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://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/johann_hari/article2486595.ece
[Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on May 3, 2007]
Note: http://comment.independ...
Johann Hari: The Real Scandal At The World Bank
Posted on Thursday, May 03 at 10:01 by 4CanadaContributed By
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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 most sustainable product is the one you never bought in the first place."
Alex Steffan
all those poor starving people out of the kindness of
their hearts.
I'll never forget a posting on one of the forums by the ambassador to Taiwan of one of the impoverished African countries, who wrote : "We've always been very poor, but we still had something. Now we have nothing. No schools, no food, no clothing, only growing debts"
However, I have to repeat it once again, for the hundredth time: The main culprit is not necessarily the Bank, but its neoclassically brainwashed economists, the likes of Harper and Emerson.
Until this crap theory is banned from our universities, we can moan and groan, there won't be any change for the better and the mass murder will continue.
In any case, no ideology based economic theory should ever be allowed again, if humanity wants to survive as humans.
Ed Deak.
natural resources when there are no people standing
in your way. This is one of the main reasons why the
mass extinction of humanity on the African continent is
allowed to continue.
AIDS, disease, starvation, political genocide and
massive poverty are all part of the master plan.