Quote of the day: Zoellick's question

"What started as a financial crisis, became an economic crisis, is now becoming an unemployment crisis - and to what degree does it become a human and social crisis?" Robert Zoellick - World Bank president

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"To what degree does it become a human and social crisis?"

That is the big question isn't it and a rather stupid one, if you think about it. It is as if economic problems and unemployment problems were not occurring among human beings and were not therefore automatically social problems in nature.

That the question could be glibly formulated in this way by the head of the "world" bank is surely part of the problem itself.

In Zoellick's question it seems implicit that finance and economics are like the weather, existing outside of humanity, with laws of their own instead of being human creations that, as humans have made them, humans can remake them... and are remaking them constantly.

That separation of economics from its human component is perhaps the most transcendental characteristic of the "conservative revolution", which appears to be collapsing around our ears at the moment. DS

Hit the road jack..... no mo', no mo', no mo', no mo'

"Everyone ran into the hallways and were clapping and hugging each other," said one employee who declined to be named. - Reuters

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Whew!

DS

Blair and Wolfie, a snapshot of Limbo

"There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country, simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming." 'Riverbend'

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Occasionally political life produces delicious synchronicities. In the same week that Tony Blair threw in the towel, Paul Wolfowitz, one of the most influential promoters of the war in Iraq, the event most responsible for spoiling Blair's brilliant career, begged a stony faced board of the World Bank not to forcibly remove him from his post as its president. Both men have been brought low by a war that began over four years ago.

In Umberto Eco's bestseller "The Name of the Rose", those who tried to read Aristotle's "Book on Comedy", were poisoned by just touching the pages. Although many would like to move on, "turning the page" on Iraq is just as futile. Invading Iraq was a serious strategic error which Israel's legendary military guru, Martin VanCreveld considers, "the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them" and which others have gone so far as to compare with Hitler's suicidal invasion of Russia. One of the differences between a tactical error and a strategic error is that strategic errors don’t go away, paraphrasing an old advertising slogan, they are “the gift that keeps on giving”. Like Aristotle's "Book on Comedy," they simply don’t allow their pages to be turned.

Blair's predecessor, Harold Macmillan, envisioned Britain's relationship with America's rude "new Rome" as that of the wise and cultured Greeks, but in Iraq it fell to Tony Blair to fully explore the meanings of the word "Greek", because as the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote in the Guardian, "Blair failed to understand that America's really special relationship is with Israel, not Britain. Every time that George Bush had to choose between Blair and Ariel Sharon, he chose the latter." In fact, for the neocons like Wolfowitz who promoted it, the invasion of Iraq was a success until Ariel Sharon lapsed into coma. In fact, a shattered, chaotic Arab world divided into fractious "reinos de Taifas" incapable of uniting against Israel and the subsequent devastation of Iran were the invasion's true objects. Only the brilliant Sharon could ever have hoped to navigate in such chaos: the "sorcerer's apprentices" like Bush and Ehud Olmert are lost in the wreckage and Blair's career is just another broken toy.

Blair and Wolfowitz can go home now and write their memoirs, but Bush, likewise paralyzed by Iraq's poisoned pages, has a year and a half of political limbo left in the White House. Albert R. Hunt, Bloomberg's Washington bureau wrote, "Almost two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Bush's job performance. Bush is reviled around much of the world and has precious little political capital at home. This has enormous implications for foreign policy, domestic politics and the legislative agenda for the next year and a half." The behavior of Iran, Russia and Venezuela bear out Bloomberg's analysis. DS

Wolfowitz: Up against the wall Paul

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Paul Wolfowitz, whose every failure has been handsomely rewarded, is certainly the most visible, successful and symbolic of the neocons.

Over a half a million Iraqis have died, millions have been displaced. These are people who had never done any harm to the USA.

Their pain, their fear and their blood cry out for justice.

Thousands of Americans have been killed, maimed or crippled by this war, mistakenly believing in good faith that their sacrifice was in defense of their country and its flag when, in fact, they have been led to besmirch and desecrate them.

Their pain, their fear and their blood cry out for justice.

People are sent to prison everyday for stealing a car or a purse...

Until Wolfowitz and the others he represents are brought to trial for war crimes it will be impossible to begin to address the damage that has been done to America's central belief in the goodness of its own nature. DS

Andrew Cockburn: The puppet who cleared the way for Iraq's destruction - Guardian
Abstract: Among those relishing the exposure of World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz's manoeuvres on behalf of his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, in recent weeks was almost certainly the former US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was driven from public life thanks to the catastrophe of Iraq, and for the moment at least lurks in obscurity. Wolfowitz, his deputy until 2005, contributed in almost equal measure to the debacle, yet managed to slide from the Pentagon into the presidency of a leading international institution with every chance to redeem himself. Blame for torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, bungling over troop levels, chaos in Iraq's reconstruction, and the general meltdown in Pentagon management has all too often been laid at Rumsfeld's door alone. However, Wolfowitz was an energetic enabler of these outrages and many other notorious initiatives.(...) Before we conclude that Wolfowitz was the original author of the policies that destroyed Iraq, we should note that his entire career, at least up through his Pentagon service, has been in the service and at the direction of others. His early work in Washington promoting the dubious merits of an anti-ballistic missile programme, for example, was sponsored by Paul Nitze, a powerful insider who devoted a lifetime of intrigue to boosting east-west tensions and US defence spending. Nitze served as godfather to the neoconservative movement in the 70s, correctly calculating that a fusion of the pro-Israel lobby with the military-industrial lobby would create an alliance of unstoppable power. Among the early and most potent recruits was an old friend of Wolfowitz's, Richard Perle, known and feared in Washington as "the Prince of Darkness" for his ruthless bureaucratic skills and commanding position in the neoconservative forces. The relationship flourished into Wolfowitz's sojourn in the Pentagon. Officials who worked closely with him remarked to me on the amount of time Perle, then a close associate of Conrad Black, spent closeted with the deputy secretary. They remained in constant touch, as Wolfowitz's phone logs attest. Other regular recipients of Wolfowitz calls included Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then chief of staff to Vice-President Cheney and now a convicted felon, and Robin Cleveland. Cleveland was in charge of national security programmes at the White House office of management and budget. From that powerful position, according to a former close colleague of Wolfowitz's, she "was one of the most important people in the group that gave us the Iraq war". Late last year Perle and other leading neoconservatives lashed out publicly at Rumsfeld, deriding his mismanagement of the Iraqi enterprise they had worked so hard to set in train. "Interesting they are not going after the puppet," the former colleague emailed me in reference to Wolfowitz's absence from his old friends' denunciations. Given recent sordid revelations, his role in shredding the reputation of the World Bank and the morale of its employees may be harder to obscure. READ IT ALL

The wolf's joke is on us folks

Oh grandma, what a big ego you've got!

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German speakers tell me that if you remove the "O" from Wolfowitz, the resulting phrase in German, "wolf witz", would translate into English as "wolf joke". Neat, huh?

Some joke!

If you consider how many enemies Wolfowitz has made since the war in Iraq began, how unpopular he is with career civil servants, how politically weakened his patrons are and how many journalists in Washington are looking for scandals to publish, then Wolfowitz's behavior can only be described as reckless or even delusional.

His attitude is so dangerous to the institution that he directs and to himself and his girlfriend as to be self-destructive. Without getting into psychobabble, I wonder if he is nuts. No joke. DS

Sidney Blumenthal: Wolfowitz's girlfriend problem - Salon
Abstract:(...) Superficially, Wolfowitz's arrangement for his girlfriend of a job with a hefty increase in pay in violation of the ethics clauses of his contract and without informing the World Bank board might seem like an all-too-familiar story of a man seeking special favors for a romantic partner.(...) But the fall of Wolfowitz is the final act of a long drama -- and love or even self-love may not be the whole subject. Wolfowitz's girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza, is a Libyan, raised in Saudi Arabia, educated at Oxford, who now has British citizenship.(...) Back in 2003, Wolfowitz had taken care of Riza by directing his trusted Pentagon deputy, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith -- who had been in charge of the Office of Special Plans and had been Wolfowitz's partner in managing the CPA -- to arrange for a military contract for her from Science Applications International Corp. When the contract was exposed this week, SAIC issued a statement that it "had no role in the selection of the personnel." In other words, the firm with hundreds of millions in contracts at stake had been ordered to hire Riza. Riza was unhappy about leaving the sinecure at the World Bank. But in 2006 Wolfowitz made a series of calls to his friends that landed her a job at a new think tank called Foundation for the Future that is funded by the State Department. She was the sole employee, at least in the beginning. The World Bank continued to pay her salary, which was raised by $60,000 to $193,590 annually, more than the $183,500 paid to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and all of it tax-free. Moreover, Wolfowitz got the State Department to agree that the ratings of her performance would automatically be "outstanding." Wolfowitz insisted on these terms himself and then misled the World Bank board about what he had done. Exactly how this deal was made and with whom remains something of a mystery. The person who did work with Riza in her new position was Elizabeth Cheney, then the deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. And Riza's assignment fell under the purview of Karen Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. But these facts raise more questions than they answer. The documents released by the World Bank do not include any of the communications with the State Department. How did Elizabeth Cheney come to be involved? Did Wolfowitz speak with Vice President Dick Cheney, for whom he had been a deputy when Cheney was secretary of defense in the elder Bush's administration? Riza, who is not a U.S. citizen, had to receive a security clearance in order to work at the State Department. Who intervened? It is not unusual to have British or French midlevel officers at the department on exchange programs, but they receive security clearances based on the clearances they already have with their host governments. Granting a foreign national who is detailed from an international organization a security clearance, however, is extraordinary, even unprecedented. So how could this clearance have been granted? State Department officials familiar with the details of this matter confirmed to me that Shaha Ali Riza was detailed to the State Department and had unescorted access while working for Elizabeth Cheney. Access to the building requires a national security clearance or permanent escort by a person with such a clearance. But the State Department has no record of having issued a national security clearance to Riza. State Department officials believe that Riza was issued such a clearance by the Defense Department after SAIC was forced by Wolfowitz and Feith to hire her. Then her clearance would have been recognized by the State Department through a credentials transmittal letter and Riza would have accessed the State Department on Pentagon credentials, using her Pentagon clearance to get a State Department building pass with a letter issued under instructions from Liz Cheney. But State Department officials tell me that no such letter can be confirmed as received. And the officials stress that the department would never issue a clearance to a non-U.S. citizen as part of a contractual requisition. Issuing a national security clearance to a foreign national under instructions from a Pentagon official would constitute a violation of the executive orders governing clearances, they say. Given these circumstances, the inspector general of the Defense Department should be ordered to investigate how Shaha Ali Riza was issued a Pentagon security clearance. And the inspector general of the State Department should investigate who ordered Riza's building pass and whether there was a Pentagon credentials transmittal letter. READ IT ALL

Wolfowitz: banking's answer to Katrina

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It is amazing how normal all this is beginning to seem. These people start wars that fail miserably, they fail at everything they touch, they lie, they steal, people die, but little or nothing happens to them beyond being moved to other well paid jobs. Sometimes they get medals too.

The behavior of Bush and Bush's people is like that of officials in a dictatorship. In a dictatorship, the dictator and his coterie enjoy full impunity. So seemingly do Bush and the bushies, but at the same time they are having their dirty linen being constantly washed in public, something that never happens in a dictatorship, except when someone is being deliberately disgraced, on orders of the dictator. In the Bush regime everything is revealed, but precious little happens.

I lived the Spain of Franco and rumors of all sorts of malfeasance of the Wolfowitz type flew among insiders, but none of it ever showed up in the media, of course. Nobody was particularly shocked either, nepotism, favoritism and the like were the heart of the system. Dictators become dictators to facilitate themselves and their friends. However, one of the reasons that many Spanish conservatives were longing for democracy was to introduce accountability into the system in the interest of efficiency, if for no other reason. At that time even those of the far left, who abhorred much about the United States, frankly admired how Watergate was carried out and how Nixon was removed. The United States was a model of sorts for both left and right at that time.

I wonder if Franco were dying now, would the United States be considered any sort of model for an aspiring Spanish democrat of any political color? DS

Wolfowitz Dictated Girlfriend's Pay Deal - Washington Post
Abstract: according to documents released by the bank's executive board yesterday.(...) Wolfowitz joined the bank in 2005 after working at the Pentagon, where as deputy defense secretary he was a principal architect of the Iraq war. This made him a controversial figure at the bank, where he fostered resentment among its member nations and 7,000 Washington employees. World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz personally dictated the terms under which the bank gave what it called his "domestic partner" substantial pay raises and promotions in exchange for temporarily leaving her job there during his tenure,A number of the bank's leading donor nations, including Britain, expressed public concern about aspects of his leadership long before the current uproar over his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, which began when details of her pay package were publicly revealed last month. As bank staffers and development activist groups continued to call for Wolfowitz's resignation, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said that he has President Bush's "full confidence" and that "we expect him to remain as World Bank president." Defenders also surfaced from other quarters. The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial that "the forces of the World Bank's status quo," angered by Wolfowitz's efforts to fight "corruption-as-usual" and institute more accountability in the institution's lending practices, had seized on a trivial issue to bring him down. One former bank staffer said that "some of the countries who failed to block his election are trying to set him up, and he walked into that trap really well." But while few knowledgeable observers were prepared to predict Wolfowitz's departure, many expressed concern that the turmoil is threatening to undermine the work and credibility of the bank. "The issue now, as far as many of us are concerned, is a matter of corporate governance," said a senior bank staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. "The Europeans want him out. The U.S. remains silent, and the board is divided." Others expressed concern about the effect that the controversy could have on this year's negotiations to finance the International Development Association, the bank's lending vehicle for the world's poorest countries. Europe contributes 60 percent of the IDA's funding, and the United States and Japan together give about 26 percent. U.S. contributions and pledges to the current three-year program total about $3 billion.(...) In a memo to the bank's vice president for human resources dated Aug. 11, 2005, Wolfowitz wrote, "I now direct you to agree to a proposal which includes the following terms and conditions." Riza was to be "detailed to an outside institution of her choosing while retaining Bank salary and benefits." She was to receive an immediate raise with approximate annual increases of 8 percent. By 2010, when Wolfowitz's five-year term expired, she would reach a salary of $244,960, significantly above the maximum of $226,650 allowable for her pay grade. On her return to the bank, she would be automatically promoted to the level of senior country director; if her return were delayed another five years by a second Wolfowitz term, she would be elevated to the level of bank vice president.

Wolfie blew it............ in a honey pot

"What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privitize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!" - Kurt Vonnegut

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This is really too delicious! Here is Wolfowitz who goes around the world wagging his finger at third world leaders and urging them to "fight corruption," caught in the tackiest, cheesiest most obvious of compromising situations... How dumb can you get? Is he dumb or is he just crazy?

Good question! This is a sample of the same brain power that organized the invasion and occupation of Iraq... Looked at that way it is kind of reassuring. A Spanish philosopher once said that if he had to choose between bad people and stupid people he would choose the bad people, because they sometimes took a rest. DS

Wolfowitz must be told to resign now - Editorial - Financial Times
The president of the World Bank has one asset: his credibility. The Bank’s capacity to make a difference lies not in its money and ideas but in its ability to be the world’s voice for development. This includes, as Paul Wolfowitz, the current president, has insisted, being the voice for good governance. Recent revelations have, however, demonstrated such serious failures that the Bank’s moral authority is endangered. If the president stays, it risks becoming an object not of respect, but of scorn, and its campaign in favour of good governance not a believable struggle, but blatant hypocrisy.

It is important to understand what is not at issue here. It is not Mr Wolfowitz’s unpopularity, even though his role as an architect of the Iraq war made him disliked from the start. It is not failures of management, even though his reliance on a group of outside appointees made him mistrusted by many inside and outside the Bank. It is not disagreements over development doctrine, where some convergence of views has occurred. It is not a romantic relationship with a subordinate, itself hardly a rarity in today’s world.

The issue is whether the failures of corporate governance are serious enough to damage the Bank’s moral authority. In a world where curtailing corruption and improving governance have become central to the practice of development, the world’s premier development institution must, like Caesar’s wife, stand above suspicion.

What then is the story? When Mr Wolfowitz became president of the World Bank he also became the boss of his girlfriend, Shaha Riza. To resolve this situation – inconsistent, rightly, with Bank rules – Ms Riza was seconded to the US State Department.

So far, then, so unproblematic. Yet, it is alleged, the terms of the appointment, which appear astonishingly generous, violate a number of Bank protocols. Worse, it now appears Mr Wolf­owitz personally directed the Bank’s head of human resources to offer his girlfriend these exceptional terms. Worse still, this has come out after misleading claims by a senior official that the ethics committee of the board, in consultation with the general counsel, approved the agreement.

What then do we see here? The answer is: an apparent violation of Bank rules; favouritism that borders on nepotism; and a possible cover-up. It is true Mr Wolfowitz and Ms Riza were put in a difficult position. Even so, what has come out would be bad in any institution. In an institution that spear-heads the cause of good governance in the developing world, it is lethal.

The World Bank has moved from being a self-proclaimed exemplar of best practice in corporate governance to an example of shoddiness. As long as Mr Wolfowitz stays, this can be neither repaired nor forgotten, be it outside the Bank or inside it. In the interests of the Bank itself, he should resign. If he does not, the board must ask him to go.

Wolfowitz's socks

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Just a note on this incident. People are treating it like a joke, but my instinct tells me that it something significant. It is a very weird and revealing detail of a very powerful, influential person.

The fact that both socks have identical holes is strange. Socks have to worn very hard for that to happen. Holes this size don't appear suddenly: when he put them on that morning, he was aware of holes. Practical questions arise: does he ever change his socks? Does he wash his feet regularly?

I don't want to get into psychobabble, but is seems to me there is something perverse, perhaps hostile, about this behavior in someone this important. If any clinical psychologist is reading this, I would very much welcome a professional take on the Wolfowitz socks mystery. DS