Ten Common Questions:
#2: Why cancel debt?
"The total sum needed is of a similar size to the financial package recently approved to assist the troubled economies of South Korea and Indonesia. That money was raised in a matter of days - and how much did we feel that?"
"... Leviticus Chapter 25, (is) a passage that makes Das Kapital look tame. Leviticus tells its readers that God designed the world to be in harmony, and that every seven years creditors should offer debtors a remission - or repayment holiday. But every seven times seven years (49 years for the arithmetically challenged) there should be a Sabbath's Sabbath; a complete dismantling of the structures of social and economic inequality. Debts should be forgiven completely, slaves freed and land forfeited for non-payment of debt returned to its original owners, a principle endorsed both by Exodus and Deuteronomy. The Bible is unambiguous.
The idea was simple. Israel's rich landowners had to be reminded that private property was not theirs - it was God's - and they had to accept that there was a social mortgage, as the Pope puts it, on their autonomy of action and capacity to build up wealth careless of the social consequences. The distribution of income and wealth had periodically to be equalised to restore God's harmony every 49 years. And once that was done, horns would sound 'the Jubilee' throughout the country.
Ann Pettifor, the director of Jubilee 2000, although a lapsed church-goer, freely acknowledges that her campaign was named after Leviticus's Jubilee and also the crucial role played by the support of evangelical Christians and the organised churches alike."
"The debt burden of the poorest countries is over 90 percent of their income. In Zambia, every citizen now owes the country's creditors $790 -- more than twice the average annual income. In Nicaragua, debt servicing is two-and-a-half times greater than recurrent expenditure on education and health combined."
"I was a bit nervous the first time I went out to Africa, I thought why am I here, what role is there for a comedian off British television to be going into an African village where people have so little food that they might not be here in six months time. What can I say to them, what can they say to me?
But when I had my first conversation with the women of the village, all of the members of the crew were introduced, it was explained what the camera man did, it was explained what the sound crew did, then it was explained who I was. One of the women said "Oh yes, we understand -- he is a story teller, it's his job to tell our stories to the people back in England."
"Bono and Geldof have made our job more difficult.
I understand the game they're playing. They believe that praising the world's most powerful men is more persuasive than criticizing them. The problem is that in doing so they turn the political campaign developed by the global justice movement into a philanthropic one. They urge the G8 leaders to do more to help the poor. But they say nothing about ceasing to do harm."
"An aura of sanctity is descending upon the world's most powerful men. On Saturday the finance ministers from seven of the G8 nations (Russia was not invited) promised to cancel the debts the poorest countries owe to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. ...
The idea, swallowed by most commentators, that the conditions our governments impose help to prevent corruption is laughable. To qualify for World Bank funding, our model client Uganda was forced to privatize most of its state-owned companies before it had any means of regulating their sale. A sell-off that should have raised $500m for the Ugandan exchequer instead raised $2m. The rest was nicked (stolen) by government officials. Unchastened, the World Bank insisted that - to qualify for the debt-relief program the G8 has now extended - the Ugandan government sell off its water supplies, agricultural services and commercial bank, again with minimal regulation.
And here we meet the real problem with the G8's conditionalities. They do not stop at pretending to prevent corruption, but intrude into every aspect of sovereign government. When the finance ministers say "good governance" and "eliminating impediments to private investment", what they mean is commercialization, privatization and the liberalization of trade and capital flows. And what this means is new opportunities for western money."