SAPs forever.

By: Ahmed M. EL NAHAS – Montopoli, January the 8° 2012.

“In the course of the coming week, the Egyptian Government is due to negotiate with the IMF -International Monetary Fund - terms for a new loan amounting to 3 Billion Dollars”.

These two lines scrolled lately on the  monitors of the major news agencies, and became part of the Economic News chapter incorporated within some TV news. Do we know what that really means? If the Egyptian deficit has reached over 182 Billion Egyptian Pounds, what could be the real urgent need to tie our necks, wrists, arms and legs to an insignificant new financing topped by new interests, when we can’t already honour the previous loans interests’ rates?

Citizens around the world like you and me, especially in the “Third World”, are being educated - through programmed media tools (films, TV series, conferences, newspapers, concerts, news agencies…etc.) - that either the IMF or the World Bank, being the dominating financial institutions in present times, are officially manifesting a culture and interest geared towards the implementation of a “Poverty Reduction Strategy” on a worldwide scale; and are being falsely promoted as UN organizations. But we know for certain that both are entirely USA establishments acting according to the guidelines preset by the “Federal Reserve” and the market trends set by the “NYSE”.

So, the IMF and the WB, being two American institutions, were chartered upon the principles of the “Bretton Woods” accords to promote and protect solely the interests of the USA worldwide in order to give the USA the upper hand in negotiating terms and conditions to obtain the benefits it seeks from any nation, either being natural resources, logistical support, or merely a favourable vote in the “Security Council” or the “General Assembly”, or even in other regional or continental representations.

A plain and simple organised “Twisting Arms” technique using the only powerful mean human mind has ever conceived: Money. Through financing needy countries, by short and mid-term loans, in their turn bearing complicated interest rates scheme grids. While knowing far ahead in anticipation that those countries will never be able to honour such “royalties” unless granted new loans; hence the need of the “Structural Adjustments Programs” as pre-conditions for approving the loans, scheduling their interests, and granting new loans to cover the overdue. Now we know that the system was set to weaken such nations depriving them from sovereignty, wealth and resources.

We’ve been under that burden for too long time, and we have seen the results: in the flagrant loss of Sovereignty; in the Selling-Off the Public thing and the villainous Squandering of Public Wealth in the name of an unleashed Privatisation; in the systematic impoverishment of the Agriculture, as well as our Health, because these said SAPs imposed the use of certain fertilisers and pesticides which damaged the land and infected the water bodies thus affecting the entire natural cycle; in the ever deteriorating Education. The list is long and it features on top “Corruption, Incompetence and Ignorance” as a common denominator in that silly equation.

Will we ever be able to learn from our past mistakes like any normal responsible beings? When are we going to stand up and explain to the governing bodies the need for a “National Resources Based Economy” instead of that monstrous “Monetary Based Economy”?

It is important to deepen our understanding about the International Monetary Fund & the World Bank’s  Structural Adjustments Programmes, in order to ascertain the nature of their functions, and find out whether they are a “Tool for development, or a Mean of control”?

“Structural adjustment policies are just one of the mechanisms whereby inequality, inequity and poverty has been structured into laws and institutions on a global scale”.

Some of the “Standard” pre-conditions imposed by any Structural Adjustments Program can include:

Ø  Cutting expenditures, also known as Austerity. And that is mainly in the areas of education, health, agriculture, defense, scientific research;

Ø  Focusing economic output on direct export and resource extraction,  

Ø  Devaluation of currencies,

Ø  Trade   liberalization, or lifting import and export restrictions,

Ø  Increasing the stability of investment (by supplementing foreign direct investment with the opening of domestic stock  markets),

Ø  Balancing budgets and  not overspending,

Ø  Removing price controls and state subsidies,

Ø  Privatization or divestiture of all or part of state-owned enterprises,

Ø  Enhancing the rights of foreign investors vis-a-vis national laws,

Ø  Improving governance and fighting corruption.

In practice these terms/conditions are the secret arm by which the unscrupulous major international financial institutions are handling our destinies. Because by the end of the day it will not be the Government Officials or the Ministers, Parliamentary Delegates and Senators, Political Parties, Major Newspapers or wealthy profiteering business class who will foot the bill, they all are well paid and are not risking any kind of pay cuts or income reduction, on the contrary each will seek his part of the coming pie.

It is going to be us. It always have been at our expenses. We the simple innocent honest ordinary citizens; whom our specie is shrinking day after day and are condemned to turn into the helpless and hopeless minority! Who else will absorb the devastating outcome of continuous inflations and currency devaluations ordered by those SAPs? Those resulting from accumulated overdue loans topped by interests that someone, because there is always this someone, with confident deep serene voice who kept explaining, day and night, how urgent the loans were needed. To feed the poor or cover the naked? Not at all, they were urgently needed to finance “Privatisations”!!?

Remember that word: “Privatisation”, the synonym of dismembering the State and depriving it from its major assets. Because it is going to be, among other new conditions, the corner stone of next week’s negotiations to force our esteemed “National Rescue Government” to tighten OUR waist-belts so that we stop thinking beyond securing tonight’s dinner, while they would carry on with their “All Is Well” and “Business as Usual”.

Pass On The Word.