Commenting on the appointment of Paul Wolfowitz to run the World Bank, Max Borders (the whole thing is well worth reading) at Techcentralstation:
As Jim Vallette at TomPaine.com writes:
and the Pacific pointedly demanded that the democratically elected
representatives of borrowing nations be the final arbiters of all
economic policies in their countries. They are challenging the very
structure of the Bank — which would entail taking voting power from
the wealthiest nations."
Jim
Vallette thinks that would be a good thing. I don’t. To allow borrowing
nations be the final arbiters of their own economic policies is like
handing kindergartners your wallet and telling them to go find their
own dinner. (If they weren’t hospitalized from cotton candy overdose
first, your credit cards would be maxed out at the video arcade.) I
realize the child analogy may seem harsh on some level, but when
borrowing nations have only extended palms to offer in return for aid,
they are infants at the level of institutional development.
People like Paul Wolfowitz know that projects like the Marshall Plan
only work in the context of people with certain traditions and fixtures
such as titled property, systems of arbitration, and counter-corruption
mechanisms. Under the development status quo, goons get more Kalashnikovs, cronies get more kickbacks, and poor people get more alms.
Third WorldIraqIn other words, too much of the vast resources poured into the Third World
end up in the coffers of dictators, cronies and lackeys. And the money
that does trickle through to the people ends up as some expensive,
misguided "infrastructure" project, or creates dependency relationships
on people trapped at subsistence. If Wolfowitz has the fortitude to
commit to war in Iraq,
then he’ll have the fortitude to pull some of these welfare nations
from the World Bank’s subsistence teat unless they change. And
Wolfowitz will demand reform, not just from recipient countries, but throughout the whole World Bank organization.
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