A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE (Part 12). This blog is a continuation of the review of The Creation of World Poverty by Teresa Hayter, published in 1990.
Redistributing income from the poor to the rich
The conditions attached to official ‘aid’, especially to the lending of the World Bank and the IMF, are now designed above all to extract resources from the Third World’s poor in order to enable their governments to service their debt. The policies demanded have the effect of redistributing income from the poor to the rich. Because of this, the burden has been borne not by the governments and elites of the Third World, nor of course by the banks or the tax-payers of the West, but overwhelmingly by the Third World’s poor. The real villains, the Somozas, the Marcos family, the many others who enriched themselves, and the banks and governments that connived with them, enjoy their stolen wealth; and the US and British economies are cushioned by massive trade deficits financed partly by Third World interest payments.
In 1988, the net outflow was US$50 billion
As a result of this latest form of extortion, together with big and continuing declines in the prices paid for most Third World commodity exports and contraction in their markets in industrialized countries, nearly all of the Third World countries’ already low income levels have declined severely since 1982. Although official publications continue to claim the West is ‘helping’ by providing ‘aid’, in fact, even in terms of strictly financial flows, resources are now flowing in the opposite direction. In 1988, the net outflow was US$50 billion.
The Third World’s debt is unjust; it ought to be canceled
Campaigns on behalf of the Third World’s poor have been joined by environmental organizations, outraged at the directly and indirectly destructive effects of aid on forests and soils. The World Bank, attacked for its failure to mobilize grass-roots support and consult local people, has turned the tables, in its latest and most flagrant bit of hypocrisy, by attacking African governments for their failures in this respect. But when mobilization does occur, the World Bank is at the forefront of the West’s attempts to crush it. The Third World’s debt is unjust; it ought to be canceled, across the board, without conditions; or repudiated. Blatantly unjust though the extortion through debt service is, it is only the latest episode in a long and discreditable history. This is the history which this book attempts to describe.