Look Out - Rodrigo Rato new head of IMF

[donsu]

sub-title: watching Spain crumble

http://www.counterpunch.com/

Rodrigo Rato has been appointed as the new managing d\irector of the International Monetary Fund. I have read the biographical notes and references to his career that have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and other major papers in the U.S., and nowhere have there appeared those key elements of his biography that could shed light on his economic policies. As I have written about in a previous article (The US Media's Double Standard. The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush, CounterPunch, August 21, 2003), one of the most unsettling developments in the main stream U.SUS media is their right wing shift. For example, the US press saluted Mr. Aznar, past president of the Spanish government, as a "great friend of the U.S." (confusing, as usual, the U.S. government with the U.S. population), without once making reference to his fascist past and current ultra-right wing positions. The same is happening now with Mr. Rodrigo Rato, Mr. Aznar's Minister of Economy, who is responsible for the dismantling of the Spanish welfare state.

Mr. Rato is of the ultra-right . While in Aznar's cabinet, he supported such policies as making religion a compulsory subject in secondary schools, requiring more hours of schooling in religion than in mathematics, undoing the progressivity in the internal revenue code, funding the Foundation dedicated to the promotion of francoism (i.e., Spanish fascism), never condemning the fascist dictatorship, and so on. In the economic arena, he dramatically reduced public social expenditures as a way of eliminating the public deficit of the Spanish government, and was the person responsible for developing the most austere social budget of all the governments of the European Community.

-snip-

Mr. Rato (and Mr. Aznar) has paraded triumphantly around the EU-15, claiming that Spain is in the top of the league because it is the first member of the EU-15 to reach the stability pact, i.e., public deficit zero. And non other than Blair's Minister of Economy, Gordon Brown, became Rato's main advocate for the IMF position. Nowhere mentioned is the enormous costs this "success" has had on the quality of life of average folks in Spain. And these are the same policies that Mr. Rato is going to follow in the IMF, policies that have caused enormous pain and harm to the Spanish people, and will now be implemented world-wide. Nowhere, however, have the mainstream media reported on such important dimensions of Mr. Rato's tenure as Minister of Economy of Spain. Quite remarkable!
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