Arg and I know exactly how we hate IMF, more than world bank.
The International Monetary Funds has helped to implement a neo-liberalist politics in Brazil that consists of the following:
=>
Privatisation of public services: One of the biggest shits I've seen done in this country was how Govern sold the whole energy, phone & cell phone, siderurgy, banks, roads, etc... Lots of people lost their job (including my father) and those who kept the job received lower wages. The cash the govern received from it disappeared, because it was used to pay external debts that only increased more and more...Here's some samples of what happened in different areas:
>> Cell Phone: Before the privatisation, it was very expensive to get a cell-phone line, although the costs of phoning someone was lower. Today, the greatest majority of the cell phones are "pai de santo" (translation, would be something like High Priest... "Pai-de-santo" are spiritualist priests that claim to receive the presence of spirits, souls... what does this has tol do with cell phones? Well, these cell phones only receives phone calls, but they aren't used to call anyone. Today, we have millions of cell phones here and the tendency is to increase this ammount in geometric progression rates... even dogs and beggars have cell phone here.. but few people use them to phone someone.... The services and support are terrible... all cell phone companies are very disorganized and usually receive a lot of complaints... doesnt matter if it's spanish, italian or brazilian companies...
>> Normal phone: This one improved a bit, it's cheaper to get a phone line, but the costs of calling it and a certain monthly (liegal) tax (that you can't stop paying) makes it more expensive to maintain. Telemar is the main company that provides this service here and these bastards receive about 700 000 processes in justice per month only in the state I live... this is more than all other companies together, which gives you an idea of the quality of their service. Their competition here doesn't provide digital traffic in phone lines, which means that people can't use its phone line to access internet. People used to complain at the state company that used to do the phone services, but they were certainly much better than these arrogants from Telemar.
>> Light/Energy: Most of the electrical business is getting bankrupted... Blackouts doesnt happen much often, but they do.... In 2001, we had an energetic crisis because 90% of our energy depended on water and it wasn't raining enough in the country.... It was funny that this happened 3 years after the privatisation, so these companies were suposed to spend some cash in the construction of new power plants, but they didnt... Only govern spends cash with it. Weird isn't it? Anyway, the energy costs increases a lot per year... today, turning on the air conditioners makes your light tax getting high enough to move to outer space... And our daily 40'C doesn't help that much :|
>> Roads: Most of the remaining public roads are in a terrible situation... however, if you see roads that are well conserved (or suposed to be well conserved), prepare your pocket... it will be expensive.
In short, a high increase of monthly costs, no improvement of quality... it's just easier to have access to these things...however, the money the govern won with it is now with IMF and world bank...
=>
Minimum state and the public services being scrapped: Studying in a public school was once a reason to be proud... afterall, people had a good quality education and easy access to great universities. Today, even the worse paid schools are better than most of public schools... Hospitals are also abandoned or lacking resources and same for other basic services, because the cash that used to go to these services are directed to pay external debts... Fortunatelly, this new govern started to increase resources to federal universities and hospitals since last year, but a lot of damage has been done already.
=>
Automatic aproval at schools! Quantity over quality: IMF, world bank and others have been pressuring the degradation of our school system. They don't want people being reproved in the end of the year, because "this makes poor people to give up from school". Then, I wonder how would these people learn something if no one cares if they are learning? Even the market will reject these people... And unfortunatelly, it's a reality in public and some private schools... Then, they complain that there are people that studied for over 8 years and don't know how to write... assholes!
- etc... I'll write more later...but you can already get the idea of the shit and why I hate IMF and other organizations that follows the same path...
Edited by Banshee, 22 January 2005 - 07:30 PM.
