CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

TABLE 6.2 HOW TO SPEND $100 BILLION
“I Don’t Understand” and “Don’t Tell Anyone” 259
Annual Expenditure
Item (in US$ billions)
Vaccinations and additional health services for
100 million children
$ 2.5
Training and retraining, basic medical supplies, support,
and salaries for 1.5 million health care workers, per year
15.8
200,000 new hospital beds 9.0
Triple-drug therapy and testing for 10 million AIDS
patients, per year
4.0
Universal family planning services, per year for 10 years 10.5
One million new classrooms 6.9
Training and annual salaries for one million new teachers 3.3
Sustainable agricultural programs for 800 million
malnourished people, per year for 10 years
17.0
Clean water systems for 1.75 billion people, per year for
10 years
10.0
Self-help housing for one billion people, per year for 10 years 21.0
Total $100 billion
Source: The annual expenditure estimates are drawn from several sources: the World
Health Organization (hospital beds), UNICEF (childhood vaccinations and teacher training),
the World Bank (classrooms and teacher salaries), the Clinton Foundation (negotiated
rates for antiretroviral triple-drug therapy and AIDS tests in certain developing
countries), and UNESCO (for all other items listed).
Joseph Stiglitz said that there is an “intellectual gap between what we know
and what is still practiced.” 16 The New York Times commented, “His premature
departure . . . removes from Washington the most outspoken critic of
the practices that the big industrial nations favor in their relations with the
developing world.” 17
The World Bank of recent years is long on scholarship and short on results.
And there are blinders on the scholarship. For many of its researchers, if it can’t
be seen, it doesn’t exist. If dirty money does not show up in GDP or in international
financial statistics, then it literally has little or no reality. Some work has
been done on underground economic activity in a few countries, estimated at