THE REAL SCANDAL AT THE WORLD BANK
The World Bank is killing thousands of the poorest people in the world
By: Johann Hari
While the world's press has been fixated on the teeny-weeny
scandal over whether the World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz
helped to get his girlfriend a $300,000-a-year gig next
door, they have been ignoring the rancid stench of a far
bigger scandal wafting from Wolfie's Washington offices.
This slo-mo scandal isn't about apparent petty corruption in
DC. It's about how Wolfowitz's World Bank is killing
thousands of the poorest people in the world, and knowingly
worsening our worst crisis - global warming - every day.
Let's start with the victims. Meet Hawa Amadu, 70-something,
living in the muddy slums of Accra, the capital of Ghana,
and trying to raise her grandkids as best she can. Hawa has
a problem - a massive problem - and the World Bank put it
there. She can't afford water or electricity any more. Why?
The World Bank threatened to refuse to lend any more money
to her government, which would effectively make it a leper
to governmental donors and international business, unless it
stopped subsidising the cost of these necessities. The
subsidies stopped. The cost doubled. Now Hawa goes thirsty
so her grandchildren can drink, and weeps: "Am I supposed to
drink air?"
She is not alone. Half a world away, in Bolivia, Maxima Cari
- - a mother - is also thirsty. "The World Bank took away my
right to clean water," she explains. In 1997 the World Bank
demanded the Bolivian government privatise the country's
water supply. So Maxima couldn't afford it any more. Now she
has to use dirty water from a well her villagers dug. This
dirty water is making her children sick, and she is sullen.
"I wash my children weekly," Maxima says. "Sometimes there's
only enough water to wash their hands and faces, not their
whole body ... This is not a nice way to live." The newly
elected socialist government of Evo Morales is planning to
take the water back - and he is, of course, condemned and
threatened by the World Bank.
Meet some more victims. I have met hundreds, from Africa to
Latin America to the Middle East. Muracin Claircin is a rice
farmer in Haiti - only he can't grow rice any more. In 1995,
the World Bank demanded Haiti drop all restrictions on
imports. The country was immediately flooded with rice from
the US, which has been lavishly subsidised by the US
government. The Haitian government barely exists and can't
offer rival subsidies anyway: the World Bank forbids it. So
now Muracin is jobless and his family are starving.
Some 5,000 miles away, Charles Avaala in Ghana is watching
his tomatoes rot. He used to grow them for a
government-owned community tomato cannery that provided
employment for his entire community. The World Bank ordered
his government to close it down, and to open the country's
markets to international competition. Now he can't compete
with the subsidy-fattened tomatoes from Europe. He, too, is
starving.
How would Hawa and Maxima and Muracin and Charles feel if
you told them none of this is considered a scandal, but
business as usual?
These victims are not merely an anecdote soup; they are an
accurate summary of the World Bank's effect on the poor.
Don't take my word for it. The World Bank's own Independent
Evaluation Group just found that barely one in ten of its
borrowers experienced persistent growth between 1995 and
2005 - a much smaller proportion than those who stagnated or
slid deeper into poverty. The bank's own former chief
economist, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, says this
approach "has condemned people to death... They don't care
if people live or die."
Why? Why would a body that claims to help the poor actually
thrash them? Because its mission to end poverty has always
been mythical. As George Monbiot explains in his book The
Age of Consent, the World Bank was created in the 1940s by
US economist Henry Dexter White to be a further projection
of US power. The bank's head is invariably American, the
bank is based in Washington, and the US has a permanent veto
on policies. It does not promote a sensible mix of markets
and state action - the real path to development. No: the
World Bank pursues the interests of US corporations over the
poor, every time.
The bank's staff salve their consciences by pickling
themselves in an ideology - neoliberalism - that says there
is never a conflict between business rights and human
rights. If it's good for Shell, it must be good for poor
people - right?
This ideology also backfires on us in the rich world. In
2000, the World Bank was finally forced to undertake a
review of its energy policies. It did its best to rig it,
putting the former energy minister of the
corporation-licking Indonesian dictator General Suharto in
charge. Emil Salim was even serving on the board of a coal
company at the time he was appointed. But - to everyone's
astonishment - Salim concluded by opposing the
carbon-pumping oil and gas projects that make up 94 per cent
of all the bank's energy projects. He said they should be
stopped altogether by 2008.
The bank's response? It ignored its own report and carried
on warming. The business climate, it seems, trumps the
actual climate. Feel the heat.
While the elites huff and puff about Wolfowitz's alleged
small corruption and ignore his organisation's proven
immense corruption, there is something we - ordinary
citizens - can do. In the summer of 2001, at the global
justice protests in Genoa, I met Dennis Brutus, a former
inmate of Robben Island prison alongside Nelson Mandela. He
had been repelled by the bank's actions in South Africa, and
started his protests against them by asking a very basic
question: who owns the World Bank? It turns out we do.
Ordinary people in the West - through their trade unions,
churches, town councils, universities and private
investments - own it. The bank raises nearly all its funds
by issuing bonds on the private market. They are often held
by socially minded institutions, the kind who signed up to
Make Poverty History. So, Brutus realised, we have a simple
power: to sell the bonds and bankrupt the World Bank. "We
need to break the power of the World Bank over developing
countries just as the disinvestment movement helped break
the power of the apartheid regime in South Africa," he
explained.
The campaign to make World Bank bonds as untouchable as
apartheid-era investments has already begun. The cities of
San Francisco, Boulder, Oakland and Berkeley have sold
theirs. Several US unions have also joined. Even this small
ripple has caused anxiety within the bank about the threat
to its "AAA" bond rating.
In the Genoa sun, as tear gas fired by the Italian police
hissed in the background, Brutus told me: "I lived to see
the death of political apartheid. Now I want to live to see
the end of global financial apartheid."
This is the fight we should join. Not some petty squabble
over which Washington technocrat is morally pure enough to
lead the forces of subsidy-slashing and starvation.
The Independent
April 26, 2007
- ----- End forwarded message -----
- --
*** FULL-SPECTRUM FIGHTBACK! ***************************************
* In advance of the Revolution: * Get facts & get organized *
* Fight the Man! * thru these sites & movements *
********************************************************************
* http://ExxposeExxon.com Exxpose Exxon! *
* http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org Immigrant Solidarity Network *
* mailto://beckyg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx CounterPunch Speakers Bureau *
* http://www.focusweb.org Focus on the Global South *
* http://progressive.org/mccarthy McCarthyism Watch *
* http://stopcafta.org Stop CAFTA *
* http://www.brusselstribunal.org Brussells Tribunal on Iraq *
*Don't fight racism fixating on race: OBLITERATE it with Socialism!*
GPG fingerprint = 2E7F 2D69 4B0B C8D5 07E3 09C3 5E8D C4B4 461B B771
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQFGMaTzXo3EtEYbt3ERAtm0AJoDbv56ooWyzcGXedeO7SPnu9t01gCguWDM
MkEJbdRFHPay55y81onvf+A=
=JsFX
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----