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7 May 2007 @ 04:27, by Astrid Ware
Published on Thursday, April 26, 2007 by The Independent/UK
The Real Scandal At The World Bank
The 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.
j.hari@ independent.co.uk
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Category: Globalization
5 comments
7 May 2007 @ 04:51 by a-d : to join -or not to join... to join -or n
" 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."
what are we -as members of the Human Family do about this? Are we ready to foin the Bay Area people in the fight -or... Should we -once more- stand as Partners In Crime, the way we hide our complicity and complasancy behind all kinds of excuses - of which most "important" and "powerful" being that; "well... we gotta have a money system!..." to which I say: "really" !?!... and certainly I say : "... and the only one we can have is the most corrupted and rigged game Human Mind have ever been able to dream up? No better alternative systems can not be dreamt up, eh?"
Next ones without Water(RIGHTS!!!!!) who's it gonna be???
....And how can an other person (the World Bank is, after all, like all other corps, groups, orgs & and "religions" made up of flesh and blood -though very thin & lifeless blood, but nevertheless, "blood" - humans) take away someones RIGHT to -as in this case- RIGHT to clean Water?!?!?!??..... That should boggle our Minds more than for instance questions like how to get to the Moon or Mars -or wherever we think we will venture in a "day or two"!!!
9 May 2007 @ 06:03 by vaxen : Well,
A-d, I agree with you. And on the surface of things seems like these cities are following a good path to...? More of the same? I can't say that what these cities are doing isn't just another 'coverup' of even deeper forms of corruption.
I mean, after all is said and done, these 'cities' are a part of an over all lying and terribly corrupted 'system.' I am totally in favor of ending Washington DC once and for all time. I mean end it!
Establish a new Government and that will require? You guessed it. The scum at the helm will not relinquish power, you know that, and they appear to have all the 'forces' of the military industrial education entertainment complex by the proverbial balls.
Look around you, here at NCN, for example, and what do you see? Do you see us buying land and really getting something (NGO or whatnot) set up and working or do you see over ten years of... blogging?
Virtual mind control. Lots of talk, netwide, in lots of net communities. Making a difference? Not yet!
Bush is still in Office, not that it would make one iotas' worth of difference if he weren't, and the war is continuing into the unknown depths of the well known future.
The UN has a plan. They wanted to rid the Earth of 2/3rds of humanity by the year 2000. Didn't jell... So, what's a few more years to their ilk?
The USA has been divided into 12 Federal Reserve Zones. Take a peak at the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Of course the plan was drawn up much earlier for the takeover of this country, its' people, its' resources, and that has happened whether, or not, the traitor teachers, in the halls if Ivy, tell you about - it or not.
I mean the underground cities which abound, the Deep Underground Military Bases etc., have been built for something. I'll do some research on this and get back with you on what I find... but, I'm not hopeful about this at all.
I mean... the US Army is broke! What does that tell us? Ma and Pa America don't know what has hit them. Even if they did, what could they do about it?
The Concentration Camps are there, and they are empty, yet fully staffed, what does that tell you? The returning army will help us? Heh! The youth are being systematically destroyed there with the "go ahead" of their parents and teachers and...
I'll check it out, A-d... meanwhile, thanks, and keep up the good work till ya can't.
9 May 2007 @ 13:25 by Istvan @24.250.208.109 : the irrelevant human
"Look around you, here at NCN, for example and what do you see? Do you see us buying land and really getting something (NGO or whatnot) set up and working or do you see over ten years of... blogging?"
Thanks for your comment Waxen!
Since I have been reading NCN (about 7 yrs) I have encountered many, who have sincerely tried to break the inherent/built in limitations of what a human (new human in this case) might be. I have encounteunterd many MiniBuddhas, MiniJesuses, MiniMandelas, MiniGandhis, plenty of mini geniuses of all kinds, but newer even one entity that in my understanding would qualify as a member of a radically new civilization, which only exists yet as inner dream and could be called perhaps as "the ones we have been waiting for".
What will it take, what will it be like, what to do are relevant questions of sleeping minds.
Te genography (genetic landscape) of humanity contains within itself all the potentials, possibilities, visionary scapes of "futures past" and present.
The conundrum (puzzle) however is how to access and live by this sometimes called "great hall of wisdom" one managed to enter. The sleeper genes of wisdom are not yet awakened for most of humanity and only functioning partially for those who are beginning to "see".
There is much evidence (find on the web) tha there are multitudes of people have a fledgling of desire for change.
Fledging need support!
Yes an NGO would be helpful, bu twe need to go further, community would be more practical. DROP the MINI.
With much respect.
9 May 2007 @ 13:53 by vaxen : Dear Istvan
It is nice to see you back. I think it will get much worse in our world before it gets better. The forces of the old, corrupt, patternings, seem to want to destroy everything in their path rather than give up the miniscule power they claim as their right... that which they think gives them right of ownership to the vast hordes of seeming non thinking bestial creatures called human beings.
Since all our resources are being utilised to this end, to destroy and manipulate us, it makes it rough to make any headway at all. Usury is the order of the day and even when the swine leaders are caught filling their own coffers which that they are able to steal, and caught in one lie after another, they get a smack on the hand and $250,000 a lecture in the Ivy Halls of injustice.
9 May 2007 @ 14:57 by a-d : Every Journey;
from here to there starts -and indeed goes on- with one step after the other, one MiniJesus-step, one MiniBuddha-step, one MiniMandela-step, one MiniGandhistep after the other.... and believe it not; these guys did exactly the same: THEY Walked their Path ONE STEP at the time!
"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."
Whatever you do guys, DON'T JOIN the people (those in the Bay Area) who have already started with Actions that makes the Money Mongers sweat (Mini-)bullets! ...Since if you do; it might indeed eventually HAVE a REALLY BIG IMPACT (when enough number of People, like u 2 plus a few million/billion more, have joined! ; ) )))
Feisticious jokes aside; Why not let us all know what YOUR first Steps have been/will be. Some people might even get some Inspiration to take THEIR first steps from YOUR Good Example!.... (Wasn't/Isn't that always ONE of the Benefits from these Giants, mentioned here; that their actions inspired and were possible to copy/follow with good results as a result! : )).
Don't get me wrong: I really am grateful, that you guys even cared to read the article-and even more so; that you took the time to comment but why CONTINUE with that which you at the same time seem to despise and are objecting to???!?!?!? Doesn't make sense!
I would love for u to come up with something with greater substance and impact. That was -after all- what I expected someone (u) to tell: about their personal Ministep -or giant step, so that it would inspire more people to the same: Actions against the crooks, whether by side stepping their rotten games or by confronting or by going after them with Machettas... I really don't give a dam -as long as we do SOMETHING to topple the dorks and expand our New Better-For-ALL lifestyle/World Order. Tell us something YOU've done; something TANGIBLE, something repeatable! PLEASE!!! : )
I personally tell EVERYBODY to whom I pay for a purchase I made about the money scam and that we as long as we accept -without as much a lift of an eyebrow-their obedient slaves!.... THAT has raised a looot of eyebrows and got a lot of "oooohhh...really?! I never knew that about money and the System" -responses. I tell it to the Tellers in the Bank , I do it my grocery store etc.
I talk about the Divine Right of ALL Living Things to clean Water etc.
Not a day goes by that I don't stir up challenge some Old shit of Establishment Control tactics held firmly in Place by fellow humans. And believe it or not: most of the time people get curious and happy to hear me questioning those "this-is-how-it-is-Rules" that they thought were mandatory to follow and stick by. Now they know it is OK to say "NO, hell NO!" -EVEN when still being within the System.
But by raising my own and other people Awareness to a higher level; from there can all start dripping this very corrosive information/ knowledge -drop by drop- on these crooks' heads!...
"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."
Guttae cavatae Lapidum...
Other entries in Globalization
26 Jan 2008 @ 11:33: An Open Letter To Amy Goodman
1 Dec 2007 @ 10:42: Would You Invest In Green Technology Or Guns?
21 Nov 2007 @ 23:59: An Easy Solution Missed
7 Nov 2007 @ 21:08: Blackwater, Blackwater Run Down Through The Land, Part 2
27 Oct 2007 @ 07:43: Creating the 3rd Millennium Civilization Security
29 Sep 2007 @ 12:38: "Black Waters, Black Waters Run Down Through The Land"
24 Aug 2007 @ 07:29: American History: The Bush Family Legacy
20 Jul 2007 @ 19:17: Well, well, well... It happened!.... How do U feel about this?
7 May 2007 @ 09:38: Cascading Cross Defaults
4 May 2007 @ 08:15: A BRIGHTER FUTURE
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