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Sunday, February 23, 2020

The Fate of the Planet Rests on Dethroning the IMF and World Bank

A Global Green New Deal could herald a new era of international cooperation to curb the climate crisis.

BY JOHANNA BOZUWA AND THOMAS M. HANNA

http://inthesetimes.com/article/22323/imf-world-bank-climate-change-global-green-new-deal?link_id=3&can_id=50af4a83af05135e8d7750e0c3d68401

Last September, 6 million people joined youth-led climate protests all around the world, from New Zealand to Indonesia, from Brazil to the United States. Fed up with years of international inaction on the greatest threat to our civilization, young people and their allies are again planning to rally in massive numbers this coming April, on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Unwilling to accept anything but unprecedented, massive action on a planetary scale, many of these activists are calling for a Green New Deal to save our planet and our future: a systemic overhaul of the global economy so that it works for all, not just the wealthy few.

This sort of international solidarity action hearkens back to the anti-globalization movement of 20 years ago, when unions, environmentalists and social movements came together to call attention to the devastating effects of globalization and “free trade” imposed by multilateral institutions like World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The turn of the century protests in Seattle and elsewhere put a spotlight on what is now often referred to as the “Washington Consensus”—a decades-long, coordinated drive to impose market-centered economic and political strategies upon countries everywhere.

The transformative power of the anti-globalization movement lay in its demonstration of the interconnections of social, labor and environmental struggles across borders, and ability to unite people in high-income countries and low- and middle-income countries against a common enemy. However, much of this energy was subsequently diverted to opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, surviving the 2008 financial crisis, and confronting white supremacy and fascism in the age of Donald Trump. Activist scrutiny of the multinational institutions that govern the global economy has waned. But now, as the global climate crisis escalates and calls for a Green New Deal grow stronger, there is an opportunity to revitalize this spirit of international solidarity to develop a new international economic consensus—and new multilateral institutions—based on ecological sustainability, reparative justice, and the common good.

Investing in disaster

In 1944, during the penultimate year of World War II, representatives from 44 countries met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to discuss how to establish global peace and security through international economic cooperation. Out of this meeting, the IMF and World Bank were created, and the seeds of what was to become the WTO system sown. But with leadership and control in the hands of the United States and its close allies, these institutions soon became tools in the larger geopolitical struggles of the Cold War. Moreover, with the emergence of the Washington Consensus in the 1980s, they became weapons in an ideologically driven effort to install free market economic policies around the world: spreading economic liberalization, opening massive new markets for Western goods, shifting public assets and services into private hands, and delivering previously unattainable natural resources into the hands of large multinational corporations. As Nobel Prize-winning economist and former Chief Economist of the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz said in 2002, institutions like the IMF had been thoroughly “overrun” by “market fundamentalism.”

One of the key methods deployed by the World Bank and IMF in particular were the infamous “Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAPs). These programs conditioned international economic assistance on deep structural changes to a client country’s political and economic system—specifically deregulation, privatization and cuts in public spending. All too often the economic development and growth promised by the institutions failed to materialize, leaving many countries impoverished, embittered and indebted to Western interests.

A centerpiece of these structural adjustment programs was the privatization of publicly owned assets and infrastructure. According to author Sharon Beder, loans conditioned on privatization jumped from 13% in the 1980s to 70% in 2000. This was especially true in the energy and utility sectors, which constitute core public goods and integral points of intervention to tackle the climate crisis. For instance, during the 1990s both the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (a regional multilateral development bank) promoted energy sector privatization. Between 1998 and 2005, over half of the 115 so-called “developing” countries had either privatized or corporatized their state-owned utility, and more than a third had opened up markets to independent power producers.

The implications for the environment and the climate have been profound. Bolivia is a cautionary example. During the 1980s and 1990s, the World Bank, IMF and Inter-American Development Bank played a prominent role in sponsoring economic restructuring and liberalization of the country’s energy sector. This included partial privatization of the Bolivian state-owned oil company—shares of which were bought by international energy corporations, including Shell and Enron—as well as legal, regulatory, and administrative shifts that enabled massive foreign direct investment into the country’s energy and utility sector.

This resulted in the significant growth of oil and gas exploration and extraction operations, and the construction and renovation of numerous hydrocarbon export pipelines—all of which devastated local communities and regional environments, like the Chiquitano forest. As researcher Derrick Hindery wrote in 2004, “contrary to neoliberal rhetoric that these would boost the economy and deepen democracy … economic and political restructuring led to a reduction in state revenues, massive social unrest, and eased [multinational corporations’] access to natural resources.” Resistance to structural adjustment, including mass protests against the World Bank-directed attempt to privatize the city of Cochabamba’s water utility, was one of the causes of Evo Morales’ landslide presidential election victory in 2005.

Morales decisively broke with the IMF and the World Bank, reasserted public control over key economic sectors and decisions, including its energy utilities, and presided over an unprecedented period of economic growth, inequality reduction and improved living standards. However, the Bolivian economy largely remained reliant on the extraction and exploitation of oil, gas and minerals. Last year, Morales was overthrown by a right-wing coup, raising the prospect of a return to market fundamentalism and corporate control over strategic resources that could catalyze further environmental destruction. This is especially concerning given that Bolivia holds some of the world’s largest reserves of lithium, instrumental to building the batteries needed for electric cars and electricity storage—an industry Morales had plans to develop for the benefit of Bolivians, as opposed to Western corporations.

The World Bank and IMF’s actions have led to significant social unrest in many other countries. In 2000, the government of Ecuador agreed to privatize 18 distribution utilities in exchange for IMF funding, but public outcry successfully stopped the privatizations. Similarly, in Guatemala, the privatization of electric utilities in the 1990s has led to poor service, high prices, and repeated bouts of protests. In India and Indonesia, corruption in new private power markets formed in the 1990s has also sparked widespread unrest. And in Costa Rica, an IMF supported attempt to privatize the country’s popular electric and telecoms utility was defeated in 2000 due to major protests and upheaval. Today, Costa Rica’s publicly-owned electric system—a network that includes a national public utility working in coordination with local, cooperative and municipal utilities—is the only one in the world to run an entire country on virtually 100 percent renewable energy. What’s more, any revenue from Costa Rica’s national utility is used to support other social services.

In recent years, the World Bank IMF and WTO have ostensibly begun to change their tune. They are increasingly professing concern about climate change, as well as economic and social inequality. For instance, the World Bank claims to have implemented an “institution-wide effort to mainstream climate considerations into all development projects.” Sensing the changing political and economic winds post financial crisis—and stung by criticisms from the anti-globalization movement and their own manifest failures—these organizations are eager to claim that the Washington Consensus era is firmly in the past.

However, as many observers have noted, the actions of these institutions fall far short of their rhetoric. Despite expressing concern over climate change, the WTO has done almost nothing to challenge fossil fuel subsidies on unfair trade grounds, despite being asked to do so by twelve member nations in 2017. In fact, recent research has found that while several cases of subsidies for renewable energy development had been challenged at the WTO level in the past decade, no fossil fuel subsidies have. The World Bank’s fossil fuel exclusion policy has already fallen far behind those of its peers, such as the European Investment Bank, which has excluded nearly all fossil fuel finance.

More generally, the climate crisis is inseparable from the free-market economic policies and history of imperialism that continue to underpin the World Bank and IMF’s outlook on international development. President Barack Obama’s “Power Africa” program (which the World Bank helped fund) is an instructive example. Nominally intended to expand energy access in sub-Saharan Africa, it ultimately operated as a way for U.S. companies like General Electric to capture the African energy market by selling gas turbines and grid infrastructure. These companies heavily lobbied the U.S. government and multilateral development banks to shy away from renewable technologies and direct close to $7 billion of financing to American corporations. Not only does such behavior greatly expand stranded fossil fuel assets in the Global South which must be retired before the end of their intended lives, but the revenues from the billions invested are largely retained by multinational corporations, not the countries the program was supposed to benefit.

Furthermore, a recent survey of loans made to 26 countries in 2016-2017 found that the IMF continues to condition borrowing on fiscal consolidation (cutting spending and or raising taxes) and the privatization of public goods or services. In 2018, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, blasted both the IMF and World Bank for continuing to aggressively promote privatization despite ample evidence that it “involves the systematic elimination of human rights protections and further marginalization of the interests of low-income earners and those living in poverty.”

A New Bretton Woods

Just as with World War II, today we face a global crisis—the “moral equivalent of war.” Without rapid and transformative changes to our energy, transportation and agricultural systems (among others), the world is on track to eclipse warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) within the decade, blowing past collectively agreed climate targets. At the current pace, estimates suggest as much as 6 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by 2100. Simply put, this level of warming would be catastrophic for human civilization and the planet.

In the United States and Europe, plans for a “Green New Deal” are the subject of increasing political discussion. While national and regional action is extremely important, climate change is a global threat, and what is ultimately needed is an effective global response—one that existing international institutions, agreements and approaches have demonstrated themselves woefully incapable of delivering. What is needed is a Global Green New Deal based on genuine international solidarity and climate reparations. Western-imposed free market solutions must be replaced with respect for local and Indigenous strategies; wholesale privatization ditched in favor of democratic forms of public and community ownership; Western-led extraction exchanged for reparative payback for damages to the Global South and open access to technologies; and “leadership” by those responsible for the crisis supplanted with control and power exercised by those most affected by it.

To address rising inequality and begin to rectify decades of destructive neoliberalism, the Global Green New Deal must be not only effective, but also equitable. It must recognize the outsized role Global North countries played in causing the climate crisis, both in their own actions and in imposing socially and ecologically destructive market fundamentalism around the world. A major tenet of this Global Green New Deal needs to be the creation of a new international economic paradigm—underpinned by a new or substantially transformed multilateral architecture with the capacity and will to truly deliver. This means either dramatically overhauling institutions like the IMF, World Bank and WTO, or designing new institutions to take their place. As Richard Kozul-Wright and Kevin Gallagher have recently stated, “to make a global Green New Deal work, many of the multilateral programs that have accumulated over decades will have to be culled, and a new generation of smarter institutions will have to be established.”

In other words, the Global Green New Deal can be our generation’s Bretton Woods. It is a moment with tremendous potential to construct new—or radically reformed—international institutions that provide support, aid and investment on the basis of fundamentally different values and “conditions” than before. As calls for such a “New Bretton Woods” get louder—including most recently from former UN official Rachel Kyte—it is imperative the movement for a Green New Deal does not simply seek to tinker at the edges of a fundamentally broken economic and imperialist model. It is a chance to create real international economic and environmental cooperation rooted in local experience, culture, ownership, and control.

The Washington Consensus is dead, and should now be buried once and for all. In its place, a new form of global solidarity and new multilateral institutions must rise to confront the intersecting crises we now face—and to build a lasting internationalism and an economics focused on nurturing people and planet, not on extractive exploitation by the global elite. There is a world to win, or to lose. The stakes could hardly be higher.

Inside Bernie’s Unorthodox Plan To Beat Trump

Sanders is taking a risk no one has before: banking on new voters

BY NUALA BISHARI

http://inthesetimes.com/features/bernie_sanders_campaign_strategy_new_voters_latino_organizing.html?link_id=2&can_id=50af4a83af05135e8d7750e0c3d68401

VERMONT SEN. BERNIE SANDERS HAS EMERGED AS THE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL FRONTRUNNER, finishing in the top two in the Iowa caucus (with former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg), and winning New Hampshire’s primary. Sanders’ strategy, which distinguishes him from his opponents and breaks with the traditional Democratic playbook, is deceptively simple: Convert nonvoters with a powerful message.

“We need to appeal to young people and disenfranchised working-class people who are giving up on the political process,” Sanders told rallygoers in Iowa City on January 12. “That’s the way we’re going to beat Trump.”

Or, as Sanders campaign surrogate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) told a Las Vegas crowd: “The swing voters that we’re most concerned with are the non-voters to voters. What we need to communicate is that this, this year—for two days, your primary and the general—it’s worth it to believe.”

Leticia Arce, 29, is volunteering at a Spanish-language phone bank session January 24 at Sanders’ campaign office in the historically working-class, Latino Mission District of San Francisco. Arce, a tenant- and immigrant-rights organizer, appreciates Sanders’ plan to expand Social Security benefits.

“I work with a lot of people who are getting $900, $1,000 in Social Security, and they’re paying $600, $700 of that toward rent,” Arce says. “A lot of elders need to keep working into their seventies to survive.”

Two of the women Arce brought with her were senior, monolingual Spanish speakers who can’t vote—but are dedicated to turning out Sanders supporters.

“[Sanders’] vision can really move voters who haven’t historically voted,” Arce says. “It’s just a very exciting time and a big opportunity to get people activated.” But there are decades of apathy and disenfranchisement to tackle, too. “People have a lot of pessimism toward voting,” she adds, and many of her phone calls consist of basic civic engagement: What is a primary? Why does California matter? How do you register as a Democrat?

“Oftentimes, when I talk to monolingual Spanish voters, they haven’t been outreached to,” Arce says. “They’re not getting all the phone calls that English voters might be getting.”

Sanders is working to change that, adding more campaign offices and field organizers since 2016. Though his platform certainly hasn’t changed much (Medicare for All, tuition-free college and massive investment in affordable housing remain central planks) his campaign strategy has.

“I think [the Sanders camp was] initially running—and he’s been pretty up-front about this—because someone needed to make the progressive case on that national stage,” says Dan Cohen, a progressive political strategist and pollster not affiliated with the Sanders campaign. “When that’s your goal, you’re a lot less worried about building an infrastructure capable of [winning a primary].”

The so-called nonvoter group Sanders is going after includes the newly eligible young voter, the non-registered voter, the occasional voter and the regular voter who doesn’t primary. These nonvoters are younger, less affluent and less likely to be white. Most make less than $30,000/year.

Reaching these voters costs money and can come at the expense of outreach to more reliable voters. Sanders, the primary’s most successful fundraiser, is using that money to “cast a broad net,” says Chuck Rocha, a senior advisor to the campaign. In the first five primary states, the Sanders campaign began door-knocking almost a year ago, talking with voters to “determine who is most likely to be energized by Bernie Sanders.”

California offers a snapshot of this growth since 2016, expanding three offices in Los Angeles and Oakland to 19 across California, the majority in working-class and Latino neighborhoods. The campaign had the most extensive California ground game until late entrant Michael Bloomberg began pouring money into the state, hiring 220 organizers (to Sanders’ 90) and targeting centrist Latinos. But Sanders got a head start, boasting a half million phone calls and 400,000 doors knocked in the state in 2019.

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With 415 delegates, California has the most of any state. Starting this year, it has bumped its primary from June—so late, its results often did not change the outcome of the race—to the most influential day of the season, March 3, aka Super Tuesday. But California matters to Sanders for more reasons than just momentum.

“California is a state that actually represents this country—it’s not Iowa, it’s not New Hampshire,” says Jane Kim, Sanders’ California political director. “He wants to demonstrate that he can win a diverse state that is rich with Latinx, Asian-Pacific Islander, African American voters and young voters. He believes that that’s his base: working-class voters. Nowhere in the country is the income inequality so stark as it is here in the state, and that’s really what his agenda is based on.”

According to the California Civic Engagement Project, Latinos comprise nearly a quarter of all voter growth in the United States from 1996 to 2016. They make up 21% of California voters. Yet many campaigns invest little in outreach to Latinos.

“They’re never talked to early in a campaign,” Rocha says. “Just at the last minute, with some horribly translated Google ad, and then they’re expected to turn out. There’s never an expansion of the universe. It’s just a halfway effort to try to get the prime voters among the Latino universe out. We’ve turned that on its head.”

Half of Sanders’ California area directors—three of six—are Latino, as is the state director of the campaign, Rafael Návar. According to Návar, primary election outreach efforts in California began in earnest in summer 2019—with an emphasis on non-party preference voters, particularly in Latino working-class communities. It’s a valuable voter base: A quarter of registered voters in California have not declared a party preference, more than all registered California Republicans. But reaching these voters is not easy. Only rarely have neighborhoods with high concentrations of non-party preference voters heard from presidential campaigns.

“They’re infrequent voters—they might miss midterms, or [might not be] engaged in every election cycle,” Návar explains. “But we know that they would respond favorably to the policies that Sanders puts forward. Our strategy is really focused on talking to these voters and meeting them where they’re at.”

Sanders canvasser Ivan Aguilar’s specialty is in talking with people who may not be interested in politics. Aguilar, 27, began campaigning for Sanders in 2016, but he says there’s more energy from his Latino community this time. At a 2019 Day of the Dead celebration in Oakland, for example, he says a flood of people descended on his Sanders table with questions, turning his four-hour shift into a 10-hour day. The next morning, campaign staffers offered him a position as a field organizer. He quit his job and started knocking on doors.

Aguilar canvassed Meadow Fair on January 26, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in East San Jose. The neighborhood is mostly small, one-story single-family homes, their yards filled with orange trees, cacti and flowers.

“You’re going into neighborhoods that have never been outreached to before,” says Aguilar. “A lot of the people, especially in this area, are apolitical—or they already see Bernie in a good light, and then in that case it’s kind of easy.”

“Buenas tardes,” Aguilar begins at the door, switching to English as needed. When residents are on the fence about voting in the primary, Aguilar launches into his personal story about Sanders.

For Aguilar, that tale begins with the 2008 recession. His father owns a small trucking business and had managed to save enough to buy two small houses in Tracy and Hayward, Calif., but their family lost both homes during the collapse.

“To see their houses be taken away so easily, overnight basically ... it really struck me,” Aguilar says. “This affected everyone I knew. I was like, ‘This is not right. Something has to be done.’ ”

“It’s very encouraging,” Aguilar says about the grassroots-level campaign strategy. “In a lot of Latino communities, it’s often the kids who are voting within the household. You go to these houses, you ask for their name, and they greet you with enthusiasm.”

Time magazine reports that 44 million Americans owe a whopping $1.6 trillion on their student loans, so it’s not surprising that Sanders’ platform of tuition-free public college appeals to young voters. The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University deduced that, during the 2016 primaries, Sanders won more of the youth vote than President Donald Trump and candidate Hillary Clinton combined: Sanders pulled in 2 million ballots from voters 18–29, compared with less than 1.6 million. In 2019 he introduced a plan to cancel all $1.6 trillion in U.S. student loan debt.

“The younger generation today is, in my view, the most progressive young generation in the history of this country, and for every three young people who vote, two out of those three will vote progressive,” Sanders told a crowd at Iowa State University in January. “The not-so-good news is that same generation historically hasn’t voted in very large numbers. So tonight [what] I’m saying to that generation is: If you are tired of student debt, if you are sick and tired and scared about climate change, if you are disgusted with racism, and sexism, homophobia and xenophobia, and if you believe that healthcare is a human right, then you can’t sit it out and you can’t complain.”

But Sanders’ youth outreach goes deeper than his platform. In 2019, the campaign launched an organizing boot camp for college-age volunteers called Students for Bernie Summer School, complete with homework and webinars. The Bern mobile app, also launched in 2019, serves as an organizing tool for graduates of the boot camp: Users can identify potential swing voters and log voter information. The technology is simple and familiar for social media users, making it easy to sign up friends, family and neighbors with a few taps and swipes.

Sanders’ young supporters seem to be pressuring their elders. Sanders’ popularity first ballooned among Latino youth, and then the older generation got on board. “The best way I’ve seen to get people out—or even to care at all—is through their children,” Aguilar says. “If they hammer in the message themselves when I’m not there, that really cracks the shell.”

Bernie Sanders begins his presidential campaign tour in Madison, Wis., on April 12, 2019. (Courtesy of Bernie Sanders campaign)

“WE ARE THE ONLY ONES TAKING RISKS TO TRY AND EXPAND THE ELECTORATE, and the only ones with the infrastructure to take those risks,” says Sanders Iowa field organizer D’Angelo Oberto-Beso.

One such effort is with another growing Democratic base: immigrant voters. A tenth of eligible 2020 voters was born outside the U.S., the highest proportion since 1970. This group will have an opportunity to vote out a sitting president known to describe immigrants with words like “invasion” and “killer,” who has said he is “seriously” considering abolishing birthright citizenship, and who has even told four elected U.S. congresspeople to “go back” to the “crime-infested places from which they came.”

Though a limited run, the Iowa caucus proved Sanders’ appeal among working-class immigrants. In Ottumwa, an hour north of Iowa City, Sanders canvassers worked the midnight shift at JBS Plant, a pork packer whose 2,500 workers hail from more than 50 different countries, and it paid off. A group of Ethiopian Americans turned out for the special satellite caucus organized by their union, United Food and Commercial Workers— with Sanders carrying 15 to 1.

In Iowa City, a small group of Sudanese immigrants rallied for Sanders. In These Times met 10 of the supporters two days before the caucus in the Pheasant Ridge apartment complex, in a lower-income neighborhood on Iowa City’s West Side.

“I am caucusing for Bernie because he focuses on the working class and how to make day-to-day life better for workers,” says Eltayeb Elamin, 47, a naturalized citizen from Sudan. He registered to vote for the first time for the caucus and hosted a house party for Sanders supporters, dressed in a jalabiya and taqiyah—traditional Sudanese white robes and hat. He served ten guests hot chai sada tea and baleela, a chickpea dish.

Ahmed Elkamil, 35, served as Elamin’s translator. Elkamil resettled in the United States 20 years ago with his father, fleeing violence, poverty and persecution in Sudan. He voted for Obama in Tennessee in 2012, but said he skipped the 2016 election because he was disillusioned by Clinton and the Democratic Party.

“With Bernie, the draw for me is—it’s almost a running joke—that he always says the same thing,” Elkamil says. “I value that consistency. He’s also the only candidate who has articulated a specific vision against endless war.”

Another satellite caucus, this one for foreign language speakers at Caring Hands and More in Iowa City, awarded all of its delegates to Sanders after two busloads of Sudanese Americans attended from Pheasant Ridge, including Elamin and Elkamil.

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Investing in nonvoters is always going to be risky, which is why, historically, presidential candidates haven’t done it—choosing to spend, instead, on television advertisements or mailings to well-educated, regular voters. Decades of this practice have only disenfranchised certain communities even more, making it even more difficult to mobilize nonvoters.

“The [non]voters need to be attitudinally willing to do something they haven’t done before,” Dan Cohen says. “When there are issues at stake that are profoundly important to the disaffected voter, that gives you that ingredient. The question then simply becomes whether their organizers will be able to credibly convey that message and build that same trust, and whether the campaign is organized and disciplined enough to carry it over the finish line.”

If so many barriers exist to get nonvoters to the polls, why would Sanders make it a key part of his campaign strategy? For Sanders and his followers, the motivation for turning out working-class, nonvoters is as ideological as it is practical.

“What the political revolution means to me ... is getting millions of people who have given up on the political process, working people and young people, to stand up and fight for their rights,” Sanders told the Associated Press in June 2019.

“We’re also thinking, ‘What will it take to actually build the political power to enact Bernie’s agenda?’” Claire Sandberg, national organizing director for Sanders’ campaign, told The Intercept’s Ryan Grim. “What will it take to actually win back the Senate? ... The only way that we can possibly do that is if we build a huge movement that can actually expand the electorate in all 50 states.”

“It’s a strategic gamble that this campaign is taking, that if you engage in that community and invest in them, that they will show up at the primary,” Chuck Rocha says. “I never—until I worked for Bernie Sanders—worked for a candidate who has taken such a broad approach to voter contact.”

For some, the importance of this strategy’s success cannot be overstated.

“If there was ever going to be an experiment where all the different pieces were there—and you’ll be able to answer, ‘Yes, this can be done,’ or, ‘It can’t,’—this is it,” Cohen says. “And if it is successful, it will transform so much of our Democratic politics.”