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Thursday, April 28, 2005

Neoliberalism Robbing Nicaragua Blind

An interesting article by Toni Solo. Excerpts:
The pitiful legacy of 15 years of neo-liberal barbarism is a national phenomenon. The inhuman effects of extreme poverty spread far beyond the sprawling slums of the capital Managua. A more thorough indictment of the role of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank would be hard to imagine.

And it is all deliberate. Not in the sense that the living-dead managerial class who draw their salaries in those institutions set out intentionally to starve millions of people and deny them access to education and healthcare. Like the bureaucrats of Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany or imperial England and France, they just obey orders and care little about the consequences.

These imperialist enforcement agencies impose suffering on hundreds of thousands in Nicaragua because their corporate masters decided decades ago that North American big business needed a huge pool of slave labour in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. They needed to cut costs so as to compete with emerging economies in Asia and undercut European competitors. The principal means to achieve that aim have been to seek to try and destroy those countries' domestic agricultural economies and to privatize their State sector resources.
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In tandem with all this, the United States uses trade measures like the mis-named Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) to guarantee an investment framework enabling US corporations and their local clients to exploit Plan Puebla Panama infrastructure and local slave labour to the limit. It is puzzling why so many people in the United States seem to think these arrangements will benefit them. The whole idea is to shift business out of the United States to where costs are cheapest.