George Monbiot- "I'm With Wolfowitz"

[Jcrowley]

I'm With Wolfowitz
Liberal handwringing over the World Bank simply reflects a failure to recognize the role it exists to fulfil
by George Monbiot

It's about as close to consensus as the left is ever likely to come. Everyone this side of Attila the Hun and the Wall Street Journal agrees that Paul Wolfowitz's appointment as president of the World Bank is a catastrophe. Except me.

Under Wolfowitz, my fellow progressives lament, the World Bank will work for America. If only someone else were chosen, it would work for the world's poor. Joseph Stiglitz, the bank's renegade former chief economist, champions Ernesto Zedillo, a former president of Mexico. A Guardian leading article suggested Colin Powell or, had he been allowed to stand, Bono. But what all this hand-wringing reveals is a profound misconception about the role and purpose of the body Wolfowitz will run.

The World Bank and the IMF were conceived by the US economist Harry Dexter White. Appointed by the US Treasury to lead the negotiations on postwar economic reconstruction, White spent most of 1943 banging the heads of the other allied nations together. They were appalled by his proposals. He insisted that his institutions would place the burden of stabilizing the world economy on the countries suffering from debt and trade deficits rather than on the creditors. He insisted that "the more money you put in, the more votes you have". He decided, before the meeting at Bretton Woods in 1944, that "the US should have enough votes to block any decision".

Both the undemocratic voting arrangement and the US veto remain to this day. The result is that a body that works mostly in poor countries is controlled by rich ones. White demanded that national debts be redeemable for gold, that gold be convertible into dollars, and that exchange rates be fixed against the dollar. The result was to lay the ground for what was to become the dollar's global hegemony. White also decided that the IMF and the bank would be sited in Washington.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0405-25.htm

[aquart]

1. Nobody in his right mind should be with Wolfowitz.

Who is this fool?

[Jcrowley]

2. Did you read

the whole article?

[NormanYorkstein]

3. the World Bank is approaching irrelevance

South America is done with the World Bank, now they have they own Bank of the South. China and India don't need it, all that is left is for the World Bank to continue "loaning" money to African dictators but how much harder can they squeeze poor Africans to "repay" the debt?

The article is correct, Wolfowitz is irrelevant to what the WB actually does. Complaining about "American influence" is just wealthy Euros complaining on being cut out of the action.

[NormanYorkstein]

4. A most profound quote from the article:

"But this surely illustrates the unacknowledged paradox in neocon thinking. They want to drag down the old, multilateral order and replace it with a new, US one. What they fail to understand is that the "multilateral" system is in fact a projection of US unilateralism, cleverly packaged to grant other nations just enough slack to prevent them from fighting it."

That's about the truest thing I've read all week.