Words&Dirt

“For years, there had been rumors that the international financial institutions had been dabbling in the art of ‘pseudo-crisis,’ as Williamson put it, in order to bend countries to their will, but it was difficult to prove.  The most extensive testimony came from Davison Budhoo, an IMF staffer turned whistle-blower, who accused the organization of cooking the books in order to doom the economy of a poor but strong-willed country.

Budhoo was a Grenadian-born, London School of Economics-trained economist who stood out in Washington thanks to an unconventional approach to personal style: he let his hair stand straight on end, à la Albert Einstein, and preferred the windbreaker to the pinstripe suit.  He had worked at the IMF for twelve years, where his job was designing structural adjustment programs for Africa, Latin America and his native Caribbean.  After the organization took its sharp right turn during the Reagan/Thatcher era, the independent-minded Budhoo felt increasingly ill at ease in his place of work.  The fund was packed with zealous Chicago Boys under the leadership of its managing director, the staunch neoliberal Michel Camdessus.  When Budhoo quit in 1988, he decided to devote himself to exposing the secrets of his former workplace.  It began when he wrote a remarkable open letter to Camdessus, adopting the j’accuse tone of André Gunder Frank’s letters to Friedman a decade earlier.

Showing an enthusiasm for language rare of senior fund economists, the letter begin: ‘Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after over twelve years, and after 1000 days of official Fund work in the field, hawking your medicine and your bag of tricks to governments and to people in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa.  To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples….The blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers.  It dries up, too; it cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name.’

He then went on to build his case.  Budhoo accused the fund of using statistics as ‘lethal’ weapons.  He exhaustively documented how, as a fund employee in the mid-eighties, he was involved in elaborate ‘statistical malpractices’ to exaggerate the numbers in IMF reports on oil-rich Trinidad and Tobago in order to make the country look far less stable than it actually was.  Budhoo contended that the IMF had more than doubled the crucial statistic measuring the labor costs in the country, making it appear highly unproductive––even though, as he said, the fund had the correct information on hand.  In another instance, he claimed that the fund ‘invented, literally out of the blue,’ huge unpaid government debts.

Those ‘gross irregularities,’ which Budhoo claims were deliberate and not mere ‘sloppy calculations,’ were taken as fact by the financial markets, which promptly classified Trinidad as a bad risk and cut off its financing.  The country’s economic problems––triggered by a drop in the price of oil, its primary export––quickly became calamitous, and it was forced to beg the IMF for a bailout.  The fund then demanded that it accept what Budhoo described as the IMF’s ‘deadliest medicine’: layoffs, wage cuts and the ‘whole gamut’ of structural adjustment policies.  He described the process as the ‘deliberate blocking of an economic lifeline to the country through subterfuge’ in order to see ‘Trinidad and Tobago destroyed economically first, and converted thereafter.’

In his letter, Budhoo, who died in 2001, made it clear that his dispute was over more than the treatment of one country by a handful of officials.  He characterized the IMF’s entire program of structural adjustment as a form of mass torture in which ‘”screaming-in-pain” governments and peoples [are] forced to bend on their knees before us, broken and terrified and disintegrating, and begging for a sliver of reasonableness and decency on our part.  But we laugh cruelly in their face, and the torture goes on unabated.’

After the letter was published, the government of Trinidad commissioned two independent studies to investigate the allegations and found that they were correct: the IMF had inflated and fabricated numbers, with tremendously damaging results for the country.

Even with this substantiation, however, Budhoo’s explosive allegations disappeared virtually without a trace; Trinidad and Tobago is a collection of tiny islands off the coast of Venezuela, and unless its people storm the headquarters of the IMF on Nineteenth Street, its complaints are unlikely to capture world attention.  The letter was, however, turned into a play in 1996 called Mr. Budhoo’s Letter of Resignation from the I.M.F. (50 Years Is Enough), put on in a small theater in New York’s East Village.  The production received a surprisingly positive review in The New York Times, which praised its ‘uncommon creativity’ and ‘inventive props.’  The short theater review was the only time Budhoo’s name was ever mentioned in The New York Times.”

––The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, pg. 328-31

“There is no United States ministry of culture.  Yet in an important way, the whole idea of a ministry of culture is out of date.  Historically, the salient fact about ministries of culture in Europe and in many other parts of the world is that they were rooted in aristocratic traditions in which hereditary elites were expected to preserve their nation’s heritage and, when necessary, use it to impress (and intimidate) others.

In Europe, this aristocratic stance is no longer politically acceptable.  Steve Green is a British cultural expert who has worked in both the British Council and the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC).  From where he sits, ‘The classical model of cultural diplomacy as an activity of a nation state, conducted bilaterally,’ is a thing of the past; and twenty-first-century cultural diplomacy is ‘developing in two very active directions.  The first involves the arrival of new players; the second, the development of a multilateral approach.’  Green could also have said ‘two very different directions,’ because the cultural diplomacy of some new players––Russian, China, Iran, the Persian Gulf kingdoms––is decidedly nationalistic.  But perhaps this is a tacit reason why the Europeans wrestle with the new challenge of being inclusive, multicultural, and democratic.

This is not a new challenge for America, though.  Since the days of Benjamin Franklin, American cultural diplomacy has sought to balance artistic cultivation with democracy and inclusive values.  Kennan is right to observe that a meddling Congress makes this harder to do.  But as noted above, a meddling Congress is part of what Americans mean by democracy.  European cultural officials speak frequently about ‘arm’s-length’ programs, by which they mean exchanges, festivals, and other activities immunized against political oversight.  It is, of course, crucial to protect cultural programs from the self-interested meddling of domestic political factions.  But the expectation that nations will engage in cultural programs for purely disinterested reasons is utopian.  The shadow of propaganda hovers over all public diplomacy, including cultural programs, because no government can afford to pay for open-ended interaction with every other nation.  When a government ponies up for a library, exhibition, or performing arts tour, it does so for a reason.”

––Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America’s Image Abroad, by Martha Bayles, loc. 2942-67