The real scandal at the World Bank

Poor Paul Wolfowitz. He got to the World Bank and thought he could keep behaving like he was in the Bush Administration. Now he’s facing outright insurrection from within.

Meanwhile, Johann Hari at the Independent suggests we focus our attention on the REAL scandal at the World Bank: the fact that its policies are killing thousands of the world’s poorest people.

Hari also has a suggestion for something WE can do to “break the power of the Bank over developing countries”:

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.

Read the article.