[p2p-research] Haiti and debt

[Kevin Carson]

On 1/14/10, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I completely agree the debt should be cancelled.  The facts are not what
> Alternet would have you believe.  I am not defending the U.S. which has let
> Haiti languish nearby, but it is certainly not the holder of most or even
> much Haitian debt.  The U.S. is guilty by omission, not commission.
>
> In fact, I think Haiti was the very first nation put on the HIPC program of
> the IMF when it started.
>
> More importantly, the organization that loans most money in Haiti (and the
> Caribbean) is the IDB...which is majority run by debt holders...and is a
> model for advanced governance throughout the world (and an organization
> whose function I am fairly familiar with).

Thanks for the clarifications, Ryan.

In general, I think the international community should respect the
principle of "odious debt" in cancelling add debts acquired by
previous dictatorial regimes.  For that matter, even debt acquired by
formally democratic regimes (what Chomsky calls "spectator
democracies") should be regarded as odious when it was acquired
pursuant to the decisions of technocratic policy elites with close
ties to the World Bank and IMF, and insulated from genine democratic
accountability.

The global neoliberal apparatus has fostered the growth of such
technocratic Third World elites, as insulated as possible from
democratic accountability, for a wide range of issues.  It's certainly
true for the Uruguay Round of GATT, which was developed behind closed
doors and rubber stamped by formally democratic parliamentary bodies
with little or no public consideration--and for recent changes in
digital copyright law as well.

As Chomsky has pointed out (re NAFTA among other things), when
two-thirds of the bipartisan policy establishment agrees on a measure,
and two-thirds of the American public is against it, guess which side
wins?

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html