The Pope and the IMF Have Moved Left…and Oh Yes, There’s A Bridge In Brooklyn I’d Like To Sell You Cheap…

Bamako – a Malian film by Aderrahmane Sissako – that puts the IMF on trial (literally), while showing the impact of its policies not just on Mali, but the whole African continent.

First the Pope, the head of what is arguably, perhaps the most conservative – nay reactionary – social movements in world history since Constantine legitimized its approach so long ago – doesn’t miss an opportunity to sound more leftist than Che Guevara…now the IMF is moving into the ranks of socialists….what is the world coming to? Genuine, deep going change or simple demagoguery? Do the Pope’s statements represent the beginning of a shift in the long history of that institution?;  does IMF position paper mean that much either.  Or are these gestures little more than recruitment tactics, and image polishing approaches, a bit like – as the old saying has it – putting make up on spiritual and economic corpses?

What both institutions ARE responding to – is the shift in world public opinion and their growing isolation – along with that of U.S. Republicans, and the likes of Netanyahu – on the world scene. Of course it’s “nice” to hear the Pope joining forces with Naomi Klein to save the environment from climate change and the IMF – whose whole essence has been to oppose Keynesian economic polices – calling for a bit of redistribution. But it’s difficult to think that the recent actions of both are anything more than good public relations stunts, minor tactical shifts responding to world public opinion. A public has been so bombarded with media garbage finds itself vulnerable to “the new vocabulary” ; like a drowning man it clings to these recent statements, amplifying their meaning…wanting to believe they are the precursors of something, new, something different, something better… it’s a bit sad that people have difficulty seeing through all this. But something more substantial is needed than “a new paper” from the IMF, or  recent statements of a pontiff just prior to his Latin American tour, attacking what has become a very easy target south of the U.S. border with Mexico  – world capitalism.

It’s as if the history of both institutions – the one quite long, the other more recent – are simply shunted aside, ignored, as if it doesn’t exist and doesn’t weigh, and weigh heavily on the present. Let us consider, even briefly the historical context

From its first pogrom in 38 C.E when the entire Jewish population of Alexandria was slaughtered, through the Crusades in which Christian zealots honed their skills killing Muslims in the Middle East by first slaughtering Jews in Germany and France, to the Church’s antipathy towards anything politically democratic from the French Revolution of 1789 to the Paris Commune, through the silence and vast complicity of the Vatican to the Holocaust to the seethingly political and culturally reactionary campaign of the Pope John Paul II with its disturbing cultural and political echos among the American bishops and cardinals, the Catholic Church has been historically consistent. Now we are to believe that a septuagenarian accused of complicity with the Argentinian junta in the torture of Jesuit priests by serious human rights sources has “turned the page” and become the champion of the world’s poor and oppressed masses. What are the institutional changes that are accompanying all these statements? Are they cosmetic? real? Do they exist at all? Where is the needed rigorous self-criticism – the institutional dialogue – that would give the Pope’s unending stream of public statements a bit more weight? Is this an institution, given its history, its thinking, that can make the kind of changes after 2000 years of history that are needed, called for on all sides, but most ardently from people within the church’s fold?

As for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issuing a paper essentially critical of its own policies…it’s enough to wonder if IMF president Christine La Garde hadn’t recently holed up with Pope Francis somewhere between Paris and Rome to devise a common public relations policy – minus a few changes in language. The fact of the matter is, that the policies of the IMF, especially what is referred to as structural adjustment,  – its fixation on austerity where a more generous, socially caring approach is needed – have been largely discredited worldwide for at least thirty-five years since the Third World Debt Crisis broke upon the world in the early 1980s. The Africans have made a movie about it, putting the IMF on trial (Bamako); much of the entire continent of Latin America has rejected its vicious – and from an economic view-point – just plain stupid – criteria for development that has led who continents into growing misery as government spending for infrastructure and social programs have been slashed and weak, tottering economies have been pried open to the onslaught of global capitalism…with the IMF both cheering on the onslaught and enforcing it. The fact that Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ukraine are now caught in the structural adjustment grip only serves to undermine how pervasive and insidious its impact has been. By the way, IMF (and World Bank) policies have also been – outside of U.S. academia – intellectually and academically widely discredited as well. So it is a bit difficult to get too excited by an IMF report entitled “Redistribution, Inequality and Growth” that reads like – at least in part – a self-criticism. On the one hand, “welcome to the world outside your bureaucratic bubble” one could say. But then one could/should ask a number of other questions. Why did it take you a quarter of a century to acknowledge what much of the world has known? Like the Pope’s many statements on the state of the world…what does this report mean in terms of seriously reforming the IMF? Sugar coating? Or a genuinely serious, far-reaching – and badly needed – reform?

Are we, in our rush for allies in our struggles for social justice, to save the environment and in general, to make the world a better, more humane place for us all to such a degree that we forget, cast aside, or more likely, have no idea about the power of history both in general and of these institutions in particular? Certainly, a genuinely democratized Catholic Church, an IMF that actually responds to the growing global inequality with positive, rather than punitive programs would do a world of good. But the institutional history of both suggests that changing paths is a little more difficult than issuing a flurry of public statements or issuing what amounts to as an obscure, if somewhat honest, report. Is the institutional rot so deep that real change is impossible and that a serious movement of reform will simply lead to collapse as was the case with Gorbachev’s attempts to reform Soviet Communism in the late 1980s? Reform, to say nothing of Revolution, is a risky business after all. It takes more than good intentions, nice words. The more retrograde ideas and values inculcated into both institutions run deep. Attempts at reform almost always runs into organizational resistance as vested interests fight to maintain privilege and power. And failed reforms can lead to collapse or that much more spiritual or political darkness. And while “legislation” helps, changing rules and laws are only the beginning of changing mindsets. The ideology of Milton Friedman still guides the vision of the IMF; one still hears – despite the fact that it has been officially rejected – little Latin American Catholic kids in Chicago recently  asking their Jewish teacher  “Why did you kill Christ?”

So hopefully you will excuse my skepticism about either the Catholic Church or the IMF “turning the page.”

Perhaps they will; it is not impossible for institutions or individuals to change – just exceedingly difficult. And it is even more difficult, once a process of change has been initiated, to maintain it. There are an awful lot of people who live off the coat tails of the dead leaders.  And well-intentioned “sincere” individuals – be they a Pope, a Soviet Communist reformer, the president of an international lending institution, or the current president of the United States – are not “miracle makers”…even the best of them. There are, unfortunately, no Messiahs – either secular or religious. But that is a hard one for most people to process. So many people want a “miracle worker” to do the job for us so we all can go back to “living normal lives.” No Messiah’s, and no miracle workers, not Obama, not Bernie Sanders…just us – people fumbling along to find each other. Occasionally we do.

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Links:

Pope Francis, the CIA and Death Squads by Robert Parry.(note this 2013 article raises some of the same questions I do about the present Pope’s background and his connection to the Argentinian Junta of the late 1970s.