CADTM - en

A petition to all creditors, including the IMF and World Bank Over recent weeks, several countries in the Caribbean have been devastated by hurricanes. Some of those countries were already heavily indebted, often in part because of loans taken out to help with rebuilding efforts following previous disasters. Please ask lenders to suspend debt payments immediately. “We have lost all that money can buy and replace.” – said Prime Minister of Dominica, Roosevelt Skerrit Debt relief for (...) - English / Third World Debt, South, Caribbean

Manifest The referendum for self-determination in Catalonia, scheduled for October 1st and requested by a majority of Catalan citizens, seeks to determine the relationship between Catalonia and the Spanish state. The referendum is a mechanism to make the existing political conflict visible and transform it. The repressive response of the Spanish State in order to prevent it, with judicial and police actions against democratically elected Catalan institutions, is a serious setback in terms (...) - English / Social movements, Spain

Before the Genoa conference, Soviet Russia had managed to sign bilateral treaties with Poland, the Baltic Republics, Turkey and Persia. More importantly, it had managed to sign a trade agreement with the UK. Signed in 1921, this agreement had sanctioned the Soviet laws of nationalization before UK courts and this meant that companies that traded with Russia no longer ran the risk of getting into trouble. |1| During the Genoa conference Russia also succeeded in signing a treaty with Germany (...) - English / Russia, Debt in the History, North

After an armed struggle for succession that lasted from 1831 to 1834, Queen Maria of Portugal repudiated a loan issued in 1833 by the self-proclaimed king, Dom Miguel. She justified the repudiation by saying that bankers should not have lent money to a usurper. The loan had been issued in Paris in 1833 through the bankers Outrequin and Jauche for a sum of 40 million francs to be repaid over 32 years at 5 % interest. The bankers had not hesitated to take risks, organizing the launch of the (...) - English / Portugal, Debt in the History, North

Yanis Varoufakis traces his collaboration with Alexis Tsípras and his alter ego, Nikos Pappas, back to 2011. That collaboration gradually broadened, starting with 2013, to include Yanis Dragasakis (who became vice-Prime Minister in 2015). There is a constant in the relations between Varoufakis and Tsípras: Yanis Varoufakis constantly argues for changes in the political programme that Syriza had adopted. Varoufakis tells us that Tsípras-Pappas-Dragasakis themselves clearly wanted to move toward (...) - English / Greece, Debt in Northern countries, North

To understand the current tensions with North Korea, you need to be familiar with the history of the two Koreas after the Second World War and the Korean War and the roles played by Japan and the United States in the area, and to analyze the reasons behind the economic success of South Korea. We include here a paper by Eric Toussaint on the so-called South Korean miracle, from his book The World Bank: A Never Ending Coup, published in 2007. The supposed South Korean success story has been (...) - English / South Korea, World Bank

To understand the current tensions with North Korea, you need to be familiar with the history of the two Koreas after the Second World War and the Korean War and the roles played by Japan and the United States in the area, and to analyze the reasons behind the economic success of South Korea. We include here a paper by Eric Toussaint on the so-called South Korean miracle, from his book The World Bank: A Never Ending Coup, published in 2007. The supposed South Korean success story has been (...) - English / South Korea, World Bank

SUMMARY * WILPF submitted statement to HRC criticising IMF Ukraine programme * Statement argued programme's harsh conditionalities hurt women * Called for human rights based approach to macro policy making In May the Geneva-based Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) submitted a written statement to the UN Human Rights Council addressing the impacts of IMF macro-economic reform programmes on women's rights in Ukraine. The statement outlined various ways in which the (...) - English / Women, IMF, Ukraine

In the final plenary conference, Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, made a revealing reply: "There is a real sympathy for Russia's condition. If Russia is to get help, Russia must not outrage the sentiments — if they like, let them call them the prejudices — of the world. (…) what are these prejudices? I will just name one or two, because they were all trampled upon in the Memorandum of May 11th. The first prejudice we have in Western Europe is this, that if you sell goods to a man (...) - English / Russia, Debt in the History, North

As the saying goes, history repeats itself because no one was listening the first time. This month marks the 35th anniversary of an event that sparked a debt crisis across the developing world. It was a crisis triggered by low interest rates in the Global North, a reckless boom in lending and borrowing to Southern countries over-reliant on commodity exports, and a fall in the price of those same commodities. Sound familiar? The parallels with today's developing world debt crisis are stark, (...) - English / Mexico, South

Over the weekend (2nd-3rd September) more than 100 participants met in Hong Kong for a People's Forum on One Belt, One Road (OBOR) and BRICS. As BRICS leaders begin to meet for their 9th BRICS summit in Xiamen this week and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council prepares to host its second Belt and Road summit in Hong Kong aiming to attract investors and others in the business community next weekend, civil society members from eight countries and local Hong Kong people came together to (...) - English / Social movements, Asia, Migrations

The report on the audit on Mozambique's “hidden” debt (2 billion dollars) made at the request of the Attorney General of Mozambique, began to circulate in late June 2017, several months behind schedule. Only the findings are currently available. They are clear: beyond the limits specified by the US cabinet Kroll: a large part of these loans are illegitimate. This audit was required by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to resume its budgetary support to the Mozambican authorities, (...) - English / Mozambique, Illegitimate debt, South

A new blatant intervention of the European Commission was triggered by the decision of the third Court of Appeal of Athens on August 1st, on the hearing of the former President of ELSTAT (Hellenic Statistical Authority), Andreas Georgiou, for repeated breach of duty. The provocative intervention of the European Commission (indication of their great discomfort over the decision of the Court of Appeal), which continues to treat Greece as an occupied country without sovereign rights, was via (...) - English / Corruption / financial criminality, Greece, North

On 20 April 1922, Chicherin announced the Soviet response to the Western powers' proposals of 15 April. It indicated that: “The Russian delegation are still of the opinion that the present economic condition of Russia and the circumstances which are responsible for it should fully justify the complete release of Russia from all her liabilities mentioned in the above proposals by the recognition of her counter-claims”. In spite of their disaccord over the exorbitant claims of the Western (...) - English / Russia, Debt in the History, North

In his latest book Adults in the Room, Yanis Varoufakis gives us his version of the reasons behind the Tsipras government's shameful capitulation in July 2015. It essentially analyses the period 2009-2015, though it makes incursions into earlier periods. In my first article on the subject of this book, I analysed critically the proposals made by Yanis Varoufakis before he became a member of the Tsipras government in January 2015, demonstrating that those proposals were doomed to fail. This (...) - English / Greece, Debt in Northern countries, North

The Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa summit in Xiamen from September 3-5 is already inscribed with high tension thanks to Sino-Indian border conflicts. But regardless of a welcome new peace deal, centrifugal forces within the fast-whirling world economy threaten to divide the BRICS. South Africa, which plays host to the BRICS in 2018, is already a victim of these trends – even as President Jacob Zuma continues to use the bloc as a primary crutch in his so-called “anti-imperialist” (...) - English / Finance against people, BRICS

After a federal judge declared that cases giving the World Bank Group “absolute immunity” from lawsuits were “wrongly decided,” communities represented by EarthRights International (ERI) have filed a petition asking the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to revisit its immunity doctrine. In June, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit ruled that the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-lending arm of the World Bank Group, could not be sued for its role in the controversial Tata (...) - English / India, World Bank, South

The London report presented in the previous chapter was such a deliberate provocation on the part of Western powers that the Soviet delegation immediately got in touch with the German delegation, which Paris and London had somehow prevented from fully attending the Genoa Conference. France and Britain were hoping that they could coax the Soviet Russians into accepting the conditions mentioned above or, at least some of them, to strengthen their position when negotiating with Germany (...) - English / Russia, Debt in the History, North

In his latest book, Adults in the Room (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...), Yanis Varoufakis gives us his version of the events that led to the Tsipras government's shameful capitulation in July 2015. It essentially analyses the period 2009-2015, though it makes incursions into earlier periods. With this voluminous work (550 pages), Yanis Varoufakis shows that he is a gifted narrator. At times he succeeds in moving the reader. His direct and vivid style makes it easy to follow events. (...) - English / Greece, Debt in Northern countries, North

Western governments presented a full list of demands aimed at solving in their favour the litigation over debt repudiation and expropriations decreed by the Soviet government. Those demands were presented in Genoa on 15 April 1922, five days into the conference, in a document entitled “London Experts' Report on the Russian issue.” Western demands on Moscow Article 1 said: “The Russian Soviet Government shall accept the financial obligations of its predecessors, viz. the Imperial Russian (...) - English / Russia, Debt in the History, North