Andrew Young, the former black civil rights leader and confidant of Martin Luther King Jr., has recently come under criticism for his dirty dealings with corrupt African governments, especially for his close relationship with General Olusegan Obasanjo, Nigeria’s former president.
Young has followed the well-worn path from protest to politician to venal corporate bagman. His case is particularly repugnant in that his earlier struggles against segregation and police repression in the American South of the 1960s contrast starkly with his present political alliances with brutal dictators. While operating as a purveyor for American corporations in their plunder of African resources, he has, not incidentally, gotten very rich in the process.
Recently both the New York Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published exposes on Young’s consulting firm, ironically named GoodWorks International (GWI), as a lucrative conduit for facilitating US interests in the “emerging markets” of Africa.
According to the New York Times article, questions about Young and GWI’s relationship with the corrupt outgoing president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, became a lighting rod for those opposing Obasanjo’s anti-democratic policies during the run-up to the sham elections held last week. (See “Call for Nigerian presidential election to be annulled after massive corruption.”)
The firm advertises that it “opens doors for corporations interested in doing business in Africa and the Caribbean.” The mayor of Atlanta, Shirley Franklin, who is also a friend of Young, praised GWI for practicing “public-purpose capitalism.”
This view is not shared by those following human rights issues in Africa. “Andrew Young has never been interested in these [humanitarian] issues,” Femi Falana, president of the West African Bar Association, told the Times “He is just here making money.”
Young put it another way, “For 40 years of my life,” he told the Times, “I was on the outside seeking change. I realized that I could be more effective being on the inside implementing it.”
What changes have GWI implemented? As the principal lobbying agent for the government of Nigeria in the US, it is making millions representing major companies like ChevronTexaco, General Electric, and Motorola seeking contracts from the Nigerian government.
The company generally receives a commission equal to 1 ½ percent of a contract’s value. This is a tidy sum when GoodWorks consults on contracts such as General Electric Energy’s agreement to provide $400 million in turbines for Nigeria, as they did last year.
The firm is a major shareholder in a Nigerian energy company, Suntrust Oil, which won a lease for offshore oil fields. According to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Nigeria provides as much as 40 percent of GoodWorks revenues, paying $1.75 million to the company since 2000, not including a retainer fee of $60,000 a month.
GWI also specializes in relations with other oil-producing African states, including Sudan and Angola. Moreover, it represents other American companies among the most notorious for their slave-wages and environmental destruction in Africa, including Nike, Coca-Cola and the gold mining concern Barrick Gold, a company connected with the Bush family
The principals at GWI represent a virtual “who’s who” of political and corporate Democrats. According to the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Young set up GWI in 1997 with the help of Hamilton Jordon, President Carter’s former chief of staff. Foundation directors for GWI include President Bill Clinton, Alexis Herman, the former Secretary of Labor, and Maurice Tempelsman, a diamond merchant and fund raiser in the Democratic Party. Tempelsman has been implicated as an important figure in the DeBeers diamond cartel in Africa, now known as the “blood diamond” business.
Reports indicate that Young’s ties to Africa developed while he was the US ambassador to the UN in the late 70s, meeting Obasanjo, the military-installed president of Nigeria, at the time. “Obasanjo and I kind of hit it off immediately,” Young told the Times. “We were mainly interested in democracy.”
Actually, Obasanjo was a US operative, closely allied to the CIA, who took power in 1976 after his predecessor, Murtala Muhammad, was assassinated under unexplained circumstances. At the time, the US was still reeling from the OPEC oil embargo and was vitally concerned with Nigerian oil interests.
When Obasanjo left power the first time, in 1979, he was appointed to the board of directors of the CIA-run African American Institute, headed by the former US ambassador to Nigeria Donald B. Easum. In the 1980s, Obasanjo was sent on high-profile speaking tours by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the US Institute for Peace.
Young has defended his relations with Obasanjo, portraying him as the defender of democracy in Nigeria who has broken the past practice of corruption that has been rampant since the country won its independence. Obasanjo has also received the praises of President George W. Bush and Colin Powell as an example of the type of democracy they would like to see in Africa.
A very different picture is drawn in the February 14 issue of the International Herald Tribune, in an article entitled, “Fooling people some of the time,” which reports that Obasanjo has done nothing about corruption in the country with “as much as $600 billion in ill-gotten gains sitting in foreign bank accounts while the rural farmers live on less than one dollar a day.”
The paper accuses Obasanjo of “monopolizing power the day he entered office,” and of keeping “the oil portfolio for himself so that he could use Nigeria’s vast oil wealth for political ends.” As a result, all politicians in the government were “beholden to him for money.”
In an attempt change the constitution so that he could run a third term, he tried to pressure state governors and members of Parliament with bribes as high as $400,000, the Herald Tribune said. “Governors who refused were threatened with impeachment,” as was the case with his former ally and vice president, Atiku Abubakar, who broke with Obasanjo and ran against his hand picked successor for president.
In 2004 Transparency International ranked Nigeria the most corrupt regime in Africa. According to the BBC, out of 145 countries, only Haiti and Bangladesh ranked worse. That year, Obasanjo, despite sitting on the world’s sixth largest reserves of oil, ended government subsidies on oil, sparking a series of strikes and pitched battles in which the police and military murdered protesters. The removal of subsidies was part of an IMF restructuring program that Obasanjo imposed with a vengeance.
“Who benefits from Andy Young’s relationship with the government of Nigeria? It’s not the Nigerian people,” remarked Ken Silverstein, a reporter for Harper’s Magazine. “As I see it, the primary beneficiaries of his work in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa are those corrupt, authoritarian regimes he works with and his private corporate clients.”
Young has provided his services both to enrich his clients and himself, but also to assist the United States as it joins hands with various blood-soaked dictatorships and strongman in order to secure American strategic interests in the pivotal continent.
Young is a member of the National Security Study Group and therefore would have been briefed on the Bush administration’s newly established United States Africa Command (AFRICOM).
Young is aware that the US has developed strategic interests in the oil states of Africa and has made plans for the establishment of strategic military bases. West Africa alone has an estimated 15 percent of the world’s oil reserves. And by 2015, the region is expected to provide 25 percent of the US energy market.
Meanwhile, the funds flowing into GWI and the hands of Andrew Young are at the expense of the Nigerian and African masses. Despite the nation’s wealth in natural resources, 70 percent of its population of 140 million lives on less than US $1 per day.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
Monday, April 30, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Czech fugitive nabbed at OR Tambo Airport
When millionaire Radovan Krejcir slipped out the back door of his luxury villa near Prague in the Czech Republic, and fled to the Seychelles, a police chief was fired for letting the wanted man escape.
Over the next two years, Czech authorities began losing hope of getting their suspect back as the 38-year-old Krejcir and his family secured new citizenship and settled down in the island paradise.
But in a surprise twist the alleged criminal boss - wanted for fraud and planning a murder - was arrested at OR Tambo International Airport on Saturday.
Krejcir, who appeared at the Kempton Park magistrate's court on Monday, had entered the country on a fake passport, national police spokesperson Director Sally de Beer said. He travelled under the name Egbert Jules Savy and was flying from Madagascar, members of the Crime Intelligence Unit reported. He was nabbed at 5.15pm as he got off the plane.
Krejcir has been on the run since 2005 and has reportedly made shocking claims of giving bribes to his country's government officials. From his hideout in the Seychelles, Krejcir said a book he was writing would prove to be "the next Watergate scandal" for the Czech government. He has maintained his innocence and benefited from the fact that no extradition agreement exists between the Czech Republic and the Seychelles. "It is believed he intended to settle in South Africa," De Beer said on Monday night. "He is wanted by the Czech Republic on charges of fraud involving hundreds of millions of euros, as well as for conspiracy to commit murder."
Krejcir is suspected of orchestrating a complex fraud scheme in 2004 and 2005. During his court appearance on Monday, Krejcir's identity was confirmed and his case postponed to May 2. He will remain in custody until then.
De Beer said a warrant of arrest would now have to be sent from the Czech Republic, after which the extradition process would start. Interpol had issued a red notice - an international warrant of arrest "with a view to extradition" - for Krejcir, but it seems unlikely that he will be boarding a plane soon.
Extraditions out of South Africa have been put on hold pending the outcome of an alleged stem cell fraud couple's challenge to the extradition agreement between South Africa and the US. If accused stem cell fraudsters Stephen van Rooyen and Laura Brown succeed in their Pretoria High Court bid, which is due to continue on Thursday, every single extradition treaty concluded by South Africa since 1996 would be rendered invalid.
Source: IoL
Monday, April 23, 2007
Huge win for Nigeria's Yar'Adua
Nigeria's ruling party candidate Umaru Yar'Adua has won controversial presidential elections by a landslide, according to official results. He gained 70% of the vote but European Union observers say the elections did not meet international standards and were not "credible". The EU says at least 200 people have died since campaigning began.
The two main opposition candidates have told their supporters to reject the results and want a re-run. Mr Yar'Adua gained 24.6m votes, against 6.6m for his closest challenger, Muhammadu Buhari. Vice-president turned opposition candidate Atiku Abubakar came third with 2.6m votes.
This should be the first time Africa's most populous nation replaces one elected civilian head with another. "I felt greatly humbled by the events of today and this mandate," Mr Yar'Adua, 56, told state television. Mr Buhari had earlier threatened to call his supporters onto the streets if Mr Yar'Adua was declared the winner and there was tight security outside the election commission headquarters in the capital, Abuja.
Independent National Election Commission (Inec) head Maurice Iwu refused to take any questions from the large crowd of journalists waiting for the results. He only read out the results. Shortly before the announcement was made, outgoing President Olusegun Obasanjo made a surprise televised address to the nation. He admitted that the poll had not been perfect but said the next elections would be better. "It is my fervent wish that Nigerians will consider this experience as a necessary step in our journey as a people towards consolidating our democracy," he said.
Nigeria's biggest election monitoring group said the presidential poll was so flawed that it should be scrapped and held again. "In many parts of the country elections did not start on time or did not start at all," said Transition Monitoring Group chief Innocent Chukwuma. The US says it is "deeply troubled" by the weekend polls which it said were "flawed". A spokesman at the State Department said Washington hoped the political parties would resolve any differences over the election through peaceful, constitutional means.
Voter Donaman Atezan, 25, told the BBC News website that election material was delivered late to his polling station in the central Benue Sate, after most people had gone home. "Thugs were then left alone to vote and each one of them voted for the PDP over and over as many times as the ballot papers were available," he said. He said he tried to vote for an opposition candidate but the ballot paper was ripped from his hand.
Officials had struggled to deliver some of the 60m ballot papers to stations in time for the vote. They only arrived in the country on Friday evening. “ [It is] a necessary step in our journey as a people towards consolidating our democracy ” The boldest of several attempts to disrupt polling was in the hours before voting was due to start when a petrol tanker laden with gas cylinders was used in an attack on the electoral commission's headquarters in Abuja. The attackers tried to roll the unmanned tanker into the building, but the vehicle missed its target and came to a halt.
The presidential poll was running alongside elections for the National Assembly and Senate. The new government is scheduled to take power on 29 May. Nigeria - one of the world's biggest oil producers - is of key strategic interest to both the West and the growing economies of the East. But despite the country's huge oil wealth, tens of millions live in poverty.
Source: New York Times
The two main opposition candidates have told their supporters to reject the results and want a re-run. Mr Yar'Adua gained 24.6m votes, against 6.6m for his closest challenger, Muhammadu Buhari. Vice-president turned opposition candidate Atiku Abubakar came third with 2.6m votes.
This should be the first time Africa's most populous nation replaces one elected civilian head with another. "I felt greatly humbled by the events of today and this mandate," Mr Yar'Adua, 56, told state television. Mr Buhari had earlier threatened to call his supporters onto the streets if Mr Yar'Adua was declared the winner and there was tight security outside the election commission headquarters in the capital, Abuja.
Independent National Election Commission (Inec) head Maurice Iwu refused to take any questions from the large crowd of journalists waiting for the results. He only read out the results. Shortly before the announcement was made, outgoing President Olusegun Obasanjo made a surprise televised address to the nation. He admitted that the poll had not been perfect but said the next elections would be better. "It is my fervent wish that Nigerians will consider this experience as a necessary step in our journey as a people towards consolidating our democracy," he said.
Nigeria's biggest election monitoring group said the presidential poll was so flawed that it should be scrapped and held again. "In many parts of the country elections did not start on time or did not start at all," said Transition Monitoring Group chief Innocent Chukwuma. The US says it is "deeply troubled" by the weekend polls which it said were "flawed". A spokesman at the State Department said Washington hoped the political parties would resolve any differences over the election through peaceful, constitutional means.
Voter Donaman Atezan, 25, told the BBC News website that election material was delivered late to his polling station in the central Benue Sate, after most people had gone home. "Thugs were then left alone to vote and each one of them voted for the PDP over and over as many times as the ballot papers were available," he said. He said he tried to vote for an opposition candidate but the ballot paper was ripped from his hand.
Officials had struggled to deliver some of the 60m ballot papers to stations in time for the vote. They only arrived in the country on Friday evening. “ [It is] a necessary step in our journey as a people towards consolidating our democracy ” The boldest of several attempts to disrupt polling was in the hours before voting was due to start when a petrol tanker laden with gas cylinders was used in an attack on the electoral commission's headquarters in Abuja. The attackers tried to roll the unmanned tanker into the building, but the vehicle missed its target and came to a halt.
The presidential poll was running alongside elections for the National Assembly and Senate. The new government is scheduled to take power on 29 May. Nigeria - one of the world's biggest oil producers - is of key strategic interest to both the West and the growing economies of the East. But despite the country's huge oil wealth, tens of millions live in poverty.
Source: New York Times
Monday, April 16, 2007
Scandal, political tensions spur demands for Wolfowitz’s ouster at World Bank
Pressure for the resignation of Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank escalated over the weekend in the wake of a Group of Seven (G7) finance ministers meeting in Washington, where several participants suggested his position was untenable.
French Finance Minister Thierry Breton, for example, declined to say whether he believed Wolfowitz should be ousted but declared that the World Bank should be “ethically irreproachable,” an obvious reference to the seedy scandal involving a hefty pay raise and promotion for Wolfowitz’s girlfriend, Shaha Riza, a Libyan-born British citizen who was a career bureaucrat at the World Bank before US President George W. Bush appointed him to head the agency a little over two years ago.
“I fully trust the governing board to draw the consequences it must draw,” added Breton.
Germany’s development minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, stated that Wolfowitz must decide “whether he still has the credibility to represent the position of the World Bank.”
Swiss Economics Minister Doris Leuthard declared, “It is not the World Bank’s credibility, but Mr. Wolfowitz’s credibility that is on the line.”
Brazil’s minister, Guido Mantega, echoed these sentiments, adding, “We’ll have to see if Wolfowitz will be able to retain the moral authority necessary to fulfill his duties.”
Meanwhile, the World Bank’s Development Committee, made up of 24 finance or development ministers representing the member countries on the bank’s board, issued a statement declaring, “We have to ensure that the bank can effectively carry out its mandate and maintain its credibility and reputation as well as motivation of staff. The current situation is of great concern to all of us.”
A day earlier, Wolfowitz was booed at a meeting with staff of the international lending agency, who overwhelmingly support his removal. The World Bank Group Staff Association issued a statement Thursday declaring that it “seems impossible for the institution to move forward with any sense of purpose under the present leadership, especially in our endeavor to assist governments and their people in improving their own governance.”
The association added, “The President must acknowledge that his conduct has compromised the integrity and effectiveness of the World Bank Group and has destroyed the staff’s trust in his leadership. He must act honorably and resign.”
It is widely believed that the board, which in practice votes according to the dictates of the world governments that its members represent, will stall in making any decision on Wolfowitz’s fate, in hopes that he will resign.
For its part, the Bush administration issued statements of strong support and confidence in its former second in command at the Pentagon continuing at the helm of the World Bank, an institution that employs some 13,000 people worldwide and lends approximately $25 billion annually.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that underlying this sharp difference over the personal and professional fate of Wolfowitz are profound and deepening tensions between US and European capitalism, not only over the role of the World Bank but a host of economic and political issues.
The appointment of the former US assistant defense secretary and key architect of the US war of aggression against Iraq had been opposed from the outset by the majority of the World Bank’s professional staff—an April 2005 poll showed 90 percent of staffers against it—as well as the bulk of the world’s governments that participate in its deliberations.
Wolfowitz was and remains irrevocably identified with the lies about “weapons of mass destruction” and terrorist ties employed by the Bush administration to justify launching the 2003 US invasion of Iraq—a war that Wolfowitz had supported well before the September 11, 2001 attacks and before the election of Bush himself.
The appointment was widely perceived as another gesture of the right-wing US administration’s contempt toward the rest of the world, as well as its determination to subordinate every international institution to its own militarist campaign to assert US global hegemony.
In two years, Wolfowitz has managed to fully live up to these expectations.
The scandal involving preferential treatment for someone with whom he was romantically involved is only the latest—and most personally embarrassing—of a series of controversies that have surrounded Wolfowitz’s tenure at the World Bank.
Nonetheless, this affair has its own unmistakable significance, both in what it says about the personal mores of those who make up the top echelons of capitalist politics in America and about the broader cynicism and hypocrisy that pervades US foreign policy.
Wolfowitz disclosed his relationship with Riza in the spring of 2005, during his negotiation of a lucrative five-year contract to serve as the board’s president. The bank’s ethics committee determined that maintaining her on staff in a position over which Wolfowitz would effectively exercise managerial control would violate the bank’s conflict-of-interest rules.
As the Washington Post revealed in an article by Karen DeYoung Sunday, the deal that Wolfowitz cut for his girlfriend was part of an aggressive and avaricious campaign to reap unprecedented compensation and perks for himself and his cronies. In his own case, this involved the negotiation of clauses allowing him to earn a substantial second income through lecture and book deals.
In the case of Riza, Wolfowitz issued a personal order to the bank’s director of personnel to increase her annual salary to $193,590—a $60,000 hike—while she was reassigned from the World Bank’s Middle East press office to the US State Department. She worked—making more than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice herself—under the supervision of Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Elizabeth, who had been given her own nepotistic appointment to the number two position in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs only two months earlier. There Cheney’s daughter—who left the post last year—was reportedly a leading proponent of US aggression against Syria and Iran.
No doubt, the awarding of a salary increase that amounts to more than the total annual income earned by 75 percent of American households seemed like no big deal to Wolfowitz at the time. At the Pentagon, he had presided over multi-million-dollar corruption involving his Iraqi ally Ahmed Chalabi and the principal military contractor in Iraq—formerly headed by Dick Cheney—Halliburton.
Dictated unprecedented compensation for girlfriend, cronies
With the release of the details of his girlfriend’s pay deal—described by the staff association as “grossly out of line” with personnel policy—his office circulated a false claim that the arrangement had been approved by the World Bank’s relevant boards. In fact, as is now documented, Wolfowitz—together with Riza’s lawyer—dictated the terms, overriding the recommendations of the institution’s ethics committee and barring relevant personnel from any negotiations on the contract.
Riza, incredibly, has issued a statement claiming that she was “victimized” by this lucrative arrangement, and has demanded “an end the unwarranted and malicious public and private attacks.”
Similarly, Wolfowitz brought with him to the World Bank two right-wing Republican White House operatives—Robin Cleveland and Kevin Kellems—whom, the Post reports, he “installed in senior positions and rewarded with open-ended contracts and quarter-million-dollar, tax-free salaries, despite their lack of development experience.”
Significantly, just months after his installation at the World Bank, Wolfowitz named Suzanne Rich Folsom—an attorney and Republican activist—to head the agency’s Department of Institutional Integrity, which conducts internal corruption investigations. The appointment was made in the wake of the bank’s own search committee’s selection of nine suitable candidates, all of whom were rejected in favor of the Bush administration loyalist.
Wolfowitz’s arrogance and apparent personal corruption were all the more striking given his attempt to make a campaign against government corruption internationally the signature issue of his tenure at the World Bank. Like the “war on terror” and the crusade for “democracy,” this campaign became more and more obviously a cover for the pursuit of US global interests.
Corruption was invoked as a pretext for cutting off loans to countries under conditions in which it served Washington’s foreign policy purposes, while ignoring corruption whenever it would have cut across American interests.
Thus, Uzbekistan, which had received half a billion dollars in loans from the World Bank since 1992, had an aid package suddenly revoked on Wolfowitz’s orders in September 2005, just two months after the country’s dictator, Islam A. Karimov, terminated a US basing agreement, ordering American troops and warplanes out of the country.
When it came to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other regimes of strategic importance to US military operations, however, the concern for corruption went out the window.
According to the Washington Post, “Both [World Bank] staff and management also have raised concerns over what several described as Wolfowitz’s insistence that the bank accelerate its lending to Iraq and open an office there.” The Iraqi government is universally acknowledged to be among the most corrupt on earth, and in the end, the World Bank proved unable to recruit qualified personnel to staff any such office, because of justified concern over the civil war conditions prevailing in the country.
Wolfowitz’s international critics have ample cause to press for his removal from the World Bank. However, underlying the firestorm over the unethical and reactionary policies pursued by a man who is by the strictest definition a war criminal are powerful international economic and political tensions that are increasingly coming to the surface.
The crisis confronting Wolfowitz at the World Bank is inseparable from the debacle created by the criminal enterprise with which his name will always be associated: the US war in Iraq. The turn against him by the ministers of one government after another is a further indication of the political isolation of the Bush administration both at home and abroad.
More fundamentally, the ex-Pentagon official’s predicament is a manifestation of the changed position of US capitalism in global economic and political affairs.
The World Bank—together with the International Monetary Fund—was one of the key institutions set up under US hegemony in the aftermath of the Second World War for the purpose of reconstructing European capitalism and creating the conditions for the further expansion of American capitalism itself.
Given Washington’s preeminent role in the institution’s creation, as well as the predominance of US finance capital in world economic affairs during the postwar period, the US government was given the right to appoint the president of the World Bank, as well as a share of the votes on its board of directors that amounted to effective veto power.
This share, however, has been reduced because of the relative decline of US economic preeminence and the rise of powerful capitalist rivals in Europe and Asia. While Washington held just over 37 percent of the voting rights at the foundation of the World Bank, today its share has been reduced to a little more than 16 percent. The four next most powerful shareholders in the bank—Japan, Germany, France and the United Kingdom—can now outvote the US. China, which still is allocated less than 3 percent of the votes, is making a strong case for strengthening its position at American expense.
Nonetheless, the bank remains headquartered in Washington, and the US government continues to exert decisive influence over its decisions.
But to the extent that American imperialism remains the dominant global power today, it is not on the basis of its economic might or productive capacity. Rather, it is attempting to compensate for its relative economic decline by military means. This inevitably generates immense inter-imperialist conflicts and tensions.
While for the most part, Washington’s rivals in Europe and Asia have bowed to US militarism, they have not done so without bitter resentment of Washington’s dominance and a determination to pursue their own interests as capitalist powers. In the ugly scandal surrounding Paul Wolfowitz, they have found a means of furthering these aims.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
French Finance Minister Thierry Breton, for example, declined to say whether he believed Wolfowitz should be ousted but declared that the World Bank should be “ethically irreproachable,” an obvious reference to the seedy scandal involving a hefty pay raise and promotion for Wolfowitz’s girlfriend, Shaha Riza, a Libyan-born British citizen who was a career bureaucrat at the World Bank before US President George W. Bush appointed him to head the agency a little over two years ago.
“I fully trust the governing board to draw the consequences it must draw,” added Breton.
Germany’s development minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, stated that Wolfowitz must decide “whether he still has the credibility to represent the position of the World Bank.”
Swiss Economics Minister Doris Leuthard declared, “It is not the World Bank’s credibility, but Mr. Wolfowitz’s credibility that is on the line.”
Brazil’s minister, Guido Mantega, echoed these sentiments, adding, “We’ll have to see if Wolfowitz will be able to retain the moral authority necessary to fulfill his duties.”
Meanwhile, the World Bank’s Development Committee, made up of 24 finance or development ministers representing the member countries on the bank’s board, issued a statement declaring, “We have to ensure that the bank can effectively carry out its mandate and maintain its credibility and reputation as well as motivation of staff. The current situation is of great concern to all of us.”
A day earlier, Wolfowitz was booed at a meeting with staff of the international lending agency, who overwhelmingly support his removal. The World Bank Group Staff Association issued a statement Thursday declaring that it “seems impossible for the institution to move forward with any sense of purpose under the present leadership, especially in our endeavor to assist governments and their people in improving their own governance.”
The association added, “The President must acknowledge that his conduct has compromised the integrity and effectiveness of the World Bank Group and has destroyed the staff’s trust in his leadership. He must act honorably and resign.”
It is widely believed that the board, which in practice votes according to the dictates of the world governments that its members represent, will stall in making any decision on Wolfowitz’s fate, in hopes that he will resign.
For its part, the Bush administration issued statements of strong support and confidence in its former second in command at the Pentagon continuing at the helm of the World Bank, an institution that employs some 13,000 people worldwide and lends approximately $25 billion annually.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that underlying this sharp difference over the personal and professional fate of Wolfowitz are profound and deepening tensions between US and European capitalism, not only over the role of the World Bank but a host of economic and political issues.
The appointment of the former US assistant defense secretary and key architect of the US war of aggression against Iraq had been opposed from the outset by the majority of the World Bank’s professional staff—an April 2005 poll showed 90 percent of staffers against it—as well as the bulk of the world’s governments that participate in its deliberations.
Wolfowitz was and remains irrevocably identified with the lies about “weapons of mass destruction” and terrorist ties employed by the Bush administration to justify launching the 2003 US invasion of Iraq—a war that Wolfowitz had supported well before the September 11, 2001 attacks and before the election of Bush himself.
The appointment was widely perceived as another gesture of the right-wing US administration’s contempt toward the rest of the world, as well as its determination to subordinate every international institution to its own militarist campaign to assert US global hegemony.
In two years, Wolfowitz has managed to fully live up to these expectations.
The scandal involving preferential treatment for someone with whom he was romantically involved is only the latest—and most personally embarrassing—of a series of controversies that have surrounded Wolfowitz’s tenure at the World Bank.
Nonetheless, this affair has its own unmistakable significance, both in what it says about the personal mores of those who make up the top echelons of capitalist politics in America and about the broader cynicism and hypocrisy that pervades US foreign policy.
Wolfowitz disclosed his relationship with Riza in the spring of 2005, during his negotiation of a lucrative five-year contract to serve as the board’s president. The bank’s ethics committee determined that maintaining her on staff in a position over which Wolfowitz would effectively exercise managerial control would violate the bank’s conflict-of-interest rules.
As the Washington Post revealed in an article by Karen DeYoung Sunday, the deal that Wolfowitz cut for his girlfriend was part of an aggressive and avaricious campaign to reap unprecedented compensation and perks for himself and his cronies. In his own case, this involved the negotiation of clauses allowing him to earn a substantial second income through lecture and book deals.
In the case of Riza, Wolfowitz issued a personal order to the bank’s director of personnel to increase her annual salary to $193,590—a $60,000 hike—while she was reassigned from the World Bank’s Middle East press office to the US State Department. She worked—making more than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice herself—under the supervision of Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Elizabeth, who had been given her own nepotistic appointment to the number two position in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs only two months earlier. There Cheney’s daughter—who left the post last year—was reportedly a leading proponent of US aggression against Syria and Iran.
No doubt, the awarding of a salary increase that amounts to more than the total annual income earned by 75 percent of American households seemed like no big deal to Wolfowitz at the time. At the Pentagon, he had presided over multi-million-dollar corruption involving his Iraqi ally Ahmed Chalabi and the principal military contractor in Iraq—formerly headed by Dick Cheney—Halliburton.
Dictated unprecedented compensation for girlfriend, cronies
With the release of the details of his girlfriend’s pay deal—described by the staff association as “grossly out of line” with personnel policy—his office circulated a false claim that the arrangement had been approved by the World Bank’s relevant boards. In fact, as is now documented, Wolfowitz—together with Riza’s lawyer—dictated the terms, overriding the recommendations of the institution’s ethics committee and barring relevant personnel from any negotiations on the contract.
Riza, incredibly, has issued a statement claiming that she was “victimized” by this lucrative arrangement, and has demanded “an end the unwarranted and malicious public and private attacks.”
Similarly, Wolfowitz brought with him to the World Bank two right-wing Republican White House operatives—Robin Cleveland and Kevin Kellems—whom, the Post reports, he “installed in senior positions and rewarded with open-ended contracts and quarter-million-dollar, tax-free salaries, despite their lack of development experience.”
Significantly, just months after his installation at the World Bank, Wolfowitz named Suzanne Rich Folsom—an attorney and Republican activist—to head the agency’s Department of Institutional Integrity, which conducts internal corruption investigations. The appointment was made in the wake of the bank’s own search committee’s selection of nine suitable candidates, all of whom were rejected in favor of the Bush administration loyalist.
Wolfowitz’s arrogance and apparent personal corruption were all the more striking given his attempt to make a campaign against government corruption internationally the signature issue of his tenure at the World Bank. Like the “war on terror” and the crusade for “democracy,” this campaign became more and more obviously a cover for the pursuit of US global interests.
Corruption was invoked as a pretext for cutting off loans to countries under conditions in which it served Washington’s foreign policy purposes, while ignoring corruption whenever it would have cut across American interests.
Thus, Uzbekistan, which had received half a billion dollars in loans from the World Bank since 1992, had an aid package suddenly revoked on Wolfowitz’s orders in September 2005, just two months after the country’s dictator, Islam A. Karimov, terminated a US basing agreement, ordering American troops and warplanes out of the country.
When it came to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other regimes of strategic importance to US military operations, however, the concern for corruption went out the window.
According to the Washington Post, “Both [World Bank] staff and management also have raised concerns over what several described as Wolfowitz’s insistence that the bank accelerate its lending to Iraq and open an office there.” The Iraqi government is universally acknowledged to be among the most corrupt on earth, and in the end, the World Bank proved unable to recruit qualified personnel to staff any such office, because of justified concern over the civil war conditions prevailing in the country.
Wolfowitz’s international critics have ample cause to press for his removal from the World Bank. However, underlying the firestorm over the unethical and reactionary policies pursued by a man who is by the strictest definition a war criminal are powerful international economic and political tensions that are increasingly coming to the surface.
The crisis confronting Wolfowitz at the World Bank is inseparable from the debacle created by the criminal enterprise with which his name will always be associated: the US war in Iraq. The turn against him by the ministers of one government after another is a further indication of the political isolation of the Bush administration both at home and abroad.
More fundamentally, the ex-Pentagon official’s predicament is a manifestation of the changed position of US capitalism in global economic and political affairs.
The World Bank—together with the International Monetary Fund—was one of the key institutions set up under US hegemony in the aftermath of the Second World War for the purpose of reconstructing European capitalism and creating the conditions for the further expansion of American capitalism itself.
Given Washington’s preeminent role in the institution’s creation, as well as the predominance of US finance capital in world economic affairs during the postwar period, the US government was given the right to appoint the president of the World Bank, as well as a share of the votes on its board of directors that amounted to effective veto power.
This share, however, has been reduced because of the relative decline of US economic preeminence and the rise of powerful capitalist rivals in Europe and Asia. While Washington held just over 37 percent of the voting rights at the foundation of the World Bank, today its share has been reduced to a little more than 16 percent. The four next most powerful shareholders in the bank—Japan, Germany, France and the United Kingdom—can now outvote the US. China, which still is allocated less than 3 percent of the votes, is making a strong case for strengthening its position at American expense.
Nonetheless, the bank remains headquartered in Washington, and the US government continues to exert decisive influence over its decisions.
But to the extent that American imperialism remains the dominant global power today, it is not on the basis of its economic might or productive capacity. Rather, it is attempting to compensate for its relative economic decline by military means. This inevitably generates immense inter-imperialist conflicts and tensions.
While for the most part, Washington’s rivals in Europe and Asia have bowed to US militarism, they have not done so without bitter resentment of Washington’s dominance and a determination to pursue their own interests as capitalist powers. In the ugly scandal surrounding Paul Wolfowitz, they have found a means of furthering these aims.
Source: World Socialist Web Site
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)