'Who does the IMF represent?'(International Monetary Fund; Rep. Bernie Sanders queries Asst. Sec. of the Treasury Timothy Geithner - excerpts) (Cover Story) (Transcript)

Bernie Sanders: We are here today, among other things, to find out if the IMF is an institution that serves the interests of the working people and the middle class of the United States--the vast majority of our citizens--or whether the IMF is simply a front group for giant banks, global corporations, and wealthy investors. Who does the IMF represent?

We are here today to find out if the IMF is improving the lives of the people of the Third World, many of whom are living in desperate, grinding poverty, or whether the IMF primarily serves the interests of the local ruling classes and elites in those countries in which the IMF does business.

Further, we want to know whether the representatives of the United States to the IMF in the Reagan Administration, the Bush Administration, and the Clinton Administration have obeyed the law. Some of us spend a lot of time up here doing our best to make laws that we think are sensible, and every now and then we would like the law to be obeyed.

Congress for the last twenty years has repeatedly required specific actions by United States Executive Directors to the IMF, but there is grave doubt as to whether these legal requirements have in fact been carried out.

Some of us want to know if the IMF strengthens or undermines democracy around the world. The New York Times described the IMF and its sister institution, the World Bank, as "the overlords of Africa." Ninety countries with more than half the world's population have lived directly under IMF-imposed conditions. In other words, the IMF has had an enormous impact on billions of people throughout the world.

How well has the IMF performed in improving the lives of the people in the Third World?

Has the IMF helped countries who come to it for loans become more self-sufficient, or has it turned them into loan junkies?

One might think that after the IMF is done with these countries, they would be less in debt than before the IMF got to them in the first place. It is disconcerting to learn, therefore, that from 1982 through 1990, debtor countries in the South paid their creditors in the North $6.5 billion in interest and another $6 billion in principal payments every month, as much as the entire Third World spends on education and health.

Yet the debtor countries were 60 percent greater in 1990 than in 1982. In other words, after cutting all of their basic programs, they were more in debt than when the IMF got to them in the first place. Does that sound like a...