. We, too, demand control of our lives and our community.
August, 2002
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