[Debate] An essay on the World Bank prez race

[Patrick Bond]

**(With all the hard-core neoliberal hostility being expressed against 
Jim Yong Kim, a bit of balanced critique is surely overdue.)


*Promise-breaking at the World Bank, Part 1: Before*

By Patrick Bond, 7 April 2012

That 66^th birthday month of his, March 2012, was auspicious for adding 
a little spice to his dreary life, but no, it just can't last. Born in 
March 1946 alongside his evil twin, IMF, in Savannah Georgia, after 
conception in what must have been a rather sleazy New Hampshire hotel 
(the 'Bretton Woods') in mid-1944, the old geezer known as the 
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or much better by 
his nickname World Bank (but let me just use WB), really ought to be 
considering retirement.

Description: C:\Users\User\2012\Kim dancing.jpg


Not to be ageist (ok just this once), but still, it's patently obvious 
that WB's relentless WashCon ideology is so last-century, so discredited 
by recent world financial melting, and so durably dangerous in today's 
world. His presidents have reflected the worst of the old yankee 
imperialist mindset. And let's not even start on IMF's extremist lads 
and lass, who in recent years have migrated their austerity dogma from 
North Africa to Southern Europe and to my native Ireland, meeting 
growing resistance along the way.

Even that one moment in 1997-98 when, obviously in mid-life crisis and 
slightly destabilised by his East Asian buddies' spills, WB developed a 
little moral spine and sensibility -- witnessed by his chief economist 
Joseph Stiglitz's loose talk of a new Post-Washington Consensus -- the 
devil on WB's right-hand shoulder (named Larry Summers) told his then 
president James Wolfensohn to boot Stiglitz out, in September 1999, if 
Wolfensohn wanted to hang around WB for another five years. Order given, 
and immediately executed.

So the fresh, slightly punky Post-WashCon chatter was never heard again 
in the 21^st century Bank. Although each December since 2009, current 
president Robert Zoellick has tried to masquerade WB during UN climate 
summits as a Green Bank (hah) 
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/03/19/what-will-robert-zoellick-break-next/), 
the institution has degenerated into a bumbling, often senile, and 
permanently demented entity.

Alzheimers kicks in when a Third World minister in the pocket of a US or 
European energy company comes knocking to beg for a coal-fired power 
plant, as WB immediately forgets the greenwash: "but of course, we know 
of no climate constraints!" (translation: I'll soon be dead). Or when 
WB's staffers venture with the IMF's into North African finance 
ministries, wanting to wrench their dirty money back -- yet pretending 
never to have heard of their now missing or sick or dead hunting pals 
Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gadaffi. 
(http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/73932) (The IMF's 
Washington and Cairo leadership -- specifically, John Lipsky and Ratna 
Sahay -- have even been babbling incomprehensibly about 'social 
justice,' so desperate are they to sell new loans so Egypt's tyrant 
generals can pay off the old.) (http://links.org.au/node/2546)

However, instead of suggesting a graceful exit from a world economy 
still crippled by recent financial-liberalisation thuggery egged on by 
WB, his minder two blocks east in the White House Oval Office has given 
the old man a taste of Viagra, by nominating for WB president a virile 
52-year old (the youngest ever), a man who is doubtless best known 
across the globe for stylish rapping and dancing with talented Dartmouth 
College kids. 
(http://www.businessinsider.com/video-obamas-nominee-for-the-world-bank-is-a-rapping-space-man-2012-3)


WB's most likely new leader (because really, only yankees need apply), 
Dartmouth president Jim Yong Kim, will be a heartbreaker, it's easy to 
predict -- and the kids already teach us that if we just bother to hear 
them.

One senior student, Dennis Zeveloff, wrote in /The Dartmouth/ newspaper 
that Kim's management refused to "communicate with students, improve 
advising or create a more academic atmosphere." 
(http://thedartmouth.com/2012/03/29/opinion/voces) Those hoping for a 
different WB with Kim as president and more access for progressive civil 
society, listen up.

Max Yoeli, the 2012 student body president, wrote in the same pages that 
Kim suffers "a remarkable devotion to image over impact, a disregard for 
student input and selfishness in his fulfillment of a tremendous 
responsibility." There was "a stunning lack of transparency"; he 
"consistently abdicated leadership"; and Kim's "fractured and 
disappointing legacy" will be remembered for "his utter lack of ties to 
the community and the shortest presidential tenure at the College since 
the early 19th century." (http://thedartmouth.com/2012/03/29/opinion/yoeli)

As whistle-blowing student Andrew Lohse complained in an article in /The 
Dartmouth /that Obama should have read, two months prior to Kim's Bank 
nomination, "a systemic culture of abuse exists under a college 
president who has the power and experience to change what can only be 
described as a public health crisis of the utmost importance: the 
endemic culture of physical and psychological abuse that occupies the 
heart of Dartmouth's Greek [fraternity] community." 
(http://thedartmouth.com/2012/01/25/opinion/lohse)

Lohse's main allegation, confirmed in a /Rolling Stone /magazine 
investigation 
(http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/confessions-of-an-ivy-league-frat-boy-inside-dartmouths-hazing-abuses-20120328#ixzz1rERvlM7L) 
last month (following which Lohse was rewarded with a stunningly 
misguided College prosecution, subsequently withdrawn), is that 
Dartmouth Man gets taught ruling-class behavior during student 
fraternities' hazing experiences.

Michael Bronski, a professor of women's and gender studies, confirmed to 
/Rolling Stone /that Dartmouth's Animal House frat "members are secure 
that they have bright futures, and they just don't care. I actually see 
the culture as being predicated on hazing. There's a level of violence 
at the heart of it that would be completely unacceptable anywhere else, 
but here, it's just the way things are."

In Lohse's own frat, first-year recruits were, as he witnessed, 
compelled to "swim in a kiddie pool full of vomit, urine, fecal matter, 
semen and rotten food products; eat omeletts made of vomit 
['vomelettes']; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge 
to vomit blood; drink beers poured down fellow pledges' ass cracks; and 
vomit on other pledges, among other abuses."

Kim was Dartmouth's president when Lohse began complaining. The 
Dartmouth president was fully aware of the vomelette-makers' ethos, 
including denialism, but did nothing, says Lohse, leaving "an 
intoxicating nihilism at the center of our culture that fraternities 
perpetuate through pathological lies while continuing the abuses."

As One Percenters in training, Dartmouth Men are the sixth-highest paid 
university graduates in the US, in spite of what Lohse calls the 
"pervasive hazing, substance abuse and sexual assault." Yes, according 
to the student paper, "Dartmouth reportedly has the highest number of 
reported sexual assaults in the Ivy League."

Observed Yoeli, "Kim could not find time to attend a single event of 
V-Week --- 11 days devoted to combating violence against women --- 
despite its clear relevance to campus life." And as for the College's 
hottest issue since in 1986 likeminded frat boys bashed an 
anti-apartheid, pro-divestment shantytown on the campus quad, "Kim will 
likely escape Dartmouth without making any meaningful progress on 
hazing," laments Yoeli.

/Rolling Stone /explained this by quoting Kim's 2009 promise to rich 
alumni worried that Dartmouth's quaint primitiveness might not earn his 
respect. He "reassured them he had no intention of overhauling the 
fraternities," because, Kim confided, "One of the things you learn as an 
anthropologist, you don't come in and change the culture." (He learned 
that lesson as a doctoral student at Harvard, not far from Dartmouth in 
distance or philosophy, though hazing is reportedly not quite as 
rigorous.) That's one promise Kim did keep.

Why focus so much on this pathetic institution? Concludes Lohse, "One of 
the things I've learned at Dartmouth -- one thing that sets a 
psychological precedent for many Dartmouth men -- is that good people 
can do awful things to one another for absolutely no reason."

Dartmouth's man-grooming sounds like excellent preparation for climbing 
the career ladder: straight up from cooking vomelettes for your peers, 
into WB's arms where as I argue below, in relation to fossil fuels, 
lending that causes victims to vomit blood seems to be structured into 
the job.

But what Kim's crack about anthropology means is that he promises, in 
effect, to break any promise you think his nomination portends for 
changing -- even slightly adjusting -- WB's exceptional track record of 
poverty-creation.

So if you thought the excellent book he co-edited a dozen years ago -- 
appropriately entitled /Dying for Growth 
/(http://www.zcommunications.org/contents/185491) -- means that 
Professor Kim will teach our old WB dog a new trick, then, if you can 
hold back the tears, read his banal /Financial Times /op-ed a week after 
the nomination (shortly after that dangerous Noam Chomsky endorsement of 
the book circulated amongst chin-wagging elites). Writing about his 
native Korea, an exception that in many respects proves the rule (of 
uneven and combined capitalist development), Kim soothed the /FT's 
/corporate readership: "I have seen how integration with the global 
economy can transform a poor country into one of the most dynamic and 
prosperous economies in the world." 
(http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/tg1510.aspx)

It's no doubt hard to hear, but Kim's critique of the neoliberal, 
corporate-driven, debt-encumbered, health-destroying, 
environment-raping, patriarchy-promoting, racist power regime called 
globalization -- so convincingly argued in /Dying for Growth -- /is 
already being dashed against the reality of Washington financial power. 
It's just like Obama's intoxicating ability to say things in 2008 that 
you thought he meant, which ever since gave him space to legitimise 
imperialism, re-empower the corporate oligarchy, erode the Constitution 
and destroy the environment.

"Kim promised Dartmouth an approximately 10-year engagement," griped 
alumnus Charlie Hoffmann: "Partners in Health colleagues must have 
missed the irony in their statement on Kim's nomination: 'Jim is all 
about delivery and about delivering on promises often made but too 
seldom kept.'" (http://thedartmouth.com/2012/03/29/opinion/voces)

Partners in Health is possibly the most progressive, dynamic major NGO 
in the health field, and after co-founding this non-profit agency with 
Paul Farmer in 1987, Kim could easily have retired with laurels, basking 
in the light shining from Farmer's halo. But though the Partners in 
Health workers I know are of exceptional integrity, that's because 
they've mostly shied away from administering neoliberalism.

In short, if you want a world without poverty and you think scraggly old 
WB can be botoxed into a beautiful ally, then you are certain to soon 
feel just as jilted as you did three years ago, the last time a pretty 
politician made out with you and, if you were an ordinary US citizen, 
stole your vote with zero payback, and if you were not, blew away any 
illusions that a US president could do the world any good.


*
*** *

**

*Promise-breaking at the World Bank, Part 2: After***

If you want a world without poverty /or /species-threatening climate 
change, then let's fast-forward a bit, to the point World Bank President 
Jim Yong Kim breaks your heart by endorsing what remains the world's 
worst financial coal-addiction 
(http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art.shtml?x=569967), which in turn 
is required to power the world's most active financing of Resource-Curse 
economics in some of the world's most despotic regimes 
(http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art-569560).

Looking back, you could say that the relationship went sour with Kim's 
approval, in mid-2012, of WB credits for a Kosovo coal-fired power plant 
everyone admits isn't even economically efficient 
(http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art-568872) yet will poison the air 
near the capital city. (http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art-569226)

Then Kim quickly approved more tranches of WB's biggest-ever loan, to 
the corrupted South African government for its fraud-filled Medupi power 
plant, along with more financing for the hotly contested Indian 
coal-fired power plants that his sponsor Tim Geithner (Dartmouth class 
of '83) at Treasury has also been supporting through the US Ex-Im Bank. 
And before long he was down the slippery slope into funding one killer 
coal-fired power plant after the next.

How can that be, you're asking, because not only is Kim a medical 
doctor. Less than two weeks after receiving the WB presidential 
nomination, in early April he renamed the medical school at Dartmouth 
after Dr Seuss (the "Geisel School of Medicine") -- to be sure, merely 
because before his death, Geisel (class of '25) and his wife gave more 
money to Dartmouth than anyone else ever did. Fibbed Kim at that event, 
"Ted Geisel lived out the Dartmouth ethos (/sic/) of thinking 
differently and creatively to illuminate the world's challenges and the 
opportunities for understanding and surmounting them."

In contrast to Dartmouth Man, cartoonist/author Geisel was a genius of 
allegory, especially in relation to environmental conservation. (Thanks 
to my three year old daughter, I know this very well.) The best-loved 
work by Dr Seuss these days is /The Lorax/, a major motion picture in 
which the self-destructive Once-ler character cuts down all the Truffula 
trees for his obscure and useless Thneeds factory, notwithstanding 
prescient pleadings from the near-extinct Lorax. Filmmakers updated 
Geisel's tale insofar as Once-ler (standing in for capitalism) promotes 
a silver-bullet solution (seeds) to the exhausted-resource crisis. It's 
the same fantasy that motivates a great deal of WB agro-corporate and 
climate techie-fix research and investment.

(For the sake of full disclosure, not long before Kim arrived, I was 
flown in to Hanover to address Dartmouth environmentalists on the perils 
of carbon trading -- 
http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/Bond%20climate%20change%20paper.pdf -- and 
had a marvellous time, especially with several staff and students with 
whom today I still work. Like Geisel, there are always exceptions at 
sites like Dartmouth.)

Which quickly brings us to the link between ecological catastrophe and 
human health, one that WB has in theory recognised and in practice 
mainly ignored.

Kim is by all accounts an eminent medical doctor with a terrific track 
record of public health management and advocacy, especially against 
AIDS. I write from the city with the world's largest HIV+ population so 
we will always be grateful for Kim's role in cheapening AIDS medicines 
against the interests of Big Pharma, the World Trade Organisation, 
intellectual property rights, and the US and Mbeki-era South African 
governments.

So how will he react, when just weeks from now he is faced with the 
greatest problem WB ever created -- greenhouse gas emissions from fossil 
fuel energy -- by being the world's largest single climate-change 
financier? Kim's new WB underlings are, after all, incessant creditors 
of new coal-fired powerplants, including their largest project loan 
ever, for $3.5 billion, which was made to South Africa to build Eskom's 
Medupi plant exactly two years ago. 
(http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/files/WB%20Eskom%20powerpoint%20slides.pdf)

After the tragedy of Obama, Kim could well be a farce: someone who 
co-edited the great book /Dying for Growth/ yet who must actively ignore 
data (from Christian Aid in London) projecting 185 million African 
deaths in the 21^st century due to 'growth' that in turn creates runaway 
climate change, not to mention the vast number of coal-related diseases 
he will now be blamed for. Yet this is precisely what multinational 
capital requires of Kim: a revitalised image to help raise $85 billion 
for WB's recapitalisation, which will in turn keep financing, amongst 
other eco-social-economic catastrophies, coal-fired powerplants and 
their carbon market fake-fix at a time both are in extreme disrepute.

But why be so cynical before Kim has a chance? It's simply a matter of 
considering the underlying power relations. Recall in December 2008, 
Obama chose for his economic team maniacs like Paul Volcker 
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/11/12/against-volcker/) and Larry 
Summers 
(http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/04/why-we-should-banish-larry-summers-public-life). 
Because US civil society let the pressure /completely /off Obama, so 
early, it took another thirty months before finally Occupy Wall Street 
and similar uprisings across the US began, but after the fiscal horse 
had bolted from democratic influence into the endless stables of 
financial tyrant Goldman Sachs.

Kim will be firmly instructed to respect the prevailing culture, for 
it's in corporate capital's short-term interest to both extract and burn 
the maximum amount of fossil fuels, especially in the death-grip 
competitive era in which Western transnational corporates are being 
challenged by Chinese and Indian corporates in a race to most rapidly 
destroy the planet. The Westerners are pulling out all the stops, and it 
is only possible to understand the appointment of Kim in the context of 
petro-military-financial complex influence over capital accumulation.

Flash back to those dozen years after the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, when 
financial penalties for emissions appeared to become more likely, albeit 
channelled by WB, UN and Goldman Sachs cronies into what we can term 
without exaggeration /The Lorax-/style 'privatisation of the air' 
(carbon trading). Towards the end of that period, we witnessed a big 
climate-denialist push from leading oil firms -- BP, Shell, Chevron and 
ExxonMobil -- through thinktanks and astroturf advocacy such as the 
Global Climate Coalition.

The disinfo marketing worked from 2009-11, for it switched typically 
vacuous US public opinion away from a desire to solve the climate crisis 
-- ideally through a solution like the Montreal Protocol which in 1987 
phased in a CFC ban to stop the ozone hole from growing -- into a 
different headspace: either questioning the science, or preferring to 
simply ignore the signs of climate change, and the implications for 
rising global environmental injustice.

Instead of addressing the crisis, corporate capital decided to promote 
-- with world taxpayers covering the bill -- a variety of 'false 
solutions.' If these happen in Third World sites like South Africa, they 
are termed Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs). The WB is still the 
leading force in financing these innovations, even as the European 
carbon markets in which CDMs are sold are now crashing to all-time lows, 
from highs of over 30 euros/tonne in 2006 down to just over 6 
euros/tonne in early April, thus threatening the entire carbon casino 
with a fatal crash.

How brutal a contradiction is this for Kim? If activists can keep the 
pressure on, he will be increasingly embarrassed at maintaining WB's 
fossil fuel portfolio, for scientists have been establishing explicit 
links between climate change and what former Bolivian ambassador to the 
UN Pablo Solon termed 'genocide and ecocide' at the Durban COP17 climate 
summit here last December.

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch8s8-7.html

Even using a word like genocide, Solon was not being in the least 
hyperbolic. The main scientific board -- the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change -- considers a variety of adverse healthcare effects of 
climate change, including higher levels of malnutrition, malaria, 
respiratory disease, diarrhoea, and deaths due to extreme weather 
conditions. And the World Health Organisation admits the burdens of 
climate-related disease are already unfairly distributed, with Southern 
and Eastern Africa, small islands and areas reliant upon snow-packed 
water supplies (from the Andes and Himalayas) most susceptible. Like so 
many sites in which Kim and Partners in Health have worked, 
environmental health and economic racism overlap closely.

In coming weeks, Kim should be acutely ashamed of presiding over WB's 
extreme coal-heavy portfolio, given that three Environmental Defense 
Fund scientists -- Sarah Penney, Jacob Bell and John Balbus -- recently 
found that "between roughly 6000 and 10,700 annual deaths from heart 
ailments, respiratory disease and lung cancer can be attributed to the 
88 coal-fired power plants and companies receiving public international 
financing." 
(http://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/9553_coal-plants-health-impacts.pdf) 


And writing in /Geotimes/on "Health Impacts of Coal," three other 
scientists -- Robert B. Finkelman, Harvey E. Belkin, and Jose A. Centeno 
-- observe the rise in cancers, bone deformation, black lung and other 
respiratory diseases, sterilization, and kidney disease associated with 
coal. (http://www.geotimes.org/sept06/feature_HealthImpacts.html) They 
illustrate their argument with a photograph describing a place that, 
ultimately, supplies me my electricity: "Uncontrolled coal fires in 
Witbank, South Africa, rage along a coal mining road. Such fires can 
contain toxic compounds that endanger the health of mine workers and 
nearby residents."




Much of Witbank's output is used in Eskom's power plants, but four 
corporations (AngloCoal, BHP Billiton, Eyesizwe and the world's largest 
mining house, Xstrata/Glencore) also export via the world's largest coal 
port, Richards Bay. Yet more output from the vast field is shipped a few 
dozen kilometres south to Secunda, where it feeds the world's single 
largest CO2 emissions site, Sasol's coal-to-liquid plant.

Forty major new coal mines are being dug in this area to supply growing 
world demand. Along with higher corporate profits and faster climate 
change, we can expect more of Witbank's notorious health problems, 
including stunted growth of children, silicosis, other lung and 
respiratory diseases and mining fatalities, according to shocking 
research by Victor Munnik, Geraldine Hochmann and Mathews Hlabane 
(http://www.bothends.org/uploaded_files/2case_study_South_Africa.pdf).

These are the same coalfields that will supply Medupi, in spite of 
fierce opposition and evident corruption by the borrower. The immediate 
debtor is the much-hated SA parastatal company Eskom, whose chairperson 
Valli Moosa engaged in what is scathingly called 'tenderpreneurship' to 
direct (through tenders) WB resources into boilers made by Hitachi, in 
whose local subsidiary South Africa's ruling party -- the African 
National Congress (ANC) -- has a 25 percent ownership. Because Moosa was 
on the ANC's finance committee at the time, even the state's public 
protector ruled his role to be 'improper.'

In spite of that, a CDM team from the United Nations Framework 
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) voted in February 2012 to make 
Moosa head of a panel looking into future CDM policy. Under Moosa's 
reign, Eskom threatened it would apply for CDM monies to augment WB 
financing for Medupi, but that conflict of interest hasn't worried the 
UNFCCC neoliberals, since the body is presided over by a notorious 
carbon trader, Christiana Figueres, and since the team Moosa is chairing 
does not have a single member on record questioning the failed carbon 
trading strategy.

(By the way, the Medupi boilers are not being produced on time because 
Hitachi screwed up, so there are now renewed threats of electricity 
blackouts in South Africa, where Eskom still gives BHP Billiton the 
world's cheapest electricity -- $0.02 per kWh compared to $0.15 for most 
domestic households -- with the firm chewing up more than 10 percent of 
the national supply, so as to export aluminium whose main ingredient, 
bauxite, is imported to Richards Bay from Australia. If you buy many of 
our base metals within South Africa, you pay a higher price than do 
customers abroad, given the big companies' oligopolistic pricing power, 
a debilitating fact that the SA Competition Tribunal finally recognised 
last week when penalising Arcelor Mittal for domestic price-fixing.)

WB appears to revel in this sort of economically-irrational, 
crony-capitalist, back-scratching, health-defying, climate-amplifying, 
mega-corporate complex of bad states and big business. Were there 
justice and a modicum of countervailing power or morality within crusty 
old WB's hardened soul, this travesty would be reversed. The 
(ir)responsible WB bankers, economists and environmental consultants 
would be fired and banned from ever lending again, and reparations would 
be paid. (I debated one of these charlatans, Bill Moomaw from Tufts 
University, the day after the Medupi loan was made -- 
http://openmediaboston.org/node/1250-- and as a result, can only 
recommend the application of an academic malpractice standard.)

Instead, last month, the WB's Inspection Panel whitewash team issued a 
milquetoast report on Medupi, ignoring or downplaying all the major 
problems.

So it is safe to predict that without a change in the power balance, Kim 
will nudge-nudge, wink-wink these kinds of WB projects, /precisely the 
way he did the Dartmouth hazing/, and the haze in the Witbank air will 
get thicker, as the size of children's heads shrinks and the diseases in 
their lungs grow. Through Dr Kim, a health-caring WB image will be 
created while substantive support to progressive health initiatives will 
be stymied. And it is controversial yet safe to predict that Kim will 
soon be hated by a public health community that currently adores him for 
his excellent career to date.

As Finkelman, Belkin, and Centeno point out, "In the 13th century, the 
dense, sulfurous air in London attracted the attention of the British 
royalty who issued proclamations banning the use of coal in London." But 
to get Kim to catch up to eight-century old preventative healthcare will 
be impossible given the balance of forces amongst Third World elites in 
sites like South Africa, within the fossil-addicted WB itself, and a few 
blocks away at the White House and Treasury where mega-energy interests 
hold enormous sway.

The point here is not that the WB should become /more /involved in 
healthcare, for after all, it's a /bank, /full of /bankers /and dogmatic 
neoliberal economists who continue to practice their craft unshaken by 
the events of 2008-09/. /To /lend/ hard currency to poor countries -- 
money often hijacked by venal elite rulers -- so as to support public 
health, is financially ridiculous. The successful demand by African 
health advocates to /halt/ WB lending to poor countries to buy 
overpriced AIDS medicines a decade ago is one reflection of this common 
sense.

As Jois Mukherjee of Kim's group Partners in Health put it in the 
journal /HIV+ /in mid-2001, "More World Bank loans are definitely not 
going to help. We're firmly against -- and I think most of the activist 
community is against -- loans as a major funding source for the HIV 
epidemic. It can't be the major source of funding because these are 
countries that can't afford the debt payments they already have. These 
areas are in need of debt relief, not more loans." 
(http://books.google.co.za/books?id=ZmUEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false 
<http://books.google.co.za/books?id=ZmUEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false> 
)

Instead, what are required from world elites are fewer Intellectual 
Property Rights restrictions on Third World countries producing 
vitally-needed medicines that are now threatened by 
Washington-Brussels-Geneva free-trade pressure and by multinational 
corporate takeovers of Indian firms; more R&D on Third World diseases 
instead of the best medical brains being used for so much wasteful 
cosmetic healthcare; and more /grants/ from Northerners who are the 
people most responsible for the climate-related fatalities that in 
Africa will probably exceed 200 million range within the next century. 
(http://www.southcentre.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1695%3Asb60&catid=144%3Asouth-bulletin-individual-articles&Itemid=287&lang=en 
<http://www.southcentre.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1695%3Asb60&catid=144%3Asouth-bulletin-individual-articles&Itemid=287&lang=en>)

That 'climate debt' must be paid, and although Hilary Clinton offered 
$100 billion/year from the North during the Copenhagen COP17 in December 
2009, this was a promise she apparently meant to break, as it was 
offered only to ease pressure on Obama who arrived there the following 
day. The recipient of the grants, the Green Climate Fund, is being 
designed (partly by South African Trevor Manuel) as a 'Greedy Corporate 
Fund,' as NGO critics call it. It is currently under the WB trusteeship 
of Zoellick, who after taking over from his nepotistic predecessor, the 
war criminal Paul Wolfowitz, in 2007, rapidly tripled WB lending for 
coal projects. Clinton hasn't paid a cent, as her team repeatedly goes 
to the UN climate summits with one aim in mind, sabotage. 
(http://www.ukznpress.co.za/?class=bb_ukzn_books&method=view_books&global[fields][_id]=395 
<http://www.ukznpress.co.za/?class=bb_ukzn_books&method=view_books&global%5bfields%5d%5b_id%5d=395>)

The single best example of such a grant mechanism, according to the 
trusted advocacy group Health GAP, is the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, 
Tuberculosis and Malaria. After intense struggles to launch the fund a 
decade ago, it has subsequently channelled nearly $23 billion into 150 
countries, saving millions of lives.

However by now it was meant to have raised its capacity up to $10 
billion in annual grants. Butin continuing the isolationist policy of 
predecessor George W. Bush, Obama maintains funding at only half what is 
needed, failing to locate the $1 billion per year that the Global Fund 
requires to even maintain existing levels. So huge cuts -- 25 percent or 
more -- in vital projects are already underway, leaving South Africa's 
AIDS treatment and funding-dependent Treatment Action Campaign movement 
in tatters. Recent estimates of the cost of the Bush-Obama banking 
sector bailout now approach $30 /trillion./

**** *

*Promise-breaking at the World Bank, Part 3: Contenders*

It is onto the terrain of unprecedented global financial malgovernance 
that Kim now strides. To be sure, on the way, he's being tripped up a 
little by disgruntled neoliberals like Reuters columnist Felix Salmon, 
who concludes, correctly, "the US government in general, and the 
Geithner-Clinton axis in particular, doesn't actually want any real 
change at the World Bank. Change can only come from a strong president 
who is strongly supported by the US, which has veto power over any real 
changes. Kim will be a weak president."

(http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/04/05/jim-yong-kims-depressing-tactical-silence/)

Salmon and far-sighted 'establishment' allies -- /The Economist, New 
York Times, Financial Times /and dozens of ghastly Old-Guard WB 
executives 
(http://www.worldbankpresident.org/a-bank-insider/useful-documents/former-world-bank-senior-managers-send-an-open-letter-to-the-board) 
-- support Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who was 
nominated by the governments of Nigeria, South Africa and Angola. A few 
years ago, Okonjo-Iweala served as Zoellick's understudy, without 
visible discomfort, aside from "causing great turmoil" by abolishing new 
WB staffers' open-ended contracts against the advice of her human 
resources department. 
(http://www.worldbankpresident.org/voice-of-reason/candidates/what-fuel-subsidies-in-nigeria-say-about-ngozi-okonjo-iweala-and-the-enthusiasm-were-seeing) 


Most importantly, she gave the West enormous assistance seven years ago 
in maintaining neo-colonialism in Abuja at a difficult time. As a 
result, writes a /Foreign Policy /blogger, backing Okonjo-Iweala's 
candidacy is "an easy 'reformist' stance for economic conservatives to 
take. As these sources all note in their endorsements, Okonjo-Iweala is 
a fairly orthodox, free market, growth-oriented economist." 
(http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/04/02/is_okonjo_iweala_the_establishment_choice_for_the_world_bank)

Free markets and growth are rarely so 'easy' to fuse, of course, and 
Okonjo-Iweala was not particularly successful in Abuja. According to the 
Nigerian /Guardian /columnist Sonala Olumhense, "She was one of those 
who put together the National Economic Empowerment and Development 
Strategy (NEEDS), which, we were assured, would cure employment in 
Nigeria before our very eyes. NEEDS, when the scheme was launched early 
in 2004, would create seven million jobs within three years, they told 
us, one million of them before the end of the year alone." 
(http://www.osundefender.org/?p=28671)

For Olumhense, "It was the original 419 [Nigerian financial scam]. Let 
me date-stamp all of this: Okonjo-Iweala was a key member of the 
powerful 'economic reform team' of that hour. In just months, NEEDS 
slipped into folklore; nobody from that team has acknowledged its 
existence since then, let alone taken responsibility for its deception."

Last August, continued Olumhense, "at a media briefing to showcase the 
government's economic priorities, she said that the major thrust of the 
administration's economic agenda was 'jobs and pro-jobs growth.' 
Okonjo-Iweala did something else on that day. She spoke of the 
much-awaited 'Transforming Nigeria Document,' a mysterious guide that 
has remained unpublished until this day."

Then there was the "Vision 20:2020 blueprint" which for Okonjo-Iweala 
was "the bedrock of the economic agenda. But Vision 20:2020 is a myth, 
like transformation, or NEEDS, or reform, or the war against 
corruption," concludes Olumhense.

This was confirmed by former Central Bank Governor Charles Soludo, 
quoted by Olumhense as ridiculing "the whimsical origins of Vision 
20:2020." Confessed Soludo, "The impetus was the Goldman Sachs report on 
the BRIC countries and the Next 11 countries, which included Nigeria... 
We all know it is not achievable... it remains a wish list. The numbers 
simply do not add up. At best, it is a good slogan and an interesting 
joke.'"

The same dynamics worked in relation to debt relief. Back in 2005, 
Nigeria's rowdy parliament was regularly rejecting foreign loan 
repayments as undemocratic and corrupt, given the country's desperate 
poverty and the debts' origins in the country's military dictatorships. 
So Okonjo-Iweala first came to the world elite's attention by working on 
behalf of the debt-collection mafia known as the Paris Club, with its 
representatives from the US, Europe, Brazil, Japan and the Russian 
Federation. To their applause, by October 2005 she quickly emptied 
Abuja's treasury under the rubric of 'debt relief'.

IMF rip-off artists explained the scam: "The agreement envisages a 
phased approach, in which Nigeria would clear its arrears in full, 
receive a debt write-off up to Naples terms, and buy back the remainder 
of its debt. The agreement is conditional on a favorable review of its 
macroeconomic and structural policies supported by the Fund under a 
nonfinancial arrangement." (this and the next four citations are from 
https://www.civicus.org/new/media/PatrickBond-LootingAfrica.doc 
<https://www.civicus.org/new/media/PatrickBond-LootingAfrica.doc>)

What that meant was that Nigeria, $6.3 billion in arrears, would first 
pay $12.4 billion in up-front payments. As Rob Weissman of 
/Multinational Monitor /reported, "You can celebrate this deal, as the 
Paris Club does, if you ignore the fact that creditors generally write 
down bad debts as a matter of course (not charity), the billions over 
principle that Nigeria has already sent out of the country, the fact 
that the deal imposes IMF conditionality on Nigeria (even though the IMF 
isn't providing credit to the country), and the reality of the severe 
poverty in Nigeria."

Complained the Global AIDS Alliance, "The creditors should be ashamed of 
themselves if they simply take this money. These creditors often knew 
that the money would be siphoned off by dictators and deposited in 
western banks, and the resulting debt is morally illegitimate. They bear 
a moral obligation to think more creatively about how to use this money. 
Nigeria has already paid these creditors $11.6 billion in debt service 
since 1985."

According to Soren Ambrose, then based at Jubilee Africa, "The Paris 
Club requires that countries applying for relief be under an IMF 
program, but the prospect of agreeing to one is political dynamite in 
Nigeria. The Paris Club was however under great pressure to complete a 
landmark deal with Nigeria, where the legislature had threatened to 
simply repudiate the debts, so the PSI was deemed an acceptable 
alternative. Okonjo-Iweala told Reuters on May 18 that 'the IMF makes 
sure it is as stringent as an upper credit tranche programme and then 
monitors it like a regular program, but the difference is that you 
develop it and you own it.'"

But actually, you don't own it, they own you. What the Nigerian case 
illustrates is that the IMF pulls strings on behalf of the G8 'donor' 
countries, and the G8 will continue to support the IMF if such functions 
benefit northern countries.

According to the leader of Nigeria's Jubilee network, Rev David Ugolor, 
"The Paris Club cannot expect Nigeria, freed from over 30 years of 
military rule, to muster $12.4 billion to pay off interest and penalties 
incurred by the military. Since the debt, by President Obasanjo's own 
admission, is of dubious origin, the issues of the responsibilities of 
the creditors must be put on the table at the Paris Club. As desirable 
as an exit from debt peonage is, it is scandalous for a poor debt 
distressed country, which cannot afford to pay $2 billion in annual debt 
service payments, to part with $6 billion up front or $12 billion in 
three months or even one year."

So as a result of this deal and others like it, what Okonjo-Iweala 
accomplished can be summarized in a graph from an IMF report on the 
financial meltdown, which shows quite clearly that if you sell your 
family silver -- all your reserves -- in exchange for the write-off of 
vast 'total public debt' that could never have been repaid in any case, 
your Paris Club reward is to actually /increase /your rate of debt 
repayments to overall revenues. If you are a low-income African country, 
Okonjo-Iweala's gambit means that although technically you owe half what 
you used to, in relation to GDP, you are now are milked even harder (50 
percent more from 2008 to 2009, during the worst economic crisis in 
memory).

Description: Debt payments

Source: www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/books/2009/globalfin/globalfin.pdf 
<http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/books/2009/globalfin/globalfin.pdf>

If we take this logic to its extreme, then from the standpoint of 
promoting social justice, Okonjo-Iweala would be a /better/ choice for 
WB president than Kim, because having repeatedly done deals of this sort 
against her constituents' interests, it is fair to say that no one in 
Nigerian history united the country's poor and working-class majority so 
effectively.

To illustrate, a few weeks ago Okonjo-Iweala doubled the fuel price 
overnight, on the instruction of IMF Managing Director Christine 
Lagarde, and thereby introduced an 'Occupy Nigeria' spirit that helped 
connect the dots between Wall Street and African austerity. Usually 
without such dot-connecting the result is an 'IMF Riot' by furious 
citizenries, but the protest normally pops up briefly and dies down, 
leads to intense violence and achieves very little.

However, thanks to Okonjo-Iweala's arrogant subsidy-cut advocacy, that 
social fury was transformed into mass non-violent strikes (although her 
police killed several unarmed demonstrators) and after a week, prior to 
desperate state concessions and trade union capitulation, it very nearly 
toppled the Goodluck Jonathan regime.

Such unique experience surely qualifies Okonjo-Iweala to play a role in 
humanity's greatest task in coming months and years: /uniting a coherent 
global people's movement against the One Percent/ that would make the 
1999 Seattle World Trade Organisation protest look like kindergarten 
training for Occupiers. What more could the 99 Percent ask of old WB in 
his fading days?

A similar case for Okonjo-Iweala is made by her compatriot, Ikhide 
Ikheloa, who first confirms the credentials required for a promotion: 
"There is no one else better primed to execute the obnoxious policies of 
the World Bank against African and brown nations than Okonjo-Iweala. Her 
current tour of duty, although disastrous to Nigeria and her poor, has 
given her an impeccable resume to spread the World Bank's gospel of 
uncritical capitalism and indifference to the world's poor and 
dispossessed." 
(http://saharareporters.com/article/occupynigeria-why-dr-ngozi-okonjo-iweala-should-be-next-president-world-bank-ikhide-r-ikhelo) 


After all, says Ikheala, WB "is an ancient bureaucratic relic whose time has come and gone" and, suffering within their own apparent stage of economic dementia, "The fawning over Okonjo-Iweala by Westerners has been comic... Under normal circumstances, were Okonjo-Iweala a Westerner or white, she and her bumbling team would have been fired for gross incompetence. The show of double standards is galling and maddening."

  

Still, Ikheala pleads, the ordinary Nigerian would love to see her backside, even if it means being kicked upstairs: "When Okonjo-Iweala departs for the World Bank, she will be leaving Nigeria much worse than she found it. That is the most compelling reason why she deserves the World Bank presidency. Nigerians need a break.

  

Such passion and impeccable logic is quite hard to argue against, if we want to express solidarity with Okonjo-Iweala's 150 million+ victims.

  

Description: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/NEWS/Images/autoUpload/F_1205519926845/I_1205519926845.jpgDescription: C:\Users\User\2012\220px-Jose_Antonio_Ocampo.jpg

  

Still, the case of the other contender, Jose Antonio Ocampo, needs more investigation before we might conclude which candidate deserves WB leadership -- or preferably, who can best manage WB decommissioning. An important qualification so far unmentioned: who can throw the best retirement party?

  

As Colombia's Central Bank chairperson and Minister of Finance and Public Credit, of National Planning, and of Agriculture and Rural Development during the years 1989-97, serving one of the world's most brutal governments, Ocampo surely participated in Cabinet meetings in which not retirement, but instead the/murder/  of ten thousand trade unionists, human rights advocates and ordinary citizens by mushrooming paramilitaries was discussed, condoned, advocated or even celebrated?

  

I don't know whether or not this is the case, but the best Latin American student I ever had, Jasmin Hristov, wrote the book/Blood and capital: The paramilitarization of Colombia/  <http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Blood+and+Capital>  about this period: "It is not a mere coincidence that during the era of accelerated neoliberal restructuring, the deterioration in the living conditions of the working majority has been accompanied by an increase in the capabilities and activities of military, police, and paramilitary groups, as well as the portrayal of social movements as forces that must be monitored, silenced, and eventually dismantled." (http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/blood+and+capital)

  

Given how many illustrious economists endorsed Ocampo, one would hope he has clean hands -- but then again one would hope that before signing, those economists might have explored the embarrassing possibility of Ocampo's fingerprints on our comrades' corpses. Then again, they are/economists/, so probably it didn't cross their minds.And at least Ocampo is now a committed Keynesian. In his recent advocacy for exchange controls and in a wide-ranging/Challenge/magazine interview, he comes down clearly on the left side of the discipline, aside from one faux pas: advocating another 'Green Revolution' for Africa. (http://www.challengemagazine.com/Challenge%20interview%20pdfs/027_039.pdf)

Regardless of the two contenders' foibles, it still makes sense to 
assume that Kim will be elected with a slight majority of votes -- don't 
forget, WB's Board enjoys vote-per-dollar ownership 'democracy' -- held 
by the US, Canada, Japan, Korea and most probably Europe. Brussels owes 
Washington for helping hammer up that late-1940s 'Europeans-Only' sign 
(ubiquitous here in South Africa before 1994) on the IMF Managing 
Director's door last year, permitting Lagarde -- while facing 
investigation for massive fraud on behalf of a Conservative Party donor 
-- to be selected over the other candidate, Mexico's neoliberal central 
banker.

(Her predecessor as both IMF boss and French Finance Minister, Dominique 
Strauss-Kahn, had apparently overdosed on Viagra in a Times Square hotel 
-- or was it a Lille brothel? -- a few weeks earlier. They do scrape the 
bottom of the barrel for globo-gov management these days, don't they.)

It is also safe to assume that when it comes to serving power, Kim will 
be more reliable and effective, simply because he's imperialism's 
choice, as against Brazilian and South African subimperialisms' vain 
hopes. The oft-recited yet so far mythical potential of BRICS countries 
to challenge the system, in search of a few more crumbs from the table 
(for never would BRICS' economically-obsequious leaders question what's 
served for dinner or how it's made), was dashed by Brasilia's and 
Pretoria's disunity: they couldn't even decide to promote a single 
candidate, nor, in early April, has Brazil's finance minister even 
decided to vote for the man, Ocampo, he nominated in late March.

So even if he avoids the April 9 /Washington Post /debate between WB 
presidential candidates, as is anticipated since Kim's high-minded talk 
of openness and transparency in the /FT /will be his next broken 
promise, the winner in the WB Board selection in mid-April will be Kim. 
Recall that a factor working firmly in his favour, amongst the decidedly 
undemocratic electorate favouring the /status quo/, is Kim's failure to 
initiate cultural change where it was so desperately needed, in the 
little One Percenter community of Dartmouth.

This, in turn, will make it easier to understand the same behaviour in 
Washington in relation to the 99 Percent's needs, after a banal 
honeymoon that, like Obama's first 30 months, may briefly deflect the 
cause of justice. After all, others have tried the WB insider-reform 
route -- Stiglitz on economic philosophy, Caroline Moser in gender 
policy, Herman Daly on environment, John Clarke on NGO relations -- and 
failed miserably. One day in 2012 or 2013, it is safe to predict, Occupy 
World Bank will need to move in and move Kim out, for his own good.

Before then, he will no doubt recall for WB minions the sickening 
strategy that served him so well in the noxious Ivy League, and that in 
coming months will work fine for a few thousand neoliberal economists -- 
though not so well for species survival:/"One of the things you learn as 
an anthropologist, you don't come in and change the culture."/

The most appropriate attire for the slick /status quo /moves required -- 
that outfit in which Kim was introduced to so many of us -- is a studded 
leather jacket with spaceman sunglasses. Tempting as it is to admire his 
talk-left walk-right robot-dance (I certainly do), Kim's razzle-dazzle 
really shouldn't distract the rest of us from persuasively insisting 
that WB do what should have seriously been considered years ago: 
/gracefully retire and stop causing so much trouble out here. /

Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil 
Society (http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za)


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