This page is an edited transcript of a talk given by Greg Palast at the Think Twice Conference in Cambridge, on 23 March 2002. The talk was followed by a question and answer session in which Greg spoke about Venezuela.
Is there anybody here from the World Bank? No? Well that's a problem, because what I have here says "Document of World Bank - for official use only" and "This document has restricted distribution and may be used by recipients only in the performance of their official duties as contents may not otherwise be disclosed without the World Bank authorisation", so I need someone to authorise it. But it says I can use it in the performance of my official duties, and I'm an investigative reporter, so my official duty is to show it to you. So I will.
I want to lie to you and I also want to tell you the truth, and your job is to figure out when I'm completely fabricating the information - as a Newsnight reporter I'm pretty good at that. So let me to tell you about the Zimbabwe election. Mugabe's brother was in charge of the key district, and his campaign chairman was in charge of the vote count; and there was a list of 57,700 names of people who had the right to vote that he scrubbed off the list, and it just happened that about 54% of them were white people, quite out of disproportion to the number of white people in Zimbabwe. So you can see this is serious stuff about how they fixed the vote.
That's the lie - though there are sanctions that have been imposed on Zimbabwe for their election.
I want to talk about globalisation, but you can't understand globalisation without understanding how the globalisers got there. And the commander in chief of the globalisation process is George W Bush. In the state of Florida, George W Bush's brother controlled the key election district, and his campaign chairwoman was in charge of the vote count. And during the election I was here in London watching television, watching black people get in front of the TV news cameras and say, "I tried to vote but they told me I couldn't vote because I had knocked off a grocery store in 1964 and I'm a criminal." Black people showed up to the polls and couldn't find their names on the voter rolls. And then that news story disappeared, and that was it - except I'm looking at that and saying, there are so many black people being excluded from the vote you'd almost think that there is some computer program, aiming at black people and saying "You can't vote."
Well, here's the computer program, which I discovered within the computers of the office of the woman in charge of vote count, Secretary of State for Florida Katherine Harris, who was also the campaign chairwoman of the "George W Bush for President" campaign.
America's a very contradictory place. We have a Freedom of Information Act, so you can actually see them stealing the planet from you; you can get the documentation, it's like you can look through the window and see them making the trade. So through the Freedom of Information Act, which you'll never have here for just this reason, I was able to get this list. You had to look for it, figure it out, and have the computer disks and codes cracked. And what is it? It's a list of 57,700 names of people whose names were scrubbed from the vote rolls of Florida.
In America, there are two million people in jail at any one time. Serving time is more popular there than golfing. But in a few states in the Old South, if you've ever committed a felony, you can't vote, even if you're done with your sentence. That's the law. So, in Florida they said, "We'll knock out all the people who've registered to vote who are felons." That's the law, fair enough. So they made up this list, and there are some very interesting things about it. It shows people's conviction dates: here's one I picked out at random. Thomas Cooper was convicted of a crime on 30 January 2007. Katherine Harris, detective, goes into the future, finds the criminals, brings them back and says, "No you can't vote in Florida in this election."
And as I started cracking the code and looking through the list, I found almost four hundred names of people convicted in the future. And then I got in deeper into their computers and found e-mail messages saying, "You know what, we've got people on this list who are convicted in the future." Well there's an easy way to deal with that, which is to give these people back their right to vote. (Imagine if this was Zimbabwe. Imagine what Tony Blair would say - how dare they!) Instead they said, "Well our solution is to blank out the conviction dates so no one will notice". There are four thousand blank dates, people convicted on date "nothing". Four hundred they forgot to erase.
Now George Bush won the Presidency of the United States by the count of Katherine Harris, his campaign manager who was in charge of counting votes in Florida, on the basis officially of 357 votes. This computer contains the names of 57,700 people. Now remember they're supposed to be criminals right? Well we checked: on a good day there's a possibility that 9.2% may have been convicted of a felony. Everyone else is almost innocent - almost. The reason I say "almost" is that 54% of the people on that list are very guilty of being black. For comparison, only 13% of the total population of Florida are black. And about 93% of black people in Florida voted for Al Gore, not for George W Bush (I wonder why). But on this list of 57,700 people, 54% are black; 93% of those would have voted for Al Gore - you do the arithmetic. That's how George W Bush became the leader of the Free World. And that's why Tony Blair is calling for sanctions on America - that's also a lie.
The question is, how did he get there? You don't get there just by manipulating voting; you've got to start with something which is vital in the United States, which is cash. Here in the UK you have limits on election expenditure so that there's only so much that Enron has to pay to buy your elections. It's much more expensive in the US where, in fact Enron was a number one lifetime giver to George W Bush's campaign.
George W Bush spent, to become the President of the United States, four hundred million dollars - almost half a billion dollars. Now, where does that money come from? The answer is that George "Poppy" Bush went to work after he left the White House; he's a very busy guy. I starting going through where some of his money came from, and one bit of money came from Barrick Gold Mining Corporation in Canada. It turns out that "Poppyć Bush, after he left the White House, went to work for this company Barrick.
Three weeks ago James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, was supposed to appear on CNN, and he told CNN that if I showed up and they put me on the air he would not appear; he would remove all tapes of his interviews if Greg Palast were allowed on the air. And CNN did the courageous thing and yanked me out of the studio. Now we're going to find out why. Keep your eye on the Bush family; we'll get there.
Barrick Gold Mining hired "Poppy" Bush when he left the White House, and they gave some donations to the Republican Party. Now why would they hire "Poppy" Bush, a used President who'd just been asked by the American public overwhelmingly to please vacate the White House? Now I have to be careful what I say, because I'm in the United Kingdom. Barrick Gold Mining owns the biggest gold mine on the planet; it's in Nevada in the USA, and has ten billion dollars worth of gold ore in it. They obtained this through a claim. You know when, if you ever saw Treasure Sierra Madre, there's the prospectors with the funny hats and donkeys and they find a little nugget of gold and they go "Eureka" and they run off to the claims office? You see that in old Western US movies; they run off to the claims office, stake a claim, and get a right to their property under the 1872 Mining Act, which is limited to small prospectors. But there was a special expedited procedure put in place just before "Poppy" Bush left the White House, and which allowed a certain gold mining company, Barrick Gold Mining, to obtain the rights to not just a couple of nuggets in a small mine but the largest mine on the planet. For ten billion dollars worth of gold ore they paid the US Treasury ten thousand dollars. Then Bush ended up on the Board of Directors, or their International Advisory Board I should say.
Now I have to be very cautious. As I said, one thing happened, then another thing happened. Bush was pushed out of office, there was an expedited procedure by his administration, Barrick Gold got ten billion dollars of ore, and he ended up being paid to join their Board of Directors. Don't make any connections, because my paper The Observer and The Guardian Newspapers were sued - not because those facts were wrong, they're indisputable, but because I implied a connection. Now all I did was write the facts as you've heard them, but they said "Anyone reading that might conclude that George Bush was given that position because of the gold mine that we obtained". So, I don't want anyone here making connections, because The Observer signed an agreement that we would not imply connections.
Now, what did Bush do for Barrick? What do you do with a used President? I looked on the website and it said that the International Advisory Board of this company, which Bush was on, helped obtain a mine for the company, another gold mine in Tanzania. In Tanzania they also have small prospectors; they never had big mines, only small prospectors, and there they call them jewellery miners because they dig little fifty feet pits and get gold flakes, which they sell to jewellery makers.
So Barrick Gold got this mine. I should say a unit of Barrick Gold called Sutton Mining got it; Barrick Gold hadn't bought this unit yet. I'm giving you all the details you don't need because of this legal issue - I don't want you making connections. Barrick was in the process of trying to purchase Sutton - and it did complete this purchase - and Sutton were trying to purchase this mine. But Barrick said, "There's a problem with purchasing Sutton because there's gold miners on that property, about thirty thousand of them." So Sutton Mining, which wanted to be purchased by Barrick but couldn't do so if there were miners on the property, went to the Tanzanian court and said: please get those miners out of there - we've been given a concession by the Government, and after all the World Bank told them to give us this concession because this nation needs to pay off its interest payments to the World Bank. And the court said, "No, you can't just take over this property; these people have permits." They said that in August of 1996. The next night at midnight the company rolled bulldozers across the property and smashed down all the miner's homes, covered over their pits, and chased the miners completely out of the area. There's only one problem, which is that when they rolled the bulldozers over there were still fifty miners inside the pits. They were all covered over and buried alive - except for one, and I have a witness statement from him. It took him four days to dig his way out.
Now is that a lie? Well Barrick Gold Mining, in the lawsuit against The Observer and The Guardian Newspapers, said they wanted me, and the paper, to sign a statement that no one died in the peaceful clearance of that mine. And I said, "Look, I'm not here to just pass on rumours from Amnesty International, which is the original source, I'm happy to check it out." We sent a human rights lawyer named Tunga Lissan to the mine sites. He was able to sneak a videotape out of police files of the bodies being exhumed. He got something which comes up on this screen. You can see here, if you want to look at this - I'm not passing it round for good reason - a man's body with his head crushed and an arm severed off, from the peaceful clearance of the mine. We also have signed, sworn, affidavits from survivors and witnesses.
So I said well we now have videotapes and photographs, and we have signed, sworn witness statements, and we have contemporary news articles of the killings. And Barrick said "Okay, so just sign here that you've confirmed that no one died," and The Observer said, "Sure, no problem!" And I said, "No, I won't do that." And I won't do it for another reason, even though what many people consider one of the most courageous reporters in this country said, "Greg, you're in Britain now, just sign the fucking thing and just let the truth get out somewhere else!" Because Tunga Lissan, who took the material out and gave it to The Observer and to me, was charged with sedition by the Tanzanian Government. His partners were arrested and beaten; the opposition parties, which then raised the point in Parliament, had their offices shut and smashed. And Tunga Lissan made it out of the country to Washington with these tapes and material, and was charged with sedition while he was out of the country. Then last week he says he's flying back. Everyone, including his wife, begged him not to return. I said, "They're going to arrest you as soon as you arrive." He said, "I'll be lucky if I'm arrested. Give me a copy of your book and I'll read it on the plane." I hope all's well with Tunga.
That may be one of the reasons why Jim Wolfensohn, President of World Bank, won't talk to me, but we'll set that aside for the moment.
Who owned Barrick Gold Mining - where did it come from? Have you ever heard of Barrick? I'd never heard of Barrick in my life. I looked it up, and who put up the money to create this corporation? A guy named Adnan Khashoggi. Now Adnan Khashoggi was the arms dealer who traded the arms for hostages in the Iran Contra game. "Poppy" Bush claimed he didn't know about that; he said he was out of the loop. So this is the guy who gave arms to the Ayatollah. It's a little odd because George Bush is working for the guy who armed the Axis of Evil.
By the way, it's interesting that "Poppy" Bush's last act in office, before he went on to Khashoggi's corporation, was to pardon Adnan Khashoggi, who had been charged with a felony - no connections please!
But by the end of 1996 it looks like Khashoggi was getting out of Barrick, and what was he doing? Well, when you try to track arms dealers, the people who deal with them and who know where they are any more are not necessarily Nobel Peace Prize winners, except for Henry Kissinger. But according to some really creepy sources, in May 1986 there was a meeting in place called Hotel Monceau in Paris between Khashoggi and representatives of a family named Bin Laden. Now don't misunderstand about the Bin Ladens. These are good people: they're business partners of the Bush family through a corporation called Carlyle and various Saudi royals. And they and a financier from Switzerland, who is handling the money for an organisation called Al Qa'eda, were dividing up which salaries should pay how much, and provide what arms to this organisation.
So there was this meeting, and this is what concerned me: if I know about it, then do you think that American and British Intelligence might know about it? I was interested in this for good reasons: my office had been on the 52nd floor of World Trade Center Tower One, and I wanted to know what happened. And I want to know who knew what, and when did they know it? The US had spent a trillion bucks on the CIA, and the British Government had spent God knows how much on MI6 and MI5, while people were meeting in the Hotel Monceau figuring out how much to give to Al Qa'eda. So the question was, how did the US and European Intelligence not know about the greatest, the most devastating, brutal, bloody attack on American soil since Pearl Harbour? And what I learned is that the intelligence agencies didn't see it coming because they were told not to look.
Because what I did find was a document which in the upper left hand corner says 199I, which means National Security. It was left on the desk of an associate I was working with on an investigation, by an FBI agent. Now he left it there by accident. In fact the agent then called the office and said, "I think I accidentally left a file, it's on your desk. Now you haven't looked at it, have you? I'll be by in half an hour then to pick it up. Unless you need forty-five minutes." I don't have a copy with me, and if I did, I would be joining David Shayler in court, because under your Official Secrets Act I can't have a copy. You can buy my book and you'll all be subject to arrest while you're reading it.
Interestingly I can look at it in the United States: there's no Official Secrets Act there. That doesn't mean that they won't break your legs. Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon papers, which was after all the Defense Department's analysis of the war in Vietnam, during the conduct and misconduct of that war. And he could actually release the Defense Department document - he was a chief CIA operative, but because it wasn't against the law in America to release official documents, they just cut to the chase and beat the shit out of him; he almost died. He's a big patriot because he says, "At least they had to beat me up, they couldn't arrest me" - we don't have cross dressers called the Law Lords saying "We have freedom of speech and as long as you don't actually exercise it you're going to be OK."
Anyway, this file mentioned that an investigation had been opened up on September 12th, which had been closed previously. And it had some interesting names on it: Abdullah Bin Laden and Omar Bin Laden. Now I found that really fascinating because the President of the United States, George W Bush, elected in Florida by computerised landslide, said "The Bin Laden family is all good folk" - he knows because they're his business partners in the Carlyle Group - and there's this one black sheep. But this document said, "Well maybe there's some grey sheep." In fact they were renting an apartment in Virginia Falls that overlooked the Pentagon; I went there and could stand on their apartment roof and look right down at where the plane hit. I don't want to make connections, because the Bin Laden family does sue everyone in sight who mentions anything.
And in that organisation, Carlyle, in which the Bin Ladens are involved, there is also a British ex-pat, named John Major. And what's important here is none of this Noddy stuff that Bush planned September 11th, or knew about it in advance and grounded planes. It's that they're blinded by oil. These are supposedly our buddies. We can impose sanctions on Zimbabwe because they have tainted elections - which they do, let's not excuse it - but then we can fall low and grovel in Saudi Arabia. Well one thing I'll say for Blair: he's correct, the Saudis have never had a tainted election. Or any election. But no sanctions against the Saudis, because we're more than happy to have them to sit on our oil. They're the key to Mid-East peace. You notice how peaceful it's been.
So it goes back to the money. But how did these guys get the money? Here's a document I won't show you because it's confidential - I'll read it to you. "Working Party on Domestic Regulation, 19th March 2001". It was faxed to me from "unknown sender". My best friend is someone called Unknown Sender. By the way, if you go to the World Trade Organisation web site there's an entire Greg Palast page explaining how everything I've said is wrong, including that this document does not exist. They changed that later and said I misinterpreted it, so I misinterpreted a document that does not exist.
And it's kind of technical and this document actually leads to another document, but this is an informal note from the Secretary of the European Union. This is the position of the European Union on changing the rules on the General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS). The proposals are from your Government under Dick Caborn - he was Trade Minister at the time. It's about something called the Necessity Test. And it says that the European position, which is now, in effect, the same as the US position, is that the whole purpose of changing the rules of the WTO is to "balance between two potentially conflicting priorities, promoting trade expansion versus protecting the regulatory rights of Government". It sounds like there's a problem here - trade versus the rights of Government. What you have now is the rights of Government - what parliament does, what US Congress does, and what each of the European nations' parliaments do, and now what they're talking about is setting up an agency which will have the power to say, "Well you voted this but we're going to balance that against trade". A new super-legislative body in which Parliament is reduced, in effect, to an advisory agency, which has the right to argue for positions and laws but not to enact or enforce them.
By the way I tried to talked to Dick Caborn fifteen times over three weeks while I was doing this investigation, and they said, "He has no time for you." I said "I'm here to make it real easy, I just need twenty-five seconds of his time". He had no time whatsoever, though after I wrote the article he spent hours and hours writing at length to The Observer attacking my stuff. This is the man who said not to worry about what's in this document, but then he, and your Government, were hit with $194 million of trade sanctions for getting it wrong, because other agencies, not your Parliament, decide how to interpret these laws and rules. What happened there is that the UK Government argued that bananas are a product, and the US Government prevailed by arguing that bananas are a service. So Caborn was serviced by the bananas.
It says things in here like what regulatory rules you can have. Now you may have thought the regulatory rules that you have in Britain are those that are imposed by Parliament or by your agencies, but no - you won't have that if this rule is adopted. I'm trying to explain why people are out there in the streets, and why after I've done here you should go out into the street, and paint your hair green or whatever is necessary to get the attention of the TV cameras.
The Necessity Test says, for example - this is under the sanitary agreements - "That members shall ensure that any sanitary or photo-sanitary measure is applied only to the extent necessary, and are not more trade restrictive than necessary to achieve the appropriate level of sanitary protection." We don't want to have too much sanitary protection, just an appropriate level - which will be decided by someone else - and not more trade restricted than necessary. And by the way, in case you want to argue that public interest should be included, it says that "It was proposed", and this was by Finland, "that safeguarding the public interest be a standard, but a similar provision was rejected earlier by the Working Party," which is this organisation. By the way the Working Party cannot act without the approval of Britain, everything must be done unanimously. So in other words the public interest, as a standard for determining whether you can have regulatory protections and health and safety and environment, was rejected by Britain, secretly. All these meetings are secret. Well they were secret until right now.
Now what does that mean though - least trade restrictive? Just to give you an idea, we have that rule in North America for what's called the NAFTA area - Canada, Mexico and the US. Let me give you an example how it works. A company, Metalclad, was trying to put a toxic waste dump in a state in Northern Mexico, on top of the drinking water aquifer for that Mexican state. The state did a study which showed that this would poison the water supply, and refused permission for the plant. And the NAFTA board, using the "least restrictive trade" rule that Caborn and the Blair gang would like to impose here through the World Trade Organisation, ruled that Mexico had to pay - and they did pay - $16 million to the company, about £11 million, in compensation to the company, because their action was not the "least restrictive". And that's what Caborn and gang are trying to bring to you. I just thought you should know that.
Maybe you're wondering why you don't read about things like the GATS Necessity Test. You get this on some stuff, but mostly you get kind of the happy talk of globalisation. Well, there was a committee of business and media leaders, meeting secretly; they used to call themselves The Invisibles, but they decided that was not great PR so now they soporifically call themselves The LOTIS Committee. And I got some help from the Corporate European Observatory, who are terrific, and got hold of the minutes of one of these meetings. And in the meeting was a guy named Henry Manisty, representing Reuters, the news agency. And they said, "We've got a big problem - there's this organisation out there called the World Development Movement, and they're saying there's no economic benefit of globalisation. So we looked at it and couldn't find any economic benefit of globalisation, so it's very hard to answer their arguments"!
These are the private meetings of the globalisers, the top corporate chiefs of Europe, including for example the head of Goldman Sachs, Mr Sutherland, who used to be, by the way, the head of the World Trade Organisation - he went straight from there to Goldman Sachs. So that even the former head of the World Trade Organisation is saying, "What do we do? We can't find any benefits of globalisation." So Manisty says, "Well I'll tell you what we'll do: we'll create some studies and I promise you that we at Reuters, the news service, will make sure that story is properly placed." Not that the news is created by corporate committees in secret, like some conspiracy nuts think. I just have the minutes of the meetings. People say "What's with all the conspiracy theory", but what do you want me to do? Here are the minutes of the meetings of the conspiracy. It seems like it's the guys in the meetings who are the nuts.
Here's another document which can't be disclosed. This is the plan signed by Jim Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, for Argentina. It say, "Memorandum of the President of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development"; that's the fancy name for the World Bank. "The country assistance strategy progress report for the Argentine Republic." Country assistance; that's nice, isn't it? Now, he calls for, and this is on page three, a "$3 billion cut in primary expenditures" out of Argentina's budget. This is June of 2001, so it's seven months ago. Now at that point the country was in its fourth year of recession, which had now turned into depression, with 16% unemployment. This nation had been the breadbasket and cattle-raising centre of Latin America, it was the richest country in Latin America per capita, it was an industrial powerhouse. And then they started taking advice and assistance from the World Bank, and they adopted the programme which you know under the name of Thatcherism, which led to mass privatisation of their properties and the reduction government and the end of those terrible, inefficient Peronist economic programmes. And the first steps of the programme led to minor recessions, the second steps of the programme led to major recession, the third steps of the programme led to major depression, and this is now their new advice.
Now those of you who know anything about economics, whether you're Keynesian or Marxist or even a free market fruitcake - well, except for the World Bank - know that you don't cut expenditure by $3 billion in the middle of a depression. Even Gordon Brown will tell you that he would kiss Prudence goodbye if there was a depression here, he would start spending some more money. In fact George W Bush, the second that the World Trade Centre was attacked and it threatened a wobble in the US economy, called for a hundred billion dollars in deficit spending to restore the economy, but for Argentina - the same week, by the way - he called for further reductions in their budgets, through the World Bank. Now I say he, because you have to bear in mind that the World Bank is a bank. It has stockholders, and if you listen to Wolfensohn when he's not talking on television, he talks about his stockholders. 51% of the stock of the bank is owned by the United States Treasury. It's very important to understand how they operate. And, like any majority owner, the treasury direct how its money is used.
Here's another document which I can't show you. This one is also signed by Jim Wolfensohn, and it really says, "Improving the conditions of the unemployed and the poor." Well, I'm not going to argue with that. Under that heading, "Improving conditions of the unemployed and poor", it says to cut the unemployment benefits from $200 a month to $160 a month. It also calls for mass privatisation. Now cutting benefits by $40 a month doesn't sound like improving conditions to me, but what do I know? I'm a conspiracy nut. But from an economic point of view, cutting the budgets is not just cruel, it's also stupid, because if you cut expenditure by unemployed people in the streets and in the little towns, you're basically cutting out the blood of an economy so it's going to start withering.
And it goes on and on, cut cut cut, but then it says "These measures greatly improve the outlook for the remainder of 2001 and for 2002, with growth expected to recover in the later half of 2001." Now you have to know what happened in the later half of 2001. By the later half of 2001 about 40% of the population was unemployed, with doctors and dentists and professors going out every night on the streets of Buenos Aires looking for garbage to eat, and there were no unemployment benefits.
So in other words it's not just cruel and wrong, but itseems to involve an order of self-delusion which is hard to understand, except that I've been cheating you on one thing - I didn't read you the full sentence. Why these cuts, why cut the unemployment benefits in the middle of a depression? What kind of "country assistance" is that? The answer is - I'll read the rest of the sentence for you: "$3 billion cut in primary expenditures, accommodating the increase in interest obligation." So it's about interest repayments to the Bank and its partners - they partnered with Citibank in providing loans to the country - and maybe that's one of the things that Jim Wolfensohn didn't want to talk to me about. In fact the World Bank loan package is very interesting. What do they mean by "increase in interest obligation"? The country had $128 billion in loans outstanding, and this document was a part of a deal to give them $27 billion in new funding at an interest rate of around 21%. Now let's do the arithmetic: $128 billion at 21%, that's about $28 billion in interest. In other words they just gave them enough money to pay interest back to the World Bank, except that now they owe a hundred and fifty something billion dollars, which meant that the interest obligation is higher, so they've got to find three billion dollars more for the extra interest. That was their cut in primary expenditures. So when the plane's going down they say "Turn off the engines, because you owe us".
And there's another problem with interest payments at 21%. Like most countries Argentina has laws against loan sharking, and since 21% is loan shark rates, the World Bank put in a recommendation to have what they call conditionalities, and one of the conditionalities was to remove the anti-loan shark laws. Otherwise the World Bank would be breaking the law, and Jim Wolfensohn could be arrested as a loan shark, when they're just trying to assist the country, as it says it right on the cover.
But maybe Mr Wolfensohn, who had me removed from CNN and would love to have me removed from Newsnight as well, had some other things that he didn't want to talk to me about.
Let me tell you about the World Bank's biggest loan. The World Bank used to be in project financing before they got into the "structural assistance / reform / helping countries out" game. They still do big projects. But the biggest loan guaranteed project in World Bank history went to a project in Tanzania to fund the new operations of Barrick Gold Mining. Now there was a little bit of a technical, legal problem. Remember Tunga Lissan, who was charged with sedition. After our investigation, after he saw what he saw, Tunga Lissan petitioned the World Bank, because they have a rule that says they cannot give money for any project in which people have been forcibly removed from the property. Because Jim Wolfensohn, if you talk to him, no-one gives a better speech about poverty, the terrors of poverty, and human rights. I could never give a speech like it; it's moving, it's powerful, it's extraordinary. If there were no one to challenge him you'd just say "what a good guy". And he would not support a project in which people were forcibly removed, but these miners weren't forcibly removed; they're still there. So the World Bank said they weren't removed, so he gave the money.
Let's get back to Bush and Argentina. You can't take the situation of Argentina without understanding how that downward spiral began. And it began with World Bank advice, in particular stage one of a four-stage process, and you're going to have to read my book to get the full four-stage process. But I was talking with the former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Joe Stiglitz, right here in Trinity College Cambridge. I spent several hours with him, taping him. It's a brilliant interview; it was going to be broadcast as a special till the BBC lost the tape. (I do have a transcript.) So it can't be broadcast but I can tell you what was in it. I really felt it was like those spy stories by Le Carre where the spy comes in from the cold. This was the guy from the inside, the Chief Economist in the World Bank, who had really believed in this stuff. He was also in Clinton's cabinet before he went to the World Bank.
But then he started noticing something: he said, "Well we've given advice to countries like Indonesia on how to improve their economy, and they went from a fairly expanding economy to having the capital in flames, the nation devastated. Brazil was a growing social democratic economy, and we advised them how to improve their economy, and they ended up with the capital in flames and the economy on its back." And he just went through the list of countries, Ecuador, Bolivia, etc, capital in flames, the nation on its back economically, and he said, "Maybe it's our medicine which is harming the patient. We ought to do a study to see whether our proposals may have something to do with this fact that every time we get near a country it seems to have a capital in flames and the economy falling apart." And they fired him! They wouldn't even let him resign. The US Treasury, 51% stockholder of the World Bank, and Larry Summers ordered that he be publicly fired as an example; not for taking the wrong decisions, just for asking the wrong question.
Talking about capitals in flame, I showed him another document which I don't have here right now, about Ecuador. I said, there is something I just can't understand. In the secret Ecuador document it demands, as a condition of further World Bank loan guarantees - and if you don't have World Bank, no bank will loan to you; it's a signal to the entire international financial community, you need their imprimatur - it included a provision requiring that the Government of Ecuador raise cooking gas prices by 80%. Now what I found weird about that is Ecuador's problem at that time, the reason why it was in financial trouble in the mid 1990s, was that Ecuador was a member of OPEC. It has more oil and gas than it knows what to do with: if it didn't give away, at a low price, the cooking gas to the people of its nation, it would flare it off, burn it into the atmosphere. Why raise the price in the middle of economic crisis? And he said, "What happened?" And I said, "Well they raised the price for cooking gas. The Indians came out of the hills and they burnt the capital." He said, "Yes, that's step three and a half; we used to call it the IMF riot. It's right in the plan." This is the Chief Economist of the World Bank - of course he may be a conspiracy nutter too, but he was in the conspiracy, so his information's correct. And if you look at the rest of the document, it says, "This will lead to social unrest, (meaning a riot,) which will require the Government to respond with resolve." Now resolve, of course, means tanks in the street; it was in the plan. He said, "Why would they do that? Well, what happens then is that suddenly all resistance to privatisation collapses, because crisis occurs, the capital's in flames, and to keep the capital there the entire list of 114 conditionalities imposed by the World Bank and the IMF (they work together) are adopted - boom. That was the condition of keeping the Governments in power." So, he said, it's right in the plan.
Going back to Argentina. They sold off their gas and oil for next to nothing in the mid-1990s when prices were low. After September 11th, oil prices rose markedly, but Argentina, an oil-exporting nation, was able to capture none of it because they had already sold off all the properties to Spanish companies. So much for oil; what happened to the gas? Well in 1988, when the World Bank privatisation plan in Argentina began, it was directed by a guy named Rodolfo Terragno. He was a public works minister, very right wing - he believed in all this liberalisation stuff. He says, "Well we're going to privatise everything, and to begin with, we have a national gas pipeline running from Chile to Argentina, and we're going to privatise that." And he took bids, and in November 1988 he got a call - he told me this, I filmed him. He said, "I got a call from a failed oil man in Texas in November 1988 who said, my daddy was just elected President of the United States" - the guy making the call was George W - and he said, "My daddy would appreciate it if you would give that pipeline to a company called Enron."
I have to tell you Newsnight did not run this story for a simple reason: George Bush denies it, and under British libel law if we have an accusation and a stone cold denial, we really can't run the story. So when I saw Terragno again, I asked him a simple question: I said, "We got a denial. Why would he bother denying it?" It's true it's a little embarrassing, because when Enron crashed, he said he didn't know anything about Enron till 1994. This is six years earlier. But why deny it? He was in the oil business, he could cut deals - in fact Terragno had nothing against his family, he's a friend of Neil Bush, the President's brother. He said, "Well, maybe he forgot it for the reasons that I remember it, because their proposal was on about a half sheet of paper. Everyone else had these big plans and this was half a page, and it just said, we'll give you basically one fifth of the world price of natural gas." So he said, "Why would I accept this goofy plan, to give my nation one fifth of the world price?" And the answer was, "Well, if we pay you this much and it's worth that much, you never know how much can fall off the sides and end up in the public works minister's Swiss bank account." He said, "You wouldn't forget that!" So maybe what George Bush was not remembering was an offer that appeared to be a wee bit corrupt. I asked Stiglitz about it he said, "Oh yes, we didn't call it privatisation. I started calling it briberisation." It's part of the programme; they knew about it. He said, we go into these nations and say you really have to privatise your industries, and they'd say, "Oh no, not us." Then the penny dropped and they'd say: you want us to privatise industries that were paid for with public money? They turned calculator eyes and opened up, he said, and they would start counting 10% of all future revenues of these privatised industries - suddenly you were skimming a million a year, two million a year. There was a case where the President of Kazakhstan said: yes it's true that British Petroleum and Mobil Oil, which is now part of Exxon, put a hundred and sixty million dollars into a Swiss bank account of his. He said, "I don't know why." It's not a bribe, he said, they just gave it to me.
But anyway, Stiglitz, who has a very bad attitude I suppose, called it briberisation. And when I met him here he was out looking for a job, but he's done OK since - he's just won the Nobel Prize for Economics. I said, "What do we do? Look at that hundred and fifty million dollar loan to Barrick, where it was OK because no one was removed." He said, "You can't take away the destruction of Argentina today, and 40% of the population looking for food at night, from the wholesale briberisation and theft of the nation's assets beginning in 1988. Those are the steps, and that's where it ends." And I said, "But they don't seem to stop - in fact they said, they're going to do more of it." And in fact in January, after the capital was in flames, the deputy chief of the IMF, working in coordination with World Bank, went down to Argentina and said, "You have to cut your budget further. The Government's expenditures must meet its tax revenue." Since they don't have a currency in Argentina anymore, the President pointed out that there are no tax revenues. They said, "Well expenditures must meet the tax revenues." And he said, "They never stop. It's their shock medicine, they always apply more. They're just like medieval doctors: they put on leeches and they bleed the patient, and the patient gets sicker and they say, add more leeches. And as the patient dies they say: he still had blood left." And I said, "Well, that suggests a solution to the problem, which is remove the bloodsuckers."