ABSTRACT

If You Visit The World Bank's Web site (https://www.worldbank.org/" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">www.worldbank.org/.), one of the first things you will see is its motto pledging to work for an end to world poverty. Here and there, to be sure, the World Bank has even had some modest successes at health and safety projects, though it tends at times to take credit for developments, like increased literacy in China, that it did not initiate. Not every lower-level staffer on the World Bank payroll, moreover, is a pure slave to global capital, though those who serve positive functions—funding water sanitation projects or nutrition information programs—are there because the WB believes their efforts will eventually facilitate capital investment and profit. Despite its overarching motto, “Our Dream is a World Free of Poverty”—as Michel Chossudovsky, Saskia Sassen, and others have pointed out—the WB overall has had more success at entrenching conditions that breed poverty than at alleviating them. Its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has now become notorious for enforcing draconian “structural adjustment programs” that strip social welfare programs so developing countries can repay their international debt. So brutal have those programs been that the IMF itself is now promoting plans to forgive some third world debt. Yet at the same time the IMF has seen fit to criticize what it sees as “excessive” government expenditures on social welfare in Europe.