Customer Reviews

Fifty Years is Enough: The Case Against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a very good book if you are just beginning to be interested in the politics and actions of the Bretton Woods instititions. It is one of the few books I have found in this area of criticism that does a good job of including actual data to back its claims without dragging the reader down in economic methodolgy.

I personally feel that every member of the developed world should read this book just to know how they are being indirectly represented abroad through their tax-dollars.

If you want to find out what the protests in Seattle (anti-WTO, December 1999) and Washington, DC (anti-World Bank and IMF, April 2000) were about, go for this book. Concise pieces of about five pages each written by leading figures of the movement for global social and economic justice, with pointers to books and organizations if you want to know more - this book is one of the best intros to the movement known to me.

This book is great. The reviews who have criticized this book are very uninformed people, who clearly do nothing besides preserving the status quo. I can picture them now eating their caviar while rolling down Rodeo Drive in a BMW. Anyways, read this book. Read anything and everything by Kevin Danaher, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Vandana Shiva, etc. Open your eyes to what is going on in the world. We, the people, can, and must, reclaim our power.

This book is written by people who think moral purity is directly tied to poverty, and that anyone's moral worth is in direct inverse relation to their economic worth. They presume that without economic development created by capitalism the world would be a better place! If you think that is true, and that poverty can be eliminated by eliminating wealth, then you probably think that China and the former Soviet Union have eliminated poverty in their countries, and you will probably agree with the premises of this book. Otherwise, don't waste your time.

One wonders what those who contributed to this one-dimensional effort to justify or explain the anarchy in the streets at recent international meetings did with their time before they took up protesting as a profession. Certainly not work in the field of development for a serious organization trying to make a difference in the lives of those in developing countries. Who appointed them to speak on behalf of these poor? This book is a waste of time for anyone seriously concerned about the three billion people who live in poverty. It is unintentionally revealing of a group of people who presume to criticize organizations owned and run by legitimate governments accountable to their citizens, operating in a transparent fashion with clear identification of where their funding comes from and where it goes. The irony is that these self-declared protectors of the poor have been elected by no one, operate in relative secrecy, are intolerant of criticism and do not publicly disclose the sources of their funding.