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| Thread: Global Trade Hypocrisy and Riches of Exploitation | |
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Valeriy
Mage of the Land
Naughty, Naughty Valeriy
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posted October 01, 2003 12:16 AM |
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Global Trade Hypocrisy and Riches of Exploitation
In 1944 Bretton Woods meeting allies that won the world war two decided based on the experience of the great depression that a new global economic order needs to be set up and maintained. Three organisations were created with these missions:
World Bank (WB) – to fund development in poorer parts of the world, the lender of last resort to poor nations.
International Monetary Fund (IMF) – to make the financial markets of the world stable.
International Trade Organisation – to deregulate global trade and create a free global market. In basic terms, to get rid of tariffs and subsidies, so that the most efficient producers have success in the global market without being prevented from entering different countries. Note that ITO only came into existence in 1990s as World Trade Organisation (WTO), it had to wait about 50 years before the ground was set up by WB and IMF.
Many countries that were colonies and wanted to claim independence often lacked the basic infrastructure such as transport and power once the support from the mainland has been removed. These countries do not have economically profitable industries, but they have resources and raw materials and can start to develop with the basic infrastructure in place. Financial institutions will not lend to these countries, since they have no guaranteed income to pay them back. This is where the World Bank comes in as a lender of last resort.
World Bank decision-making rests on nations that provide or promise to provide in the future the largest amount of funds for WB lending. US holds about 18% share, Japan around 8% or 9%, and some European nations are also around 8%. Nations that do not provide funds for WB lending have absolutely no say in what WB does.
Hypocrisy 1: Dominated by surpassingly democratic countries such as the US, World Bank decision making rests on the biggest powers and does not take into account the opinions of smaller nations and does not take into account opinions of the nation who’s fate is being decided through WB lending. Point 2. When a government of a nation takes on a WB loan, it is the taxpayers of that country who are taking it on. They have no say in the matter whatsoever. When corrupt governments, such as Russia have taken on loans, large sums of money have been seen transferred into Swiss bank accounts the very next day. This doesn’t stop World Bank from lending to corrupt or military dictatorship nations, and at commercial interest rates.
World Bank loans are typically grand schemes such as blocking rivers and building huge power dams to generate electricity. I can refer to particular cases later, but for now I will generalize not to make this post too long. These projects can be worth a billion or more. They are supposed to provide the country with power so that the country can start building export industries and make money off the richer nations. For example producing aluminum and manufacturing goods for export.
Hypocrisy 2: Tied aid project lending. The projects by a majority are designed in Washington and it is a condition of the loan that the loan money must be paid to US (or another nation that is providing the loan) contractors, engineers, builders and designers, and they must build the project. The money never goes into country’s economy creating jobs and consequent economic activity, on the contrary, it stimulates lending country’s economy, while the recipient country gets the debt and the interest. The projects are aimed to stimulate whose economy again?
Hypocrisy 3: projects in their majority have cost overruns, at times as huge as 500% such as the Volta river project. That would be a debt of 5 million instead of 1, or get left with a loan and uncompleted project.
Hypocrisy 4: it is a law that any employee of the World Bank, nor the World Bank itself cannot be taken to any court in the world.
Hypocrisy 5: there is no guarantee that the project will work, and loans must be repaid regardless. Majority of the projects fail – the dams get silted up, earth-moving equipment for Africa breaks down because of sand… wouldn’t you design projects with their environment in mind? Under a growing pressure, World Bank created a division to measure the effectiveness of its projects. By its own measure of SELECTED projects, only 1/3 are both economically profitable and sustainable. If all projects are measured, this will reveal a different picture. If sustainability is checked after 5 years rather than 2, that will also reveal a different picture. I will post particular examples of WB projects later if you are interested. It seems that WB projects are actually not designed to be workable, and it is doubtful that one huge institution with decades of experience can design one failed project after the other.
Hypocrisy 6: World Bank has funded transmigration projects in Indonesia and Brazil. That involved moving millions of people into outlying regions that happen to be territory of a different nation. Civil war was predicted by many and of course resulted. People were moved in areas of rainforest with poor soil, and had to shift every few years, living in complete poverty conditions and destroying the rainforest further and further, slash and burn agriculture. Hundreds of thousands of people killed in wars between the existing population and the new settlers. 2 million hectares in Indonesia were totally deforested by 90s. One project involved giving people chainsaws and moving them into the Amazon.
Dam projects of WB alone displaced 33 million people from flooded arable land in the riverbanks. New masses of water caused huge diseases. Inflow of people into cities. Slums. Shortage of food after the farmlands are destroyed contributes to making a nation food-import-dependent.
Now these projects have been happening for decades. Wouldn’t any organisation willing to do any good do better than that? Why do they do it? Why doesn’t the public hear about this?
Next time I will explain the involvement of IMF and WTO. This is just one third of the picture so far.
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You can wait for others to do it, but if they don't know how, you'll wait forever.
Be an example of what you want to see on HC and in the world.
http://www.heroesofmightandmagic.com
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arachnid
Promising
Famous Hero
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posted October 04, 2003 12:36 AM |
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i hope your remembering the rules for a good sequel........
More gorier details, twists and turns in the plot, ingeniously hidden points of an arguement, higher body/word count and please dont forget the shock ending.
If you find yourself dealing with an unexpected back-story, and a preponderance of exposition, then the sequel rules do not apply. Because you are not dealing with a sequel. You are dealing with the concluding chapter of a trilogy.
Some important points to remember:
Anyone of them including the main point of the arguement can die.
The past will come back to bite you in the ass! Whatever you think you know about the past, forget it. The past is not at rest, any sins you think you committed in the first post are about to break out and destroy you.
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Valeriy
Mage of the Land
Naughty, Naughty Valeriy
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posted October 07, 2003 10:51 AM |
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Part two of the global trade hypocrisy
Just learned another interesting detail. Since the creation in 1970 until 1978, the environmental department of the World Bank that was meant to oversee that the World Bank lending projects do not damage the environment consisted of one man (over 5000 employees in WB) and all he could do is make suggestions that had no power in terms of affecting the projects. That department was later expanded to five people, who still had no real power to halt or modify a project if it is not environmentally viable.
Now the International Monetary Fund – the IMF. Its aim is to make the financial markets of the world stable, protecting them against boom and bust cycles. Developing countries want markets to export to and strong currencies that can pay for the imports.
IMF typically comes in to deal with the country when it can no longer meet its repayments with the WB (failed) project loans. You can’t take WB to court and you must pay back the debt, even if there were 400% cost overruns on the project and it was completely useless in the end, for example Volta river project. One country tried to not pay back the debt and changed their mind – Mexico. Trade embargo will be imposed on those who defy the WB and for nations that depend on food imports it can be disastrous.
The IMF comes in and offers to lend a country more money to help meet their WB loan repayments, but under conditions that the country alters its economic policies and laws according to a model known as structural adjustment.
Structural adjustment, sometimes referred to as the Washington Consensus, is a set of extreme right-wing policies to reduce the government’s involvement in the economy. The main policies of structural adjustment are:
· opening the door to foreign investment and allowing export of profits overseas
· privatization of government-owned companies, including infrastructure such as water supply, electricity and telecommunications
· removal of barriers to trade – tariffs, quotas and subsidies – creating a free market
· reduction in government spending – health, education and welfare
The assumption behind these policies is that the market will “automatically” allocate the resources to the most efficient producers and the consumers will benefit from lower prices and higher quality. In global terms, the most efficient producers will be able to export globally, so countries will specialize in what they produce best.
It is a fact that every rich nation heavily regulated its markets, both financial and production, issued tariffs and subsidies. This is true of EU, Japan and the US. South Korea is an example economy that regulated its economy and was developing well until the deregulation in 1990s, and then its economy collapsed.
Coming back to the IMF loans, in order to be given a loan, a country must for example begin privatization of its telecommunications sector or open its financial markets to foreign capital.
Hypocrisy 7: EU, US and Japan, who provide most of the funding for IMF loans do not themselves apply the structural adjustment policies to their own economies, but insist that the developing nations do. There is not a single case of a successful economy that resulted from the structural adjustment and dozens of collapsed economies.
New Zealand, where I live at the moment, is an unusual example on the world scene, because it adopted the structural adjustment policies voluntarily without being pressured by WB and IMF. A local example of privatization, Telecom was sold overseas for 4.8 billion dollars (nobody locally had that money to buy it), and in the next 2 years made 11 billion dollars of profit, which went overseas effortlessly due to deregulation of finance. This money is simply extracted out of the country, creating spending, consumption, investment and jobs in another country’s economy.
Privatized infrastructures are often natural monopolies and while private businesses tend to be more efficient than government-ran companies, the core inefficiency that is often unconsidered by right-wing ideologies is profit. There are many documented cases when privatized water company increased charges two or three-fold in a short period of time, creating large amounts of people that do not have access to clean water in cities where diseases rampage.
Investment that comes into the country as a result of deregulation tends to be extractive investment aimed to make the maximum amount of profit and transfer it overseas to the owner, thereby depleting the local economy rather than creating reinvestment and jobs.
It is a free-market ideology that deregulated market should produce competing healthcare and education providers that improve their services and keep their prices low due to the competition. In reality of a deregulated developing country, extractive investment does not go into welfare areas as it is not profitable, and government spending in those areas is also reduced resulting in increased poverty.
Here is what happens in the economy where financial market has been deregulated, for example Mexico or Argentina. Interest rates typically rise to attract foreign money. Local big companies are purchased cheaply. The share market booms as investment flows into the country. It is sometimes referred to as hot speculative money.
Most of the share market and currency exchange transactions are done by computer programs that track the fluctuations of the markets and transfer the money in milliseconds when they see a rising trend. So when the country’s share market starts to rise, thousands of automatic transaction channel more money into it. The share market booms as prices rise even further due to high demand. The value of firm’s shares increases 300-400% when their actual value increases by maybe 5 or 10% in that period of time. This continues until a big investor sees that such growth cannot possibly be sustained and withdraws the money. The share market values fall slightly, which causes all automated programs to relocate funds. The value continues to fall even faster, and in hours the whole share market can crash as the money rapidly flows out of the country. Most of financial transactions are led by herd instinct.
The local banks, who meanwhile borrowed overseas and were lending out at high rates of interest in this growing economy find themselves in a situation of collapsed economy with no possibility to make a profit from lending, and a tail of foreign debt. The banks then raise interest rates in order to pay back their loans to foreign banks. The interest rates quickly rise by dozens of percent, reaching 50 or over 100% annual interest rates. Businesses and individuals cannot possibly pay back the loans, which causes further poverty and collapse of local businesses. In Mexico at one stage the banks would not confiscate cars from unpaid car loans because they would simply have nowhere to store such a large amount of cars.
The WB or IMF come in at that stage and offer another loan aimed to restore the banking sector and allow the economy to grow again. Once the money is loaned to the country, and given to the local banks, it is straight away paid to the foreign banks as return of debts. Effectively, the WB and IMF lending countries give this money to their own banks while the other country’s taxpayers get the debt.
25 billion US dollars is spent every day for practical goods and services.
Over a trillion dollars per day is spent on financial transactions – money buying money.
Hypocrisy 8: In the last 15 years net $1.3 trillion was transferred from poor countries to rich countries. Weren’t WB and IMF supposed to enable third world countries to create wealth by trading with the developed world?
Hypocrisy 9: The AIM of the IMF is to make the financial markets of the world stable. See the effect of structural adjustment on Mexico or other countries.
There is still a large part of the picture remaining that will shed some light on why in the world would someone do this – the WTO – in the next post.
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You can wait for others to do it, but if they don't know how, you'll wait forever.
Be an example of what you want to see on HC and in the world.
http://www.heroesofmightandmagic.com
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SirDunco
Responsible
Supreme Hero
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posted October 07, 2003 08:50 PM |
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Val,
we live in the time of Capitalism and capitalism isn't about being just and fair, it's about money and power. There is no right or wrong, there's just money.
A funny thing that administations like the Worl bandk or the WTO have headquaters in the US, eh?
Definately not an acident.
BTW to rember that the US is one of the countrys most deeply in dept, but this dept was forgoten for who would want to charge it froma Super-Power?
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Draco
Promising
Famous Hero
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posted October 07, 2003 10:24 PM |
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i would charge them.. if i had the trillions and trillions needed to loan them in the first place.
its odd how anyone can lend what they dont have. i mean really how do countries loan out money when every single country in the world is in dept?
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Valeriy
Mage of the Land
Naughty, Naughty Valeriy
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posted October 07, 2003 11:38 PM |
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Before I post the third part, here's an interesting link with many facts:
http://www.50years.org
50 Years Is Enough (of WB and IMF)
After reading this, you might also want to see www.worldbank.org and see if there are any discrepancies.
US Taxpayer is funding a good portion of WB and IMF loans that cause poverty and destruction. And I don't think the taxpayer is aware of that at all.
The ultimate sin in the Catholic Church was considered Usury - lending money at excessive rates of interest, primarily to those in desperate need. According to the Church, Usury would mean the end of decent society. I hugely disapprove of many Catholic Church practices but that's one thing they've had right.
As for US headquarters of WB, I think US basically has a veto power in these organisations, except for WTO.
You may also find interesting what the new policies for Iraq are. Industry sectors can be invested into, except for oil, rules US.
Edit: Here's another link http://www.essentialaction.org
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You can wait for others to do it, but if they don't know how, you'll wait forever.
Be an example of what you want to see on HC and in the world.
http://www.heroesofmightandmagic.com
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Lady_Milena
Honorable
Known Hero
Grannie Sweet Cheeks
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posted October 08, 2003 10:12 AM |
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The Catholic church condemned it as sinful but used it just as well.
And no, it's not sinful and of course, I'm going to explain.
Alright, why do banks exist?
Several reasons. First, some people need money and they don't have a place to take it from. Some other people have money and they would rather make profit of it then keep it at home. The banks take care of these needs.
Thing is, is it just to give money to people and expect some additional profit back?
Let me remind you that the Church didn't condemn banking. It condemned asking for interest for the money.
Thing is, look at it this way. You have 10,000 now. What can you do with the money? First, you can invest it somewhere, like buy yourself a car. Or, you can buy bonds. Or you can save the money away for later. Keep it to yourself. However, if you decide to give it to someone else, who needs it right now, they can make investment AND make profit. Same thing as what you do. Well, OK, but that's what you can do as well!! So, if you lend the money (to the bank or otherwise), it is fair that you receive refunds for MISSING out the chance to make profit by investment.
This is what the bank does. It gives money to people who need it right now (most usually for investments, like buying appartments, cars, etc) and they would MISS to make profit by themselves with this money. That's why they demand interest.
Also, when giving money, there's always certain risk it would not be paid back, not fully at least. The interest takes care of that, just like it takes care of the inflation. That is, if you look bck in the 30ies of the century, $20 was MUUUUUUCH more than it is now! With the interest, money keeps its actual cost.
So, for me at least, banking is a fair business.
Of course, then comes the issue of blackmail. Desperate people would go to a bank and agree on ridiculously high interest rates just to satisfy their current and very urgent needs.
Countries are no different.
There's one BIG law in economics defined from more than five centuries ago. I'm not sure if it was W. Petite who said it first or the merchantilists. Anyway. It's simple. It says: a country goes richer if they export more than they import. This, the riches received are bigger than the riches given. Thus, the country can make profit.
And what, every country wants to be richer and would use one and the same old trick: this one.
Banking is the BIG way to do it. Unfortunately, riches don't grow on trees. It's already there and you must obtain it. Remember people are greedy? They would get more than they need - for the sake of having it. (Now, now, don't tell me you're NOT like this. Would you not want a comp with twice the parameters of produced these days? 1 k RAM? Not that you'd really need it. But you'd gladly have it, no?)
And unfortunately, you have to choose between the more stuff and being sympathetic, charitable and good-hearted.
You could do that to a friend but to a stranger you don't know about?
Not really.
That's what happens with banking.
Haven't you noticed that when money is involved, there are no friends?
I'm not saying that all this is fair. I HATE the way it works. But it works this way, in all my pain to say it. It may seem unfair but it WORKS. I hate it. I don't support it. But I -can- see a reason in this all.
And it doesn't make me happy.
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IYY
Responsible
Supreme Hero
REDACTED
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posted October 09, 2003 02:11 AM |
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Quote:
I'm not saying that all this is fair. I HATE the way it works. But it works this way, in all my pain to say it. It may seem unfair but it WORKS. I hate it. I don't support it. But I -can- see a reason in this all.
It's a shame that this is the opinion of so many people today. There must be a better way, imo it would be some form of socialism, which will be fair. Just because something works doesn't mean it's the only way, and it certainly doesn't mean we should not rebel against it and search for a more correct way to live.
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Valeriy
Mage of the Land
Naughty, Naughty Valeriy
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posted October 12, 2003 03:22 AM |
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Chapter 3 - WTO & conclusion.
This is the third final chapter of my post to tie everything together and explain the role of World Trade Organisation.
The aim of WTO in the new controlled global economy is to remove barriers to global trade, essentially creating a global free market where consumer demand, price and quality would decide which producers survive in the global marketplace. The aim of WTO hence is to remove all import tariffs, quotas and subsidies for local industries. Once that is done goods can be sold freely worldwide, and the countries will have to specialize in what they produce and provide best in this global free market competition.
WTO was conceived in 1944 but had to wait until 1990s before it could come into power as WB and IMF prepared the ground for WTO to grow upon. In 1940s the economies of the world were quite heavily regulated and would not wish to join an organisation that requires them to completely open their market.
Once the country gets into WB loan for a project that does not work and does little or nothing to pay off a fraction of original loan, and the country can no longer meet the loan repayments schedule, the IMF offers an extra loan to cover the WB loan repayments, and with it demands that countries adjust their economic policies towards structural adjustment, which involves opening the market.
Once markets have been forcefully opened this way, countries are in WTO. And in 90s WTO finally came into power.
Remember that countries cannot refuse to pay back their loan due to trade embargo that would result. At the stage where a country can't pay back the loan, it's most likely food dependant on cheap imports - dumping of rich nations, which will be discussed further. Also dam projects, a common undertaking with WB flood huge amounts of arable farmland, causing shortages of food also. Refusing to pay back the loan would hence result in food shortage, riots and many more internal breakdowns.
Upon creation of WTO, rich nations proposed that the number of votes should depend on the share of global trade that the nation holds. Poor nations completely refused as that would leave them with no say, like in WB and IMF. They proposed one vote per country. Rich nations didn't like that either as it would not enable them to control the organisation. Compromise was the consensus decision making – everyone had to agree for a decision to be finalized.
Hypocrisy 10: seemingly democratic consensus decision-making of WTO is a joke. Poor countries can only afford to send a handful of delegates to the WTO talks, while countries like US send hundreds of highly trained and prepared delegates to each round of the talks. There are also the green rooms – discussions where countries can only get into by invitation, and the rest have no idea what agreements go on in there. Hence a country like US can run dozens of green rooms simultaneously, negotiating with chosen delegates privately, while an African country might only have two delegates on the talks that do not even get invited into a green room.
WTO talks have broken down for the first time in Cancun with no consensus being reached. This is the official response of WB about what happened, taken from article at worldbank.com
Quote:
What were the main stumbling blocks?
There were a number of difficult issues at Cancun but, in my mind, the one that stands out and conditioned everything else was agriculture. An unprecedented coalition of developing countries—the so-called G-21 that kept adding members and included Brazil, China, India, South Africa—challenged the joint US-EU position on agriculture. These countries said the US-EU proposal did not go far enough on the three key questions of market access, domestic subsidies, and export subsidies. Although the gap narrowed towards the end of the meeting it was seen as too little, too late, and thus made everything else difficult.
Technically, the negotiations ended with a failure to agree on the “Singapore issues.” But many people felt that if progress had been made earlier on agriculture, the Singapore issues, and indeed several other outstanding issues, would have been manageable.
Notice how it reads. It clearly illustrates what WB, IMF and WTO are like. This quote to me makes it sound like “things were going fine until the coalition of developing countries started challenging the US-EU proposal because it was not enough for them. Gap narrowed, but their stance just made things too difficult and no agreement could be reached.”
Hypocrisy 11: what the developed nations don’t say. EU, US and Japan have very strong agricultural tariffs and subsidies. Import tariff on butter for example reaches 150%! This is illegal by the rules of the WTO. The three powers have promised to reduce their tariffs and subsidies ten years ago. Since then nothing has been reduced and the Bush administration allocated further 180 billion subsidy to US farmers over the next 10 years. At Cancun negotiations the US/EU/JAP said that they are prepared to talk about lowering their tariffs and subsidies (which they promised they would do 10 years ago) but only if the developing nations sign an agreement that allows foreigners to purchase their central infrastructures such as electricity and water supply.
For the first time developing nations, including the major player China united and refused this nonsense. The talks ended with no agreement. To which America said that they will now negotiate with countries individually since no agreement can be made collectively. Translation – put pressure on nations one by one to accept their terms since democracy tends to prevent unfair and unquestionable rule.
Now the final piece of this horrid puzzle.
I will use EU as an example. Dairy industry in EU is quite inefficient, and were the markets open, the imports from developing nations would drive the local producers out of business, giving developing nations the much needed export income to pay off their debts. EU gives huge subsidies to dairy processing industry (Nestle is rumored to be the major recipient) for them to give guaranteed payout to the farmers. The processing industry consists of few dozen very large companies. They deliberately take large portion of production off the market and store it away (hence the expression butter mountains), artificially limiting supply and selling their product in EU for twice its price. Tariffs for imports are so high (50-150%) that imports would be even more expensive.
The excess stock is then dumped out of EU into the developing nation at around 40-50% of cost of PRODUCTION. Very cheap imports are not stopped by countries deregulated by the IMF, and the dumped imports become cheaper than the production costs of local farmers, driving the farmers in developing nations out of business, and making nations dependant on food imports. Food dependant nation is under high threat of trade embargo should it refuse to make timely loan repayments, hence giving IMF the power to offer more loans and ask for almost any economy adjustment in return.
So this is what US/EU taxpayer pays in regards to dairy products (it is same for much other agriculture):
· huge subsidies to uncompetitive local industries
· consequent double price of products that this consumer then has to pay
· export dumping which sinks third world countries further into poverty
In order to develop competitive high-tech industry a country needs regulation. We can use Japanese cars as an example. Japan had strong tariffs on import of cars to allow its local industry to grow, research and develop, along with huge subsidies. After decades of growth and refinement the car industry had the strength to compete globally. A developing nations cannot nurture any of its industries due to the lack of funds that have to be paid back for loans and deregulated economy that does not allow tariffs and subsidies.
Here’s a good question to ask yourself. If you wanted to take all the money out of the third world and put them in complete poverty, without using the direct military methods, could you have come up with a better scheme?
If you are in one of the rich nations, and you haven’t known all this before now, another good question to ask yourself is why? If you are paying taxes, a portion of them has been used to fund the above activities and cause deaths and poverty. They teach advanced equations in schools, but do they teach how the world is run or do they keep it secret and use your tax money as they please behind your back?
I’ve spent several hours writing this because I think these facts need to be known by more people so that they can make informed decisions. People also need to know what their lack of concern and belief in selective media is doing to the world. There is no way that one or a few of us can stop this, but if each of us plays a little part and does what he can to make this stop, the goal of a thousand miles will be one step closer. This has been my step. I sincerely wish that you also make yours and alter your life in some way that has less support for what is being done by the powerful nations of the world.
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You can wait for others to do it, but if they don't know how, you'll wait forever.
Be an example of what you want to see on HC and in the world.
http://www.heroesofmightandmagic.com
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bjorn190
Responsible
Supreme Hero
Jebus maker
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posted October 13, 2003 01:30 AM |
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Quote:
I’ve spent several hours writing this because I think these facts need to be known by more people so that they can make informed decisions. People also need to know what their lack of concern and belief in selective media is doing to the world. There is no way that one or a few of us can stop this, but if each of us plays a little part and does what he can to make this stop, the goal of a thousand miles will be one step closer. This has been my step. I sincerely wish that you also make yours and alter your life in some way that has less support for what is being done by the powerful nations of the world.
Nice post, must be alot of work behind it. I wrote an essay once on the european union Common Agricultural Policy, and its hard to say whether these things have an actual benefit for us, or if its just an in a democrazy justifiable way to beat up the poor making them even poorer.
But.. its hard to see how humanity can stop these things. The basic power of survival of the fittest and evolusion, combined with the scarcity of resources, makes it hard to see how we can possibly fix the basic problem.
Maybe an abondance of resources would help. But what if the thing that people want is a woman, or maybe 50 women.. its hard to create a place where everyone would be better off than if they fought for the things they want.
However, I believe in that idea.. that by cooperating and caring about others, all the people that do that will be better off. I feel that it is the core idea behind such an everyday thing as friendship.
If this friendship could be expanded to include larger and larger parts of the world population, I believe that the good people would be more efficient than the bad people, and in the end, the world would be good. However, whats good is often defined by the person that holds the most power. But.. the core idea of an expanding friendship is what I meant to post about here. Because even though we cant know anything for sure, I think we should try to do what we believe is right.
Also, laws are one way to set limits for what people can use to fight other people for resources. By expanding the laws and the enforcement of the laws, we could create less freedom to hurt others. Yes, freedom. There are good parts of it, and bad parts. Thats why Im not so sure about it. Total freedom at the expense of justice, or Total justice at the expense of freedom.. neither way is good. But for the strong, Total freedom at the expense of justice is probably what they like and vice versa for the weak. I think we should try to find a way to take a middle way.
As for what to do as an individual.. a good friend of mine once said to me: "I believe you might change the world, but no, don't tell me what you're going to do. Show me. Just do it, and then years from now, I will know what it was. I will look back on this moment and think 'yea, thats what Bjorn wanted to do'.." To this day I believe its actually one of the best pieces of advice Ive ever been given..
btw its 1 am and I had some drinks so I might be rambling  hehe
but val.. maybe we can do something some day? I mean.. change the world. Lets see what turns up. lool
cyas
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bort
Honorable
Supreme Hero
Discarded foreskin of morality
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posted November 04, 2003 05:50 AM |
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Just so you know, Val, I have read your posts and do intend to reply. You put so much effort into the posts that I want to make a reply that's actually worthwhile, but, unfortunately, it will be awhile before I have time to do so.
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Drive by posting.
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Celfious
Promising
Legendary Hero
From earth
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posted November 04, 2003 06:43 AM |
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Sorry, im' not reading more but part 1 for now but heres my part 1 lol
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Hypocrisy 1: Dominated by surpassingly democratic countries such as the US, World Bank decision making rests on the biggest powers and does not take into account the opinions of smaller nations and does not take into account opinions of the nation who’s fate is being decided through WB lending. Point 2. When a government of a nation takes on a WB loan, it is the taxpayers of that country who are taking it on. They have no say in the matter whatsoever. When corrupt governments, such as Russia have taken on loans, large sums of money have been seen transferred into Swiss bank accounts the very next day. This doesn’t stop World Bank from lending to corrupt or military dictatorship nations, and at commercial interest rates.
Well if it is really a loan set up, we really should be taking it on to ourselves for now. But at the same time, the World isnt working together on any of these projects so bloody america, the biggest loan dollar swayers, may or may not be in debt to WB.
Do you think if the whole world got together and tried to break this nonsense (nonsence of the world not working together), that we'd not be on TV trying to make a difference? Word spreads and no government is a government without its peoples satisfaction. I'm not talking revolt. I'm talking mass voice. The citizens, of this earth have our own interests and I dont see any political leaders trying to Unite the World! And its transactions. To a grand mutual flow of resource and science/mechanics ect. Inspiring the citezens to put in their part. Because we're all working together for ourselves and our world.
To unite the world can only be done without war.
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The projects are aimed to stimulate whose economy again?
Technicly ours (the worlds). But thats not the general direction of it because of misc reasons.
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earth-moving equipment for Africa breaks down because of sand… wouldn’t you design projects with their environment in mind?
Heck yeaa! Why arent we transporting loads of dirt to make a 30 foot deep wedged mud pit with concrete ontop? We can make a seventh ocean in mesopotamia.
Would the road seriously sink and has anyone tested it on 5 tons weight for 20 years straight? The world can fund it although construction would be huge :/ With Metal sheets holding the sand away so you can fill in with Mud.
I'm sure some other people have other ideas on the matter like not digging up meso, and some other plan.. 
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All plans are accessible to us if we find them
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What are you up to
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