[politics]
BYE-BYE, WOLFIE!
Analysis by Kent Manthie
Well, it’s finally over. I knew that it would end this way, what with all the vitriol and venom in the media of late over Paul Wolfowitz’s faux pas of getting his main squeeze a pay raise – from about $137,000 up to a more comfortable $194,000. That was just the thing that his enemies – and they were no small number – needed: a scandal that would eat him alive and cut short the Wolfman’s reign of terror. There are mixed reactions to Wolfowitz, however. Not everyone seems to have violent reactions against him. The Wall Street Journal has always been and still is a big fan of PW’s; to them he could do no wrong and man, what a genius they thought he was. In an editorial on Friday, May 18 the WSJ defended Paulie in no uncertain terms. To them, the Wolf-meister was a savior and the World Bank was damn lucky, in their eyes, to have been blessed with his presence. Wolf-schmack also embarked on the noble effort to rid the ranks of corruption and clean up the icky messes inside and outside the Bank. His plan was to try and get the countries to whom the Bank gave money to stop corruption, to enact reforms, et cetera but then Wolfowitz turned his anti-corruption efforts inward, to root out the bad influences inside the Bank and it was this kind of stuff that caused him no shortage of new enemies, who, once the “girlfriend” thing erupted, seized on it with great fervor and used it as ammunition to get rid of him so as to placate their status quo existences. What didn’t help matters was the fact that Wolfowitz was just too high up in the clouds to manage effectively; he lacked a hard-boiled pragmatism that enables top bureaucrats to be successful.
Ever since the “scandal” broke, when it was discovered that Wolfie had arranged for a hefty pay raise for his “companion”, Shaha Riza, a big fuss was kicked up and all the Wolf-haters had their chance and they ran with it, in earnest, calling for his resignation over and over and not taking no for an answer. The media got in on the act, as well, no doubt, they were pissed at Wolf-ernator for hoodwinking them about Iraq and this was their chance to get even. So, in a pretty quick way, forces were amassed against Wolf-bob, and soon enough there were coalitions of Wolf-choppers who wanted him out.
It got to be a continual death-watch, so to speak, in the media; everyone was on the lookout for the first sign that PW was going to throw in the towel and resign. It was like I kept seeing headlines that read “Wolfowitz doesn’t resign today”, basically, until he finally did resign. But, the way he saw it, the Wolf-er didn’t deserve to lose his job. Ol’ Paul insisted he made a concerted effort to try to do the right thing in shifting Riza over to State, he sought advice from the Bank’s ethics panel in the matter and made a point of being as open and transparent about the matter. Since he obviously knew that there was hostility towards him at the Bank, Paul the Wolf was not going to be blatantly doing unethical stuff.
But it was a boneheaded move to get his girlfriend such a big raise. Even though she is an intelligent, experienced and successful professional woman, it gave the impression that it was only due to Paulie “The Wolf” getting her the raise and that was seen as just too sleazy for words in the eyes of many Europeans (probably some of the same ones who took American Republicans to task in ’98 for being prudish and uptight when it came to the “Monica Lewinsky Matter”), who felt that the Bank’s reputation was being irreparably tarnished and PW had to go.
One could argue whether or not this is the sleaziest thing to have gone on at the Bank or if getting your best girl a pay raise is less bad than wasting billions of dollars by turning a blind eye to corruption in client states of the Bank’s or if a string of financial mismanagement that has continued at the bank, unabated, probably at its worst in the 80s, is worse. It may not be worse, but the thing about the pay raise for Riza was that it was noisy – it brought unwanted attention to the Bank and that is the major sin which was committed here – bringing this kind of dirty laundry out in the open; it’s embarrassing, for chrissakes.
In the end, Wolfowitz would not resign unless and until the board had issued a written statement that read, in effect, that Wolfowitz had not done anything unethical or illegal after an investigation that cleared him of any wrongdoing, which the board eventually did, just to be able to get rid of Wolfowitz and put the matter behind them. It was a bitter pill for the board to swallow, to have to make this statement; certain board members made their displeasure with the statement known and implied that it wasn’t wholly accurate, but only done as a way to get rid of Wolfowitz.
Paul Wolfowitz’s job opportunities of late have strangely paralleled the turns that Robert S. McNamara’s career took – to wit, McNamara was the architect of the disaster in Vietnam in the 1960s as Defense Secretary. After this debacle McNamara was “rewarded” for this failure with the presidency of the World Bank, which he headed throughout the 1970s, but in McNamara’s case, he was considered by most to have done a pretty good job as WB President. On the other hand, Wolfowitz was the architect of the war in Iraq, whispering in Rummy’s ear all sorts of grand ideas and those abstract visions, pumping up the rest of the world to get rid of Saddam Hussein; he was also the ambassador to Indonesia in the 1980s, before his storied tenure at the Pentagon. What is ironic, given the circles that Paul runs in, is that Wolfowitz actually does give a damn about the poor, huddled masses of the world’s most tragic areas. I don’t think, though, that “champion of the starving and oppressed millions” is a phrase that the average Jane or Joe in the street would ascribe to Paulie-baby. I think most people are more inclined to think of him as “war-mongering hack-brain” instead.
Those that have worked under him all consistently say one thing about “the Wolf”: he’s a terrible manager; he’s heavy on the abstract and light on the concrete and empirical. In other words, Wolfowitz doesn’t do well in applying all these theories and hypotheses and ideas floating through his head, he seems to be one who deals exclusively in abstract concepts. El Lobo is a failure when it comes to applying these high falutin ideals that swim about his mind, things like democratizing the Middle East, lifting up the third world out of chronic poverty and eliminating corruption from out-of-control governments in the self-same third world, just to name a few. This has made it nearly impossible to get anything done in his office, in fact, things don’t get done at all; inboxes pile up to near spilling over. All these lofty ideals get in the way of pragmatism and in the absence of any managerial ability they don’t bring anything to a job like the presidency of the World Bank; they may be not wholly unacceptable qualities in a free-speech way for a bureaucrat that’s deep inside the Bank, but when it comes to responsibility and stuff and being the boss of a huge international bureaucracy you need hard nuts-and-bolts style management skills – you need to be able to “make the trains run on time” and Paulie-boy wasn’t able to make them run on time – they were way too late and now he’s paying the price.
Shaha Riza is a fifty-something professional Muslim woman; she used to work at the World Bank, but when she left the Bank for a job at the State Department her beau got her a hefty pay raise. But when the beau in question turned out to be Paul Wolfowitz, the president of the World Bank things heated up in the media and in political circles around the world, so, Shaha was shuttled over, for the time being, at least, to a quasi-State Dept. program called Foundation for the Future, a lending agency to help with financing in the Arab world, to ward off any possible perceptions of conflict of interest, impropriety or nepotism when Wolfowitz was given the presidency. I’ve heard Riza described as being a “Muslim feminist” who has, in her job at the World Bank, worked hard on behalf of women in the Arab and Muslim world and who has been a champion of getting rid of tyrannical dictatorships and bringing in democracy, a progressive-minded person, well-qualified for the job she has.
The rank & file staff, who had driven the anti-Wolfowitz crusade inside the bank, in the past few weeks took to the wearing of blue ribbons, something that originally started out being a symbol of the Bank’s striving for excellence but after the Wolfowitz-Riza scandal broke, giving them all a focal point for their hatred and a catalyst for his ouster, staffers began to wear the blue ribbons as signs of their support for Wolfie’s resignation/ouster, whatever you want to call it; it was a badge of solidarity.
There are some who are coming to Paul’s defense and say that he was pushed out of the Bank merely for his work on behalf of the failed Iraq War and his over-enthusiasm for that massive “fiasco”. The idea is that Wolfowitz was forced out of the WB as payback for his unpopular views and the disaster(s) that have been created due to his ideas and his being in a position (as Deputy Defense Secretary) to do something about them. But he had also been pushing hard to rid the Bank of corruption; first it started with the corrupt governments that get funding and grants from the Bank, then the anti-corruption focus turned inward, on itself, which obviously angered the folks inside the Bank who would’ve been the focus or connected to foci of anti-corruption sweeps.
The World Bank is a great place to get a job, especially if you are a non-American because all non-American citizens who work for the World Bank get paid in tax-free salaries and those American citizens who do work for the Bank have to pay income taxes but they get those taxes reimbursed by the Bank – that is just one of the many great perks of working at the Bank; I suppose this interesting little benefit can be chalked up to the fact that it is an international organization, a transnational consortium of moneyed nations that help spur development in the poorer countries in the world, the so-called “third world”. The pay at the Bank is pretty swanky too – out of about 10,000 employees who work at the WB, there are 1396 that have higher salaries than the Secretary of State, according to the Wall Street Journals editorial page on May 18, 2007. Nice pay if you can get it – and if you do, it’s pretty damn hard to lose a job at the World Bank; you have to, like, murder someone, or blatantly rip-off the Bank to get fired.
Why does this matter at all to average Americans? Well, for one thing, 16.4% of the World Bank’s annual budget comes from U.S. taxpayers. The Bank doles out about $23 billion a year in development grants and generous loans to finance projects in poor, third world countries around the world. Due to financial mismanagement or worse, inside the workings of the Bank, officials have not always done the smartest things with the Bank’s money; this is something that supporters of Paulie’s point to as proof that he was there to do something about corruption and wasteful spending and for that effort he was smeared and attacked and driven out of the Presidency. The Wall St. Journal editorial board says the World Bank wasted about $8 billion over a 25-year period with the ultra-corrupt Suharto regime in Indonesia from the 1970s to the ‘90s, while defending the Wolf-man, but he was ambassador to Indonesia for some time, so why didn’t he do anything to help stem the tide of corruption there? He could’ve used some smooth-talking diplomatic means through the embassy, right? Well, that’s debatable, but I think that the Journal was being a wee bit disingenuous in their enthusiastic defense of him – the good ol’ boys in the editorial office at the WSJ are head-over-heels in love with all those neocons – their superheroes are Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Doug Feith, who is literally retarded, plus their pundits, Bill Kristol, Charlie Krauthammer, and all those jackasses who still go around maintaining that the Iraq War is a great thing, always has been, still is and forever will be, in fact, they think it’s going to be looked upon as a wonderful thing in the history books. Yeah, right, maybe if those “history” books are written by the scum-sucking Nazi-dogs at AEI or the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing propaganda-tanks.
Traditionally, the World Bank’s presidents have always been Americans and are always appointed by Americans – U.S. Presidents, to be specific. In turn, the Bank’s sister organization, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gets its presidents appointed by the Europeans and while one sees talk in the press lately about the idea of shaking up this custom, in other words, there are those who would like to see control of World Bank presidents wrested from the U.S. President’s hands but unless the Europeans want to give up their tradition of naming the heads of the IMF then we’d better just leave well enough alone. Just because one lame duck president appointed someone for a political payback, that doesn’t discredit the whole damn system; it just indicts the actions of Bush. Unfortunately, though, Bush gets to pick the replacement for Lon Chaney’s dad.
Among the short list for rumored replacements for the Wolf are: former US Trade Representative, Robert Zellick; current U.S. Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson; Assistant Treasury Secretary, Robert Kimmett; former Bank of Israel boss Stanley Fischer and even 80-year old former Fed Chairman, Paul Volcker, who is probably not going to take the job – at 80 years old, Volcker is probably not going to be up for the non-stop travel to the poorest, most impoverished places on earth.
You know, Bill Clinton has some time on his hands these days – so does Al Gore, who recently said that he had “fallen out of love with politics”…either one of them would make an excellent World Bank President, what with the development mission it has – imagine if Bill Clinton became WB President and then next year Hillary got elected U.S. President! Whoa, what a power couple that would be! Now, Hillary might or might not win the election, but I can tell you that, realistically, Bill won’t be the next president of the World Bank – now, I suppose one can’t say “never” about Bill Clinton, but I just can’t see Bushy naming Clinton as a replacement for Wolfowitz.
Whoever becomes the next World Bank President will no doubt be a better manager, a better leader and can definitely not be less popular than the current, outgoing one.
* The past presidents of the World Bank – from the beginning in 1944:
1. Eugene Meyer
2. John Jay McCloy
3. Eugene Robert Black
4. George David Woods
5. Robert S. McNamara (1968-1981)
6. Alden W. Clausen
7. Barber Conable
8. Lewis Preston (1991-1995)
9. James Wolfensohn (1995-2005)
10. Paul Wolfowitz (2005-2007)