Abstract
It was Bangkok, the humid summer rainy season of 1991. Thousands of workers toiled day and night on the most expensive public building ever constructed in Thailand, a country of 54 million people. The finance minister was anxious. The government had spent $100 million, and after nineteen months of around-the-clock work, the gleaming, modernistic palace of concrete and glass still was unfinished. Only a few weeks remained until “the meeting,” and national face was at stake.
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Notes
- 1.
In May 1991, almost 3 percent of Thai army recruits and 1 percent of all women attending prenatal clinics tested hiv positive. By the end of the decade, the minister of health estimates, two to four million Thais will be infected.
- 2.
The other major public international financial institutions include three regional multilateral development banks (mdbs)—the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the African Development Bank—as well as the newly created (1990) European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (ebrd). The regional multilateral development banks were founded in the 1960s to lend money to developing countries for large-scale economic development projects in their respective regions. Their structure and operations are largely modeled on the World Bank. The ebrd was established at the initiative of the French government and Jacques Attali to lend to the new market economies developing in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It too is a public international financial institution, conceived along the lines of the World Bank and regional mdbs. Chapter 3 discusses in more detail the origins and functioning of the World Bank, the imf, and the post–World War II international economic system.
- 3.
The total cost of a project that the Bank supports is typically two to three times greater than the amount of a Bank loan, because of cofinancing from local governments, private banks, and other bilateral and multilateral development assistance agencies (such as the regional mdbs, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the foreign aid agencies of Japan and the Western European nations). Disbursements on new World Bank loans typically extend over several years, so the actual amount of money the Bank annually pays out is less than the amount of new lending commitments. In 1992 the Bank disbursed $16.43 billion.
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- 5.
“End-use efficiency” refers to investments in energy use and consumption that reduce total demand for power while achieving the same goals of industrial production, lighting, heating, etc. The power that is freed up can be supplied to new users and thereby replaces power that otherwise would have to be produced through investments in new generating facilities such as hydroelectric dams and coal-fired plants. In newly industrializing nations such as Thailand, the cost per unit of power for such “demand-side” energy investments is often a fraction—one-third or one-quarter—of the cost of new “supply-side” power plants. The World Bank’s negligence of end-use efficiency and conservation investments is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.
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One authority on Thai forests, Larry Lohman, writes, “The economic policies promoted by the World Bank in Thailand, in short, could hardly have failed to promote uncontrollable deforestation, no matter how finely they were tuned” (Lohman, “Trees Don’t Grow on Money” [see endnote 34], 1). On deforestation, growing social inequity, and the occupation of forests in Thailand and Southeast Asia by vested economic interests, see Gopal B. Thapa and Karl E. Weber, “Actors and Factors of Deforestation in ‘Tropical Asia,’” Environmental Conservation, vol. 17, no. 1 (Spring 1990), 19–26.
- 8.
However, the ban was difficult to enforce, and some illegal logging continued. Thailand’s loggers and military also began to seek forestry concessions in neighboring, more pristine countries such as Burma and Laos.
- 9.
The great lords, eager for cash revenue, fenced off huge areas of formerly common grazing and pasture lands, whose customary use was essential for the survival of most of the English yeomanry. The process of enclosure lasted hundreds of years, engendering poverty, uprootedness, and suffering for much of England’s population; it forged the urban masses of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Britain and the human raw material for the Industrial Revolution and the modern English working class.
- 10.
Michael Milken epitomized the “go-go eighties” on Wall Street: he earned $500 million in a single year and led his firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert, to unheard-of profits by virtually inventing and dominating the market for high-interest, high-risk corporate “junk bonds.” Milken entered a federal prison on March 3, 1991, to begin serving a ten-year sentence, after having pleaded guilty to six felonies, including insider trading, fraud, and bribery.
- 11.
These World Bank associations appear to be purely circumstantial. Many were fooled by bcci, including Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young, and others were criminally indicted in connection with their association with the rogue bank, like Clark Clifford. There may be much more to uncover about World Bank-bcci connections in the huge volume of documents that were seized from bcci offices in Washington and are now dispersed among the U.S. Justice Department, the Federal Reserve, and the New York District Attorney’s Office.
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© 2013 Bruce Rich
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Rich, B. (2013). The Dwelling Place of the Angels. In: Mortgaging the Earth. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-515-1_1
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