Faint praise, bad faith and disinformation– Western pundits, the IMF and Nicaragua

[Judi Lynn]

Faint praise, bad faith and disinformation– Western pundits, the IMF and Nicaragua

By toni solo. Tortilla con Sal

Tortilla con Sal
Monday, Jan 6, 2014

"Western domination of the IMF has encouraged countries strong enough to do so to set themselves free from IMF tutelage. In Latin America, among the countries to have done so most emphatically are Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador and Brazil – all countries with abundant natural resources to underwrite their autonomy. In Nicaragua's very different and much more vulnerable case, the incoming Sandinista administration in 2007, led by Daniel Ortega, inherited an IMF program from the country's previous right wing government. President Ortega and his economic team deftly incorporated that existing IMF program into an economic strategy far more broadly based than the IMF's own myopic neoliberal agenda"

In overwhelmingly adverse global economic conditions, President Daniel Ortega and his colleagues have stubbornly implemented an extraordinarily successful economic policy. In just seven years since January 2007, they have made good the irremediable defects of the hopeless Western development model based on dribbles of aid, unfair trade and mountains of debt. On December 13th, the International Monetary Fund published what amounted to a grudging acknowledgement of Nicaragua's achievement. But the IMF's remarks ignore key aspects of Nicaragua's overall economic policy.

Over the last two years, President Ortega and his team have consolidated the revolutionary structural changes begun in January 2007. Domestically, the most important change has been a radical democratization of the Nicaraguan economy with a categorical emphasis on poverty reduction. Externally, the decisive expansion of trade and cooperation relationships beyond North America and Europe has embraced both the Sandinistas' natural allies in the governments of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA) and the Russian Federation, but also a diverse range of other governments regardless of their ideological affinity.

The omission of such fundamental changes with such dramatically positive results from supposedly authoritative evaluations like those emitted by the IMF, as well as supposedly progressive NGOs, clearly merits a closer look. IMF functionaries seem to maintain continuing mystical faith in the discredited neoliberal policies first applied to the majority world and now devastating people in the US and Europe. Understanding the irrational prejudices of the Western economic managerial and academic classes in general requires both a look at contemporary history and a consideration of the Western elites' disproportionate control of global markets

More:
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_66316.shtml

[idwiyo]

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