Category: Export Credit

Internal Attack

(April 17, 2007) Since its creation in 1944, the World Bank has become the world’s leading architect of Third World corruption. In the Third World countries themselves, the World Bank has created hundreds of state-owned enterprises and then lavished them with money, requiring their officials to subject themselves neither to public oversight nor the bank’s own scrutiny. Among the Western suppliers to these corrupt state corporations, the bank awarded billions of dollars in contracts, again without public oversight or bank scrutiny, let alone market discipline.

In involuntary resettlement for China projects, the World Bank ignores its own guidelines

(May 31, 2006) For some years now, the World Bank has been promoting the People’s Republic of China as a model of “best practice” for the developing world in the contested area of involuntary resettlement. This evaluation has been widely repeated, and most recently has been adopted in several papers commissioned by the World Commission on Dams (WCD http://www.dams.org), a body mandated to conduct an independent review of the “development effectiveness” of big dams and water projects around the globe.

Western Companies Sell Their Souls for the Massive Chinese Market

(February 20, 2006) Even with the full weight of the Communist regime behind it, the censorship effort would have been futile without equipment and know-how supplied by Western vendors like Cisco Systems Inc., SunMicrosystems Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp. And with the world’s three dominant Internet companies – Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft – in a blind rush for a piece of China’s spectacular wealth, Beijing has found all the willing accomplices it needs to strip the Internet of its anonymity, its freedom, and to turn it into yet another tool of repression.

The dams balance sheet

(January 30, 2006) Waterlogging, ineffective irrigation, changing crop patterns, the promise of electricity – these lines from a Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) protest song highlight the recurrent issues that plague not just the Sardar Sarovar Project, but large dams across India.