The Headscarf is Not an Islamic Compulsion

Ayesha Khan

As the relationship between growing migrant Muslim populations and the western nations that host them grows increasingly complex, the controversy over the dress code for Muslim women has taken on an alarmingly central role.  The recent European Court of Justice (ECJ) decision, which has ruled that bans on headscarves (and other religious symbols) in the workplace can be legal, is only one in a series of judgements on this controversial matter.

While the ECJ has leaned towards religious neutrality and against the display of religious symbols in the workplace (including, for instance, the Christian cross), the United States Supreme Court, recently ruled to the contrary.  In the case of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v Abercrombie & Fitch (2015), the US Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favour of the hijab-clad employee, despite the employer’s claims that her headscarf clashed with the company’s dress policy.  Only the dissenting judge, Justice Thomas reasoned as the ECJ has, that the dress code was a neutral policy and could not be the basis for a discrimination lawsuit.  Even in the United States, however, the outcome of such cases is not always clear.  In 2012, for example, a hijab-wearing employee who had sued Disneyland, did not succeed against her employer.

Legal decisions aside, the issue of the hijab seems to have become a bone of contention between those in the West who see the increasing number of headscarves around them as a cultural invasion and those among the often young Muslim population who see it as a symbol of resistance.  Instead of an essential religious dictate, however, the hijab is more of a desperate attempt to forge an identity that has largely been displaced as a result of migration.

Women in Muslim-majority countries who veil or cover their hair often do so because of familial, or in the case of Saudi Arabia and Iran, state pressure.  Ironically, women who wear the hijab in the West often choose to do so.  While women in the Middle East may be wrapping themselves in additional garments to ward off the prying eyes of men dominating the bazaars and workplaces, some Muslim women in the West have told me that they find the hijab liberating and empowering.

As someone who grew up partially in Saudi Arabia and witnessed firsthand the oppression of women that comes through forcing the veil upon them, that is indeed a strange concept for me to digest.  The constant conflation of Muslim women and the headscarf in the western media is therefore something that I find quite disturbing.  There are countless observant and pious Muslim women who do not cover their hair.  On the other hand, there are also those who wear the hijab but aren’t particularly interested in following some of the more fundamental dictates of Islam.

For generations we have learned that in order to be true to the Muslim faith one must affirm that there is one God and that Muhammad is his messenger.  The Quran repeatedly stresses the importance of being steadfast in prayer and of giving alms to the poor, to feed the needy and to take care of orphans.  Not once does the Quran mention the hijab, or headscarf, explicitly as an Islamic necessity.

There are a few verses in the Quran that advise a modest dress code but to borrow a line from the renowned Pakistani film, Khuda ke liye(For God’s sake), “How can a religion that is meant for all time and all peoples insist on  one particular uniform?”

Certain Islamic scholars from countries as diverse as Pakistan, Egypt and Morocco have affirmed the view that what is modest is subject to interpretation and discretion and does not necessarily include a head-covering.

Paradoxically, at a time when significant numbers in the West are growing resentful of headscarves and most unfortunately some of this intolerance has manifested itself in the form of hostile Islamophobic attacks on hijab-clad women, the fashion industry is rushing to embrace the hijab.  Realising the monetary potential of marketing to brand-conscious hijabi millennials, Nike Pro Hijab, priced at $80, is the latest addition to jump on the “modest fashion” bandwagon.  Dolce and Gabbana have gone several steps further, with their ostentatious daisy print hijab and abaya collection, aimed undoubtedly at the residents of the oil-rich Gulf Arab states, they accessorise with statement handbags and sunglasses that could set you back thousands of dollars.  Modesty anyone?

Keeping the controversy alive, a few months ago, Playboy magazine featured its first hijab-wearing Muslim woman.  For her supporters, this was a “bold case for modesty” and perhaps another milestone in breaking barriers for those wearing headscarves.  But to me, this was akin to turning the entire concept of hijab on its head.  Though the Quran does not dictate a precise form of dress for men or women, it does ask both to be discreet and modest and not to draw unnecessary attention to oneself.  An often-quoted verse asks both men and women “to lower their gaze and guard their private parts”.  Playboy of course has historically been associated with the exact opposite of this philosophy.

The concept of Islamic modesty therefore is not meant to test boundaries or provoke identity clashes with a wider society but simply to maintain decorum, respect and harmony between men and women.  As Muslims in the West, we would be better off focusing on the more basic and uncontested tenets of our religion and finding common ground with other Abrahamic faiths based on shared principles, such as providing for the needy and helping the downtrodden.

Slaughtered Arabs Don’t Count

Bruce Mastron

From the Guardian on Wednesday:

“An airstrike by the US-led coalition against Islamic State on a school west of the Syrian city of Raqqa has killed at least 33 people, many of whom had fled nearby fighting, sparking further concerns that new rules of engagements may be causing an increase in civilian casualties.

“The attack follows a separate US strike on a mosque complex in the north-west of the country last Saturday that killed at least 52 people. The incident triggered fears that a White House-ordered review of rules governing the use of drones had already given military planners more flexibility on ordering strikes.”

A thank you to the Guardian for covering this extraordinary story.

But the reaction by most of the Western media, including the New York Times?

Meh.

The reaction to the London attack Wednesday in which, not counting the attacker, left three people dead?

Banner headlines and constant updates.

The death of civilians is a crime which should never be tolerated.

But apparently more for some than others.

I’ve spent 30 years in journalism, so I know the closer a story gets  — and “closer” includes the same type of people as opposed to foreigners in a supposedly distant land — the greater and longer the treatment.

And some may say that because the London attack happened outside Parliament, it merits even more outrage.

But why is Parliament more sacred than a haven for refugees or a mosque?

And where are all the world leaders offering condolences to the dead Syrian children and other civilians killed by their very own governments?

Sadly, as we all know, this is really nothing new.

But this disproportionate coverage of Europeans versus Arabs — pretty much inversely proportional to the actual death counts — hides a crucial lesson that we just can’t seem to learn.

These attacks are not unrelated.

I have no idea — and I suspect the Western experts don’t either yet — if the London attack was a direct response to the recent civilian slaughters by the West in its battle against the Islamic State.

But regardless of the direct motivation, the mass murders of innocents in the Middle East by the West go at least as far back as the first “Gulf War.”

(They go much further back, but let’s start with the battle against an Iraqi dictator we helped put in and then keep in power.)

Would there have been this most recent attack in London — or even an Islamic State for that matter — without all the endless Western war crimes against Muslims for almost three decades?

Until we — and that includes the media we in the West rely upon — mourn the deaths of the innocents our governments kill as much as the deaths of innocents killed by our enemies, the bloodshed will never end.

And all too likely only get worse.

Monsanto in India: The Sacred and the Profane

Colin Todhunter

Foreign capital is dictating the prevailing development agenda in India. There is a deliberate strategy to make agriculture financially non-viable for India’s small farms, to get most farmers out of farming and to impose a World Bank sanctioned model of food production. The aim is to replace current structures with a system of industrial (GM) agriculture suited to the needs of Western agribusiness, food processing and retail concerns.

The aim here is not to repeat what has been previously written on this. Suffice to say that the long-term plan is for an overwhelmingly urbanised India with a fraction of the population left in farming working on contracts for large suppliers and Walmart-type supermarkets that, going on current evidence (see 4th paragraph from the end here), will offer a largely monoculture diet of highly processed, denutrified, genetically altered food based on crops soaked with chemicals and grown in increasingly degraded soils according to an unsustainable model of agriculture that is less climate/drought resistant, less diverse and unable to achieve food security.

Thanks to its political influence, Monsanto already illegally dominates the cotton industry in India with its GMOs. It is increasingly shaping agricultural policy and the knowledge paradigm by funding agricultural research in public universities and institutes. Its practices and colonisation of institutions have led to it being called the ‘contemporary East India Company‘ and regulatory bodies are now compromised and riddled with conflicts of interest.

Monsanto is hard at work with its propaganda campaign to convince us all that GM food is necessary to feed the world’s burgeoning population. Its claims are hidden behind a flimsy and cynical veil of humanitarian intent (helping the poor and hungry), which is easily torn away to expose the self-interest that lies beneath.

With an obligation to maximise profits for shareholders, Monsanto seems less concerned with the impacts of its products on public health (whether in Argentina or the US) or the conditions of Indian farmers due to its failed GM cotton and more concerned with roll-outs of its highly profitable disease-associated weed-killer (Roundup) and its GM seeds.

To ensure it remains ‘business as usual’, part of the relentless message is that there is no alternative to the chemical-intensive/GMO treadmill model of farming (which by now, any informed person should know is nothing but a lie). Monsanto has done every foul thing possible (including bribery and fakery) to ensure its business model dominates and that critics are smeared or crushed. As a result, we have an increasingly dominant model of unsustainable industrialised food and agriculture dominated by green revolution ideology and technologies (and wedded to and fuelled and driven by powerful commercial and geopolitical interests), which involves massive social, environmental and health costs.

Rejecting Monsanto’s neocolonialism

In 2015, trade and agricultural policy analyst Devinder Sharma asked the following questions during a debate on Indian TV about rural population displacement and farming:

“Why do you want to move the population just because Western economists told us we should follow them? Why? Why can’t India have its own thinking? Why do we have to go with Harvard or Oxford economists who tell us this?”

His series of questions strike at the heart of the prevailing development paradigm in India. It is a model of development being dictated by the World Bank and powerful transnational agribusiness corporations like Monsanto and Cargill.

Monsanto’s mindset is based on the conquering and control of nature.

Let us turn briefly to Raj Patel:

“Modern farming turns fields into factories. Inorganic fertilizer adds nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous to the soil; pesticides kill anything that crawls; herbicides nuke anything green and unwanted—all to create an assembly line that spits out a single crop… .”

Contrast this with the ethos and principles of agroecological approaches to farming, which works with nature, as set out here.

Monsanto’s business model thrives within a system of capitalism and a system of agriculture propped up by the blood money of militarism (Ukraine and Iraq), ‘structural adjustment’ and strings-attached loans (Africa) or slanted trade deals (India) whereby transnational agribusiness drives a global agenda to suit its interests and eradicate impediments to profit. And it doesn’t matter how much devastation ensues or how unsustainable its model is, ‘crisis management’ and ‘innovation’ fuel the corporate-controlled treadmill it seeks to impose.

Devinder Sharma is thus right to ask why can’t India have its own thinking.

And India does have its own thinking. Environmental scientist Viva Kermani:

“It can quite easily be said that Hinduism is the world’s largest nature-based religion that recognises and seeks the Divine in nature and acknowledges everything as sacred. It views the earth as our Mother, and hence, advocates that it should not be exploited. A loss of this understanding that earth is our mother, or rather a deliberate ignorance of this, has resulted in the abuse, and the exploitation of the earth and its resources.”

Kermani notes that centuries before the appearance of the modern-day environmental movement and Greenpeace, the shruti (Vedas, Upanishads) and smruti (Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas, other scriptures) instructed people that the animals and plants found in India are sacred; that like humans, our fellow creatures, including plants have consciousness; and, therefore, all aspects of nature are to be revered. She adds that this understanding of and reverence towards the environment is common to all Indic religious and spiritual systems: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

According to Kermani, the Vedic deities have deep symbolism and many layers of existence. One such association is with ecology. Surya is associated with the sun, the source of heat and light that nourishes everyone; Indra is associated with rain, crops, and abundance; and Agni is the deity of fire and transformation and controls all changes. So much importance was given to trees, that there was also Vrikshayurveda – an ancient Sanskrit text on the science of plants and trees. It contains details about soil conservation, planting, sowing, treatment, propagating, how to deal with pests and diseases and a lot more.

On the other hand, Kermani notes that the Western religions, especially Christianity, viewed this nature worship as paganism, failing to recognise the scientific and spiritual basis of the relationship between man and nature and how this is the only way to sustain ecological balance. Christians were made to turn all their love and adoration for nature towards their one and only god, who was a jealous god. The elements of nature then became devoid of all divinity and were left to be conquered by man.

Whereas the Christian belief is that nature is destructive and therefore has to be conquered, according to Kermani, the Dharmic view propagates conservation of the nature and advices man to live in harmony with nature without indulging in exploitation. Hindus strongly believe that the world is one family and thus the divine is also seen in animals and are protected. The deification of animals, therefore, has led to the protection of many species of animal. The recognition that every animal played a role in creating an ecological balance, allowed people to live in harmony with animals.

Kermani concludes by saying:

“Today’s environmental crisis demands a response. The world is grappling to find solutions to multiple crises of the environment. Technology is considered the panacea. For Hindus, the environment is not protected because of the selfish urgency to save biodiversity and hence save human future, but because it is the Dharmic way of life and hence a righteous duty that all humans are obliged to perform.”

And before critics say this is all well and good, but how can India possibly feed itself without chemicals, without Monsanto or Bayer, without agritech inputs? Such people should know that India is self-sufficient in many staples and was traditionally more productive prior to the imposition of green revolution ideology and technology. Moreover, such ideology and technology has undermined an indigenous farming sector that once catered for the diverse dietary needs and climatic conditions of India and it has actually produced and fuelled drought, degraded soils, illnesses and malnutrition, farmer distress and many other issues.

Playing god

Similar processes that destroyed the essential link between humans and nature played out in the West long ago. Many of the ancient pagan rituals and celebrations (that early Christianity incorporated and co-opted) helped humans come to terms with some of the most basic issues of existence (death, fertility, good, evil, love, hate, etc.) and served to sanctify their practical relationship with the natural environment and its role in sustaining human life. The planting and harvesting of crops and various other seasonal activities associated with food production thus became central to various beliefs and customs.

For example, Freyfaxi marks the beginning of the harvest in Norse paganism, while Lammas or Lughnasadh is the celebration of the first harvest/grain harvest in Paganism and Wicca and by the ancient Celts.

Humans celebrated nature and the life it gave birth to. Ancient beliefs and rituals were imbued with hope and renewal, and people had a necessary and immediate relationship the sun, seeds, animals wind, soil and rain and the changing seasons that nourished and brought life.

Discussing Britain, Robert W Nicholls explains:

“The cults of Woden and Thor were superimposed on far older and better-rooted beliefs related to the sun and the earth, the crops and the animals, and the rotation of the seasons between the light and warmth of summer and the cold and dark of winter. These ancient beliefs were so well established that whatever the name of the great god who for the moment was favored by the state rulers, whether Mithras or Woden – or Christ – the old practices, so essential for the fertility of the crops and for good luck in life, were maintained in farming communities until Christian decrees and the feudal system led to their final attrition.”

Nicholls reaffirms the importance of agriculture in these beliefs by adding:

“Little is known about the religious beliefs that sustained the rural population of pre-Christian Britain… The range of pagan deities – earth, water, fire, the sun, stone, and wood – supported as they were by agrarian production, suggests a religion that had a sound practical base. Two illusive figures appear as a backdrop to rural beliefs and demonstrate a male-female, winter-summer bipolarity: an ancient Earth Mother, who preceded the rise of later goddesses and grain deities, and a horned god of the hunt, who was the pivotal focus of a totem cult of stag masqueraders.”

In the 1950s, Union Carbide produced a series of images that depicted the company as a ‘hand of god’ coming out of the sky to ‘solve’ some of the issues facing humanity. One of the most famous images is of the hand pouring agrochemicals on Indian soils. As Christianity co-opted traditional pagan beliefs to achieve hegemony, corporations steeped in the Western mindset that Kermani speaks of have also sought to depict themselves in a god-like, all-knowing fashion.

But in more modern times, instead of using spiritual/religious ideology to secure compliance, they have relied on neoliberal economic faith and dogma and have co-opted science and scientists whose appeals to authority (not logic) have turned them into the high priests of modern society.

Whether it is fuelled by Bill Gates, the World Bank’s neoliberal-based rhetoric about ‘enabling the business of agriculture’  or The World Economic Forum’s ‘Grow’ strategy, the implication is that the India’s and the world’s farmers must be ‘helped’ out of their awful ‘backwardness’ by the West and its powerful corporations – all facilitated of course by a globalised, corrupt system of capitalism.

The same farmers who Viva Kermani says have “legitimate claims to being scientists, innovators, natural resource stewards, seed savers and hybridisation experts. Instead, they were reduced to becoming recipients of technical fixes and consumers of the poisonous products of a growing agricultural inputs industry.”

The same farmers whose seeds and knowledge was stolen by corporations to be bred for proprietary chemical-dependent hybrids, now to be genetically engineered.

And what is the result of the war on nature, farmers, traditional agriculture and the environment?

We see the capturing of markets and global supply chains for the benefit of transnational corporations involved in food production. We see the destruction of natural habitat in Indonesia to produce palm oil. We see the use of cynical lies (linked to palm oil production) to corrupt India’s food system with genetically modified seeds. We witness the devastating impact on farmers and rural communities. We see the degradation of soils, health and water resources.

And we see Monsanto making huge annual profits, and its CEO Hugh Grant and VP Robb Fraley being amply rewarded. Grant brought in just under $12m in 2015. Fraley raked in just under $3.4m. In January 2015, Monsanto reported a profit of $243m (down from $368m the previous year). Greed and ego trump all else. Farmer suicides are little more than collateral damage. And environmental degradation is a price worth paying.

In India today, we have a BJP-led government that espouses politically expedient Hindu nationalist sentiments. And yet it is selling out the nation to foreign interests whose beliefs and actions are opposed to much of what traditional Hinduism stands for in terms of its ecological heritage. Where is the logic?

The logic is fairly easy to decipher: what is happening has little to do with Hinduism or nationalism, however defined, and everything to do with a Wall Street backed Indian political elite suffering a severe bout of Stockholm syndrome, in awe of its captors.

From Paris to London: Another City, Another Attack

Patrick Cockburn

In the immediate aftermath of what police are describing as a terrorist incident in and around Parliament, at least three facts stand out suggesting that the attacks are similar to those carried out over the last two years by Isis supporters in Paris, Nice, Brussels and Berlin.

The similarities with the events today are in the targets of the attacks which in all cases were ordinary civilians, but the means of trying to cause mass casualties differs. In Nice, Berlin and London no fire arms were used by the attackers, while in Paris and Brussels there was a coordinated assault in which guns and explosives were employed.

In Nice on 14 July 2016 a truck killed 86 people and injured hundreds, driving at speed through crowds watching a firework display on the Promenade des Anglais until the driver was shot dead by police. Isis claimed that he was answering their “calls to target citizens of coalition nations that fight the Islamic State”. Britain is a member of the coalition with aircraft and special forces troops in action against Isis in Iraq and Syria.

Isis claimed responsibility for a lorry which drove into a Christmas market in 19 December 2016, killing 12 and injuring dozens. As with Nice, this appears to resemble what happened on Westminster Bridge, going by first reports.

The overall location of the attacks today may be significant and would fit in with the way that Isis normally operates when carrying out such atrocities. This is to act in the centre of capital cities or in large provincial ones in order to ensure 24/7 publicity and maximise the effectiveness of the incident as a demonstration of Isis’s continuing reach and ability to project fear far from its rapidly shrinking core areas in Syria and Iraq.

Isis is sophisticated enough to know that such attacks carried out in news hubs like London or Paris will serve their purposes best. In cases of attack with a knife or a vehicle then Isis would not need to provide more than motivation, though individuals seldom turn out to have acted alone. It may no longer have cells in Europe capable of obtaining fire arms or making bombs.

It could be that the attacks were carried out by another group, the most obvious candidate being one of the affiliates of al-Qaeda in Yemen. Syria or elsewhere. On 11 March 2017 Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda, carried out two bombing attacks in Damascus, killing 59 people, mostly Shia pilgrims from Iraq visiting holy sites. But the Syrian arm of al-Qaeda, while carrying out suicide bombings against targets in Syria, has previously avoided doing so abroad in order to make itself more diplomatically palatable than Isis.

Could the attacks on Westminster Bridge and in Parliament be linked to the siege of Mosul where Isis has lost the east of the city and half the west since an Iraqi army offensive started on 17 October? Isis has traditionally tried to offset defeats on the battlefield, by terrorist attacks aimed civilians that show they are still very much a force to be feared. The same logic led to the ritual decapitation, drowning and burning of foreign journalists and domestic opponents.

The most likely speculation at this early stage is that the attacks in London are inspired or directed by Isis, but there is too little evidence to make the connection with any certainty. Isis often holds off claiming such atrocities for several days to increase speculation and intensify terror.

World Bank Declares Itself Above the Law

Pete Dolack

The World Bank has for decades left a trail of human misery. Destruction of the environment, massive human rights abuses and mass displacement have been ignored in the name of “development” that works to intensify neoliberal inequality. In response to legal attempts to hold it to account, the World Bank has declared itself above the law.

At least one U.S. trial court has already agreed that the bank can’t be touched, and thus the latest lawsuit filed against it, attempting to obtain some measure of justice for displaced Honduran farmers, faces a steep challenge. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of legal proceedings, however, millions of people around the world have paid horrific prices for the relentless pursuit of profit.

A trail of evictions, displacements, gross human rights violations (including rape, murder and torture), widespread destruction of forests, financing of greenhouse-gas-belching fossil-fuel projects, and destruction of water and food sources has followed the World Bank.

The latest attempt at accountability is a lawsuit filed in the U.S. federal court in Washington by EarthRights International, a human rights and environmental non-governmental organization, charging that the World Bank has turned a blind eye to systematic abuses associated with palm-oil plantations in Honduras that it has financed. The lawsuit, Juana Doe v. International Finance Corporation, alleges that

“Since the mid-1990s, the International Finance Corporation [a division of the World Bank] has invested millions of dollars in Honduran palm-oil companies owned by the late Miguel Facussé. Those companies — which exist today as Dinant — have been at the center of a decades-long and bloody land-grabbing campaign in the Bajo Aguán region of Honduras.

For nearly two decades, farmer cooperatives have challenged Dinant’s claims to sixteen palm-oil plantations … that it has held in the Bajo Aguán region. On information and belief, Dinant’s former owner, Miguel Facussé, took that land from the farmer cooperatives through fraud, coercion, and actual or threatened violence. The farmer cooperatives have engaged in lawsuits, political advocacy, and peaceful protests to challenge Dinant’s control and use of the land. And Dinant has responded to such efforts with violence and aggression.”

Bank’s own staff cites failures

EarthRights International alleges that the World Bank has “repeatedly and consistently provided critical funding to Dinant, knowing that Dinant was waging a campaign of violence, terror, and dispossession against farmers, and that their money would be used to aid the commission of gross human rights abuses.” The lawsuit filing cites “U.S. government sources” to allege that more than 100 farmers have been killed since 2009.

The suit also says that the International Finance Corporation’s own ombudsman said the World Bank division “failed to spot or deliberately ignored the serious social, political and human rights context.” These failures arose “from staff incentives ‘to overlook, fail to articulate, or even conceal potential environmental, social and conflict risk’ and ‘to get money out the door.’ ” Despite this internal report, the suit says, the World Bank continued to provide financing and that the ombudsman has “no authority to remedy abuses.”

(World Bank representatives did not respond to a request for comment. Although not directly a party to the lawsuit, Dinant describes the allegations as “absurd.” In a statement on its web site, the company said “All allegations that Dinant is — or ever has been — engaged in systematic violence against members of the community are without foundation.”)

EarthRights International’s lawsuit faces an uphill challenge due to an earlier suit filed by it on behalf of Indian farmers and fisherpeople being thrown out by the same court when it ruled that the World Bank is immune from legal challenge. The bank provided $450 million for a power plant that the plaintiffs said degraded the environment and destroyed livelihoods. The court agreed with the World Bank’s contention that it has immunity under the International Organizations Immunities Act. (The dismissal has been appealed.)

The International Organizations Immunities Act provides that “International organizations, their property and their assets, wherever located, and by whomsoever held, shall enjoy the same immunity from suit and every form of judicial process as is enjoyed by foreign governments.” The World Bank has been declared the equivalent of a sovereign state, and in this context is placed above any law as if it possesses diplomatic immunity.

This law is applied selectively; lawsuits against Cuba are not only allowed but consistently won by plaintiffs. These are not necessarily the strongest of cases, such as participants in the Bay of Pigs invasion winning judgments and a woman who was married to a Cuban who went back to Cuba winning $27 million because the court found that her marriage made her a “victim of terrorism”!

More than 3 million people displaced

Despite its immunity, a passport may not be needed to enter a World Bank office, but can it be argued that the lending organization uses its immense power wisely? That would be a very difficult case to make.

A 2015 report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that 3.4 million people were physically or economically displaced by projects funded by the World Bank. Land was taken, people were forced from their homes and their livelihoods damaged. Some of the other findings of the report, on which more than 50 journalists from 21 countries worked:

*From 2009 to 2013, the World Bank pumped $50 billion into projects graded the highest risk for “irreversible or unprecedented” social or environmental impacts — more than twice as much as the previous five-year span.

*The bank regularly fails to live up to its own policies that purport to protect people harmed by projects it finances.

*The World Bank and its International Finance Corporation lending arm have financed governments and companies accused of human rights violations such as rape, murder and torture. In some cases, they continued to bankroll these borrowers after evidence of abuses emerged.

*Ethiopian authorities diverted millions of dollars from a World Bank-supported project to fund a violent campaign of mass evictions, according to former officials who carried out the forced resettlement program.

One of the articles that is a part of this investigative report said the bank routinely ignores its own rules that require detailed resettlement plans and that employees face strong pressure to approve big infrastructure projects. The report says:

“The World Bank often neglects to properly review projects ahead of time to make sure communities are protected, and frequently has no idea what happens to people after they are removed. In many cases, it has continued to do business with governments that have abused their citizens, sending a signal that borrowers have little to fear if they violate the bank’s rules, according to current and former bank employees.

‘There was often no intent on the part of the governments to comply — and there was often no intent on the part of the bank’s management to enforce,’ said Navin Rai, a former World Bank official who oversaw the bank’s protections for indigenous peoples from 2000 to 2012. ‘That was how the game was played.’ …

Current and former bank employees say the work of enforcing these standards has often been undercut by internal pressures to win approval for big, splashy projects. Many bank managers, insiders say, define success by the number of deals they fund. They often push back against requirements that add complications and costs.”

Funding that facilitates global warming

Incredibly, one of the outcomes of the Paris Climate Summit was for leaders of the G7 countries to issue a communiqué that they would seek to raise funds “from private investors, development finance institutions and multilateral development banks.” These leaders propose the World Bank be used to fight global warming despite it being a major contributor to projects that increase greenhouse-gas emissions, including providing billions of dollars to finance new coal plants around the world. The bank even had the monumental hypocrisy to issue a report in 2012 that called for slowing global warming while ignoring its own role.

It is hoped you, dear reader, won’t fall off your chair in shock, but the World Bank’s role in facilitating global warming has since only increased.

Financing projects that facilitate global warming had already been on the rise. A study prepared by the Institute for Policy Studies and four other organizations found that World Bank lending for coal, oil and gas reached $3 billion in 2008 — a sixfold increase from 2004. In the same year, only $476 million went toward renewable energy sources. Oil Change International (citing somewhat lower dollar figures) estimates that World Bank funding for fossil fuels doubled from 2011 to 2015.

Destructive logging projects across the Global South funded by the World Bank accelerated in the 1990s. Despite a January 2000 internal report finding that its lending practices had not curbed deforestation or reduced poverty, Southeast Asia saw a continuation of illegal logging and land concessions, and untimely deaths of local people blowing the whistle, as has Africa.

Similar to its report on curbing global warming that ignores its own role, the World Bank shamelessly issued a 2012 report calling for international law enforcement measures against illegal logging. Perhaps what is illegal are only those operations not funded by the bank?

Loans to pay debt create more debt, repeat

Ideology plays a critical role here. International lending organizations, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, consistently impose austerity. The IMF’s loans, earmarked for loans to governments to pay debts or stabilize currencies, always come with the same requirements to privatize public assets (which can be sold far below market value to multi-national corporations waiting to pounce); cut social safety nets; drastically reduce the scope of government services; eliminate regulations; and open economies wide to multi-national capital, even if that means the destruction of local industry and agriculture. This results in more debt, which then gives multi-national corporations and the IMF, which enforces those corporate interests, still more leverage to impose more control, including heightened ability to weaken environmental and labor laws.

The World Bank compliments this by funding massive infrastructure projects that tend to enormously profit deep-pocketed international investors but ignore the effects on local people and the environment.

The World Bank employs a large contingent of scientists and technicians, which give it a veneer of authority as it pursues a policy of relentless corporate plunder. Noting that the bank possesses “an enormous research and knowledge generation capacity,” The environmental and social-justice organization ASEED Europe reports:

“The World Bank is the institution with one of the largest research budgets globally and has no rival in the field of development economics. … A number of researchers and scholars have questioned the reliability of the World Bank-commissioned research. Alice Amsdem, a top scholar on East Asian economies, argues that since the World Bank continually fails to scientifically prove its conclusions, its policy justifications are ‘quintessentially political and ideological.’ Regarding the World Development Report (WDR) series, for example, Nicholas Stern, an Oxford professor in economics and former World Bank chief economist says that many of the numbers used by the Bank come from highly dubious sources, or have been constructed in ways which leaves one sceptical as to whether they can be helpfully applied.” (citations omitted)

Capitalist ideology rests on the concept of “markets” being so efficient that they should be allowed to work without human intervention. But what is a market? Under capitalism, it is nothing more than the aggregate interests of the most powerful and largest financiers and industrialists. No wonder that “markets” “decide” that neoliberal austerity must be ruthlessly imposed — it is those at the top of vast corporate institutions who benefit from the decisions that the World Bank, and similar institutions, consistently make.

Markets do not sit in the clouds, beyond human control, as some perfect mechanism. They impose the will of those with the most who can not ever have enough. Markets are not ordained by some higher power — everything of human creation can be undone by human hands. Our current world system is no exception.