Under The New World Order

The Religion Of The Future

There Has Been A Jewish War On Russia For Over A 100 Years - Morris

World Bank Want Water Privatised

Humans can survive weeks without food, but only days without water — in some conditions, only hours. It may sound clichéd, but it’s no hyperbole: Water is life. So what happens when private companies control the spigot? Evidence from water privatization projects around the world paints a pretty clear picture — public health is at stake.

In the run-up to its annual spring meeting this month, the World Bank Group, which offers loans, advice and other resources to developing countries, held four days of dialogues in Washington, D.C. Civil society groups from around the world and World Bank Group staff convened to discuss many topics. Water was high on the list.

It’s hard to think of a more important topic. We face a global water crisis, made worse by the warming temperatures of climate change. A quarter of the world’s people don’t have sufficient access to clean drinking water, and more people die every year from waterborne illnesses — such as cholera and typhoid fever — than from all forms of violence, including war, combined. Every hour, the United Nations estimates, 240 babies die from unsafe water.

The World Bank Group pushes privatization as a key solution to the water crisis. It is the largest funder of water management in the developing world, with loans and financing channeled through the group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). Since the 1980s, the IFC has been promoting these water projects as part of a broader set of privatization policies, with loans and financing tied to enacting austerity measures designed to shrink the state, from the telecom industry to water utilities.

But international advocacy and civil society groups point to the pockmarked record of private-sector water projects and are calling on the World Bank Group to end support for private water.

In the decades since the IFC’s initial push, we have seen the results of water privatization: It doesn’t work. Water is not like telecommunications or transportation. You could tolerate crappy phone service, but have faulty pipes connecting to your municipal water and you’re in real trouble. Water is exceptional.

Private sector priorities

“Water is a public good,” Shayda Naficy, the director of the International Water Campaign at Corporate Accountability International (CAI), told me, “for which inequality has to fall within a certain range — or it means life and death.” When the private sector engages in water provision, greater disparities in access and cost follow.

Water is also different because it requires such huge, and ongoing, infrastructure investments. An estimated 75 percent of the costs of running a water utility are for infrastructure alone.

The track record of publicly funded private water projects shows that the private sector doesn’t find it profitable to invest in the infrastructure really needed to ensure that communities have access to clean and affordable water. “Water companies have found that their niche is seeking efficiency solutions through hiking prices and cutting spending on infrastructure investment,” Naficy told me.

Even as the World Bank Group continues to promote water privatization, its own data reveal that a high percentage of its private water projects are in distress. Its project database for private participation in infrastructure documents a 34 percent failure rate for all private water and sewerage contracts entered into between 2000 and 2010, compared with a failure rate of just 6 percent for energy, 3 percent for telecommunications and 7 percent for transportation, during the same period. 

A look at projects deemed successes (PDF) by the World Bank Group shows they are not experienced that way on the ground. An IFC-funded private water project in central India’s largest city, Nagpur, for example, is the country’s first “full city” public-private partnership and has raised serious concerns among local residents. Worries range from high prices to project delays to unequal water distribution and service shutdowns. Allegations of corruption and illegal activity have led residents to protest, and city officials have called for investigations of contract violations. “In the last three years, the cost of operation and maintenance of the system has increased drastically and the price of water has increased manyfold,” Jammu Anand of the Nagpur Municipal Corporation Employees Union said in a statement released by CAI. (CAI details other examples like this one from Nagpur in its 2012 report “Shutting the Spigot on Private Water: The Case for the World Bank to Divest.” Full disclosure: I am a strategic adviser to CAI.)

What advocates, including Naficy and Anand, are reminding the IFC today is that significant and steady infrastructure investment is the only way to foster safe, affordable and dependable water supplies. And that is done more effectively by the public sector than by private corporations. Water systems need treatment facilities and a mechanism to channel water from its source in a stable way, usually through pumps, piping to households and individual connections from main pipes to households. According to Naficy, “There is no end run around building a strong public sector and building strong public oversight.”

In addition, financing by the IFC, which is both investor and adviser on these projects, poses a conflict of interest. On the one hand, the IFC is advising governments to privatize the sector; on the other, it’s investing in the corporations getting those contracts. “It’s self-dealing: setting up a project that it’s in a position to profit from,” Naficy told me. When the IFC was established in 1956, it was expressly prohibited from purchasing corporate equity to avoid this sort of conflict, but the board amended this rule a few years later, allowing these kinds of deals. The IFC insists there are interior barriers to such conflicts of interest, even as its own annual report touts “client solutions that integrate investment and advice.” 

Opening up the spigot

Independent water advocates, from CAI to Anand’s group in India and others including the Focus on the Global Southnetwork, point to India today as evidence that privatized systems lead to underfunded infrastructure and unpredictable, often high prices. The IFC defends the private sector by claiming that these companies offer efficiency gains (PDF). But those gains come at the expense of lower-income households, advocates such as Naficy point out, as companies increase rates to subsidize their own profitability.  

There’s a growing backlash against these projects. In 2000, headlines around the globe documented protests in Bolivia’s third-largest city in response to the privatization of the city’s municipal water supply and against the multinational water giant Bechtel, eventually pushing the company out of the country. The IFC’s own complaint mechanism reports that 40 percent of all global cases from last year were about water, even though water projects are only a small fraction of what the IFC funds. In 2013, CAI and 70 advocates from around the globe released an open letter (PDF) to the World Bank Group calling for “an end of all support for private water, beginning with IFC divestment from all equity positions in water corporations.”

“Corporations don’t have a social or development mission,” Naficy told me. “Right now we’re funding development to prop up private projects, instead of putting the decisions for funding in the hands of governments that are accountable to people.”  

Clean and affordable water is the basis of life. Skyrocketing water prices, unsafe supply, failing infrastructure — these problems fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable among us. This is why public institutions, not private corporations, must lead the development of water systems and delivery. The World Bank Group is uniquely positioned to increase access to clean water for the billions who need it. Instead of using its position to line the pockets of water companies, it should support what is most needed: affordable, clean — and public — water for all. 

Source:http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/4/water-managementprivatizationworldbankgroupifc.html

THE WRH BANKER ARTICLES: ALL IN ONE CHUNK

THE WRH BANKER ARTICLES: ALL IN ONE CHUNK

by Michael Rivero

I have received many emails regarding the various articles I have written about the problems with the current economic system of being forced to borrow all currency at interest from a privately-owned central bank. This is, of course, the very system of banking the United States fought a revolution to be free of, only to be sold back into said banker slavery not just once, but three times by corrupted congresses and corrupted presidents.

I have been asked to collect all those articles into a single page to make it easier for people to send to their friends, and this collection is the result.

ALL WARS ARE BANKERS' WARS!
This article and the video made from it set out the history of the last 260 years showing the effects of efforts by private bankers to impose their system of slavery on the world. To keep their schemes going, these modern-day slavers do and have resorted to assassination and war to force the world to conduct all commerce only using bank notes borrowed at interest from the bankers. This is a mafia-like practice of taking a "piece of the action" of all economic activity in exchange for little more than ink and paper (and the correct bribes to the correct officials). The Federal Reserve act forced that system on the American people, while the post-WW2 Bretton-Woods agreement forced it onto the rest of the world. Since this article was written I have received a lot of email from people saying that for the first time in their lives, the history of the US makes perfect sense!

THE ELEVENTH MARBLE
This article reduces to easy-to-understand imagery the fatal design flaw of the Private Central Banking system, whether it is the federal Reserve, the ECB, the IMF, the World Bank, or any of their hideously mutated clones around the world. by design these banks create more debt than money with which to pay that debt. The moment that first pretty-printed piece of paper goes into circulation, more money is owed to that private central bank than actually exists, which means the debt can never be paid off. The bankers use that accumulating debt to control all of society. Then-head of the Rothschild banking empire Nathan Meyer Rothschild put it simply when he stated, "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws." Over time, that artificially created debt accumulates until servicing that debt and its interest overwhelms the rest of the economy and brings it crashing down, as it is in the midst of doing right now. As a side note, after this article went viral, some economic "experts", including a PhD, wrote counter-articles attempting to explain why that eleventh marble was really there, and failing to convince anyone, denounced all doubters of the Private Central Banking system as completely ignorant of how modern economics works. We are not ignorant. We see how modern economics works when we walk through our towns and see the homeless and hungry, the shuttered businesses, the dilapidated streets and utilities, and the obvious decline in the American lifestyles for those who are not part of the government and banking cliques.

THE FATAL FLAWS IN WALL STREET'S ECONOMIC THEORY
Today we hear many economists, even Allen Greenspan, admitting the economic system has problems, although they scrupulously avoid any discussions regarding the eleventh marble. They hide the truth behind euphemisms like "flawed theories" and "serious misjudgment." But there are problems with the way the financial system operates over and above the eleventh marble, and here are a few of them.

HOW YOU BECAME A SLAVE TO THE BANKERS!
The United States was started with the concept of the public currency being a public utility; created and issued by the government to serve commerce and the community, without accruing interest to a private central bank. This article shows how the current system transformed the public currency from public utility to private for-profit operation to enrich the bankers.

Awaken slaves! - How The Private Central Bank Ponzi Scheme Trapped And Destroyed America
I wrote this article because a lot of people did not see the mechanism by which real wealth is transferred from the workers whose labor creates that wealth, to the private central bank.

MORTGAGE-BACKED SECURITIES FRAUD 4 DUMMIES! (aka the Cliff Notes version)
The corporate media attempted to pin the blame for the 2008 crash onto ordinary Americans. The truth is somewhat different.

BANKERS GONE WILD - HOW THE US GOVERNMENT HELPED WALL STREET GANG-RAPE AMERICA'S MIDDLE CLASS (AND MOST OF EUROPE)
This was the first of the articles about money and banking, providing an overview of how private central banks do not exist to serve the community, but only to serve themselves.

The United States Is In Deep Doodoo!
Originally written in 1998, this article sounded a warning about the debt-based economic system, and made some sadly accurate predictions about the draconian steps the government would take to prolong its rule over the land and the people.

INTRODUCING - THE LECTRO!!
A proposal for a new value-based currency that cannot be hoarded or manipulated.

Forbidden Knowledge - History of the Khazar Empire - Lecture by Jack Otto

Greedy bankers Commercial banned in Switzerland

Top 17 Reasons To Own Gold Right Now

World at 8 Monday 14 April 2014

Switching Sides: Ukrainian armored unit joins anti-govt protesters in east