Brilliant investigative reporter Anne Williamson on the World Bank’s global plantation, its serfs and overseers:
“For the well-positioned second-raters that people the Bank, there’s no advantage in trading in a country club existence and perfumed reputation just to browbeat and bludgeon troops out of poor nations in return for dollar grants. It’s so much more agreeable to posture as a helping-hand, hiding the nasty imperial bits in the loan covenants. True, the policies the loans require often lead to public riots, and to resource, land and territorial wars among their clients, but the mainstream media never connects the loans to their bloody consequences. At worst, details of the borrower’s thievery leak out.
What’s really at stake for staff is the richest, absolute best government plantation in the entire world. World Bankers, along with IMF, IFC and EBRD employees, enjoy a mem-Sahib lifestyle; tax-free six-figure salaries, foreign expeditions involving first-class travel, five-star hotels, generous per diems, lavish banquets, and – if one is obliged to “stay on” overseas for “mission” work – extensive local staff and personal aides, language tutors, tuition support for the children, numerous mandated vacations home per annum, residential rent subsidies, full insurance packages, diplomatic mail for those legally-dubious art acquisitions, the best address, and fancy invites.
If you are a foreign national lucky enough to escape your native backwater for an assignment in Washington, or London, or Paris, or Geneva – all the best places! – there is no treachery you wouldn’t commit to stay in place. (The very best institutional reform scheme ever put forward was Christopher Fildes’s suggestion to move the Bank’s headquarters to Bangladesh.)
If you are a consultant, or an academic “adviser,” you’ll keep your honest opinions to yourself, and do the job, no matter how mad or useless. There’s no way your university could, or your firm would, roll out a red carpet like the World Bank does.
If you are a Third World borrower and a government official and therefore advantageously-positioned to skim the loans and use the principal for purposes more useful to you and your continuing hold on power than to the nation, the World Bank is your literal lifeline. Without scads of dollars to hand out, an honest election or worse – open revolt – are always possibilities.
If you are a large, richly-endowed private corporation with an eye on the profit possibilities in some foreign hellhole, you’ll play along, doing your bit to legitimize, publicize and generally support the Bank. After all, those giveaway loans may well be your critical leverage indirectly. Tit for tat. Loan for license.”