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May 1, 2007

World Bank President blog corrals Wolfowitz chatter

Here's the place to track the endgame on the Wolfowitz matter: World Bank President.

Alex Wilks, coordinator of the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) and headquartered in Brussels, writes in the "About" statement on the site,

...This blog was originally set up the day in January 2005 that former World Bank president James Wolfensohn announced he would be retiring. We wanted to shine a light on the medieval process for choosing the head of this very powerful institution - the fact that the position is in the gift of the US government.

Sadly despite our efforts to expose the behind the scenes manouevres and dealings, George W. Bush did get to tap a candidate on the shoulder and put him at the top of the Bank.

We tracked and informed the global reaction to the Wolfowitz appointment, almost entirely of alarm, but decided in April 2005 to put the site on ice and let the tracking of Wolfowitz in office take place elsewhere.

The predictions on this site about the problems Wolfowitz would cause proved true and in April 2007 bubbled up very dramatically in the world's media. The time had come to start blogging again...

While Wilks posts under his own name, recents reports hail from "Deep Insider," "The Beaver" and "A Washington source" and several others.

The latest post, from "Deep Insider":

Leadership Everyone's favorite phrase in the otherwise indigestible statement Paul Wolfowitz so kindly emailed to everyone at the Bank yesterday (three hours after his press flaks had showered it on a bored Washington press corps) was his pleading closing complaint. He denounced the process, which was intended
"to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that I am an ineffective leader"

No one has to work on that. We all know what happens with him and his entourage on the 12th floor, and it's not management. It's tourism.

*Eurodad describes itself as "a network of 48 development non-governmental organisations from 15 European countries working for national economic and international financing policies that achieve poverty eradication and the empowerment of the poor." It includes Oxfam, which most Americans have heard of.

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 10:31 AM | Permalink