Why should we add another voice to the global protest against World Bank and IMF policies?
In 1944, the World Bank and its partner, the International Monetary Fund, were founded in Bretton Woods, a resort town in the northeast United States. White-ruled South Africa was given special treatment, and was one of the first member-states within the two institutions. The Bank and IMF were then–and are still–mainly controlled by the US government, which happily promoted apartheid because it served the interests of large US companies. The World Bank traditionally has a US citizen as its president (today, James Wolfensohn) and the IMF is headed by a European (Horst Koehler). Instead of carrying out their mandates to “reconstruct” and “develop” countries in need of assistance and to assure orderly flows of capital, the World Bank and IMF have presided over disaster. The past two decades have witnessed unbearable Third World debt crisis, and periodic financial collapses (for which the Bank and IMF provide commercial bank bailouts that protect the rich at the expense of the poor). The
