Paul Wolfowitz to head World Bank?

[Allison]

Wow, Bush certainly hasn't been pulling any punches with his recent nominations. He's raised eyebrows again by nominating another controversial hardliner for a post on the world stage.

Say what you want about Bush, but he's got some balls, that's for sure.

http://www.reuters.com/financeNewsArticle.jhtml?type=bondsNews&storyID=7924983

[Rooster]

"Several international groups, including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and ActionAid, called Wolfowitz a bad choice."

All the more reason to put him in!

[Hammer]

I have to admit that it seems like an odd choice. Of course, I have no idea what the responsibilities of that post include. Just seems odd going from DOD into banking.

[Rooster]

True. Perhaps this is a way for Bush to put him in an important position yet keep him out of trouble (and distance his administration from the negative aspects of Iraq)?

[cogsliastro]

if thats the case roo,dont you think that rumsfeld should be gone?

[Grundy]

Interesting POV from an ex-World Bank consultant, John Perkins. Basically he points out that the role of the WB is to put third world countries into so much debt they can be easily exploited for US interests, you know..like how the mafia works. This is a perfect job for Wolfowitz.

Taken from: http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/perkins.html

BRANCACCIO:

For much of his career, as a consultant in international development, John Perkins says he was an empire builder… though maybe not in ways you'd think.

Perkins calls himself an "economic hit man" — a kind of secret agent of U.S. power, armed not with a Walther PPK pistol but a set of corrupt economic spreadsheets. His job, he says, was to convince developing countries to borrow money to build expensive projects. Projects like roads, dams and power grids that would ostensibly improve the quality of life.

But there was a catch: These projects would also leave these countries with more debt than they could ever hope to repay. This crushing debt, Perkins says, left those countries with little choice but to follow America's lead on foreign and economic policies. His controversial book, CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN has been on THE NEW YORK TIMES best seller list for 11 weeks.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Well, John Perkins, welcome to NOW.

JOHN PERKINS: Thank you, it's great to be here, David.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: One of the things about reading your book is that you have to just take it on faith that you're being up front. I don't mean to be unkind, but even something as basic as the word in the title, "economic hit man," I mean it sounds like something a publisher came up with. But you say this was the term that was actually used in the biz.

JOHN PERKINS: Well, we used it tongue in cheek. But the term was one that really stuck with us because in fact, what we were called upon to do is very similar to what Mafia hit men do. Except we were a lot more efficient about it. A lot more secretive. A lot more professional and did it on a much larger scale.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: It's true that organized crime does use debt to exercise control. There's a way to do that. When someone is in hock, they are in your thrall, in a sense. And you've seen it--

JOHN PERKINS: Right.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: In this country. You're really translating that to the international sphere.

JOHN PERKINS: Yes. It's a game that's very very old. It's been played by empires for a long time. And we've taken it to a whole new level of perfection since World War II and especially in the last four decades. In fact we've managed to create what I believe is history's only truly global empire. And for the first time we've created an empire primarily without the military.

When the Romans or the Conquistadors or the English or the French sent their armies out to the world and created these empires, everybody knew they were doing it. The armies were obvious. But we've done it in a way that's much more subtle. A way that many people in the United States still believe that most of our aid is altruistic. It isn't altruistic for the most part. It's done in the process of creating this empire.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: But just for the sake of living with yourself when you're a younger man, I mean you must have said to yourself, "I am helping the population of this developing country, be it Indonesia, be it someplace else, by bringing, for instance, a hydroelectric project to them." Yes, it'll cost them a lot, yes, they'll have to borrow a lot. But ultimately you must have been guided by the sense that you're trying to help out poor folks.

JOHN PERKINS: Well, that's what I'd learned in business school and that's the model that the World Bank presents. But if you really get to know these countries, and I did, I spent a lot of time in them, what I saw was that the money that was going to build these projects like the hydroelectric projects or the highways or the ports, hardly ever actually made its way to the country.

The money was transferred from banks in Washington, DC to banks in Houston or San Francisco or New York where most of it went to big US corporations. The ones we heard a lot about these days like Halliburton and Bechtel. And these corporations then built these projects and the projects primarily served the very rich in those countries.

The electricity, the highways, the ports were seldom even used by the people who needed them the most. But the country would be left holding a huge debt and it would be such a large debt that they couldn't possibly repay it. And so at some point in time, we economic hit men, we go back into the country and say, "Look, you owe us a lot of money, you can't pay your debts. Therefore sell us your oil at a real cheap price or vote with us at a UN vote or give us land for a military base or send some of your troops to some country where we want you to support us."

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You think that from the word go that this kind of lending was meant to essentially put these countries into hock?

JOHN PERKINS: There's no question in my mind that this was what I was intended to do was to go out and create these projects that would bring billions of dollars back to US corporations and create projects that would put these countries into such deep debt, that in essence, they became part of our empire. They became our slaves in a way.

And, it's important to understand that what I was doing was not illegal. It is not illegal. It should be. But it isn't. Now, if I were a banker and I were to go to you and convince you to take a loan that I knew you'd never be able to repay, that's criminal. I could be taken to court for that or ...

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Yeah, it's like selling a naïve investor some sort of fancy investment vehicle. It's against the law.

JOHN PERKINS: It's exactly, it's against the law. But on the international scale, it's not against the law. We write the laws. And if you go to the textbooks in the business schools you'll see that increasing gross national product is toted as something that's good for development. And that's and we usually did that. However, in most of these countries or many of these countries, when you increase gross national product, you may only be increasing the wealth of a very few families who own most of the major resources in the country.

The people who live off subsistence farming and other activities or close to subsistence, don't gain anything. In fact, you build a hydroelectric dam across their river, destroys much of the life downstream. It destroys their farms, it destroys their fishing. It does them a great deal of damage. And they're left holding this debt that should be going to pay for their education, health services, other social services. But can't, because it's owed to us.

The reason I wrote the book, David, is because finally after 9/11 I realized that the American people must know what's going on. Because most Americans don't know. And the that 9/11 was just symbolic of a tremendous amount of anger around the world. And we in the United States don't are not aware of that. September 11th made us somewhat aware of it although I think we've really covered that aspect of it over. We say this is a rogue terrorist.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Or that it's based in sort of religious passion. Or that it's something about Saudi Arabia in particular. This isn't really about the United States and its international relations. That's the argument.

JOHN PERKINS: That's the argument. But in fact, if you go to Catholic countries in South America, you'll see that Osama bin Laden is a is a hero amongst a lot of people. He's on billboards. He's on T-shirts. It's very unfortunate that this mass murderer has become the symbol of a David who is standing up to a Goliath. The way they see it. He's like a Robin Hood to many people.

Twenty-four thousand people die every day from lack of nutrition. Thirty thousand children die every single day from - diseases for which we have cures. For which we have medicines. And that shouldn't be happening. It doesn't need to happen. That's over 50,000 people every single day dying terrible, painful, awful, needless deaths. So 3,000 at the World Trade Center was atrocious, terrible; 200,000 or whatever the tsunami is atrocious and terrible. And they make the news. But these 50,000 plus that die every single day needlessly, don't ever make the news. And their families and the people in those countries are very angry. Because we could prevent that. And in fact, our policies and especially many of our corporate policies, foster those kinds of conditions that create situations where those people are dying of lack of nutrition and lack of medicines.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: There will be Americans who reflect on this and say look we tried to share the wealth and for whatever reason, it came to naught.

JOHN PERKINS: We didn't try to share the wealth. We Americans believe that that's what we're doing. We're a good hearted compassionate people. But the fact of the matter the ones who make the decisions I was in that position. This is a lot of people out there today in that position. They're getting very wealthy. Their corporations are getting wealthy, and a few families in these developing countries who collaborate with us in this process, are getting fabulously wealthy, too.

But the poor are getting much poorer and the gap between rich and poor has increased tremendously over the last 30 years. Over this time when the World Bank and the United Nations has told us that we're making improvements in fact the gap is has more than doubled.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You know, I saw a World Bank official quoted in regard to your book, hadn't read the book. Saw some account. But thought that your view of all this was really out of date. And regardless of whether or not your vision of this is really what happened, World Bank has moved on.

Even now they've shifted. I saw a statistic in 1980 something like three or five percent of their lending went into things like health and pensions and education. Now it's up to 22 percent. They're not giving so much money to big dam projects that runs up the debt.

JOHN PERKINS: If you really look behind those numbers of schools and hospitals and those kinds of things, you'll see that yes, we've spent more money on constructing those types of facilities — building the schools and the hospitals. The big construction companies have gotten rich building them.

But look behind the numbers and see how much money we've put into training health specialists. Doctors and nurses and technicians or how much money we've put into teaching into training teachers. To fill the schools. It's not enough to build schools and hospitals. You've also got to create the whole system that allows for better education and better health care. It's- I'm very sad to say it's a system that has really pulled the wool over people's eyes. We paint a very good picture, but when you go deep in, you find a very different story.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: John, I appreciate this. The book is called CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN. John Perkins, thank you very much.

JOHN PERKINS: You're welcome, David, it's been my pleasure.

[Rooster]

Ya know what kinda blows his jaded/cynical perspective though?

We forgive BILLIONS of dollars of debt every year to developing countries.

And we're in a no-win situation. If we don't provide logistical support to get them out of the stone age- we're greedy techno-scrooges. If we do, we can't exactly provide it for FREE, people have to earn a living. So they go in debt - at least their people are better off for it.

I'm not saying his perspective isn't accurate - but there's always 3 sides to the truth.

[Allison]

Ya know what kinda blows his jaded/cynical perspective though?

We forgive BILLIONS of dollars of debt every year to developing countries.



Actually, that could support his claims. If we grant loans that we know can't be repaid in an effort to exercise control over other countries, it only makes sense that we'd forgive the debt at some point in exchange for something we want, an airbase, a vote at the U.N., whatever.

I don't know about the accuracy of what this guy is saying, and I've never really paid that much attention to what the World Bank does, but I think it's peaked my interest enough to pay better attention. I was just saying to Grundy today how I always thought that the forgiving of debt was some big altruistic event. Now I'm going to have to wonder.

[Rooster]

The only alternative would be to withhold loans - and you know how well that would turn out.