Drop the Debt

Here is something they don't tell you on the World Vision ads:

Contrary to a myth popular in the West, the poor have funded the rich through interest on debt they never knew they had.

What is debt?

Start with the World Bank. An organization that loans a nation money when it is in crisis, right? The purpose of the World Bank when it was established after the Second World War was to rebuild Europe and then starting "developing" the Third World.

Developing is used in a loose sense here.

Power plants, factories and other liberal economic functions were built in parts of Africa and across Asia. By the 1980s, creditors received over $1.3 trillion from countries in debt for these projects.
Debt became the contemporary form of slavery.

Take the Philippines, where dictator Ferdinand Marcos accepted loans from international financial institutions to let Westinghouse build the Bataan Nuclear Power Station.

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  It cost $2.6 billion.
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  It was built on an earthquake zone.
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  The plant never opened.

Marcos pocketed a percentage of the money from the World Bank, then when he was overthrown in 1986, the Filipino people were left with a gigantic debt they never asked for.

In the early 1990s, forty percent of the Phillipines' budget went to paying back the interest on that debt to the World Bank.

The Philippines had a population of 94 million and in 2006, over forty percent of the people were living on less than $2 a day.

Debt is a large reason why places like Smokey Mountain exist, an enormous garbage tip in Manila which holds over two million tonnes of waste. People pick through garbage to eat. In Manila, over 50 per cent of the population live in slums.

Debt has not only a human cost, but destroys the environment as well. Philippines is very rich in natural resources, but food growing land has been turned into factories to appease the IMF (this is liberal reform).

The irony is that the rich world lectures developing nations like the Philippines on protecting the environment when paying back the West is the reason rainforests and rice paddies are being obliterated.

Poverty is not only a function of debt. There are numerous other social and political factors that come into play.

But do not be naive.

The World Bank is not a humanitarian organisation, despite the image they try to portray. They are a bank.

The debt from developing countries makes a tiny dent in the over all profit of this institution. 

But the function of the World Bank is not "working towards a world free of poverty". 

Otherwise they would wipe the debt that is choking half the world.

Do YOU give a shit? Go here.