Not That I Want To Hear About Him, But What The Hell Has Happened To

[Dinger]

Wolfowitz? Jeez, it's like he disappeared off the face of the earth. Maybe he's too busy licking combs yet.

[TAPat]

1. I was just wondering the same thing yesterday! nt

[emulatorloo]

2. 4-20-2006: Wolfowitz Turns Outside U.S. for World Bank Picks

<snip>

Wolfowitz Turns Outside U.S. for World Bank Picks
Staff Selections May Temper Criticism
By Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 20, 2006; D01

World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz, who has drawn criticism for depending on a small group of U.S. aides, has selected a New Zealander and a Salvadoran to be managing directors, the topmost staff rank at the bank, according to a senior bank economist.

The two are Juan Jose Daboub, a former minister of finance and head of El Salvador's largest telecommunications company, and Graeme Wheeler, the bank's acting managing director. The selections, disclosed by the economist on condition of anonymity, have been presented confidentially to the bank's board and will be announced publicly during the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which are getting underway this week.

The appointments are by far the most important move to date by Wolfowitz to fill vacancies at senior levels. Since he took the bank's helm in June, a number of top officials have left, some because of dissatisfaction with the new leadership and some because of normal retirements. The large number of vacancies has aroused intense concern among staffers that Wolfowitz is being too slow in giving them direction; many of them have also chafed about the influence wielded by several Americans with ties to the Bush administration, including two who worked with Wolfowitz during his years as deputy secretary of defense and were given high-ranking staff posts.

The selections of Wheeler and Daboub may dampen some of that dissension. Wheeler, a former official of the New Zealand Treasury, is a bank veteran and has been serving as acting managing director since the post was vacated last year by Shengman Zhang of China, who became the most powerful staffer under Wolfowitz's predecessor, James D. Wolfensohn.

<snip>

more at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/19/AR2006041902621_pf.html

[notadmblnd]

3. he's busy running the World Bank

nt

[0007]

4. Here's the latest....

Read more here

World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz, who has drawn criticism for depending on a small group of U.S. aides, has selected a New Zealander and a Salvadoran to be managing directors, the topmost staff rank at the bank, according to a senior bank economist.

The two are Juan Jose Daboub, a former minister of finance and head of El Salvador's largest telecommunications company, and Graeme Wheeler, the bank's acting managing director. The selections, disclosed by the economist on condition of anonymity, have been presented confidentially to the bank's board and will be announced publicly during the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which are getting underway this week.div class=excerpt]

[ms liberty]

5. He's gone from helping destroy America to...

being the head of the World Bank, where he can help destroy the world. Destroying the world requires maintaining a lower profile, doncha know.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

6. Searching for corruption

World Bank demonstrations in DC this weekend. Pouring rain too.

[swag]

7. He's now King of the Economic Hit Men.

[FloridaPat]

8. Heard he wants to put a "branch" of the bank in Iraq. Make it easy

for Iraq to get "loans" for all that oil.

[MADem]

9. Fascinating piece in WAPO about him (dated tomorrow)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21/AR2006042101756.html

It starts out with full blown praise, and then settles down a bit. Worth reading.

The big finish:

...So, responding to corruption is complicated. But thanks to his habitual mistrust of bureaucratic wisdom, Wolfowitz failed to absorb this point from the experts working under him. Instead, he and his immediate circle preached an idealistic message of "zero tolerance" on corruption, reminiscent of the "you're with us or you're against us" rhetoric that Bush used in his early response to terrorism. Because he has failed to lay out a sophisticated framework explaining what degree of corruption merits an aid freeze, Wolfowitz's decisions to cut off certain countries have seemed arbitrary to some critics. In February he launched a richly justified effort to postpone debt relief to the super-corrupt Republic of Congo. But the government officials who sit on the bank's board pushed back, turning the normally formulaic board meeting into an all-day fight and forcing Wolfowitz to backtrack.

Then, on April 11, Wolfowitz delivered a major speech on corruption -- ironically, in Indonesia. He acknowledged that merely freezing bank projects is not a solution to graft; the World Bank's job is to battle development problems, not to abandon countries that suffer from them. But the speech still failed to explain the criteria under which freezing aid makes sense, and Wolfowitz's promise to deploy teams of corruption experts to poor countries raised more questions than it answered.

For the past 10 years, the bank has tried to reform civil services, foster investigative journalism and promote other policies to fight corruption. But the bank's internal assessors have concluded that few of these projects worked. Again, Wolfowitz does not seem to have listened closely enough to the experts in the bureaucracy he runs. He is too attracted to the grand idea, the idealistic vision.

Wolfowitz has time to correct his errors. But he remains a rebel, a romantic, a professorial dreamer; he is less skilled at the bureaucratic slog of getting ideas implemented. This is not the ideal profile for the leader of an unwieldy multilateral agency -- especially an agency whose poverty-fighting mission is a notorious graveyard of impractical ambition.

[cliss]

10. It's interesting -

if you go to the World Bank, there is a section about 'corruption'. You are not allowed to be corrupt, do dirty dealings or misrepresent the money you borrow.

.....sound familiar?