James North: Egypt is looted, and the US Press calls it Reform

One of the most annoying and dishonest features of the mainstream American media over the past couple of decades has been its use of the word "reform," without quotation marks, as shorthand for a set of controversial economic policies the United States and global institutions like the International Monetary Fund have imposed on poor nations in the global south. The word "reform" is biased. No right-thinking person could be against it. If the New York Times and the Washington Post had followed their own rules about objectivity, they would have instead used neutral terms, like "neo-liberalism," or "the Washington Consensus," and they would have pointed out that distinguished economists like Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, along with large, vocal masses of people in the poor countries themselves, have warned for years that the "reform" policies are a slow-motion disaster. The latest evidence for the failure of neo-liberalism comes from Egypt, and even the mainstream press is finally recognizing it. In the Washington Post recently, Stephen Glain blamed the US government, the IMF and the World Bank for pushing policies that severely damaged Egyptian agriculture, to the point where the country now has to waste precious foreign exchange to import nearly all of the wheat it needs for bread, the staple food. An earlier Post article showed how the US Agency for International Development (AID) funded a Cairo think tank that vigorously promoted the "privatization" of state-run companies, public resources, and lands. Privatization, one of the tenets of the neoliberal orthodoxy, is supposed to foster competition, efficiency and economic growth.