3. Summary:

The 'Washington Consensus', which recommends programmes of privatisation, liberalisation and economic stabilisation measures are all about making Third World economies more dependent on (or "integrated into") Western needs and in particular more open to exploitation by Western multinationals; structural adjustment policies (SAPs) also guarantee the West a massive supply of cheap labour.

The universal enforcement of SAP's imposed by the IMF & World Bank is a continuation of the imperialist manipulation which occurred in colonial times to achieve the domination of the colonial economy. SAPs, to use their abbreviation, do just that; they 'sap' the vitality of domestic economies. There is a wide gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of globalisation and between the rhetoric and reality of IMF and World Bank operations. The rhetoric promises progress toward broad-based prosperity and environmental stewardship. Many citizens see a different reality: pockets of obscene wealth in the midst of growing human misery, social dislocation, and environmental devastation [WDM June2000]. SAP's lengthen the duration of the famously coined phrase 'trickle-down' to the extent of a dripping tap, while skewering the playing field in favour of multinational capital, consigning domestically led economic recovery firmly to the back-seat. The 'globalisation' process as a whole is rendered a downward spiral to nations in the South by a combination of fundamentally-flawed and dangerously irresponsible economic restructuring and the devastatingly dominant-impact on domestic-economies worldwide from the TNC's oligarchy (for e.g. the impact of export dumping and the taking over of local grain markets by multinational grain companies like Cargill), together with the massive issue of continued massive outflows from these economies through debt repayments (for e.g. Zimbabwe has foreign debt in excess of US$5 billion, creating an unnecessary pressure to increase export revenues, from a narrow array of primary commodities that suffer ever-downward pressure in market price).

The commonality of poor terms of trade amongst countries in the south, particularly Africa, is best understood if one accepts that exchange rates have purposively been deflated across the "developing world" (particularly in Africa), and so, could be considered a continuation of the imperialist manipulation which occurred in colonial times to entrap countries into the colonial economy when the imperialists' intervention and subjugation of the colonies to new monetary and taxation systems ensured that the value of their own currency values relative to the Imperial Powers' own goods, services and labour were pre-determined by the imperialist masters.

The majority of the population in countries of the South remain largely disenfranchised from the whole process of economic growth, being as they are increasingly dispossessed of having the ability to attain a decent livelihood within domestic agriculture through the market invasion of cheap grain from the North, and conversely, subjugated to wage slavery from the suppressed multiplier effect on the domestic economy from the simultaneous stranglehold of debt, neoliberal fiscal restraint, and the overbearing appropriation of profits and enclosure of markets by multinationals.

The legacy of colonialism, then, has been a familiar pattern starting with the straight swap of power from the colonialists to elite dictatorships (forming itself a lethal concoction in terms of the long-term health of democracy with the cold-war and post cold-war foreign manipulation of political situations - particularly in Africa), through to subjugation of national economies by multinational power aided by a holy trinity of the IMF, World Bank and WTO/GATTS whose neoliberalist dogmatic perspective, while being intellectually backward in that it is the fastest way to undermine the claimed objectives which are actually sought and hypocritical (we can subsidise our production through the military industrial complex, but you in the South can't), as-it-is-implemented, the "holy-trinity" is also fundamentally complicit in the neo-colonial appropriation and resource exploitation. And what is driving this ever-constant need for multinationals to generate profits? As well as their pressure to acheive rates-of-return for their shareholders, it is their own indebtedness (to banks) - which is a byproduct of a debt-money system which itself is the driving engine of capitalism and the necessary source of speculative investment for wealth accumulation, like it was in the days when the first slave-ships ventured out, financed by banks such as Barclays. The same enclosure of local markets by the global market which occurred through the spread of the imperialist empire occurs now, except now it is happening at a colossal scale and at a furious rate, underwritten by a monetary system that is utterly demand-led by a world financial market that is driven by market signals generated from the collective might of this "casino stampede". Countries of the South, infact, having embarked on a frantic re-run of our own history - propelling their societies into the modern world instead o f being given the opportunity to learn from our mistakes and avoid the injustices of our history - have been forced through a compressed version of that history, involving land enclosures, dispossession and wage dependency and industrialisation at the expense of rural development.

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