Lawmakers are pressuring the White House to intervene in a multilateral economic austerity program crushing a nation much closer to the shores of the United States than Greece.
Five Democratic lawmakers implored the administration, in a letter sent this week, to call on international financial institutions to loosen the strict conditions attached to their assistance to Jamaica.
“The time has come to revisit the terms of Jamaica’s IMF program,” the lawmakers said in their missive, referring to the International Monetary Fund—one of the central actors tightening the screws on Greece as well.
Alongside the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, the IMF has for three years forced Jamaica to set budget surplus goals at 7.5 percent —roughly double the levels established for Greece.
“The policies implemented under the program have dampened rather spurred growth,” the Representatives said. They noted that since 2007, Jamaica’s economic growth rate dropped 1.4%, while its poverty rate doubled and its high unemployment rate, at 14.2 percent has persisted
“To make matters worse, austerity measures have led to deep cuts in critical health and education programs,” the letter states. It was signed by Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), and Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.).
Earlier this month, a separate group of congresspeople, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), drafted a letter to IMF Director Christine Lagarde, taking aim at the organization’s austerity regime in Greece. The legislators described the IMF’s policies in Greece as a “mistake,” and suggested that Lagarde’s institution is “responsible for further damage to the Greek economy.”
Mark Weisbrot, the co-founder of the Washington-based economic think, the Center for Economy and Policy Research, said both letters “represent significant pushback against the IMF’s role in the debt crises in Jamaica and Greece.”
“The US has veto power in the IMF and the Fund may find it will have to take these congressional concerns seriously,” he added in a Thursday press release.
