There's nothing I enjoy more than seeing a pierced short-haired hippie girl getting cross-checked by a burly man in riot gear. No, I haven't ever actually seen this, but I bet it would be glorious.
A few weeks ago a crowd of angry people gathered in front of the World Bank headquarters in downtown DC, toting signs with clever phrases like "World Bank get out" and "Adjust This". Now don't get me wrong, everyone looks sexy wearing a bandana covering their face like a Zapatista, and with Rage Against the Machine playing in the back of your mind you're bound to feel like a bona fide badass. But for God's sake, unless you're fighting for your homeland or packing real heat you come across as a bit silly.
/huh?
Meanwhile the hardworking folks inside the Bank seem to view the protest against their life's work with an air of detached amusement. Two days before the protest, I asked one of the heads of the Africa Section how he felt about all the ire directed against the Bank's work. His reply: "They don't seem to know or care very much about real economics." The sad part is that his reply wasn't a jaded defense of what these protesters see as the exploitative and monopolistic motives of the Bank. Rather, it's a tragic fact.
/take them bowling.So gather round, fuckers. The World Bank's task is to help less-developed countries become
less less-developed! You oppose development altogether? Well damn, son, I imagine the emaciated child carrying an empty food bowl would beg to differ! How do you fill the bowl? You do it by loaning enormous sums of money to very poor countries. The idea is that they will be able to pay off the loans by making themselves more economically productive. The countries spend the money themselves on roads, schools, clinics, irrigation systems, and so on. The bastards!!! Over the past few decades the Bank has been investing more and more into "soft" projects, ranging from AIDS awareness in Africa to increasing caloric intake of nomadic farmers in the Andes! The injustice of it all!! Around the mid 90s people started complaining (alas, in some cases rightly so) that some of the infrastructural projects undertaken by the Bank had adverse impacts on the environment and cultural cohesion of the host nations, and the Bank quickly responded to this with increased transparency and a host of new oversight regulations (i.e. publishing a 17-volume cultural impact study of a single dam in Angolia, egad!!). But somewhere over the past decade our generation woke up to the fact that if we dress up like paramilitary guerillas and don gas masks, our chances of getting laid by those cute activist girls shot up dramatically. And besides, it's easy to attack a multinational institution with as threatening a name as the "World Bank," and if Tim Robbins is speaking out against it, then by God it's a worthwhile cause.
/meet Cameroon.Hey you dumb hippie, here's an exercise: Go up to the next homeless person you see and give them $100, no strings attached. Sounds cliched and happy and utopian, but bite the bullet and admit you would never do such a thing. So think about it: The best possible thing you could do *is* give him the $100, but insist that he spend it on a suit and a haircut and a fake resume from Kinko's, then ask for it back in 1-- no, 5 years once he starts making a paycheck... with $3 interest. The injustice!!!! And the irony, oh the irony! The more stringent environmental and cultural regulations the Bank imposes on the developing nations, the *less* likely the nations are going to be willing to put up with them, and will instead seek inflow from private sources that will bend them over and fuck them harder than they did Argentina (and it *was* private money behind that). Tell the hobo what color suit to buy and how to cut his hair and eventually he'll tell you not to bother and to fuck off.
And when these governments continue to stay bankrupt through gross mismanagement and corrupt governance, who's seen as the corrupt monopolizer? When foreign investors capitalize on the headway made by Bank investment and then pull out suddenly on the whims of the market, who's seen as the destroyer of economies? When the company contracted by the Bank to run a refinery commits a terrible environmental catastrophe and doesn't foot the bill on its own, who gets the blame? When thousands of children are starving in a country that the US doesn't allow domestic aid to flow into due to human rights abuses, who's decried as inhumane? If the UN has taught us anything, it's that it's easy to target a multinational institution for the failings of individual actors. And if calls for worldwide debt relief are answered, who takes the fall?
/haha yeah, good times...Granted, the Bank should change its way of dealing with certain issues, among them its response to the protests. Calling in the riot police against a bunch of teenagers is only reinforcing the unfortunate image of an opaque and monolithic institution. However gratifying it may be, clubbing some Che-wannabe dipshit over the head with a blackjack is a poor substitute for actually responding to the charges brought against the institution. So yes, I'd love to see [(former)President] Wolfensohn come out wearing Birkenstocks, carrying some herbal tea, talk to these people, tell them why they're misguided, and then play the cello for them.
/no really, he plays the cello.Yes, it goes without saying that Wolfowitz's confirmation was either intended to be a provocation to the rest of the world or at the very least an act so insensitive it looked like a provocation. The power vested in the presidency of the Bank is limited in almost all respects by the Bank's Board members, and ultimately answers to what is known as the "Washington Consensus", meaning the biggest donors get the most say. Yet somehow protesting the US Treasury Department isn't that sexy.
And after all this, I'm still a liberal. A liberal who's fed up with having to judge people who talk a lot of shit. Go after the WTO, protest at Davos, yell curses at the IMF, but leave the Bank alone.
