Today a coalition of NGOs is demanding that as the price for any new US funding, the IMF agree to the following reforms: the IMF must not impose contractionary policies during recessions, or must provide quantitative justification for doing so; the IMF must exempt health and education spending from any government budget caps; parliaments must be given authority to approve or reject deals negotiated between the IMF and finance ministries.

If the IMF will not agree to stop imposing contractionary policies during recessions, or will not agree to stop promoting cuts in education and health spending, then the much-advertised pretense that funding the IMF bears any relationship to helping poor people in poor countries doesn’t pass the laugh test. If we truly want to help poor people in poor countries, there are far better things we can do with $100 billion. Indeed, simply using this money to stimulate our own economy would do far more good for the world, through increasing our capacity to absorb other countries’ exports, not to mention the remittances that flow from our economy to Haiti, El Salvador and elsewhere, than would increasing the leverage of the IMF to impose austerity. (Posted by Bulatlat.com))

Robert Naiman is senior policy analyst at Just Foreign Policy

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