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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: illyia who wrote (58779)	2/20/2006 1:17:16 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362382

World Bank secret committee came up with and approved sale of port control to Dubai, reminiscent of the secret committee that implemented the federal reserve...The World Bank and the IMF were originally temporary organizations begun to help countries rebuild after WWII. After that was accomplished, they managed to stick around to see that emerging countries didn't. How Wolfowitz, whose loyalties you so rightly question, ended up heading that organization after being roundly condemned for his part in foisting Iraq war on us is highly suspect, Here's an article I found. Wolfowitz's Corruption Agenda By Sebastian Mallaby Monday, February 20, 2006; Page A21 Nine months into his tenure as president of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz has made headlines mainly by provoking a staff backlash. Neoconservative commissars are seizing control! (Actually, Wolfowitz has a grand total of four Republicans in his entourage.) The World Bank's agenda is being hijacked by a Bush man! (Actually, Wolfowitz has resisted the Bush administration's bad policies on debt relief and climate change.) The previous World Bank president, James Wolfensohn, made no secret of his intention to blow up the institution when he arrived in 1995. Wolfowitz's accession has been comparatively mild, but his reputation as the architect of the Iraq war colors the response to him. Meanwhile, the staff backlash is obscuring something interesting. In the past few months, there have been hints of fresh thinking on corruption. Now the evidence has reached critical mass: The change appears to be genuine. Why I Published the Cartoons » Flemming Rose \| The idea wasn't to provoke gratuitously or to insult Islam -- but simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing in tighter. * Milbank: Democrat Precriminations * Broder: Trillion Dollar Tax Gimmick * Grunwald: Michael Brown Q & A OPINIONS SECTION: Boomers, Editorials, More Who's Blogging? Read what bloggers are saying about this article. * TurcoPundit Full List of Blogs (1 links) » Most Blogged About Articles On washingtonpost.com \| On the web First, a bit of context. The World Bank used to avoid all mention of corruption, believing it should stay out of "politics." This was absurd: The bank had long been telling borrowers how to structure their budgets -- a clearly political subject -- and corruption can't be separated from the bank's development mission. Then, with the arrival of the bomb-throwing Wolfensohn, things began to change. Wolfensohn denounced the "cancer of corruption" in 1996; and the bank's even bomb-happier chief economist, the Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz, gave speeches attacking the narrow economic understanding of development and proclaiming the centrality of politics. Speeches are one thing, action quite another. The Wolfensohn bank developed state-of-the-art corruption indexes, which are now used by the U.S. government to identify which countries deserve extra foreign assistance; it created a department to investigate malfeasance in bank projects. But the anti-corruption unit was understaffed and ineffectual, and the bank did not build on Wolfensohn's cancer talk by cutting off corrupt borrowers consistently. Excuses were found. Lending frequently continued. In a series of tough decisions, some of which have been widely reported and some of which have not, Wolfowitz has challenged this culture. The bank has held up $800 million in lending to Indian health projects. This is a vast sum, and India is one of the bank's most formidable clients: It borrows a lot, has a good economic record and tells development organizations to get lost if they behave condescendingly. But Indian politicians were said to have their hands on the health funds, so Wolfowitz blocked the loans anyway. washingtonpost.com