In their perpetual confusion, some liberal critics conclude that foreign aid and IMF and World Bank SAPs “do not work” because the end result is less self-sufficiency and more poverty for the recipient nations. Why then do the rich member states continue to fund the IMF and World Bank? Are their leaders just not as intelligent as the liberal critics who keep pointing out to them that their “failed” policies are having the opposite effect?
In fact, it is the critics who are stupid, not the western leaders and investors who enjoy such immense wealth and success and own so much of the world. They pursue their aid and foreign loan programs because such programs do work. The question is, work for whom? Cui bono? (Who benefits?)
The function of overseas investments, loans, and aid is not to uplift the masses in other countries. (There’s no profit in that.) It is to advance the imperial interests of the global capital accumulators, to help them take over the lands and local economies of Third World peoples, monopolize their markets, depress their wages, indenture their labor with enormous debts, privatize their public service sector, and prevent these nations from emerging as trade competitors by depriving them of normal development. In these respects, investments, foreign loans, and structural adjustment programs work very well indeed.
The real mystery is: why do some commentators find such an analysis so improbable? Why do they dismiss it as a “conspiracy theory”? Why are they skeptical that US rulers knowingly and deliberately pursue policies in the Third World (suppress wages, roll back environmental protections, diminish the public sector, cut back human services) designed to benefit the global corporate interests? These are the same policies that the same US rulers pursue on behalf of the same moneyed interests right here in our own country. Why would any of these players behave so differently elsewhere?
The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development released a 2005–2006 report showing that half the world’s wealth is owned by 2 percent of the richest adults. It is time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world—and want to own it all—are “incompetent” or “misguided” or “failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies.” When we think the empire builders are being stupid, we are not being very smart ourselves. They know what they are doing; they know where their interests lie—and so should we.