Thom Yorke turns on the IMF and World Bank over debt

Thom Yorke has posted on spinwithagrin.co.uk, the site the band set up for journalists to put questions to them, that some poor countries will end up paying more than before. The G7 have in effect cancelled what they are owed, he writes, but the World Bank and the IMF insist on their own debts being paid.

In July Yorke used his radiohead.com page to attack the G8 leaders when the Okinawa summit ended without cancelling debt. In October the Irish Socialist Worker counted all five members as Jubilee 2000 supporters, and quoted Ed O'Brien on Naomi Klein's book No Logo. No Logo certainly made me feel less alone. She was writing everything I was trying to make sense of in my head.²

The post comes after Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, told a Jubilee 2000 rally in London on 2 December that debt payments to Britain from about 40 poor countries, Cameroon, Tanzania and Mozambique among them, would be cancelled or held in trust funds and handed back once each country met certain conditions. The same rally saw Jubilee 2000 pass the work on to Drop the Debt, a new campaign aimed at next July's G8 summit in Genoa. Yorke sends readers to its website, which warns that Zambia, due to be considered for cancellation, may see its payments rise.

Yorke gives Brown some credit in passing, calls the officials who run the two lenders grey haired buffoons¹, and admits it takes a qualified economist to follow it all. The way I look at it, the IMF and WB are there to hide the will of their majority shareholders, ie, the G7.¹ Those shareholders, he argues, keep the debts and the trade tariffs in place so that these countries can only develop on Western terms, and he calls that a crime against humanity.