In recent years, the World Bank, eager to try its hand at any task, has sought to project itself as the financial guardian of “post-conflict” societies. In Bosnia, Serbia, East Timor, Mozambique, Rwanda, and most recently Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, the World Bank has honed its approach to states that have endured destruction of infrastructure, large-scale killing and mass migration. Now it appears that the World Bank will be thrust into the spotlight in Iraq, charged with putting back together what United Nations sanctions, authoritarian neglect, and U.S. military action have broken.

For almost a decade, the World Bank has been pressuring Ghana to privatize its public water system, or to enable some form of "private sector participation" in the water system. Ghana is, of course, not unique in this regard. Over the same period, people throughout the Global South have witnessed World Bank and corporate schemes to wrest control of now-public water systems and deliver them into private hands.

There are many people around the world who must wonder if they have any friends in the U.S., or in the rest of the Global North for that matter: the people of India’s Narmada Valley, as the monsoons approach and again they are threatened by a rising dam and floods; the peoples of Afghanistan “liberated” from the Taliban, but now largely forgotten; the peoples of Colombia being fumigated from the air in the grand plan that is Plan Colombia and the U.S. “war on drugs”; the people being dragged out of their homes by gun-wielding U.S. soldiers in Iraq; the peoples of Liberia, the peoples of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the peoples of Haiti, the peoples of Palestine, the peoples of Chechnya.

A U.S. Senate report has found that the World Bank and other U.S. taxpayer-backed agencies knew that Enron was paying commissions to a shadowy company called Sun King to win a contract to build a power plant on a barge in Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala, ten years ago. Today, Enron International still controls the project, and U.S. taxpayer monies are intertwined, through outstanding OPIC and Maritime Administration project finance.

"How many poor people are there in the world? This simple question is surprisingly difficult to answer." So begins "How Not to Count the Poor," a new study published at www.socialanalysis.org by two Colombia University scholars. In it, economist Sanjay Reddy and philosopher Thomas Pogge mathematically dissect the process by which the World Bank’s staff economists arrive at an estimate of the scope of global poverty each year and reach the stunning conclusion that their methodology is fundamentally flawed so as to yield results that could not possibly be accurate.