CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

370 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
try to justify to Mary her current plight, while representing the worst of
our operating system’s underpinnings: “We have to do what’s best for the
whole world. Yes, we’re taking tens of billions of dollars out of your country.
This enables us to protect this money and help it grow. If we left it
here, it could be lost through waste and inefficiency. It’s a pity that you
and your child suffer from this process, but we do hope you understand
that the ends justify the means.” I could not deliver such lines, and I suspect
you could not either.
A system that drives Mary to the floor and then rationalizes this outcome
is a system that belittles us. “Why should we care?” as has been said to
me many times does just that; it belittles us. Most Americans and Europeans
would not deliberately inflict harm on the distant poor. We may do so because
we are uninformed or desensitized but, for most, not because we are
completely indifferent to the suffering caused.
Benefit for all is derived from earning fair and honest profits out of creative
and productive endeavors. Harm for all is derived from earning dishonest
profits out of illicit transactions. Mary has a right to live in a country
where her fellow citizens and our fellow citizens do not cooperate in illegally
removing resources from her society. And her right and the rights of billions
of others like her are superior to any calculation of utility, advantage, or
greater good that purports to arrive at a contrary conclusion.
The past 30 or 40 years have witnessed enormous financial transfers
from poor to rich. Across this same period, the World Bank has been largely
silent on the movement of, cumulatively, trillions of dollars out of poorer
countries into western coffers. Some in the Bank seem to be intuitively
aware of this phenomenon. But in the absence of available statistics, the subject
remains off the Bank’s agenda.
Mediating between intuition and data is a duty to ask the right questions.
This is the essence of my criticism of the World Bank. For decades it
has failed in its duty to ask the right questions, and the poor have suffered
deprivation and death as a result.
The enormous gap between rich and poor threatens our basis for common
humanity and undermines our thrust for shared prosperity. One billion
rich and several billion poor living together on our small planet is unwise,
unstable, and unsustainable. Dramatic disparities hold us apart, and the rich
have more to gain than anyone else from processes that bring us together.
Development scholars often argue that, when it comes to alleviating