The World Bank has a sordid record of exploiting the people of the world in order to line the pockets of international bankers and transnational corporations. The world would be better off without the likes of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Published on Friday, April 27, 2007 by The Nation
Sacrificial Wolfie
by Naomi KleinWolfowitz’s only crime was taking his institution’s international posture to heart. The fact that he has responded to the scandal by hiring a celebrity lawyer and shopping for a leadership “coach” is just more evidence that he has fully absorbed the World Bank way: When in doubt, blow the budget on overpriced consultants and call it aid.
The more serious lie at the center of the controversy is the implication that the World Bank was an institution with impeccable ethical credentials–until, according to forty-two former Bank executives, its credibility was “fatally compromised” by Wolfowitz. (Many American liberals have seized on this fairy tale, addicted to the fleeting rush that comes from forcing neocons to resign.) The truth is that the bank’s credibility was fatally compromised when it forced school fees on students in Ghana in exchange for a loan; when it demanded that Tanzania privatize its water system; when it made telecom privatization a condition of aid for Hurricane Mitch; when it demanded labor “flexibility” in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami in Sri Lanka; when it pushed for eliminating food subsidies in post-invasion Iraq. Ecuadoreans care little about Wolfowitz’s girlfriend; more pressing is that in 2005, the Bank withheld a promised $100 million after the country dared to spend a portion of its oil revenues on health and education. Some antipoverty organization.
But the area where the World Bank has the most tenuous claim to moral authority is in the fight against corruption. Almost everywhere that mass state pillage has taken place over the past four decades, the Bank and the IMF have been first on the scene of the crime. And no, they have not been looking the other way as the locals lined their pockets; they have been writing the ground rules for the theft and yelling, “Faster, please!”–a process known as rapid-fire shock therapy.
Russia under the leadership of the recently departed Boris Yeltsin was a case in point. Beginning in 1990, the Bank led the charge for the former Soviet Union to impose immediately what it called “radical reform.” When Mikhail Gorbachev refused to go along, Yeltsin stepped up. This bulldozer of a man would not let anything or anyone stand in the way of the Washington-authored program, including Russia’s elected politicians. After he ordered army tanks to open fire on demonstrators in October 1993, killing hundreds and leaving the Parliament blackened by flames, the stage was set for the fire-sale privatizations of Russia’s most precious state assets to the so-called oligarchs. Of course, the Bank was there. Of the democracy-free lawmaking frenzy that followed Yeltsin’s coup, Charles Blitzer, the World Bank’s chief economist on Russia, told the Wall Street Journal, ??I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/27/794/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 HariWhile 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.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/26/768/ 
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