But when the Bank and the Fund lend money to debtor countries, the money comes with strings attached. These strings come in the form of policy prescriptions called "structural adjustment policies." These policies—or SAPs, as they are sometimes called—require debtor governments to open their economies to penetration by foreign corporations, allowing access to the country's workers and environment at bargain basement prices.

Recent protests against the IMF and the World Bank have shined a harsh spotlight on the way the institutions put the interests of wealthy corporations in the developed world above the interests of the planet's poor majority.

Structural adjustment policies mean across-the-board privatization of public utilities and publicly owned industries. They mean the slashing of government budgets, leading to cutbacks in spending on health care and education. They mean focusing resources on growing export crops for industrial countries rather than supporting family farms and growing food for local communities. And, as their imposition in country after country in Latin America, Africa, and Asia has shown, they lead to deeper inequality and environmental destruction.

For decades people in the Third World have protested the way the IMF and World Bank undemocratically impose such policies on their countries. In just the last year, those protests have spread to the power centers of the developed world. In April, some 20,000 people gathered in Washington, DC during the institutions' spring meetings to demand a more democratic kind of international decision-making. Similar protests took place in Prague, Czech Republic in September of that year. By dragging the Fund and the Bank into the light of public scrutiny, the Washington protests re-invigorated a public dialogue about the growing wealth inequalities within and among nations, and they put the institutions on notice that they can't continue business as usual.