Real shop name, as seen by me this evening on a shop front in Hong Kong. They did not appear to be selling bailouts at exorbitant interest rates, from what I could tell, however.
Sometimes, the most revealing aspect of the shrieking babble of the 24/7 news agenda is the silence. Often the most important facts are hiding beneath the noise, unmentioned and undiscussed.
So the fact that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is facing trial for allegedly raping a maid in a New York hotel room is – rightly – big news. But imagine a prominent figure was charged not with raping a maid, but starving her to death, along with her children, her parents, and thousands of other people. That is what the IMF has done to innocent people in the recent past. That is what it will do again, unless we transform it beyond all recognition. But that is left in the silence.
Johann Hari, writing in the London “Independent” this week, hits the nail on the head regarding the media’s coverage of the arrest of IMT chief Strauss-Kahn. It is nothing short of a scandal which the IMF has created in many countries over the years, condemning thousands, if not millions, to poverty.
His column in The Independent this week gives Malawi, among other nations, as an example of where the IMFs notorious structural adjustment programs have literally caused starvation.
(Image By Guillaume Paumier (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5), GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons)
