CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

“I Don’t Understand” and “Don’t Tell Anyone” 261
countries, shorten and damage the lives of billions of people, and can hardly
be mentioned in research studies or policy pronouncements. What has foreign
aid become, a cover story for western rapacity, a sop to our collective
conscience?
For all its good intentions, the World Bank as an institution and its
thousands of professionals need to understand something. Good intentions
in the absence of courage are pointless.
What the World Bank has failed to see, what it cannot ask, and what it
does not want to know largely accounts for its underachievement. And “underachievement”
is a very charitable word. For the West, the net effect of
pumping out foreign aid and sucking in dirty money has been harmful to
the global poor. It may be very comforting to think that poverty and inequality
are the fault or misfortune of the poor, and salvation for them
comes from the advice and benevolence of the rich. It is certainly discomforting
to think that part of their poverty, their misfortune, stems directly
from us—our actions and our silence. The global poor deserve better.
In its present thinking, the World Bank appears to have reached an analytical
cul-de-sac. In the next chapter I fling down the gauntlet that the
Bank has to pick up if it is to contribute to moving the issues of poverty
and inequality—and itself as an institution—forward.