Biden’s World Bank Pick Calls for ‘Trillions’ in Climate Spending

Ajay Banga, the former CEO of Mastercard that President Joe Biden has nominated to head the World Bank, told Axios Wednesday that both the bank and the private sector needed to spend “trillions” to combat both climate change and poverty.

Banga has been aggressively campaigning for the job, meeting with officials from 37 different governments in the past three weeks, Axios reported. The World Bank faces competing pressure from wealthy and developing countries over whether to focus on combatting climate change or poverty mitigation, but Banga said he does not view the two goals as inherently opposed to one another.

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Commentary: The World Bank Takes a Wrong Turn

President Biden’s nomination of Ajay Banga, the former CEO of Mastercard, to succeed David Malpass as World Bank president suggests that the Biden administration is prioritizing climate change over the World Bank’s founding mission of poverty eradication and economic development. This was made clear in the president’s statement singling out climate change as the most urgent challenge of our time. 

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The World Bank’s New Focus on Climate Threatens World’s Poorest Nations, Researchers Say

The World Bank’s plan to focus future efforts on climate change will have a disproportionately negative impact on its poorest client nations, despite those same countries having repeatedly reported that they would prefer the bank focus on other issues, researchers at the Center for Global Development (CGD) reported Thursday.

The Biden administration named former MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga as its nominee to replace the outgoing Trump appointee David Malpass as president of the World Bank Thursday, a key step in the administration’s efforts to refocus the agency from poverty prevention and take more climate action. However, just 6% of public and private representatives from 43 client nations listed climate change as one of the top three issues facing their country, according to a review of surveys conducted by the World Bank in 2020 and 2021, the GCD researchers reported.

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Top Ten Wealthiest Men in the World Doubled Their Wealth During the Pandemic

A recent report claims that the world’s top 10 richest men all saw their wealth double over the course of the Coronavirus pandemic, while 99 percent of global income dropped dramatically during the same period.

As reported by ABC News, a study published on Monday by the group Oxfam showed that the collective wealth of the top 10 doubled from approximately $700 billion to over $1.5 trillion between March of 2020 and November of 2021. During that same time, over 160 million people fell into poverty as incomes plummeted. The increase for the top 10 in less than two years represented a greater increase for their wealth than their growth over the previous 14 years combined.

The 10 men who were the focus of Oxfam’s study were: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer and Warren Buffett. The data for the study was gathered from the World Bank.

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Commentary: How the Left Embraced Globalization

by Edward Ring   On November 30, 1999, the largely theoretical question of globalism exploded into reality with the spectacle of 50,000 demonstrators shutting down a major meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. News coverage of this unexpected sensation, with expertly rendered video montages of police phalanxes, black-clad anarchists, smashed glass, snarled traffic, accompanied by animated commentary, provided American television media with a daily potboiler for a few days. Then globalism was again forgotten. In 1999, America’s progressive Left viewed globalism as the root cause of poverty, environmental destruction, and the disintegration of ancient cultures. They perceived globalism as the movement by multinational corporations, and their client organizations, the supranational World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to control the development and growth of supposedly sovereign nations. Instead of allowing developing countries the opportunity to grow diverse, self-sufficient economies, in the hallowed name of “free trade,” they were force-fed loans that required them to spend on mega-projects, cash crops, mines, dams, low-wage manufacturing plants—all built by multinationals that destroy the economic independence of the countries they enter. In 1999, Americans who bought running shoes produced by slave labor overseas, ate hamburgers made from cattle…

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Commentary: Joe Biden Runs for President of the World

by Robert Romano   Political parties pushing sovereignty first policies did remarkably well in European Parliament elections in the UK, France and Italy in May as nations feel increasingly overregulated and held back by the European Union. It is the latest instance of the struggle between nation-states and the global institutions that seek to control them and their destinies. And it could serve as a bellwether for the U.S. election across the pond in 2020, where President Donald Trump lines up his America first reelection bid and Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden runs for President of the World. In a fundraising call in April, Biden claimed, “I get calls from people all over the world — world leaders are calling me — and they’re almost begging me to do this, to save the country, save the world.” “Save the world”? From what, America? His opponent is the sitting President of the United States, not some third world actor. And yet, Biden’s ill-advised remarks in many ways represent the same local establishments that oppose country-first policies in many European countries — and now voters are striking back at the ballot box. In the UK, the Brexit Party, founded weeks before the European…

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David Malpass, Sharp Critic of World Bank, Could be its Next Leader

David Malpass has been a sharp critic of the World Bank, the Washington-based lending institution for impoverished nations, and now he could be its next leader. Malpass, the undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury for international affairs, is U.S. President Donald Trump’s choice to head the agency, which has always been headed by an American. But the selection, which has to be ratified by the bank’s board, could draw opposing candidates supported by poor nations that are the institution’s chief funding beneficiaries. Malpass helped push through a $13 billion funding increase for the bank last year, but he has railed against continued lending to China, the world’s second-biggest economy after the United States. He says Beijing no longer needs the bank’s support, which has amounted to nearly $62 billion in development loans since China joined the World Bank in 1980. “The World Bank’s biggest borrower is China,” Malpass said at a 2017 forum sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, China has plenty of resources.” Malpass, a Trump loyalist, has argued, much like the president, that “multilateralism has gone substantially too far,” through international agreements that largely have been described as part of the liberal world order of agencies and…

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Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith Among 100 Catholic and Evangelical Leaders Critical of Trump’s Plans to Cut Foreign Aid Funding

More than 100 Christian leaders from across the country have signed a letter asking Congress to protect funding for America’s foreign aid programs. The letter reveals divides among Christians over President Trump, whose plans continue to enjoy the support of many other Christians. The letter comes as Trump is proposing a 28 percent budget reduction for relief programs run by the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Trump’s budget for 2018 also calls for a 35 percent reduction in spending for the Department of the Treasury’s International Programs. Signers of the letter include Catholics and evangelical pastors, heads of faith organizations and recording artists and authors. Prominent names include Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. Both Dolan and Rodriguez spoke at Trump’s inauguration. Other signers include World Vision USA president Rich Stearns, former Southern Baptist Convention president Ronnie Floyd, Habitat for Humanity CEO Jonathan Reckford and Alec Hill, president emeritus of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Musical artists include Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith and Third Day. The letter noted that “many countries experience unparalleled suffering and loss of  life due to extreme poverty, disease, natural disasters and conflict.” “Matthew…

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