Who Are These People?
Over the weekend, I managed to avoid reading the article in the New York Times about agriculture in Malawi for about four hours. I knew what would happen, and when I finally read the article, it happened -- I was livid. In case you haven't read it, it is entitled "Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts". The experts happen to be the folks at the World Bank.
Judging by the article, what they are expert in is not soil science, growing food, generosity, or humanity. The gist of the article is that for years the World Bank, in its punitive way, "advised" the government of Malawi not to subsidize fertilizer handouts to the farmers, but to let the "free market" work. The result was famine, starvation, and the almost total depletion of local soils, as starving farmers planted without fertilizing the soil and depleted it more and more, thus killing themselves and wrecking the environment. This seems to have been fine with the World Bank, who were acting on principle: "In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi's farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food."
What was that again?
Their advice was, don't feed your children or elderly relatives, or even yourselves, but grow things like, I don't know (I really don't), sugar cane or tobacco, export it using lots of high-priced fuel, and then import a few, I don't know, potatoes or ears of corn, and hope for the best.
According to the article, part of the hunger problem in Africa is a lack of fertilizer (something they have plenty of in Washington, D.C.). The World Bank opposes fertilizer subsidies in order to -- well,it boggles the mind. In order to what? Get rid of the population? Degrade the soil beyond repair? I cannot think of any other reasons.
What is the goal here? Regularized financial markets? More billionaires? Really, it makes you almost vomit to imagine how the minds of these people work. Don't they understand free market capitalism? Free market capitalism operates by lurching here and there and then correcting itself. Every correction is a correction for a reason -- people made bad choices and then had to pay for them, often with their houses, sometimes with their lives or those of their relatives.
In the US, the agricultural free market has brought us lots of booms and busts, depleted soil, contaminated groundwater, superbugs, obesity, the end of the family farm, and numerous other
disasters. But the World Bank says "More of the same". Free marketers never seem to understand what an investment is -- it is something that cannot actually be "corrected" at all easily, and so people who make them (as in ethanol factories for processing corn kernels into fuel) want to protect them. In order to protect them, they fight tooth and nail against innovation and "correction". You and I might call this stupidity. The free marketers call it "creative destruction". During "creative destruction", lives and livelihoods are lost.
Doesn't that sound fun?
Of course, if you are sitting in your luxury office high in some building somewhere, perhaps it is fun to watch people starve. Perhaps it is fun to pronounce "expertly" when you don't know beans about how things grow and how agriculture works. Perhaps it is fun to coerce people into acting on your stupidities. But really, the rest of the human race has to wonder where these World Bank experts gained their expertise -- oh, I mean their sociopathic personality disorders.
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"What is the goal here? Regularized financial markets? More billionaires?"
The mission of the World Bank is a simple one, Jane. And once you really understand what they're all about, well, there's no surprise in what they'd do to Malawi - or any other country they can bully into doing their bidding.
The World Bank exists to create markets for its member countries. That's it.
The member countries loan the money. Sure, they have their own wild ideas about what it takes to create markets. Infrastructure - like building public projects like dams and water facilities. These sort of projects give the illusion, early on, that there's something altruistic about their motives. There isn't.
Regularizing financial markets? Well, sure, no country can compete in the global marketplace without basic financial structures in place. So they'll bring in the big boys for that.
But subsidizing fertilizer? Why would they do that? They want to sell Malawi food - or whatever else they need.
That's their point. Not self-susta
And it's why the World Bank has no place advising "developing" countries on steps to take to reach the World Bank conditions for its money.
The World Bank has an inherent conflict of interest with the countries it "develops" as it's not their interests it is furthering; its the lenders they care about.
World class piracy. Under the guise of assistance.
I read the article and did the same neck-jerking re-read - regarding WHY the World Bank advised NOT supporting fertilizat
Mind-boggling isn't it!!! Almost a definition for "insanity"
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, truly only care about one thing: making money. They don't care about the individual countries, nor the people within the country. Matter of fact, - the poorer the nation is, the more they can take advantage of it. They care about the creation of a single Global market - ruled by the very few... (Read "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man").
Everyday some unjust insanity is taking place (including within the USA)....
We are in deep trouble, people.... deep trouble.
We need a radically new direction for this country and for the planet itself! - Not more of the same! Greed has gotten out of control, it has to be dealt with - face-on. Perhaps a Constitutional Congress! Perhaps "nationalizing" our energy & protection sources like Haliburton & Blackwater! I can see Cheney & Prince - holding their hands to their hearts right now -just at the "mention".
I don't think the World Bank gives a shit about people, dead or alive. (see film: The Yes Men) I would assume that the World Bank's policies have a lot to do with the fact that in the West we DO subsidize farmers to the hilt--especially large outfits--and we export the excess to these countries we're advising not to grow food to feed themselves. It's a sweet deal for us.
The ice in the veins of World Bank advisors comes from the abstract and alienated (from real life) formulations of neoclassical economics. This is the sacrificial altar whose high priests include Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman and others whose emotions are reserved for the worship of Ayn Rand, the romanticizer of capitalism.
Ms. Smiley, you ask the correct question: "Who are these people?"
The simple answer: "The super wealthy and super powerful who are not us."
Like the super wealthy and super powerful of the Gilded Age, who consciously attempted a grotesque social speciation of class in 1908 when Harriman railroad money -- earned off the backs of the wretched untouchables -- funded the American Eugenics movement, a program to wipe the American blood clean of the degenerate genetic elements, mostly found among the wretched working class. Advances the program were fast. Very soon the American program became the envy of Nazi Germany, causing Herr Himmler, the brilliant chicken farmer from Bavaria and prime example of the new shiny race of men being born, to exclaim that Germany had to catch up with America in eugenics. (See E. Black's War Against the Weak)
An ancient and dark struggle is taking place bigtime in our culture. It is a struggle as old as the earth itself. The forces of evolution, the selective pressures that bear down upon us in the everyday, are once again forming another deluded group of humans who truly believe they can speciate beyond their humanness into a new shiny race of masters of the universe. They desire it so, they hunger for it so. Their vacant eyes are on fire with this desperate hunger.
Ultimately, such attempts at transcendence fail for these groups (yes, like the Nazis or the Italian Fascists) but, regrettably, not until a great many people have suffered horribly.
Our world went through this craziness in the early part of the 20th century. One would think that we would have learned something from it. Perhaps we did. I don't know.
But at this moment, I point my finger at these new pretenders as masters of the universe and I accuse, I accuse them of abandoning their humanity, turning their backs on their brothers and sisters. I accuse them of turning their backs on the Good and on God.
And damn them for it! Goddamn them for it!
Corporatists like at The World Bank
really love to talk up
the so-called, "Free Market", but all they do is rig the game for the Elite.
These people are nothing more than vampires
operating on a world-scale.
While I do not support genocide or the so-called "free market", one has to ask - should we be fertilizing soil to support overpopulation? What will happen to this country when cheap oil-derived fertilizers are no longer available?
It should be patently obvious; they'd like nothing more than to get rid of the population. It's quite similar to the neo-con's providence in New Orleans. Don't help these people of color, instead allow them to go away on their own. Starvation, and genocide are perfectly fine for native africans. Only aiding the rich and building casinos (after Katrina), both of these ploys work perfectly to get rid of the black populations so business can appropriate land for development. Maybe even cop some natural resources. And the wealthy class will mockingly praise jesus all the way to the bank.
Where did they gain their expertise? At the University of Chicago Econ Department under Milton Friedman. Read Naomi Klein's THE SHOCK DOCTRINE and you'll see that this so-called free market philosophy is in fact a calculated plan to strip mine the third world. And not just the third world; they brought it to home soil in New Orleans after Katrina. It isn't just in the US that the world is increasingly divided into the "got a lots" and the "got nothings." And that is just the way the World Bank thinks it ought to be, since after all, they are firmly in the "got a lot" camp and have convinced themselves that this is due to their own intelligence and the goodness of God, not to the modern-day rape and pillage they practice on the weak.
This is the triumph of Ayn Rand over reason.
Rand, as you may remember, was the fiction writer who did for economics what L. Ron Hubbard did for religion.
The reality of people dying of starvation? Not a problem. It's the glory of the free market that matters.
The World Bank is part of the new world order set on world domination. Our U.S. dollar lost it's strength when we allowed the world bank to print our money.
Why would any nation take advice from them?
Ms.Smiley,
You are always such a bright flame in the darkness. I have your book on fiction in my short list of next reads, and plan on listening to your voice in the darkness and informing me on my novelwriting about recent events. Thank you for your voice. On this note I wanted to actually inform you, and hope you can actually at least read this comment, and listen to kpfa's gun's and butter program on Bilderberg group two weeks ago, since it offers insights you won't get anywhere else, with the media monopoly. here is the link http://kpf
You are a great voice. Hope you speak in my area soon for a new novel reading.
Jane,
Thank you!
Thank you for bringing attention to something very rotten.
Please look at the "U.S. Cattle Industry Diagram" in www.GoodNe
The U.N., World Bank and their unfair trade practices are killing Ag production in America...
We should ALL be asking "Why?"
They denegrate farming/ranching practices - leading urbanites to believe we need to take all American soil out of production, and turn it into play grounds.
Farmers and ranchers engage in honorable work providing safe, nutrious and delicious products. Plus, they maintain some of the last reservoirs of great "families"
Yet, in today's culture, they're more ridiculed, villified, and chokingly regulated than any other profession.
If, for example, Bill Maher was as regulated, he would never made it on TV at all. Smart readers, think on that, and you'll figure out the why easily.
The U.N., Nature Conservancy, European Union, Ted Turner and yes, our own Federal government as their partners, are hell bent on taking land and water out of production agriculture. This is well documented as true, and transcends gravely serious.
Their actions will directly deprive you and I of those wonderful Farmers Markets like the one in Santa Monica.
And again...br
Thank you again, for bringing this to light.
This has been going on for a long time. The agribusinesses (e.g. Cargill) creates it, and the world bank subsidizes it. Stop buying pineapple, coffee, sugar, beef, etc., and...neve
Right on! Evertbody needs to have as little to do with the world bank as possible. The world bank is out to exploit as many countries as possible. They only represent the wealthy money grabbers-banks and Wall Street!!
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