Promise-breaking at the World Bank, Part 1: Before
That 66th birthday month of his, March 2012, was auspicious for adding a little spice to his dreary life, but no, it just can’t last. Born in March 1946 alongside his evil twin, IMF, in Savannah Georgia, after conception in what must have been a rather sleazy New Hampshire hotel (the ‘Bretton Woods’) in mid-1944, the old geezer known as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or much better by his nickname World Bank (but let me just use WB), really ought to be considering retirement.
Not to be ageist (ok just this once), but still, it’s patently obvious that WB’s relentless WashCon ideology is so last-century, so discredited by recent world financial melting, and so durably dangerous in today’s world. His presidents have reflected the worst of the old yankee imperialist mindset. And let’s not even start on IMF’s extremist lads and lass, who in recent years have migrated their austerity dogma from North Africa to Southern Europe and to my native Ireland, meeting growing resistance along the way.
Even that one moment in 1997-98 when, obviously in mid-life crisis and slightly destabilised by his East Asian buddies’ spills, WB developed a little moral spine and sensibility – witnessed by his chief economist Joseph Stiglitz’s loose talk of a new Post-Washington Consensus – the devil on WB’s right-hand shoulder (named Larry Summers) told his then president James Wolfensohn to boot Stiglitz out, in September 1999, if Wolfensohn wanted to hang around WB for another five years. Order given, and immediately executed.
So the fresh, slightly punky Post-WashCon chatter was never heard again in the 21st century Bank. Although each December since 2009, current president Robert Zoellick has tried to masquerade WB during UN climate summits as a Green Bank (hah) (http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/03/19/what-will-robert-zoellick-break-next/), the institution has degenerated into a bumbling, often senile, and permanently demented entity.
Alzheimers kicks in when a Third World minister in the pocket of a US or European energy company comes knocking to beg for a coal-fired power plant, as WB immediately forgets the greenwash: “but of course, we know of no climate constraints!” (translation: I’ll soon be dead). Or when WB’s staffers venture with the IMF’s into North African finance ministries, wanting to wrench their dirty money back – yet pretending never to have heard of their now missing or sick or dead hunting pals Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gadaffi. (http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/73932) (The IMF’s Washington and Cairo leadership – specifically, John Lipsky and Ratna Sahay – have even been babbling incomprehensibly about ‘social justice,’ so desperate are they to sell new loans so Egypt’s tyrant generals can pay off the old.) (http://links.org.au/node/2546)
However, instead of suggesting a graceful exit from a world economy still crippled by recent financial-liberalisation thuggery egged on by WB, his minder two blocks east in the White House Oval Office has given the old man a taste of Viagra, by nominating for WB president a virile 52-year old (the youngest ever), a man who is doubtless best known across the globe for stylish rapping and dancing with talented Dartmouth College kids. (http://www.businessinsider.com/video-obamas-nominee-for-the-world-bank-is-a-rapping-space-man-2012-3)
WB’s most likely new leader (because really, only yankees need apply), Dartmouth president Jim Yong Kim, will be a heartbreaker, it’s easy to predict – and the kids already teach us that if we just bother to hear them.
One senior student, Dennis Zeveloff, wrote in The Dartmouth newspaper that Kim’s management refused to “communicate with students, improve advising or create a more academic atmosphere.” (http://thedartmouth.com/2012/03/29/opinion/voces) Those hoping for a different WB and more progressive civil society access with Kim as president, listen up.
Max Yoeli, the 2012 student body president, wrote in the same pages that Kim suffers “a remarkable devotion to image over impact, a disregard for student input and selfishness in his fulfillment of a tremendous responsibility.” There was “a stunning lack of transparency”; he “consistently abdicated leadership”; and Kim’s “fractured and disappointing legacy” will be remembered for “his utter lack of ties to the community and the shortest presidential tenure at the College since the early 19th century.” (http://thedartmouth.com/2012/03/29/opinion/yoeli)
As whistle-blowing student Andrew Lohse complained in an article in The Dartmouth that Obama should have read, two months prior to Kim’s Bank nomination, “a systemic culture of abuse exists under a college president who has the power and experience to change what can only be described as a public health crisis of the utmost importance: the endemic culture of physical and psychological abuse that occupies the heart of Dartmouth’s Greek [fraternity] community.” (http://thedartmouth.com/2012/01/25/opinion/lohse)
Lohse’s main allegation, confirmed in a Rolling Stone magazine investigation (http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/confessions-of-an-ivy-league-frat-boy-inside-dartmouths-hazing-abuses-20120328#ixzz1rERvlM7L) last month (following which Lohse was rewarded with a stunningly misguided College prosecution, subsequently withdrawn), is that a Dartmouth Man gets taught ruling-class behavior during student fraternities’ hazing experiences.
Michael Bronski, a professor of women’s and gender studies, confirmed to Rolling Stone that Dartmouth’s Animal House frat “members are secure that they have bright futures, and they just don’t care. I actually see the culture as being predicated on hazing. There’s a level of violence at the heart of it that would be completely unacceptable anywhere else, but here, it’s just the way things are.”
In Lohse’s own frat, first-year recruits were, as he witnessed, compelled to “swim in a kiddie pool full of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products; eat omeletts made of vomit [‘vomelettes’]; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beers poured down fellow pledges’ ass cracks; and vomit on other pledges, among other abuses.”
Kim was Dartmouth’s president when Lohse began complaining. The Dartmouth president was fully aware of the vomelette-makers’ ethos, including denialism, but did nothing, says Lohse, leaving “an intoxicating nihilism at the center of our culture that fraternities perpetuate through pathological lies while continuing the abuses.”
As One Percenters in training, Dartmouth Men are the sixth-highest paid university graduates in the US, in spite of what Lohse calls the “pervasive hazing, substance abuse and sexual assault.” Yes, according to the student paper, “Dartmouth reportedly has the highest number of reported sexual assaults in the Ivy League.”
Observed Yoeli, “Kim could not find time to attend a single event of V-Week — 11 days devoted to combating violence against women — despite its clear relevance to campus life.” And as for the College’s hottest issue since in 1986 likeminded frat boys bashed an anti-apartheid, pro-divestment shantytown on the campu
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