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The World Bank | |
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| Founded | July 1944 |
The World Bank is a neoliberal financial institution headquartered in Washington, D.C. It exists to serve the interests of Western countries and its leaders are usually U.S. citizens that are supported by the U.S. Congress.[1] Five major industrial countries have more voting power in the World Bank than almost 100 Third World countries, and the USA alone controls 20% of votes.[2]
The stated purpose of the World Bank is to "reduce poverty and increase shared prosperity" through "financing, policy advice, and technical assistance" to governments, and also focuses on strengthening the private sector in developing countries.[3] However, as historian and political scientist Eric Toussaint asserts, the unstated agenda of the World Bank is to "subordinate the public and private spheres of all human societies to the capitalist imperative of seeking maximum profit" which results in stagnation and deterioration of the living conditions of a great majority of the world’s population, concurrently with greater and greater concentration of wealth, as well as contributing to the deterioration of the natural environment.[4]
In 2015, a UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty called the World Bank "a human rights-free zone" and said that in its operational policies, the World Bank "treats human rights more like an infectious disease than universal values and obligations."[5]
Countries must also join the International Monetary Fund to be eligible to join the World Bank Group.[3]
We economic hit men really have been the ones responsible for creating this first truly global empire. And we work many different ways, but perhaps the most common is that we will identify a country that has resources our corporations covet—like oil—and then arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations.
But the money never actually goes to the country; instead, it goes to our big corporations to build infrastructure projects in that country: power plants, industrial parks, ports—things that benefit a few rich people in that country, in addition to our corporations, but really don't help the majority of the people at all. However, those people—the whole country—are left holding a huge debt. It's such a big debt they can't repay, and that's part of the plan, that they can't repay it.
And so at some point, we economic hit men go back to them and say, "Listen, you owe a lot of money; you can't pay your debt. So, sell your oil real cheap to our oil companies, allow us to build a military base in your country," or "send troops in support of ours" to someplace in the world, like Iraq, or "vote with us on the next U.N. vote" to have their electric utility company privatized and their water and sewage system privatized and sold to U.S. corporations or other multinational corporations.
So there is a whole mushrooming thing, and it's so typical of the way the IMF and the World Bank work: you put a country in debt—and in such a big debt it can't pay it—and then you offer to refinance that debt and pay even more interest. And you demand this quid pro quo, which you call "conditionality" or "good governance." Which means, basically, that they've got to sell off their resources, including many of their social services, their utility companies, their school systems, sometimes, their penal systems, their insurance systems, to foreign corporations. So it's a double, triple, quadruple whammy.
— John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, interviewed in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man documentary, 2009
History[edit | edit source]
The World Bank was founded at the end of the Second World War and initially loaned money to Western European governments.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the World Bank systematically granted loans to colonial powers and their colonies for projects that increased exploitation of natural resources and of peoples for the benefit of the ruling classes in the colonizer countries. The World Bank refused to apply a United Nations resolution adopted in 1965 calling on it to refrain from supporting Portugal financially and technically until the country’s government abandoned its colonialist policies. The debts contracted with the World Bank on decision of the colonial powers, Belgium, Britain and France, in their African colonies, were subsequently imposed on the new countries at the time of their achieving independence.[4]
In the 1960s and '70s, it supported the industrialization of agriculture in Third World countries.
In 1991, the World Bank encouraged moving industries that cause high amounts of pollution to Third World countries.[1]
See also[edit | edit source]
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 The Thistle (2000). The IMF and the WORLD BANK: Puppets of the Neoliberal Onslaught, vol. 13. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- ↑ Vijay Prashad (2008). The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World: 'Kingston' (p. 243). [PDF] The New Press. ISBN 9781595583420 [LG]
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 “The World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).” 2018. World Bank.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Toussaint, Eric. 2022. “World Bank and IMF: 76 Years Is Enough! Abolition! – CADTM.” CADTM. CADTM. August 11, 2022. Archive.
- ↑ “‘The World Bank Is a Human Rights-Free Zone’ – UN Expert on Extreme Poverty Expresses Deep Concern.” 2015. OHCHR. Archive.