The Successful Future of Ukraine is in the Hands of All Ukrainians, Not the IMF's Vampire Bankers

The U.S. is the International Monetary Fund's [IMF's] largest shareholder. The U.S. alone has veto power over all IMF decisions and policies including conditionality and its noose like structural adjustment programs. IMF conditionality is a set of policies or conditions that the IMF requires in exchange for financial resources. The IMF does not require collateral from countries for loans but rather requires the government seeking assistance to correct its macroeconomic imbalances in the form of policy reform. The details of the 'conditionality' differ from loan to loan and country to country, but one condition, structural adjustment - the cutting expenditures known as austerity - is part of them all.

The recent report by international researchers at Eurodad, 'Conditionally yours  An analysis of the policy conditions attached to IMF loans', includes examples of the most common conditions that include: restructuring of tax codes, cutting spending, freezing or cutting public sector wages, shrinking public welfare programs— including pensions, reducing minimum wage levels, sales taxes, privatizing public resources, reducing trade union rights, restructuring and privatizing public enterprises, and reduced minimum wage levels. Notice that all of them harm the poor and none of them target the rich.

Eurodad’s research found that despite the IMF's publicly stated goals to ‘streamline’ their conditionality the number of policy conditions per loan has risen in recent years and that the biggest IMF loans have the heaviest conditionality. Including an exceptionally high numbers of conditions in Cyprus, Greece and Jamaica, which average of 35 structural conditions per programme. The report concludes "If countries are genuinely facing protracted and serious debt problems, then IMF lending only makes the situation worse." And that, "Almost all the countries were repeat borrowers from the IMF, suggesting that the IMF is propping up governments with unsustainable debt levels, not lending for temporary balance of payments problems – its true mandate."

For example, just as The Shock Doctrine predicts, four years after the launch of the EU-IMF loan program, Greece faces 27.5 percent unemployment, with 57 percent of people between 15 and 24 out of work. Wages and pensions have been slashed, public services gutted, while inequality and poverty continue to climb."

Another new study, 'The Impact of Fiscal Austerity on Suicide: On the Empirics of a Modern Greek Tragedy', finds direct link between Greek austerity cuts and increase in male suicides. The study was published in April by University of Portsmouth researchers in the journal Social Science and Medicine. Researchers found that every one percent cut in public spending corresponded with a 0.43 percent increase in suicides among men in Greece and that men between the ages of 45 and 89 are at the highest risk of austerity-caused suicide. Their conclusion: The cause of the huge jump in suicides in Greece is IMF imposed austerity.

That the International Mother Fuckers wield a financial noose designed to force the privatization of publicly owned common assets has long been cursed by critics. The fact that in Ukraine for instance the Empire's goal is to eliminate their public banking system, put their water, electricity, public transportation, vast agricultural lands and other public infrastructure on the block is as odious as it is obvious. But worst of all the criminals at the IMF are murderers.

Yet another recent study shows that even the staff at the IMF hate what the institution is doing. The results of this study conducted by Beatrice Edwards, executive director of the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower organization which has represented employees at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, were not pretty, acknowledging that the employees said they feared retaliation for speaking out at a time when the bank institution faces intensifying criticism that its projects often do more harm than good. Beatrice said, “You’d have to be in a very strange frame of mind to be on a one-year contract and report something over your supervisor’s head that implicates him.”

It's little wonder that the 'many' living in either Eastern or Western Ukraine, or anywhere else where the Empire's vampires decided to suck the life blood out of, are rising up against the tyranny by the EU-US-IMF of the 'few'. The people of Ukraine still have an opportunity, in part because Russia and Putin did before and will again offer them a much better deal, to avoid the noose if they can realize that they are being divided and manipulated by the vampire capitalists. Ukrainians, like all of us, can resist the Empire if we recognized we are all in this battle together. The future of Ukraine is in the hands and hearts of the people there, the 'many', just as yours is wherever you live.