That�s not surprising. The secret report notes that the plan to make the US dollar Ecuador�s currency has pushed 51% of the population below the poverty line. The World Bank �Assistance� plan simply calls for facing down civil strife and suffering with, �political resolve� - and still higher prices.

The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations dispersed by bullets, tanks and teargas) cause new panicked flights of capital and government bankruptcies. This economic arson has it�s bright side - for foreign corporations, who can then pick off remaining assets, such as the odd mining concession or port, at fire sale prices.

Stiglitz notes that the IMF and World Bank are not heartless adherents to market economics. At the same time the IMF stopped Indonesia �subsidizing� food purchases, �when the banks need a bail-out, intervention (in the market) is welcome.� The IMF scrounged up tens of billions of dollars to save Indonesia�s financiers and, by extension, the US and European banks from which they had borrowed.

A pattern emerges. There are lots of losers in this system but one clear winner: the Western banks and US Treasury, making the big bucks off this crazy new international capital churn. Stiglitz told me about his unhappy meeting, early in his World Bank tenure, with Ethopia�s new president in the nation�s first democratic election. The World Bank and IMF had ordered Ethiopia to divert aid money to its reserve account at the US Treasury, which pays a pitiful 4% return, while the nation borrowed US dollars at 12% to feed its population. The new president begged Stiglitz to let him use the aid money to rebuild the nation. But no, the loot went straight off to the US Treasury�s vault in Washington.

Now we arrive at Step Four of what the IMF and World Bank call their �poverty reduction strategy�: Free Trade. This is free trade by the rules of the World Trade Organization and World Bank, Stiglitz the insider likens free trade WTO-style to the Opium Wars. �That too was about opening markets,� he said. As in the 19th century, Europeans and Americans today are kicking down the barriers to sales in Asia, Latin American and Africa, while barricading our own markets against Third World agriculture.

In the Opium Wars, the West used military blockades to force open markets for their unbalanced trade. Today, the World Bank can order a financial blockade just as effective - and sometimes just as deadly.

Stiglitz is particularly emotional over the WTO�s intellectual property rights treaty (it goes by the acronym TRIPS, more on that in the next chapters). It is here, says the economist, that the new global order has �condemned people to death� by imposing impossible tariffs and tributes to pay to pharmaceutical companies for branded medicines. �They don�t care,� said the professor of the corporations and bank loans he worked with, �if people live or die.�

By the way, don�t be confused by the mix in this discussion of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They are interchangeable masks of a single governance system. They have locked themselves together by what are unpleasantly called, �triggers.� Taking a World Bank loan for a school �triggers� a requirement to accept every �conditionality� - they average 111 per nation - laid down by both the World Bank and IMF. In fact, said Stiglitz the IMF requires nations to accept trade policies more punitive than the official WTO rules.

Stiglitz greatest concern is that World Bank plans, devised in secrecy and driven by an absolutist ideology, are never open for discourse or dissent. Despite the West�s push for elections throughout the developing world, the so-called Poverty Reduction Programs �undermine democracy.�

And they don�t work. Black Africa�s productivity under the guiding hand of IMF structural �assistance� has gone to hell in a handbag. Did any nation avoid this fate? Yes, said Stiglitz, identifying Botswana. Their trick? �They told the IMF to go packing.�

So then I turned on Stiglitz. OK, Mr Smart-Guy Professor, how would you help developing nations? Stiglitz proposed radical land reform, an attack at the heart of �landlordism,� on the usurious rents charged by the propertied oligarchies worldwide, typically 50% of a tenant�s crops. So I had to ask the professor: as you were top economist at the World Bank, why didn�t the Bank follow your advice?

�If you challenge [land ownership], that would be a change in the power of the elites. That�s not high on their agenda.� Apparently not.