From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sat Apr 14 2007 - 08:04:06 EDT
Hi Patrick, All banks, like governments, have communications staff, not in the least because banking depends on trust and public credibility. If you don't have that, you don't get the money to play around with. Of course, the communications section can quickly become a propaganda section. Ken Rogoff told the FT: "President Wolfowitz's credibility is so badly compromised that the board is eventually...going to have to force him to resign." A White House spokesperson said "the president has full confidence in Paul Wolfowitz'' adding "we expect him to remain as World Bank president.' http://www.ft.com/cms/s/875846d8-e9bc-11db-91c7-000b5df10621.html The White House is thoroughly corrupt, and so it is no surprise that the thoroughly corrupt US president and vice-president want to protect their corrupt US cronies. There is no honour among thieves, but they stick together. An FT editorial states: "That the US has in recent years lost a great deal of moral credit around the world is undeniable. But one area where the present administration has been relatively forward-looking has been aid and development. It has raised the share of gross domestic product spent on official aid to a still low 0.17 per cent, but that is well above the mere 0.1 per cent in 1999. It has supported ambitious debt cancellation for the world's poorest countries (sic.!). It has also, rightly, put much weight on the need to tackle corruption and improve governance in aid recipients. The best justification for placing Mr Wolfowitz at the bank was his determination to give this last objective overriding priority (sic.!). It is possible to debate the wisdom of this, since the quality of governance, albeit hugely important, is not the sole determinant of development. But one point nobody can debate: if the US has decided that this is what it wants the World Bank to achieve, it cannot sustain a president who is no longer a credible spokesman for that cause. To do so can only destroy yet more of its own battered moral capital. It would be worse than a crime; it would be a blunder." http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0df59e26-e9f3-11db-91c7-000b5df10621.html This is of course largely a whitewash, we are talking about a few crumbs falling off the table and being grabbed by the poor, rather than being recycled by the waiter and the cleaning staff, with the world media cheering about the generosity of the rich. Wolfowitz has no working experience as banker. But what is more revealing is, that the FT editor thinks that a blunder (faux-pas) is worse than a crime. Why the rhetoric about a blunder being worse than a crime? Because the crime might be a relatively "trivial" incident, like a few million dollars falling off the back of a truck, while the blunder really hurts you and your own people in public opinion, and that could cost a whole lot more. In other words, the public image is more important than the wrongdoing - what people believe about you, is vastly more important than what is really true about you. Anybody who is working constantly with the money of the rich or with taxpayers' money is going to grab some of the loot for himself, and this is understandable and excusable, so long as it does not become public knowledge. That's the morality. Jude Wanniski gave a very good thumbnail sketch in Counterpunch of what I called "Wolfowitz's world": "If you want to know how Professor Wolfowitz got the job, follow the money. That's what the World Bank is all about. (...) On paper, its function was to lend money to developing countries to help them grow. Its real job has been to serve the interests of the major money-center banks and the multinational corporations who make the big bucks in World Bank development projects. The Bank, which is really a "fund," persuades a poor country like Ghana, for example, to build a new industrial complex in order make stuff for export. It will lend the money to Ghana -- which it gets from global taxpayers including you and me -- and arrange for the complex to be built by one of the favored corporations in the military-industrial complex. The list always includes Bechtel Corporation, Halliburton, and Kellogg Brown & Root, a division of Halliburton. These outfits go in and build the projects because the locals have no expertise. (...) nice, little "doable" wars (Wolfie's word), are meat and potatoes for the military-industrial complex. Instead of squeezing nickels and dimes out of the taxpayers to persuade Ghana to build a steel mill it doesn't need and can't run, even little wars run into the billions. And everyone gets into the act. The arms makers who produce airplanes, tanks, guns, jeeps and humvees get to blow up a country (like Iraq) and Bechtel and Halliburton come in right behind to rebuild it. In announcing the Wolfowitz appointment today, President Bush said the World Bank is a big organization and Wolfowitz has experience running a big organization, the Pentagon!! As far as the military-industrial complex is concerned, Wolfowitz did a FANTASTIC job. He was only expected to plan for a $30 billion war and he screwed up so badly that it is now a $200 billion war, and counting. Anyone who can screw up that badly deserves a promotion, to the World Bank. (...) There will of course be complaints from various global diplomats about the obvious incompetence of Wolfowitz, just as there were puzzled head-scratchings around the world about the incompetence of Condi Rice as Secretary of State or John Bolton as UN Ambassador. But money talks in all the places where the directors of the World Bank live, and they will be advised to clam up by the local military-industrial money machines. (...) Nor can we expect any complaints from Congress, because in one way or another there is too much money at stake, too many reputations looking toward bigtime lobbying jobs when its time to give up a seat in Congress. (...) So you see why it makes perfect sense to have Wolfowitz at the World Bank. He's terrific at doing wars, and wars are much more profitable than nickel-and-dime industrial projects." http://www.counterpunch.org/wanniski03172005.html I am not arguing that all of the World Bank development projects are bad, but a lot of them are. The main reason why, is that corrupt governments grab tax money, and give it to the bank to lend out to other corrupt governments, to finance projects which the local people did not want, and the real financial beneficiaries of which are mainly corrupt foreign corporations who have their sales staff stacked at every level of the process all over the world to grab the recycled taxpayers' money, the use of which taxpayers gave no mandate for. There is no accountability, because by institutional definition there cannot be any accountability under those conditions. The talk is about "development assistance", but it is just a gravy train for wellpaid people who exploit popular feelings of charity and philantrophy to line their own pockets with, and the pockets of their friends. Anybody who knows anything about finance, also knows that the more you "lend money to someone else to lend to someone else" etc. the more accountability for what is actually done with the money goes down the gurgler. You create more accountability in the first instance precisely by cutting out all the middlemen that can be cut out, i.e. by cutting out as much financial intermediation as you can. Why do they talk about "governance" at all, do you think? Jurriaan
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