The world financial crisis, and Russia's collapse in particular, have provoked a rush of proclamations by experts of all varieties that the neo-liberal consensus may not be perfect. Critics like the 50 Years is Enough Network have been saying this for years, of course, but there’s nothing like some pain for the powerful to drive plain realities home to pundits. Over a year after the crisis in East Asia began, the "tigers" -- Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia -- are still staggering, despite rescue packages assembled by the IMF amounting to over $110 billion. And the Russian decision in August to default on some debts and devalue the ruble sent investors around the world into a panic and the U.S. stock market into its second-biggest point drop ever. Suddenly Wall Street looked as vulnerable to the IMF's miscalculations as poor people around the world have been for decades.

In the face of their loss of credibility, the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank promise to be unusually interesting this year. President Clinton has called for top finance officials to meet in Washington - presumably at those meetings, scheduled for October 2 - October 9, which dozens of Finance Ministers and central bankers were already planning to attend. Clinton’s stated goal of crafting new approaches to the international economy is a dramatic admission that the exiting financial institution, the IMF in particular, no longer command the confidence of the most powerful political leaders. These developments make the 50 Years is Enough Network conference - "Sado-Monetarism: The Other Capital Punishment (October 2 - October 4) - an even more important opportunity to put forth vigorous critiques and alternative visions.

In short, 1998 may be remembered as the beginning of the end for the extremist neo-liberal model that has beset the world for some 20 years. The obsession with free markets, cuts in social spending, dismantling of trade and investment regulations, and privatization that has gripped both the right and what passes for the left may finally be broken. Let there be no doubt: this is potentially a major turning point, one of the most significant in many years. And while the work done by many groups like those in the 50 Years is Enough Network has been vital, we have most of all to thank the "other side," the IMF and its friends. For it was the IMF's single- minded pursuit of the "trickle-down" dogma that kept them from humanizing their programs a little bit and thereby postponing the debacle.

Had the IMF seen the problems in East Asia as the straightforward liquidity crises they were and simply pressured the banks involved to reschedule loans, most of us might never have heard about it. But by following its doctrine of protecting the interests of First World bankers before all else, the IMF fuelled panic and brought about perhaps the most rapid reversal of economic fortunes in history (in the absence of war). Had the IMF not insisted on seeing those liquidity problems as fiscal crises requiring recessionary policies, Suharto would likely still be ruling Indonesia and the rest of the world might still have little hope of overturning the fraudulent science perpetrated by the IMF.

The IMF’s insistence that its experts alone know best and its adherence to strict free-market ideology in the face of all contrary indications also led to its humiliation in Russia. In the last years of the Soviet Union, the IMF swooped in and proceeded to short-circuit an economic program, known as the "500 Days Plan," formulated by a team of economists assembled by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. As Dmitri Glinski, a new partner of the 50 Years is Enough Network, notes, the program provided for measured privatization of state companies to employees at reasonable prices, a comprehensive social safety net, and strong, democratic legislative institutions. But the IMF favored an authoritarian, top-down solution that would first wipe out "excess money" -- people's savings -- to balance supply and demand simply by suppressing demand. Since implementing the IMF program rather than its own, the Russian government has received tens of billions of dollars from the IMF -- money that has helped finance Yeltsin’s attack on Parliament, the civil war in Chechnya, and, shortly before the last election, Yeltsin’s comeback presidential campaign. Had the IMF not urged Gorbachev to ignore his own advisers and then done everything it could to bolster the phenomenally corrupt, unpopular, and inefficient Yeltsin government, we might not have a financial crisis that has finally gotten the attention of investors and pundits in the U.S. and around the world.

Would it be wrong . . . with the experts finally noticing that the IMF programs in these places are causing, rather than resolving, social dislocation, deepening poverty, and inequity . . . for economic justice advocates to claim a victory, to gloat a little? We have, after all, been shouting that Emperor IMF has no clothes for a long time!

But it would be unseemly to gloat when the reversals being celebrated signal continuing, and aggravated, suffering for the peoples of East Asia and Russia, and very possibly for the rest of the world too. Indonesians are no doubt glad to be rid of Suharto, but the new government is suggesting that they contribute to the country's recovery by not eating two days a week. The number of Indonesians living below the poverty line has increased from 22.5 million to 118.5 million since the crisis began (that from 11.2% of the population to 60.6%). Over a million Koreans have been laid off, and about 800,000 Thais have lost their jobs. Suicide rates have leapt. Not exactly news that economic justice advocates can be enthusiastic about.

Even in the face of such news, however, I would suggest that it is important for us to gloat. Or at least to be quite vigorous in pointing out precisely what has happened, and who has made it happen. The disasters the people of East Asia and Russia are enduring can be partly redeemed if we make sure they are known and understood. When more of the world understands more thoroughly the arrogance, immorality, and incompetence of the IMF, we can end the reign of terror that institution has imposed on Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe. Using today's bad news - news that is much the same as that which has inspired us, over the years, to become part of the economic justice movement, but which is getting more attention because more money is now involved and more people closer to "home" are losing it -- we can change tomorrow's news to something more hopeful.

The danger if we don't gloat is that some people might get the idea that these crises were unavoidable, like natural disasters. Or that they were simply the fault of the victim countries. We must point out that the results of IMF intervention in East Asia and Russia parallel exactly the catastrophic circumstances we have been documenting in country after country where the IMF has been active. Massive layoffs, cycles of financial crises that never seem to get resolved, policy packages that de-fund social spending and multiply the debt burden, widening gaps between the rich and poor, resource-rich countries suddenly unable to feed themselves -- these symptoms were not first seen in Indonesia or Russia. We have seen them in Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Papua New Guinea, Bolivia, and dozens of other countries. Groups like those in the 50 Years is Enough Network have been diagnosing this ailment for a long time, and the carrier of the virus is well-known to us. We can finally reverse the IMF’s accumulation of power, stop it from expanding, and return to people around the world some measure of control over their economic fate.

The IMF has often been referred to as a bill collector for bankers in the industrialized countries. Their policies in East Asia, which can be explained under no other logic, confirm this accusation beyond a doubt. The defense that the economies were done in by "crony capitalism" looks less compelling when one realizes that for 30 years the governments, corporations, and institutions of the North have supported that corrupt model and trumpeted its apparent phenomenal success (in reality, of course, the distribution of wealth was very skewed). For the IMF to step away and point fingers now is disingenuous.

What is finally clear is the true meaning of "crony capitalism" in today’s global economy. The IMF and its partner institutions - all of them run by bankers - have used their massive resources and leverage over indebted governments to make sure that their fellow bankers and investors would be able to maximize their profits and minimize their risks. The IMF has guaranteed wealthy foreigners that they would be bailed out of risky investments, and has done so by exercising its power to make the very people in the countries being exploited by outsiders take out loans to pay them back. We have countenanced putting the global economy under the control of people who believe that the essential, the only, measure of fairness, prosperity, and success is how outside investors can profit from a particular national economy. It has been a shameful, outrageous period, and one we should be very happy to see pass into history. Of course we aren’t there yet: we must work hard to bury this model now that the opportunity is upon us.

Because these crises have coincided with the Clinton Administration's request for $14.5 billion for the U.S.'s share of the 45% quota increase decided on a year ago by the IMF Board of Governors, the 50 Years Is Enough Network has have been devoting a good deal of energy to encouraging Congress to deny the funds. We have been pointing to the IMF’s appalling record on poverty creation (rather than reduction), debt relief, labor and human rights, environmental protection, women’s rights, lack of transparency, and popular participation. We intend to stop the IMF from expanding by exposing its malfeasance, and in this way actually work to reduce its grip on the world economy. We have succeeded in appealing to the progressive instincts of some Democrats in the House of Representatives, but the key to blocking the appropriation since its introduction in the Spring has been the opposition of the majority of the Republicans in the House. As of this writing, we are entering the "end-game," and we have a good chance of limiting the Administration to a $3.4 billion contribution to an emergency bailout fund.

Should we indeed stop the U.S. from approving its share of the quota increase, we will have achieved an unprecedented, major victory. Never before has the U.S., or any other major shareholder in the IMF, withheld its quota payment. Since it is the largest shareholder, the U.S. serves as the lead country for all the others: Japan, Germany, and the rest of the industrialized nations wait until the U.S. approves its quota payment before acting to follow suit. The signal sent by Congress if it refuses to pay out the $14.5 billion will be powerful: the IMF will not expand, the pundits and analysts worldwide will interpret the move as a loss of faith in the institution and a turning point in the management of the world economy, and the influence of the IMF will be significantly reduced.

Now that the model of the world widely accepted as the only possible one has been thrown into doubt, we hear more and more the question of what the alternatives are. We would be mistaken, I think, to believe that we have to propose an alternative to the IMF model of the world with equal pretenses of comprehensiveness. Our critique of globalization, after all, rests in large part on the absurdity of trying to impose a monolithic economic model on widely divergent cultures, geographies, and conditions. Our emphasis should instead rest on ridding the world of the sort of arrogance displayed by the IMF, which believes it has the answers provided by a divine science of economics (though of course they obey only one school of economics), and restoring sovereignty to the many peoples of the world. We would by no means advocate closing down international trade, but instead dismantling the ideologies and institutional structures that have concentrated privilege and power among a small number of people. A world with less exploitation need not be a world with less co-operation; the world we should foresee is not a chaotic one, or one divided, but one richer in variety, freer interactions, and greater equity. And we may finally be taking significant strides toward such a world.