Chossudovsky said even stimulus packages will not solve the crisis. He said it is the IMF and World Bank, the financiers, which will set the guidelines for stimulus packages. “And the IMF-WB are institutions or bureaucracies which in effect are controlled by the Wall Street. They don’t have any authority in their own right, they are very much integrated into the Wall Street establishment,” he said.
He said that any kind of stimulus package has to go to Washington.
Philippines
“This stimulus package is really based on an existing structure of interference and hegemony in the internal affairs of the Philippines…it goes back more than 20 years and is precisely on that basis, on this type of environment of conditionalities and economic reforms imposed by the creditors that this stimulus package is going to be implemented,” he said.
He added, “And it’s going to be implemented on borrowed money obviously because the external creditors are there and they are also now imposing particular directives on how the money is going to be spent.”
Chossudovsky said there are two programs of the WB that is important in the present context. One is called the PIP or the Public Investment Program which essentially is a list of investment projects and is entirely under the control of the WB. The second one, he said, is the Public Expenditure Review.
“They say there is some corruption in the allocation of the WB fund but they [WB] are complicit in that corruption because they deal with the people [involved in corruption],” he said.
Severe
“The seriousness of this crisis is the fact that as far as solutions are concerned, we cannot expect any solution within the system and certainly not from the US administration, certainly not from the G-20 because within that group, except for a couple of exceptions is the dominant Washington consensus of the neoliberal agenda,” Chossudovsky said.
“In the Philippines, this crisis will be extremely severe because it is imposed upon an existing situation…of dependency, lack of sovereignty, crisis of the real economy, and poverty of the large majority of the population. The measures which are currently being formulated must be challenged in a very consistent and meaningful way.”(Bulatlat.com)
