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Posted by Doctor Jonas (Member # 481) on :
 
I know that you can't believe in these multinational institutions, like the IMF or even sometimes the UN. But the World Bank has now shown too evidently that it's just a political and economical tool from the powerful countries. Even if sometimes it could do good with its loans.

Just a link to the news: Paul Wolfowitz named head of the World Bank.

Oh, and I really saw all the other countries exerting enourmous pressure for avoiding that this would happen.
 

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Posted by David Sands (Member # 132) on :
 
I must say that international finance is not my bag. However, much of the problem with the World Bank parallels a problem I've seen in law schools with the catch-all subject "poverty law." Allow me to explain.

Lots of well-meaning and enthusiastic young lawyers in the law schools of the United States (some of them my friends) want to dedicate their lives to alleviating poverty. They usually demand a specialized course in the subject. They take that one course and graduate, hoping to dedicate a significant portion of their professional lives to causes like the Legal Aid Corporation. (Essentially, free lawyers for the poor in civil cases. Naturally these guys are way overworked. I can speak from firsthand experience on that.) The problem I've noticed is that areas like "poverty law" aren't really concerned with poverty per se. They usually end up as very shallow introductions to other subjects in which lawyers who deal in poverty work.

A better way to learn the skills necessary to helping these people is learning the specialized subjects that poverty lawyers uses from one day to another: criminal procedure, secured credit, bankruptcy, administrative law, negotiation, landlord/tenant law, domestic relations, etc. Learn those and you�ll be much more useful to your clients than taking a single course that barely gets you into the specific problems the poor have. What those who demand courses in poverty law are asking for is really symbolic. They want to schools to demonstrate their dedication to helping the poor by educating their students in this area. Too often, they don�t understand that you will have to go deeper than talking about �poverty� if you want to get something done.

Now, take this back up to the World Bank. Commonly, I read those of a liberal internationalist bent saying we are not doing enough to alleviate poverty, help the environment, and preserve local cultures by changing the lending practices of the World Bank. They're angry that appointing someone like Wolfowitz is a political signal that we don't care about the world's poor. However, the reasons you have these problems are not necessarily about poverty, the environment, and the sociology of different peoples. Other phenomena are preventing these people from getting out of poverty, preserving their environment, and maintaining their local cultures and traditions. Want to stamp out poverty? Give them opportunities to work when overseas corporations want to take a chance by outsourcing to foreign labor. Protect the wealth those workers accumulate with property rights. Save their environment by making the parents in these countries wealthy enough so that they can use their money to do more than feed starving children.

If Wolfowitz can steer the World Bank away from just �poverty reduction� and improve associated measures of quality of life (e.g., transparency, property rights, independent judiciaries, local capital investment markets, difficult as it is to measure these) poverty will take care of itself. We all want to help the Third World solve its problems. However, declarative acts that do little to change the internal mechanics that prevent nations from growing are a poor place to start. If there�s a good chance to believe Wolfowitz can make a dent in some of those self-destructive behaviors, I say give the man a chance to prove himself.
 

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Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
 
And let's be fair: his name does come next alphabetically.
 

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Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
 
But, OK, more to the point: his status as a neoconservative policy maker, and thus his presumed agreement with said set of economic policies, has nothing to do with his actual qualifications for the job. There are a great many thinkers who would agree with your positions, David, but I would hope, were you the one doing the hiring, that you would consider actual experience in the matter at hand as a factor having at least as much weight as their ideological allegiance.
 

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Posted by David Sands (Member # 132) on :
 
Sol: Nothing I would wholly disagree with you on that. I simply haven't had the time to follow this story like the others, but I've heard it said that he's not such a left-field candidate as his opponents would claim. I know that when the cabinet assignments were being made in early 2001, there was something of a debate over whether he should have been put in the Defense Department. There were some that would have preferred him in the State Department since his area of expertise is East Asia.

Now, precisely what subspecialties he proficient in, I can't say I know. But I'm not sure that's as important as many think. Past a certain point, another decade spent on a specialty only results in diminishing returns. A technocracy is one approach to take with government, but it's not one that always results in the kind of coordinated change that the current administration thinks the world needs.

And appointing from within the specialties that might give someone the qualifications on paper isn't a prerequisite to doing the job well subsequently. E.g., Earl Warren had no judicial experience before his tenure with the Supreme Court. He did pretty well by the estimations of many. Another example is Vaclav Havel. He didn't have much government experience as a playwright, but he did an acceptable job as president that needed to rebuild after the disaster of Communism.

What seems important about his appointment is not so much that he's a whiz with banking (which I doubt he's completely unknowledgeable in), but that he's what industrial-organizational psychologists call a "change agent". He's there to shift the focus of the culture from one set of values to another. I suppose that could be characterized as an appointment based in part on ideology. But it's not like the other side doesn't do the same thing. Presidents have been appointing agents of their ideas since the dawn of the Republic. I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that the appointment shouldn't be criticized because it's ideological and because his background in international banking is not as deep as that of those who have spent lifetimes on these issues, but because there are specific policies and ideals that Wolfowitz brings to the table that are incompatible with interests of those he would be serving.
 

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Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
 
Well, let's be frank. The opposition to Wolfowitz from most quarters comes from his involvement in Iraq, either because they believe the whole war to be illegal or at best inadvisable, or because they believe his planning was wholly inadequate.

Now, cards on the table, this is the direction I lean in personally, but that particular set of incidents aside, the operations of the World Bank (on which I am by no means well-informed) require the kind of consensus building that, for whatever reason, was absent from our Recent Mesopotamian Adventure. Yet we're told that, hey, the World Bank is a large organization, the Pentagon is a large organization; same difference, right? But even if one were to agree completely with the decisions of some hypothetical Pentagon apparatchik, a warmaking enterprise is not the same thing as an enterprise charged with promoting financial security.
 

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Posted by Nim' (Member # 205) on :
 
Plus, the planning and application of the second gulf war reeked of shortsightedness and underestimation of opposition and required management initiatives.
I would only assume that world banking and monetary resource manipulation on an international scale demands deeply farsighted and subtle minds, which, to me, calls to mind someone who's the polar opposite from Wolfowitz in character. Not that I know his favorite color or Pepsi/Coke choice, but he's been kind of visible in the news for the last years, even to europe.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
A local editorial pointed out that this is a clever way of avoiding having Wolfowitz step down in disgrace after all his Iraq-bungling.
After all, promoting him to this new position gets him out of the Iraq spotlight and says "we did nothing wrong" at the same time.

If they had asked him to step down from his post, it would have been admiting there were serious problems with the case they built for war.

...and we all know, the Bush administration does not make any mistakes, right?

So now this fuckwad is in charge of the World Bank.
 

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Posted by Doctor Jonas (Member # 481) on :
 
What I don't understand is how Bush got the complicity of the board of directors at the Bank to appoint him, and no serious complaints from any country have been placed... come on, not even Castro said a word.
 

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Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
 
Well, traditionally the U.S. selects the head of the World Bank while Europe gets to choose. . . I'm not sure, but some other international body's leader. The IMF maybe?

Ah, here we go, from the Wikipedia:

quote:

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By convention, the Bank president has always been a US citizen, while the Managing Director of the IMF has been a European with the exception when US citizen Anne Krueger held the position until a new director was found. There is no requirement that a nomination by the United States government must be accepted by European and other partners.

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quote:

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Well, traditionally the U.S. selects the head of the World Bank while Europe gets to choose. . . I'm not sure, but some other international body's leader. The IMF maybe?

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Well, I know there has been talk of The Leader nominating Gordon Brown as head of the IMF to get him out of the way.
 

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Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
 
"I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that the appointment shouldn't be criticized because it's ideological (...) but because there are specific policies and ideals that Wolfowitz brings to the table that are incompatible with interests of those he would be serving."

No, it should be criticized because someone with the ideals of Wolfowitz should not be head of an organization with the ideals of the World Bank, which we all know he is there to bring in line with the ones of those who nominated him. Sure, both sides like to maneuver their own people into positions of power, but the forwarding of national agendas should end where blatancy begins, if you know what I mean.
 

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
 
If "blatancy" wasn't smashed beyond all hope of recognition back when John Negroponte was appointed ambassador to Iraq (if not even earlier), then I don't think it exists.
 

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Posted by Nim' (Member # 205) on :
 
This may sound a bit "out there" to some of you but I think I've discovered just how Wolfowitz managed to get the big chair at World Bank, it's an old trick my grampa referred to as "the Cardmaster", done in two steps;

Step 1: Wolfowitz buys nice suitjacket for, say, ninetyeight dollars. Ok, fair enough, right?

Step 2: Now get this, he wins an internship that gets him ahead of the game? Well I'd have to say that's priceless!
 

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Posted by Nim' (Member # 205) on :
 
And here I thought americanos knew their commercials.
 

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Posted by Doctor Jonas (Member # 481) on :
 
Sorry, Nim, but your public isn't what it used to be.
 

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
 
I'm more worried about why Swedes know our commercials.
 

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Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
 
Because your TV shows contantly reference them. I have never had relations with Armor hotdogs, but I still know that stupid jingle.
 

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Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
 
There's an Armor hotdog jingle?
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
If they were available, would you "have relations" with a hot dog?

...and do I really want to know?
 

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Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
 
That one that goes:

"Hotdogs, Armor hotdogs /
What kinds of kids eat Armor hotdogs? /
Fat kids, skinny kids, kids who climb on rocks /
..."

And so on. The Simpsons has done it twice, and I've seen it elsewhere, so don't tell me it doesn't exist.

(We do get "I feel like Chicken Tonight", though.)
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
Huh. I get the first one (though that ad campaign was over looong before I was really watching TV as a child) but I've never actually seen the "Chicken commercial".

I know the Simpsons episode you're referring to even: the first Thanksgiving ep, IIRC.
 

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Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
 
No, the first Thanksgiving one is the one where Bart destroys Lisa's centrepiece. This is a later one.

The "chicken tonight" one isn't really played over here any more, but (like I imagine the Armor one there) it has entered the collecctive consciousness somewhat for its sheer awfulness.

"Doesn't this family know any songs that aren't commercials?"

(They also reference the Armor one when Skinner pretends to have a bomb strapped to his chest. But it's not a bomb. It's hot dogs. Armor hot dogs.)
 

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Posted by Doctor Jonas (Member # 481) on :
 
And the hotdog commercial/jingle they sung was the Oscar Meyer one, not the Armour one, when Jay Sherman was at the Simpsons house.
 

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Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
 
Yeah, not that episode. The one I'm talking about is from (I think) "Mrs Bouvier's Lover". The one where Grandpa and then Burns both make a play for Marge's mum.
 

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Posted by Doctor Jonas (Member # 481) on :
 
Ahhh, they make plagiarisms from everywhere in that one. Yes, it's likely, though I forgot about it.
 

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Posted by Nim' (Member # 205) on :
 
TSN:

quote:

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I'm more worried about why Swedes know our commercials.

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