Corporate Criminal of the Week

James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank

World Bank Attempts to Privatize Water

Imagine how great it would be if you couldn't afford to pay for drinking water. What would life be like tomorrow if you woke up and someone told you they decided you do not have a right to life? How fair would it be if you had to pay a company exorbitant amounts of money just to survive, all so that its executives and shareholders could line their already bulging pockets.

We live in times of rapid worldwide population growth. With current growth rates, our world's developing countries will need increased access to water right? Wrong. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank President John Wolfensohn, water is not a fundamental human right, but a privilege only the rich should be able to afford. Imagine trying to live through programs implemented by crooks like Wolfensohn designed to raise the price of drinking water by two to three times, all supposedly in the name of increasing access and lowering prices for water (it sounds just a little Orwellian).

In a despicable act of corporate crime, the World Bank and IMF are moving to hand over public utilities responsible for keeping millions of malnourished people in the Third World alive to the "responsible" private sector (responsible like Enron, Tyco, and World Com of course!). Maybe next up we should expect the privatization of air.

But how important exactly is universal access to water? The worldwide consumption of water has been doubling every twenty years for starters. And the U.N. figures show that near 1 billion people in the Third World do not have sufficient or adequate access to fresh drinking water. So by this logic, making it more expensive and harder to get could be the only solution.

So here comes the privatization tidal wave again. How can one look at children in the Third World in the eye and seriously tell them that they cannot have minimum amounts of drinking water because some rich fat cat in Washington wants to see his stock go up a few points?

Monsanto and Bechtel - both large multinational corporations, in conjunction with the IMF and World Bank - understand the potential for charging excessive rates for water. This is why the World Bank enforces policies specifically designed to hand over public water services to private corporations (we should also remember that corporations are totalitarian institutions with almost no public accountability by design). "For profit water" has become a likely reality for many countries, including; Colombia, Bolivia, Ghana, India, Angola, Benin, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Niger, Panama, Rwanda, Sao Tome, Senegal, Tanzania, and Yemen. Sound impossible? Here is how it works.

Step 1: The IMF and World Bank, basically imperialistic by design, provide massive loans to unaccountable Third World dictators and autocrats (usually U.S. supported).

Step 2: These dictators sell their people out, and agree to neo-colonial "structural adjustment" programs. These programs include provisions designed to destroy labor movements, lower the standard of living, and privatize public services, "blue gold" being just one example.

Step 3: The Third World elites (heads of government and business) then further consolidate their power. They do this not just by creating policies that line their own pockets, but also by taking the loan money (which must be paid back by the public) and using it to strengthen the corporate police state.

This scenario works out great for First World and Third World elites, but has disastrous consequences for the majority of the population. The World Health Organization already estimates that 2 million people die a year from diarrhea sickness from a lack of fresh water.

Privatizing water inevitably leads to further restrictions on access to fresh water in developing countries (which is already a major problem without the IMF attempts).

But the 15,000 demonstrators who showed up in Washington last week have a better idea. Maybe we should keep water public, and not intentionally kill millions of innocent civilians, which we currently do by eliminating water access and supporting brutal corporate-sponsored dictators.

Some countries have already followed the activists' lead. Activists in Cochamba, Bolivia already succeeded in expelling Bechtel and its "for profit" water program. It is now time for everyone else to reject these policies designed to promote "corporate greed over human need."

Unfortunately, Bechtel and Monsanto will not give up without a fight. Because Bolivia will not let them murder innocent people, they have filed suit against the country demanding that Bolivia pay the lost profits for the "blue gold" program. I have a better idea, though, for Bolivia and its people. They can tell Bechtel and Monsanto to go to hell.