The president of the World Bank is usually American and the managing director of the IMF is usually a European.

The World Bank started innocently, loaning money to Western European governments to help rebuild their countries after World War 2.

It was during the long rein (1968-1981) of former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara as president that the bank turned towards "development" loans to Third World countries.

McNamara brought the same philosophy to "development" that he had used in war - bigger is better. Ever since, the Bankk has chosen oversized, expensive projects like mega-dams regardless of their appropriateness to local conditions. Wealthy countries were developed one step at a time - the Pilgrims did not hop off the Mayflower and start building the Hoover dam, for example. Meanwhile, there is the $40 million loan to the communist Chinese dictatorship for a project that will resettle 60,000 Chinese into occupied Tibet. The widely-respected Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, called it "cultural genocide".

The World Bank had promised to consult with the people who were to be resettled, and those displaced by the resettlement. They had lied.

According to the Bank's independent Inspection Panel, it did not even consider alternative sites or other options-- a major violation of the Bank's guidelines.

The Bank is intolerant of dissent. In December 1999, Joseph Stiglitz, the Bank's chief economist, was forced out after he criticized the IMF's handling of the Asian financial crisis.

Stiglitz, one of the America's most highly respected academic economists, had also written reports on how the IMF caused disaster in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In Russia alone, Stiglitz noted in one paper, the number of people in poverty rose from 2 million to 60 million in just a few years of IMF rule.

In March 2000 Ravi Kanbur, a Cornell University economist who was lead author of the World Bank's influential 2000 World Development Report, quit after being pressured by neos to move the report to the right.

His supporters did not give up, and as a result the final draft of the 2000 Annual Development Report of the World Bank admitted that trade by itself is not magic and recommends instead that governments "make state and social institutions more responsive" to those trapped in poverty.

However, Ravi and friends never broke any windows, and got no press coverage.

The World Bank spends millions of dollars each year on public relations, yet had to cancel a meeting in Spain because they were causing such huge protests.

How's the World Bank's record on responsible lending?

In 1992, an internal World bank review found that more than a third of all Bank loans did not even meet the World Bank's own standards.

The IMF works with the WB as a "lender of last resort" to countries that cannot borrow money from other sources. In other words, the IMF is a "loan shark".

Like a loan shark the IMF always has strings attached. Borrowers must implement what is formally known as a "structural adjustment program" (SAP), but more often referred to as an "austerity plan" regardless of what the public wants.

Typically, a government is forced to eliminate price controls or subsidies, devalue its currency or eliminate labor regulations like minimum wage laws.

By some bizarre coincidence, all of these policies hurt the poor and help the rich. They also destroy economies, meaning that the loans will never be paid off...But then, bankers do not profit from that, they profit from interest payments. In fact, the poor nations have already paid five times as much as they received in the first place. Over the years 1981 through 1987, the poor paid US$1.5 trillion more in debt service than they received in new loans. Not that new loans are that great - as of 1991 debt payments and interest meant that the poor were sending rich bankers $145,000 every MINUTE, nearly twenty-five hundred dollars a second. A strange way to make a world free of poverty.