Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
In a letter to members of the US Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a call to investigate a whistleblowing case against President Trump. The allegation is that he tried to use $250 million in US military aid for Ukraine as a bait to influence the 2020 U.S. presidential election in his favor.
Her political posturing is dumbfounding, considering that she has refused to acknowledge, let alone make a call to investigate, a credible whistleblower case that revealed the World Bank used fabricated data to receive $16 billion in international aid from the US. The World Bank is hosted and financed by American taxpayers through the Congressional appropriation process that the Speaker controls.
The case was brought to her attention by African American Bishops for Justice – a social justice group from Maryland, Virginia, Alabama, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia. The Bishops were involved in the case because the World Bank is a neo-apartheid institution that has a personnel policy not to hire African American professionals because it deems them intellectually “inferior” and culturally “ghetto.”
The Bishops appealed to the Speaker, outraged that such an institution is funded by their tax dollars. This is the whistleblowing case that Speaker Pelosi went radio silent on. On May 9, having failed to get her response after repeated attempts, leaders of the group staged a sit-in protest in her office to protest her silence. The captioned picture shows only some of the participants in the sit-in protest. This was the second time the group visited her office.
Her officers refused to meet with them. Instead, they gave them a contact information and encouraged them to follow up with him. They followed up as advised. Their repeated efforts did not get so much as an acknowledgment, let alone a response. Instead, they gave them a contact information and encouraged them to end their protest and follow up with the contact person. They did as they were advised. Their repeated efforts did not get so much as an acknowledgment, let alone a response.
The African American Bishops were involved in the case for a number of reasons. First, the whistleblower, Dr. Yonas Biru, is a black man, who having sacrificed his career and his family’s livelihood to protect American taxpayers from an international scam was abandoned by our government. Second, the World Bank is a neo-apartheid institution that has a personnel policy not to hire African American professionals because it deems blacks intellectually “inferior” and culturally “ghetto.”
The World Bank is not shy to admit its racist policy. There are 16 World Bank confidential memorandums and reports confirming this. One of the memorandums revealed “Some managers rated blacks as inferior” and admitted “race-based discrimination is present in our institution… This problem is serious, indeed.”
The $16 billion whistleblowing case that Dr. Biru exposed revealed that the World Bank willfully underestimated China’s and India’s GDP figures by 40% and 36% respectively. Similarly, the Bank shrank the economies of 21 African countries.
This was done to (1) make developing countries look much poorer than they were and inflate the number of extremely poor people in the world; (2) justify World Bank’s request for additional international aid, and (3) lend China and India tens of billions of dollars with low interest rate loans, burdening American taxpayers who subsidize such loans.
The whistle blower, Dr. Yonas Biru, was the Deputy Global Manager of the Bank’s international economic data production unit. His problem started when he refused to clear the fraudulent data for publication. Instead, he instructed the staff economist who produced the data to recalculate the GDP figures.
The staff refused. To top it off, he moved the raw data from the Bank’s institutional sever to his personal laptop and denied Dr. Biru access to it. The World Bank was not afraid to confirmed this on the record.
A month before the data was published, the chair of the Bank’s external Technical Advisory Group raised a red flag, writing “the data for China and India are seriously misleading.” Another member of the Advisory Group, a Nobel Prize-winning economist expressed the same views, noting his “guess is that the new figures are going to undermine the dollar a day international measure…” The dollar a day estimates are used to determine the number of extremely poor people in the world.
As Dr. Biru notes in his complaint to the US Board of Director to the World Bank, “the fraudulent GDP estimates resulted in inflating the global poverty headcount from less than 600 million to 1.2 billion. Soon after the final poverty data was published, came a cascade of World Bank reports with such titles as ‘The developing world is poorer than we thought.’”
Dr. Biru added: “It was a well-choreographed marriage of fake data and charlatan analysis to pull at the heartstrings of international aid providers.” The US contribution to Multilateral Development Banks increased from a yearly average of $2.6 billion for the 4 years before the inflated data was published to a yearly average of $4.6 billion over 8 years. American taxpayers were scammed.
The World Bank not only terminated Dr. Biru, but also retroactively degraded his lifelong stellar professional record, deeming it “too good to be true for a black man.” It deleted his title and leadership roles from its publications and websites and replaced them with irreparably damaging defamatory record, condemning him to be unemployable in his area of expertise.
Dr. Ben Carson characterized the injustice as a demonstration of “lack of humanity.” Mr. Ken Cuccinelli stated, “This is a case of a deliberate and systemic destruction of a human being, emotionally, financially and professionally.”
Having given up on Speaker Pelosi, the African American Bishops for Justice wrote to President Trump to seek justice for Dr. Biru. Within 20 days, the World Bank agreed to address the injustice “adequately.”
The case provides compelling evidence on two levels. First, stressing the Bank’s claim that Dr. Biru’s professional accomplishment is “too good to be true for a black man” and the Speaker Pelosi’s utter decision to ignore repeated pleas from the African American Bishops for Justice, Bishop Brian Collins, Chair of the group concluded the following. “It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Speaker would not have ignored Jewish Rabbis or Irish Catholic Bishops, under similar circumstances.” This is a strong denunciation coming as it has from the leader of a group whose members are predominantly democratic.
Second, Speaker Pelosi treats whistleblowing cases selectively, using political partisanship as a litmus test. Her letter that states credible whistleblower cases must be handled “in the best interest of the American people” reeks of hypocrisy. The fact is that her fervent advocacy in the whistleblowing case against President Trump is fueled by the Democratic party’s radical wing that is driven by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore (Creative Commons) – Some rights reserved
Dr. Steve Parson is on the advisory board for the National Diversity Coalition for Trump.
