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To: craig crawford who wrote (12825)	12/31/1997 12:20:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 45548

I had to post this after the bailout discussion yesterday: Nader Criticizes Rubin Handling of South Korea, Citicorp Bailout US News - December 31, 1997 11:01 V%USNEWS P%USN WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Consumer advocate Ralph Nader sharply criticized Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin today in a letter challenging his handling of the South Korea/Citicorp bailout. "Your involvement and leadership in the ongoing South Korean/Citicorp bailout illustrates the perils of top government officials crafting policy with very little democratic influence and virtually no public debate," Nader wrote in a letter co-signed by Robert Weissman, co-director of Essential Action, a corporate accountability group. The letter specifically criticizes the "Great Christmas Eve Reversal," in which Rubin agreed to commit U.S. taxpayer funds to the bailout, after long asserting that U.S. funds would only be used as a "second line of defense" after monies from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank had been exhausted. Nader said Rubin had operated behind closed doors to engineer a bailout of big U.S. banks and to impose unnecessary recessionary policies on the South Korean economy. "Furthering the inequity," he wrote, "the IMF and Christmas Eve Reversal packages require South Korea to open its economy to foreign mergers and acquisitions -- meaning that Citicorp, J.P. Morgan, Bankers Trust, BankAmerica, the Bank of New York, Chase Manhattan and others are not only bailed out, but then given the opportunity to buy up lucrative sectors of the South Korean economy -- a double windfall." Nader called on Rubin to establish explicit boundaries demarcating the limits of the administration's willingness to engage in bailouts for U.S. corporate interests. "Now is the time to establish a policy framework to assure that the 'emergency' rationale is not endlessly invoked to justify frantic and flailing closed-door decisionmaking and bailout after bailout," he wrote. Nader also called on Rubin to disclose the list of the big banks that are the ultimate recipients of the bailout, cease allocating taxpayer money to financial bailouts without congressional approval, and not to seek additional funding for the IMF "which has demonstrated that is too secretive and too enchanted with pull-down austerity measures (which hurt working people in Third World countries and ultimately boomerang to hurt working people in the United States) to merit support." ------ Note: The full text of the letter can be faxed, or is accessible on the world wide web at www.essential.org/action/rubin.html. -0- /U.S. Newswire 202-347-2770/