Twenty years since its passage, NAFTA has displaced workers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, depressed wages, weakened unions, and set the terms of the neoliberal global economy.
The carbon trade doesn’t just fail to address climate change. In countries like Honduras, it fuels a perverse incentive structure by funneling cash to notorious human rights abusers engaged in extractive industries.
Back in the 1960s, the U.S. peace movement came up with a catchy phrase: “What if the schools got all the money they needed and the Navy had to hold a bake sale to buy an aircraft carrier?” Well, the Italian Navy has a line of clothing, and is taking a cut from a soft drink called “Forza Blu” in order to make up for budget cuts. It plans to market energy snacks and mineral water. Things are a little rocky in Europe these days.
Lant Pritchett—a professor of the practice of international development at the Harvard Kennedy School—has been leading a campaign against the election of Jim Kim to the World Bank presidency. Although he isn’t the only critic of Kim’s nomination, he is among the most vocal and prominent. Many of his criticisms have been amplified and echoed by other leading development economists like William Easterly at New York University and several people associated with the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC.
Since the fall of the unitary state in 1991 and the subsequent two decades of lawlessness, local Somali communities have been gradually drifting away from one another into more exclusive clans protected by regional authorities. With the absence of a functioning national government to restore public confidence and provide basic governmental services, most Somalis below the age of 30 today generally identify with regional and clan-based entities that are antithetical to the existence of a central government.
For the first time, there’s been a concerted — and effective — effort to intervene in the nominating process and prevent a crony coronation.
In 2000, along with my colleague David Wheeler, I launched B-SPAN, a webcasting system that streamed videos of Bank policy dialogues to external audiences. The key principle of B-SPAN, based on the well-known C-SPAN model of the U.S. Congress, was that once the camera was turned on, the unedited streams would allow viewers to receive an uncensored glimpse of the debates occurring within the Bank.
In 2005, President Bingu Wu Mutharika of Malawi embarked on an innovative five-year solution to promote Malawi’s agriculture sector by increasing farm subsidies and allocating 10 percent of the national budget to the agriculture sector to help promote infrastructure and farm training. Despite concerns from the World Bank and the UN, President Mutharika promoted Malawi’s agriculture sector and decreased poverty from 52 percent to 40 percent while turning Malawi into a food basket not only for its people but also for export.
Patrick Bond makes a stinging critique of the recent report of the African Development Bank that claims that ‘one in three Africans is middle class’ and as a result, Africa is ready for ‘take off’.
“The Communists have taken over the World Bank!” So far, this phrase hasn’t appeared on Glenn Beck’s infamous chalkboard. I’m still waiting for Beck or Rush Limbaugh to make a big stink that the World Bank’s chief economist is from Mainland China. Justin Yifu Lin has been in his position for more than two years and the right-wing crazies have been largely silent. Maybe they’re too busy attacking their fantasy version of President Barack Obama – the Muslim/elitist/socialist-in-chief – to pay much attention to what’s going on in the real world.