One Bank to Rule Them All

Written By Jimmy Mengel

Posted December 16, 2013

Big banks control the world.

If you had any doubt, we now have science and first-hand testimony to prove it.

Note: This is not some wild conspiracy theory. It’s systems theory, a serious scientific discipline, used by researcher James B. Glattfelder to prove that a small group of banks essentially control the world’s finances.

Glattfelder’s research proved that the top 730 shareholders control a whopping 80% of the entire revenue of transnational corporations.

But the truth is the global banking elite simply cannot maintain a stranglehold on the world’s power all by themselves. And so, while they run off with the money, their lackeys in the political sphere acts as gatekeepers.

Again, we’re not relying on labyrinthine explanations and vague fears of domination; we’re looking at the matter through scientific discipline and actual admissions from the power brokers themselves.

The fact is we simply cannot talk about global control without talking about the World Bank…

The World Bank represents 188 different countries from Albania to Zimbabwe. However, it is controlled by a small number of powerful countries, each with its own serious economic interests.

Since there is no voting for the leadership and chief economists at the bank, the United States and other large countries have complete control to appoint who they’d like to do their bidding — and they have appointed some highly questionable folks to run the behemoth:

  • Robert McNamara – JFK’s former secretary of defense and president of Ford Motor Company was chosen to lead the Bank in 1968, fresh off his disastrous handling of the Vietnam War.

  • Lewis T. Preston – a bank executive with J.P. Morgan. We all know J.P. Morgan doesn’t have the interest of the working poor at heart, as evidenced by years of abuse of regular folks, culminating in their record $13 billion fine this year.

  • Robert Zoellick – a bank executive with Goldman Sachs. Again, if the head of Goldman Sachs is at the helm, you know the bidding of the powerful will get its due… After all, you don’t earn a nickname like “The Great Vampire Squid” for your altruism.

  • Paul Wolfowitz – Much like McNamara, Wolfowitz was handed the reigns to the World Bank after helping orchestrate George Bush’s outrageous war on Iraq. While president of the Bank, he gave his girlfriend massive pay raises — more than double what she was entitled to! The fact that the head of the World Bank could engage in such petty corruption doesn’t bode well for bank at large, considering the immense power they wield. Wolfowitz was eventually forced to resign.

 

Perhaps more alarmingly, the World Bank also receives complete immunity from any and all countries it does “business” with, so it cannot be held legally accountable for its actions.

The United States has complete veto power over the Bank’s actions as well, which it can use to block any action by the Bank that may threaten national interests — and the interests of the global financial powers that control them.

The World Bank’s stated purpose is to help poor and developing countries by providing loans.

The catch? To obtain one of these loans, you have to comply with the Bank’s draconian wish lists.

Examples of the conditions countries must meet to gain access to a loan include suppressing wages, cutting programs like education and health care, and easing limits on foreign investment.

How do the results stack up with its stated mission?

Not well. In fact, data shows most countries that have taken the World Bank’s money and agreed to its terms are no better off today then they were when they received their first loan — and many are actually worse off.

From the Heritage Foundation:

  • Of the 66 less-developed countries receiving money from the World Bank for more than 25 years (most for more than 30 years), 37 are no better off today than they were before they received such loans.

  • Of these 37 countries, most (20 in all) are actually poorer today than they were before receiving aid from the Bank.

  • Former less-developed countries that have prospered over the past 30 years did so by freeing up the productive forces of their economies. The best examples are Hong Kong and Singapore: Even though a country like Singapore received a small amount of money from the World Bank, the evidence shows that what most affected economic growth was not World Bank aid, but economic freedom.

What’s more, an ex-World Bank employee described something far more nefarious than ineptitude…

Karen Hudes watched first-hand as the World Bank manipulated and covered up corruption in its economic development projects.

It’s important to know Hudes wasn’t some disgruntled lackey; she served as Senior Counsel and worked for the bank for 20 years. During those two decades at the World Bank, Hudes saw systematic and widespread corruption.

“It’s a mafia,” she told the New American.

“These culprits that have grabbed all this economic power have succeeded in infiltrating both sides of the issue, so you will find people who are supposedly trying to fight corruption who are just there to spread disinformation and as a placeholder to trip up anybody who manages to get their act together. Those thugs think that if they can keep the world ignorant, they can bleed it longer.”

Hudes saw large-scale enrichment of the powerful, while the poor the Bank was supposed to be helping were getting stiffed.

“I realized we were now dealing with something known as state capture, which is where the institutions of government are co-opted by the group that’s corrupt,” she noted.

Hudes was eventually fired after she spoke out against the Bank’s attempt to cover up a botched bailout of a crooked bank in the Philippines.

Here are a few choice examples of what happens to the $2.5 billion in U.S. taxpayer money that is funneled into the World Bank each and every year, from the American Enterprise Institute:

  • 38 countries have amassed $71 billion in unpayable multilateral loans, encouraged by the Bank’s self-serving projections of country growth, on which rich-country taxpayers must now make good.

  • Corruption has been exposed both within the World Bank and in its programs, and is now estimated at more than $100 billion.

  • Protest is rising among leading African scholars who seek to stop all aid because it serves only to entrench and enrich a series of corrupt elites. Massive anecdotal evidence of waste, ineptitude, and outright theft can no longer be ignored.

Not exactly the poverty-fighting superhero the institution makes itself out to be.

The World Bank works in conjunction with the International Monetary Fund, which operates in the same vein of enriching Wall Street and supporting dictators. We’ll pull the curtain back on the IMF next week.