I think cynicism is understandable. It is indeed an "ad-hominem" argument, but it's universal — for example, few in the West took what Pravda had to say at face value, when the Soviet Union existed. When institutions have a record of bias, their claims come under more scrutiny. It's just plain institutional analysis, which everyone uses to some extent.
(The World Bank is hardly a neutral figure. Otherwise, how could the Bush administration move the neoconservative Wolfowitz from the Pentagon to head the World Bank? Did the world's population directly vote him in? It most certainly is a "special interest group", in the sense that it acts in the interests of a tiny minority.)
There is skepticism, and then there is refusing to look into one's opponent's arguments' content. I'm all for skepticism, and I advocate double checking the data and figures of even one's closest allies, but that's not what the GP was doing - it was an outright dismissal of anything the article concluded, solely because if its author.
(The World Bank is hardly a neutral figure. Otherwise, how could the Bush administration move the neoconservative Wolfowitz from the Pentagon to head the World Bank? Did the world's population directly vote him in? It most certainly is a "special interest group", in the sense that it acts in the interests of a tiny minority.)
That said, in-depth dissections of the claims themselves are certainly good, like this critique: (http://www.stwr.org/globalization/world-bank-poverty-figures...)