whitebeard

Don't curse the darkness, light a candle.

With Wolfowitz
Have we forgotten what the World Bank is for?

The World Bank and the IMF were conceived by the US economist Harry Dexter White. Appointed by the US Treasury to lead the negotiations on post-war economic reconstruction, White spent most of 1943 banging the heads of the other allied nations together.(3) They were appalled by his proposals. He insisted that his institutions would place the burden of stabilising the world economy on the countries suffering from debt and trade deficits rather than on the creditors. ...

Both the undemocratic voting arrangement and the US veto remain to this day. The result is that the body which works mostly in poor countries is entirely controlled by rich ones. White demanded that national debts be redeemable for gold, that gold be convertible into dollars, and that all exchange rates be fixed against the dollar. The result was to lay the ground for what was to become the dollar's global hegemony. White also decided that both the Fund and the Bank would be sited in Washington.

No one was in any doubt at the time that these two bodies were designed as instruments of US economic policy. But somehow all this has been airbrushed from history. Even the admirable Joe Stiglitz believes that the World Bank was the brainchild of the British economist John Maynard Keynes (Keynes was, in fact, its most prominent opponent).(6) ...

From the perspective of the world's poor, there has never been a good president of the World Bank. In seeking contrasts with Wolfowitz, it has become fashionable to look back to the reign of that other Pentagon hawk, Robert McNamara. He is supposed to have become, in the words of an Observer leader, "one of the most admired and effective of World Bank presidents".(8) Admired in Washington perhaps. Robert McNamara was the man who concentrated almost all the Bank's lending on vast prestige projects - dams, highways, ports - while freezing out less glamorous causes such as health and education and sanitation. Most of the major projects he backed have, in economic or social terms or both, failed catastrophically.(9)

It was he who argued that the Bank should not fund land reform because it "would affect the power base of the traditional elite groups".(10) Instead, as Catherine Caufield shows in her book Masters of Illusion, it should "open new land by cutting down forests, draining wetlands, and building roads to previously isolated areas."(11) He bankrolled Mobutu and Suharto, deforested Nepal,(12) trashed the Amazon (13) and promoted genocide in Indonesia (14). The countries in which he worked were left with unpayable debts, wrecked environments, grinding poverty and unshakeable pro-US dictators.

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