Anti-globalization, social injustice, and why none of my friends should ever work for the World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc...

Since I started back here on the Hill, I've been hyper-focused on Congress and the "inside the Beltway" nonsense. Earlier today, I was talking to the great Rhondini about the World Bank, and it got my Irish up. My strictly-regulated break time expired without us reaching a resolution, so I promised her a post about the nascent evils of the IMF and World Bank. Here we are.


First of all, the World Bank is extremely good at selling themselves. Salon had a nice article the other day about how my good friends at the WB are trying to make the blogosphere work for them. It's been a while since I've read an article on the evils of the World Bank that wasn't hyper-focused on how much Wolfie was payin' people to date him.

In case ya couldn't tell, this is a biased post: I am anti-globalization. I oppose the World Bank's policies of privatization, deregulation, and trade liberalization. I consider globalized capital to be the cause of crippling poverty, water and resource wars, environmental degradation, and the spread of contagious disease in the South and the "developing" world. Of course, the World Bank isn't alone: they couldn't pull off their nefarious deeds without the help of the other soldiers in the army of globalization: the IMF, WTO, G8, and all the good folks who attend the World Economic Forum. Today's focus is the WB, though.

Johann Hari, another one of my future husbands (don't tell Keith Olbermann and an outstanding columnist for The Independent, chronicles some of the stories of World Bank victims. As the World Bank requires developing countries to privatize industry and open their economy up to free markets, hundreds of thousands of people are left starving and without clean water. Hari writes:

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."

There are a million individual examples of the World Bank's evil practices. Here are a couple:
Haitian rice farmers
Mozambique's cashew nut processing industry
The oil for arms deal in Chad
Latin American water rights
Human rights in Indonesia

The matter gets worse. On top of structural policies that create poverty and destroy local industry, The World Bank also steals money from impoverished countries. I'm actually going to read the Social Watch Report from 2006 on the metro ride home tonight, but here's the punch line: the World Bank takes more money from developing countries than it provides. Can you explain how stealing money from poor countries eradicates poverty? I'm curious. New math, I suppose.

The result is that poor countries get poorer. Peter Goodman, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, notes that the living conditions of folks in the poorest countries have worsened over the past decade "despite" World Bank efforts:

But the evaluation group study found that growth has rarely been sustained, exposing the most vulnerable people -- the rural poor -- to volatile shifts in their economic fortunes. Only two in five of the countries that borrowed from the World Bank saw per capita incomes rise continuously from 2000 to 2005, the study reported, and only one in five saw increases for the full decade from 1995 to 2005.

The study emphasized that economic growth is, by itself, no fix: How the gains are distributed is just as important. In China, Romania, Sri Lanka and many Latin American countries, swiftly expanding economies have improved incomes for many, but the benefits have been limited by a simultaneous increase in economic inequality, putting the spoils into the hands of the rich and not enough into poor households, the study concludes.

The good news is that people have noticed, and environmental, fair trade, social justice, and women's rights organizations have organized into an anti-globalization movement (Most notably, of course, in Seattle in 1999). There are some indications, particularly in Latin America, that the popular anti-globalization sentiment are translating into electoral politics. Laura Carlson argues that protests and the recent elections of socialist leaders in Latin America are an important sign of the rising populist voice. A predominant theme of the Latin American anti-globalization movement is their overwhelming desire to disentangle from the IMF/WB.

Although Venezuela's Hugo Chavez (despite his utter weirdness) and Bolivia's (much more likable) Evo Morales continue to fight the good fight, they are among the few international leaders who are willing to stand up to the IMF and World Bank. So here we are. Wolfie's out, Zoellick's in charge, and it's time to reject the World Bank and usher in a golden era of populism.