http://harpers.org/archive/2007/04/sb-20 070423sfbv

By Ken Silverstein

Paul Wolfowitz's conduct at the World Bank is outrageous and he deserves to be fired--although, let's face it, any woman who would sleep with him does deserve a raise--but let's not be romantic about his Bank opponents. To hear it from them, once Wolfie is out the door, the Bank will get back to its core mission. If by core mission they mean rewarding corrupt, Third World elites and making the poor poorer, I think they'd be correct.

There are few organizations that have done more harm to the people of the planet than the World Bank. During the 1960s and 1970s, it played a huge role in creating the global debt crisis that decimated the Third World by approving huge loans that shored up tinpot dictators like Mobuto Sese Seko in Zaire and the generals that ruled most of Latin America. The loans were unpayable, so the countries inevitably had to take out fresh loans to pay off old ones, leading to a never-ending spiral of debt. Beyond that, World Bank funds were frequently used to pay for white elephant projects--like dams that never generated a kilowatt of electricity and highways that destroyed rain forests--and much of the money found its way into the pockets of crooked government officials and the balance sheets of First World banks.

Then came the 1980s and 1990s, when the Bank became a big booster of neoliberal policies. That meant deregulation, reduced social spending (in order to save money that could be used to pay off old loans), and privatization of the same state-owned companies whose creation the Bank had previously encouraged. All of this failed just as abysmally as the Bank's prior policies. "Despite an intensified campaign against poverty, World Bank programs have failed to lift incomes in many poor countries over the past decade, leaving tens of millions of people suffering stagnating or declining living standards," the Washington Post reported last year, summarizing a report by the Bank's own autonomous assessment arm. Indeed, the few countries that in recent years have succeeded in reducing poverty--China, to take the most prominent example--have done so by aggressively rejecting the Bank's advice.

One person with whom I spoke who knows the Bank well said that many of Wolfowitz's critics have been unenthusiastic about any effort to root out corruption. "Some of them believe," said this person, "that corruption is inevitable and it's not the Bank's job to fight it. Others say he's been selective about the issue, as with the case of Uzbekistan. And others come from countries where they know people who have done very well from corruption and so their attitude is, `What's wrong with a little bribery?' They're using the uproar about his girlfriend's salary as a pretext to get rid of him, but there are no white hats on either side."

This is no defense of Wolfowitz and I'll be the first to celebrate if he gets the boot. But I wouldn't expect that outcome will actually mean much for the world's poor.

End of excerpt

Of course, the "girlfriend" is all we are hearing about regarding the World Bank in the media. Far be it for our media to inform the masses about how they are being screwed over.

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This was written by George Monbiot several years ago, and I couldn't agree more.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/25/ 073.html

By George Monbiot, Guardian (London), 21 September 2000

A few months ago I used this column to argue that the World Bank was destroying health and education in the developing world. In Zambia, for example, the conditions the bank had attached to its loans--cuts in state spending and the privatisation of services--had contributed to a 25% increase in infant mortality since 1980 and, as parents now have to pay to have their children educated, a disastrous decline in school enrolment.

The bank, oddly enough, didn't seem to be too happy about my analysis. It is simply false, Mats Karlsson, one of its vice-presidents wrote, to claim that the World Bank is further impoverishing people. It was, he insisted, lending developing countries more money for health, education and poverty reduction than ever before.

This is perfectly true. This year, for example, the World Bank will be handing out some $1.9bn for schools in poor countries. It will also be destroying schooling worth many times this amount by continuing to insist that countries put debt repayments ahead of public spending. It has yet to explain why on earth it is making dollar loans for schools in the first place, when nearly all their costs are incurred in local currencies. Only if local provision is to be replaced by foreign contractors, or if children are to be given computers before they are taught to read or write, does lending hard currency for basic education make sense. First they break your legs, then, by way of compensation, they offer you a pedicure.

At their grand summit in Prague at the end of this week, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund will insist, as the IMF's former managing director has claimed, that they are now the best friends of the poor. The bad old days of structural adjustment--forcing all the countries they deal with to accept precisely the same neoliberal prescriptions--are over. Instead of being obliged to accept policies imposed by the first world, debtor nations will now be allowed to devise their own poverty-reduction strategies.

This sounds fine, until you discover that, as the World Development Movement has documented, the recipient countries can request whatever they want as long as it's neoliberalism. As one senior bank official pointed out, the new scheme is a compulsory programme, so that those with the money can tell those without the money what they need in order to get the money.

End of excerpt.

The schemes they employ to keep developing nations in spiraling debt to keep them rich are simply evil and they need to be shut down.
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http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id= 13424

WORLD:`WE DON'T OWE THEM ANYTHING'

by Bikash Sangraula, Inter Press Service News Agency
March 29th, 2006

Over a hundred countries in the developing world have taken to neo-liberal policies thanks to the insistence of creditors from the north, including the G8, the World Bank (WB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But after 20 years, it is clear that these policies have not worked. The poor are poorer with their governments spending a lot of money to pay back loans, activists say.

Aminata Toure Barry from Jubilee South, an organisation working against globalisation and for debt cancellation, said that her country, Mali, has already paid eight times the loans it owes to creditors from the North. "But we are still continuing to pay. In fact, the loan principal has increased by three percent since 1980," she said at a seminar on The Debt Cancellation Trap by G8, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at WSF Karachi Tuesday evening.

While the living conditions of the poor in Mali continue to deteriorate, the Bank says that the solution to the problem is more debt, more neo-liberalism and more privatisation. "This does not work," Barry said categorically. "Due to these policies, a bigger proportion of our population is without food, without schools and without health facilities."

End of excerpt.

Will third world debt ever be cancelled in its entirety? It is the only way I fear to save the lives of those who will otherwise perish under World Bank/IMF rule.
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From John Pilger: New Rulers Of The World
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info /article14517.h...

This will outrage anyone with a conscience, and any successive president of this country will be expected to be beholding to these murderous cretins of the World Bank, IMF, and WTO, and that is the reality of it. I don't hear any of these candidates addressing this however, so I can only assume they all condone it.

There must then come a day when a great sea change takes place in this world and when such organizations are closed down with democratically accountable fair trade organizations being implemented without multinational corporations and the governments which suck this world dry leading them and with third world debt cancelled.

However, that will only happen if we take it upon ourselves to stand up to them, and now with the climate crisis being front and center these nefarious organizations will be seeking new ways to use that to their advantage as well to privatize water and other natural resources to keep people poor and to make the most profit off of the misery that is being inflicted on our world by their policies. I therefore have no faith in their "carbon credits program" either and only see it as another scheme to keep the poor paying for their pollution.

Shut down the World Bank and give the poor in this world a fighting chance for survival. That would be the cry of those who claim to care about the poor and Democracy if they actually did care.