The Real Scandal At The World Bank

[RestoreGore]

The World Bank is a despicable organization that needs to be shut down. Period.
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http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/johann_hari/article2486595.ece

Johann Hari: The real scandal at the World Bank

The Bank is killing thousands of the poorest people in the world

Published: 26 April 2007

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?

snip

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.

[hang a left]

1. At least give us a snippet...please.

[RestoreGore]

2. Did so. n/t

[NoAmericanTaliban]

3. The World Bank is the modern face of western colonialism

and their main concern is to protect the 'money handlers'. Their least concern is the 3rd world.

[RestoreGore]

7. So true. Their concern is perpetuating the third world...

To keep their benefactors rich. And they aren't the only ones... the IMF is part of this too...the CFR(Council on Foreign Relations) and the think tanks spawned from them as well that include members of secret societies and other moneyed interests that have been allowed to keep the poor down and kill them for decades by perpetuating war, famine, and water shortages in order to "privitize" services. What a despicable cabal.

[malaise]

4. Bookmarking this

Thanks.

[shance]

5. Who runs the World bank? That is what citizens worldwide need to know.

n/t

[HCE SuiGeneris]

6. World Bank and Federal Reserve

Two institutions with buckets of blood on their hands.

[RestoreGore]

8. Would that we had a media in this country that actually cared about that, they might find out.

That's why I am so grateful for the Internet ;-). Citizens can now do what the media is too corrupt and bought to do: tell the truth.