[Falkor-info] The real scandal at the World Bank & what You can do about it

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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?

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


The real scandal at the World Bank 
http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/johann_hari/article2486595.ece




The Disinvestment Campaign: What can you do?  (from http://www.wbbeurope.org/)

Emerging from the Global World Bank Boycott initiative, the World Bank Disinvestment Campaign is a solidarity movement between communities in the Global South, who are often negatively affected by World Bank project financing and adjustment policies, and communities in the Global North, where most of the financing for the World Bank comes from. The Disinvestment Campaign seeks to inform the public about the impact of World Bank policy in developing countries, while persuading socially responsible, public and private institutions to reconsider investing in the World Bank until the Bank agrees to the following demands...

1. Stop conditional lending practices based on the neoliberal agenda of imposing Structural Adjustment Policies, or what are now referred to as Poverty Reduction Strategies

2. Refrain from financing environmentally and socially disruptive projects

3. Cancel debt for impoverished nations

How YOU Can Use 'Disinvestment' as a tool to influence the World Bank....
The World Bank raises up to 80% of its funds by selling bonds on global financial markets. Pension funds, banks, insurance companies and investment firms (who often manage the capital of public institutions) invest in World Bank bonds. Citizens such as you and I often contribute towards the purchase of World Bank Bonds without even realising it, whether it be the student fees we pay at our university that are later invested in bonds, or the money we have invested in a specific bank. Collectively, we have the power to stop the World Bank in its tracks by taking control and speaking out about where our money is invested.

It is people such as ourselves, the stakeholders of public institutions, that have been, and are the motor behind the act of disinvestment. Taxpayers, students, members of labour unions and religious groups, workers with pension-saving plans, and clients of ethical banks are the ones from which the act of disinvestment springs and depends on. The act of disinvestment sends a strong message to the Bank to democratise and move more concretely towards our campaign demands. Please contact us or read more if you'd like to take action on the World Bank Disinvestment Campaign!

The new World Bank Disinvestment Campaign toolkit contains detailed and updated information on the functioning, funding and controversial aspects of the World Bank, as well as detailed guidelines on how to initiate a Disinvestment in your community. Online available on http://www.wbbeurope.org/tool-kit.php, paper copies are available upon request from: disinvestment [at] aseed.net.