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Author Topic: IMF loans lead to a rise in tuberculosis.
N.Beltov
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posted 24 July 2008 10:32 AM      Profile for N.Beltov   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
The rapid rise in tuberculosis cases in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is strongly associated with the receipt of loans from the International Monetary Fund, a new study has found.

Rise in T.B. is linked to loans from I.M.F.

Bretton Woods institutions are bad for your health.


From: Vancouver Island | Registered: May 2003  |  IP: Logged
Fidel
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posted 24 July 2008 10:55 AM      Profile for Fidel     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
It's damning condemnation of the west's treatment of former Soviet countries.

quote:
“When you have one correlation, you raise an eyebrow,” Mr. Stuckler said. “But when you have more than 20 correlations pointing in the same direction, you start building a strong case for causality.”

And it harkens me back to this short web essay by James Petras.


From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004  |  IP: Logged
jeff house
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posted 24 July 2008 10:59 AM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
It's damning condemnation of the west's treatment of former Soviet countries.

But not so bad as Soviet treatment of "soviet countries".

quote:
KIEV, Ukraine - Ukraine on Wednesday blamed Soviet leaders for a famine that killed millions of people in 1932-33 and published documents it said "unequivocally" proved its case — part of its campaign to get the tragedy recognized as genocide.

The national security service published archive documents it said proved that Soviet leader Josef Stalin and his subordinates were responsible for the famine.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25819596/


From: toronto | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Fidel
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posted 24 July 2008 11:06 AM      Profile for Fidel     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
[Thread drift]

Ukrainian famine not a genocide Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Edited to fix link

[ 24 July 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]


From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004  |  IP: Logged
N.Beltov
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posted 24 July 2008 11:09 AM      Profile for N.Beltov   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Petras: The transition to capitalism in Russia alone led to over 15 million premature deaths (deaths which would not have occurred if life expectancy rates had remained at the levels under socialism). These socially induced deaths under emerging capitalism are comparable to the worst period of the purges of the 1930's.

Others have compared the numbers from the Nazi invasion of 1941 and found recent events more devastating. A sobering thought.

For another view it might be interesting to read the article by Stephen Cohen in the Guardian (The breakup of the Soviet Union ended Russia's march to democracy) and the associated commentary.


From: Vancouver Island | Registered: May 2003  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 24 July 2008 11:49 AM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Michael Parenti reminds us:
quote:
The "Second World" of socialist nations has fallen into Third and Fourth World depths. In the former Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, and elsewhere, the capitalist paradise has brought massive privatization and deindustrialization, the defunding of public services, rampant inflation, and dramatic increases in poverty, hunger, unemployment, illiteracy, homelessness, crime, prostitution, disease, alcoholism, suicide, and depopulation - along with the emergence of small self-enriched coteries of gangster capitalists.

[ 26 July 2008: Message edited by: M. Spector ]


From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged
Fidel
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posted 24 July 2008 04:35 PM      Profile for Fidel     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Thanks M. Spector. They were better off before the 1990 reforms. After more than 15 years of Washington consensus tried in dozens of countries, Cuban socialism is a resounding success by comparison.

[ 24 July 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]


From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004  |  IP: Logged
Fidel
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posted 24 July 2008 10:57 PM      Profile for Fidel     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by N.Beltov:

Others have compared the numbers from the Nazi invasion of 1941 and found recent events more devastating. A sobering thought.


Yes, I'm sure I've read the same comments. Gorbachev apparently said in 2006 that the USSR should have been saved. Putin referred to the illegal dissolution and perestroika a total tragedy for the USSR.

quote:
For another view it might be interesting to read the article by Stephen Cohen in the Guardian (The breakup of the Soviet Union ended Russia's march to democracy) and the associated commentary.

quote:
One common post-Soviet myth, promoted by Yeltsin's supporters, is that the dissolution was "peaceful". In reality, ethnic civil wars erupted in central Asia and Transcaucasia, killing hundreds of thousands and brutally displacing even more, a process still under way.

That was true of Yugoslavia as well after losing its largest trade partner. Then, a declining economy, emergency IMF loans, some neoLiberal voodoo, industrial base is decimated, ethnic strife they stole our jobs! What jobs?, I keel them to death, throw in some Gladio to shit disturb. And finally - NATO bombing is the final shock and to wipe the slate clean.


From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004  |  IP: Logged
M. Spector
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posted 20 August 2008 07:45 PM      Profile for M. Spector   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Fidel:
That was true of Yugoslavia as well after losing its largest trade partner. Then, a declining economy, emergency IMF loans, some neoLiberal voodoo, industrial base is decimated, ethnic strife they stole our jobs! What jobs?, I keel them to death, throw in some Gladio to shit disturb. And finally - NATO bombing is the final shock and to wipe the slate clean.
Yes, indeed. The story of the forcible conversion of Serbia to the neo-liberal requirements of the IMF is a terrible one.
quote:
Serbia, the largest state in former Yugoslavia, has been in economic transition for the last 20 years. Political and economic developments throughout this period have accelerated the transition process: post-Cold War shock therapy programmes, the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and the constellation of political forces that were brought to power in its aftermath with support from Western allies.

Strangled by the debt crisis of the 1980s and international sanctions in the 1990s, former president Slobodan Milosevic began privatising public assets under what he termed "People's Capitalism", a model of privatisation that ensured majority shareholding for the workers of any company. The first companies to go were in food processing, metal and textile industries. In the 1990s, a constitutional amendment approved the transition to a market economy, and workers began negotiating contracts through collective bargaining rather than worker courts.

Privatisation accelerated after the October 2000 overthrow of this regime. New laws passed in 2001 regulating employment and the sale of public assets -- some under IMF and World Bank recommendations -- were promulgated. As a result, 1,852 companies have been privatised in the last seven years, according to the Serbian Privatisation Agency.

Today the workers of Rekord, based in Rakovica on the industrial outskirts of Belgrade, are locked in a battle with the company's new owners over unpaid pensions and social benefits. Many factories in Rakovica, once a highly industrialised section of the Serbian capital and centre of the country's auto industry, have suffered badly from the recent privatisation wave. The workers of Rekord boast of a time when their company was among the biggest rubber manufacturers in Europe, with an export market that included well over 150 countries. In 2005, the company was privatised and slowly driven into the ground by its new owners, who declared formal bankruptcy in October 2007.

Forced bankruptcies, now numbering in the hundreds, have become a common strategy adopted by the owners of newly privatised firms. First, they put their newly purchased companies into enormous debt to their other holdings. Owner-creditors can then either take control of company assets or restructure the company, ridding it of smaller shareholders and nullifying previous collective bargaining agreements with the workers....

In short, transition for many has meant loss of jobs and economic security, often resulting from illegal business practices and forced bankruptcies. At the other end of the social ladder, an elite class has acquired new fortunes, not by production and income generation, but through a systematic process of privatisation and wealth redistribution. Reflecting on this new economic reality, one of the workers at Rekord commented, "we are no longer living under welfare capitalism, we are living under 19th century-style primitive accumulation. In this country there is no more will to undertake production, only commerce and services."...


Source

From: One millihelen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged

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