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So much for tsunami aid (News)

Tuesday, April 19, 2005 18:02

This article discusses ways the World Bank takes advantage of countries hit by disaster or war. While simultaniously putting them deep in debt, it forces poverty-stricken nations to pass laws that give more power to multi-national corporations at the expense of local citizens, who are often already in dire straits. A recent example from southeast asia:

Although hotels and industry have already started reconstructing on the coast, in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India, governments have passed laws preventing families from rebuilding their oceanfront homes. Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly relocated inland, to military style barracks in Aceh and prefab concrete boxes in Thailand. The coast is not being rebuilt as it was--dotted with fishing villages and beaches strewn with handmade nets. Instead, governments, corporations and foreign donors are teaming up to rebuild it as they would like it to be: the beaches as playgrounds for tourists, the oceans as watery mines for corporate fishing fleets, both serviced by privatized airports and highways built on borrowed money.

World Bank
by Zan Lynx (2005-04-20 17:25)

I don't like the World Bank either. But let's say that it didn't exist. Where would poor countries borrow money from then? Would the conditions be better or worse?

So why don't countries just pretend it isn't there and not use it?

Bah. If you can't trust your government to not borrow money from the World Bank because its convenient, how can you trust them not to do other evil things even if it didn't exist?

In other words: I don't think the World Bank makes much difference.

Better no aid than bad aid
by Bitscape (2005-04-21 18:22)

I would suggest that with no World Bank at all, conditions would be decidedly better. This is because the typical loans handed out by the World Bank do little to help the world's poor anyway. In fact, as seen in the example of the indonesian fishermen being prohibited from rebuilding their houses, projects it funds often actively hurt them.

Consider this:

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". 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.

It's not about helping poor countires. It's about enslaving them under the guise of debt repayment. But guess what? That means more cheap sweatshop-produced trinkets for us!

So why don't countries just pretend it isn't there and not use it?

Because for the elites, it enhances their power and control at the expense of the rest of the population.

If you can't trust your government to not borrow money from the World Bank because its convenient, how can you trust them not to do other evil things even if it didn't exist?

You can't. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to actively make things worse, as the World Bank does. If the World Bank stipulated that countries let the local population control their resources in a democratic fashion, as opposed to its historical policy of requiring them to open up ownership to foreign corporations, then it might (arguably) be helping.

Even then, it's not a certainty, because some might prefer to maintain their traditional lifestyle of subsistance farming (or other means) than have "ownership" of a block of concrete. As it is, they get neither.

I don't think the World Bank makes much difference.

I disagree. That's like saying the Roman Empire didn't make much difference to the countries it invaded because some of them already had local despots before the Romans came along. The World Bank is a tool of the U.S. Empire to turn formerly independent countries (whether they were good or bad before) into client states for the purpose of supplying raw materials, chear labor, and tourist attractions.