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Monday, April 02, 2012

The World Bank Is Hopeless and Changing Leaders Won't Help

By Staff Report
11

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Hats off to Ngozi ... A golden opportunity for the rest of the world to show Barack Obama the meaning of meritocracy ... When economists from the World Bank visit poor countries to dispense cash and advice, they routinely tell governments to reject cronyism and fill each important job with the best candidate available. It is good advice. The World Bank should take it. In appointing its next president, the bank's board should reject the nominee of its most influential shareholder, America, and pick Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. – Economist

Dominant Social Theme: The World Bank is a great institution. We just need the right person to run it.

Free-Market Analysis: The World Bank is a part of a kind of "tag team" with the International Monetary Fund. The World Bank lends money to dictators and sundry thugs and then when these unsavory individuals abscond, the IMF is hauled in to make the people pay.

The process enriches Western corporations and ultimately creates more control for the Western power elite that has constructed the globalist echelon to begin with. The UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the International Criminal Court and many other internationalist entities are hopelessly corrupt and evidently were designed to be so.

Every part of the globalist government-in-waiting deals with other governments, and all the corruption this entails. The entire elitist mechanism is focused on providing a variety of bureaucrats with fiat money-from-nothing in order to first distort developing world economies and then collapse them.

This basic mechanism has been documented endlessly by the Internet's alternative media, and choosing an African to run the World Bank won't change an iota of the larger corrupt system.

That doesn't stop the Economist, a leading mouthpiece of the power elite, from making the case that by switching the titular head from a Western person to an African person will somehow make a difference in what the World Bank is and what it was intended to be. Here's more from the article:

The World Bank is the world's premier development institution. Its boss needs experience in government, in economics and in finance (it is a bank, after all). He or she should have a broad record in development, too. Ms Okonjo-Iweala has all these attributes ... She has not broken Nigeria's culture of corruption—an Augean task—but she has sobered up its public finances and injected a measure of transparency. She led the Paris Club negotiations to reschedule her country's debt and earned rave reviews as managing director of the World Bank in 2007-11. Hers is the CV of a formidable public economist ...

Ms Okonjo-Iweala is an orthodox economist, which many will hold against her. But if there is one thing the world has discovered about poverty reduction in the past 15 years, it is that development is not something rich countries do to poor ones. It is something poor countries manage for themselves, mainly by the sort of policies that Ms Okonjo-Iweala has pursued with some success in Nigeria.

For almost 70 years, the leadership of the IMF and World Bank has been subject to an indefensible carve-up. The head of the IMF is European; the World Bank, American. This shabby tradition has persisted because it has not been worth picking a fight over ... The rest of the world should rally round Ms Okonjo-Iweala. May the best woman win.

We can see in these excerpts many of the dominant social themes of the elite – the fear-based propaganda that is used to frighten mostly Western middle classes into giving up wealth and power to internationalist institutions like the UN, World Bank, etc.

There is, of course, the code phrase, "orthodox economist." No doubt this means that Ms. Okonjo-Iweala is a Keynesian, someone who believes that government can eradicate poverty by printing a lot of paper money.

This is simply not feasible. People cannot put themselves in control of monopoly money printing without, over time, printing too much of it.

The result is the debasement of the currency and the distortion of the economy as those who print the money also tend to fund increasingly illegitimate forms of economic development. There is a reason the world is overbanked and that people cannot find jobs.

We can also note the hoary promotion of governmental "transparency." Ironically, there is even an international entity devoted to encouraging transparency in government – founded by a former executive of the World Bank!

Transparency does nothing really to foster better government. The problem is government itself, which has a monopoly on force and which, by definition, excludes itself from competition.

Competition is the most important tool of the Invisible Hand that regulates commerce. Without competition and marketplace results, the people running government are free to do as they choose and pursue whatever nonsensical initiatives they choose.

Government also provides a control methodology for the elite families that apparently run the world's central banks and seek world government. The control mechanism that is used is called mercantilism. This is the process of passing laws and regulations that benefit one's personal private interest at the expense of others.

But there is even more to the World Bank's brief that benefits the power elite and its one-world conspiracy. This conspiracy has various elements that mostly involve scarcity memes. The idea is that the world is running out of things and only strong government action can ameliorate the subsequent problems.

This agenda – the presentation of false scarcity memes and subsequent World Bank solutions can be seen in various criteria that the World Bank has enshrined as its "goals." These are actually United Nation goals, but the World Bank is part of the UN and thus enforces its mandates. 

The "Millennium Development Goals" are intended to be "realized" (whatever that means) by 2015, and the World Bank proclaims its commitment to "achieving MDG goals" on its website, WorldBank.Org. MDG has eight goals. Each one of these items involves government bureaucracy at the local, national and international level.

Basically, the World Bank's enunciation of problems tracks the elite's phony promotional regime closely. More specifically, the goals are:

Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger:

Achieve Universal Primary Education:

Reduce Child Mortality

Promote Gender Equality

Improve Maternal Health:

Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Other Diseases

Ensure Environmental Sustainability

Develop a Global Partnership for Development

Start at the beginning. When it comes to eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, the World Bank is hopeless. Wikipedia, for instance, points out that, "Africa's poverty ... is expected to rise, and most of the 36 countries where 90% of the world's undernourished children live are in Africa. Less than a quarter of countries are on track for achieving the goal of halving under-nutrition."

This is entirely indefensible. The West and NATO have spent up to US$2 trillion in the past decade prosecuting an apparently phony war on terror, while irradiating parts of the Middle East with depleted uranium weapons.

The World Bank meanwhile, run by the same Western interests that run NATO, has been in business for well over a half-century – and yet African poverty is on the rise. This is because the World Bank's stated intentions have nothing to do with its reality.

Most of the other goals of the World Bank are similarly perverse. Universal public schooling is a disaster wherever it has been tried, but the World Bank is intent on inculcating it in developing countries.

The promotion of gender equality and the campaign to empower women is merely an additional effort to create a "battle between the sexes" that weakens traditional society and makes it easier for Western elements to exploit the resultant social tensions. Female emancipation should come from the society itself, not be imposed from the outside.

On and on. The goals sound laudable, but in practice the result is exploitative. The intention to ensure environmental sustainability is especially questionable as is the emphasis on greenhouse gases.

There is no sure scientific evidence that the world is warming or that human beings are the cause of the possibly non-existent warming. But the World Bank will be used to distort economies as it pursues this chimera. The end result will be to make societies poorer not richer.

In fact, the World Bank is an evidently destructive entity. Its approach encourages bureaucracy by channeling funds through the very governments it decries as corrupt and un-transparent. Its policies then enshrine impoverishment and social tension.

This is entirely in keeping with the REAL agenda of the World Bank that involves maintaining poverty in developing countries and establishing ever-more corrupt governmental entities that will be responsive to the elite agenda of world control.

Conclusion: It doesn't matter who leads the World Bank. Only private enterprise can lift people out of poverty. Government can't do it, and the World Bank is in any case actually configured to do the opposite of its stated intentions.




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  Posted by Hoss on 04/02/12 12:23 PM

On seeing the success of the present institutions, the BRIC's are forming their own, with which to do the same things after the demise of the dollar.

Click to view link

  Posted by Hoss on 04/02/12 12:31 PM

Oops, I see this was covered on Thursday. Back to work for me ... .

  Posted by Abu Aardvark on 04/02/12 12:37 PM

Howdy, Hoss!

Try these:

'Look Which Central Bank Has Printed Way More Than The Fed, The ECB, And The Bank Of Japan'

Click to view link


'Political and Financial Crisis Continues to Intensify in China'

Click to view link

  Posted by victorbarney on 04/02/12 02:26 PM

America, are you listening to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala? She, as your President promised you, "MARXISM"(ANTI-CHRIST) IS THE ONLY ANSWER! Arn't you so happy that our more verbally adept women & blacks make-up over 70% of the voting public? Just saying...

  Posted by runderwo on 04/02/12 04:18 PM

The Brownians are about to get their test case in Argentina.

Kirchner Grabs the Central Bank
Click to view link

Last month the Kirchner-controlled Congress delivered what could be the coup de grace for the Argentine economy: a reform of the central bank charter that eliminates a 1991 monetary rule requiring that base money be backed up by international reserves and placed beyond the control of the government. The central bank board now will come up with some formula for the amount of reserves to be kept on hand. Reserves above that amount will be available for Mrs. Kirchner's government to borrow. The formula can be adjusted at any time.

The Kirchner government has been dipping into the central bank's "excess" reserves-the surplus over the monetary base-since 2010. A showdown about that policy provoked the resignation of former bank president Martin Redrado in January 2010 and the naming of the more compliant Mercedes Marcó del Pont.

The government has argued that it is wasteful to sit on dollars that pay next to nothing when they could be used to pay down debt. That makes some sense. But paying down debt is not all Mrs. Kirchner has in mind. She maintains her popularity with generous government spending, and with international reserves fleeing, excesses are shrinking. She needed a charter change if she wants to tap more central bank funds. According to the reform, she can now borrow from the bank about twice what she could borrow before.

The bank's singular mandate of price stability has also been removed. In its place is a three-pronged mandate that includes the goals of providing for growth with social fairness and financial stability along with price stability.

Reply from The Daily Bell

Thanks.

  Posted by Bischoff on 04/02/12 07:58 PM

"... and many other internationalist entities are hopelessly corrupt and evidently were designed to be so."

Yes, remember the UN sanctions against oil sales by Saddam Hussein... ???

What happend... ??? The UN officials in charge of exemptions for oil sales to benefit Iraqi children and to acquire needed medicines were corrupted by Saddam Hussein. The UN officials were able to collect a kickbacks on the exemptions they allowed. In turn, Saddam Hussein was provided with liberal oil sale quotas. He sold the oil for EUROS to escape closer scrutiny.

The irony of it all is that selling Iraqi oil for EUROs is what killed Saddam Hussein.

How so... ??? The U.S. has an ironclad agreement with Saudi Arabia to quote oil in USD only. Saudi Arabia as the leader in OPEC enforces the world crude price. World crude quoted in USD gives value to the USD by making it the world reserve currency.

Being able to take advantage of the exemption provision in UN sanctions through help by corrupt UN officials, Saddam Hussein successfully sold Iraqi oil for Euros, thereby threatening to undermine the value of the USD.

It was the threat to the value of the USD which led to the second war with Iraq, and the ultimate hanging of Saddam Hussein. Thanks to UN sanctions, and the help of corrupt UN officials, Saddam put his head into the hangman's noose.

Reply from The Daily Bell

You sure it was SADDAM that was hung?

  Posted by seer on 04/02/12 08:09 PM

"In appointing its next president, the bank's board should reject the nominee of its most influential shareholder, America, and pick Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. - Economist"

Wait a minute-you do not say Austrian economics operates without "crony capitalism?" Finland's and Japan's public schools do quite well. Why not stick to the truth and avoid generalizations that are not true.

Your point could easily be made in your conclusion statement. So long as the rules of the game (world economy) remain the same, the outcomes and decisions will be with that paradigm.

Reply from The Daily Bell

OK, thanks Seer. Guess we should pack up and go home (or back to the North Pole). No more to see here ... Not much more to say ... Yer making the elves cry.

  Posted by Danny B on 04/02/12 11:04 PM

This is a short post that I sent to the Mogambo Guru;
The president of Argentina's Central Bank (BCRA), Mercedes Marcó del Pont;
"The banker added that 'it is totally false to say that printing more money generates inflation"

Click to view link

  Posted by Col on 04/02/12 11:21 PM

Eurozone contagion threat 'overstated'


A former senior official at the European Central Bank (ECB) has said that the risk of eurozone debt woes spreading, the so-called contagion threat, has always been "overstated".

But Juergen Stark, who resigned last year as the ECB's chief economist, told the BBC's HARDTalk that it was too early to say if Greece will be able to meet its austerity targets.

He said this would be known in six months time.

Greece has now received two bailouts.

On Friday, eurozone finance ministers agreed to increase the size of the area's rescue funds.

They agreed to boost the joint lending power of the "firewall" from 500bn euros ($668bn; £416bn) to 800bn euros ($1.1tn; £667bn).

Mr Stark said: "In my view, from the very start the contagion question was overstated.

"Now with the reform programmes underway and being implemented in Ireland, being implemented in Portugal, also the new political process in Italy, and the progress made so far in Spain, from this point of view, contagion is limited."

Mr Stark announced his resignation in September 2011 because he disagreed with the bank's purchasing of sovereign bonds from eurozone nations.

Click to view link

  Posted by Danny B on 04/03/12 12:17 AM

"Contagion is limited" So is the Milky way galaxy.

England should not be left out of the lineup.
"That includes Britain, which relies on 10 eurozone countries for loans worth over 70% of its annual national income - a higher proportion even than Italy."
Click to view link

70% of it's national income is loans??? Why does that sound problematic?

  Posted by dave jr on 04/03/12 06:03 AM

"... mainly by the sort of policies that Ms Okonjo-Iweala has pursued with some success in Nigeria."

Dear Sirs,
We have sums total 500 billion... Please to kindly open World Bank account so we place funds there...



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