Paul Wolfowitz may see himself as guiltless in the episode that led to his resignation as president of the World Bank. But nearly everyone else sees the glaring ethical problem in his engineering of a job transfer and exorbitant pay hike for his girlfriend. The fact that the former Defense Department deputy and Iraq war architect believed he was acting in good faith is only further evidence of his lack of good judgment.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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23 Comments
I wonder how many Journalist got GOBN deals in their own companies when they chap their lips on the buttocks of their employers.
How come the extravagant pay checks that Democratic Party campaign sweetheart deals never get reported?
Why is the Eagle not interested in reporting the 3.9 billion dollars in contracts that Senator Feinstein got for her husband?
How could Hillary Clinton score a bonanza in Cattle Futures when everyone else took a bath?
Methinks Rhonda is concentrating her political bias a bit too much.
I thought Brad DeLong pretty much hits the nail on the head:————”…From this and other evidence, I don’t know but I think I can guess what the story Paul Wolfowitz tells himself is, and it goes like this:
They hated me. And so they told me that I couldn’t have Shaha Riza as one of my close personal aides and pay her what I was paying Kellums and Cleveland. They told me I couldn’t have her as one of my close personal aides at all. This was unfair: she, after all, was the reason I got interested in being World Bank president in the first place. Well, if I couldn’t have her at my right hand, I was at least going to make sure that she was paid well. What I did was no deep secret–anybody who wanted to could have found out about it. But I was strong then, and nobody’s home government wanted to pick another fight with the Bush administration, so they pretended that they did not know. Now I am weaker, and they think they can take me down, and so they pretend to be shocked! shocked!–they are having their own little Claude-Rains-Captain-Renault-Holier-than-Thou moment. Liars. Hypocrites. Bureaucrats. Corrupt friends of kleptocrats. They knew, and they didn’t object. Or they ought to have known. Or they could have found out if they had dug for the details. And it’s all their fault.
By contrast, the Bank staff have not changed their public story. And, reading between the lines, I think I know what the real story is:
We told Wolfowitz that he could not recuse himself on personnel matters involving Shaha Riza and yet keep her in the Bank as one of his confidential aides and with him as her boss. We told him to move her somewhere outside his authority. We never imagined–having told him that recusal on personnel matters was insufficient–that he would then interfere in personnel matters affecting her to the extent that he would dictate her salary and give her a massive raise: we expected him to delegate that task of exactly where and at what pay grade to some vice president somewhere.
When we discovered what he had done after the fact, we knew that our home country governments did not want another fight with the Bush administration, so we let it drop. But it was still a bad and unethical thing for Wolfowitz to do. And now that the Bush administration is weak and people care little about appeasing further, now that it is clear that Wolfowitz has been a disaster as World Bank president, now that the issue has been raised not by us but by the press, and now that Wolfowitz has responded by telling lots of lies, we are ready to do now what we should have done when we discovered this and make a huge stink–hopefully, a huge enough stink to drive him out of the World Bank presidency, for which he has shown himself unsuited.
As corruption goes, this particular episode is penny-ante corruption–a matter of $50,000 a year, perhaps $500,000 in present value–but it is corruption, it is a straw, and it is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Should this be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? The only difference between Wolfowitz’s intervention in Riza’s salary and his intervention in Kellums’s and Cleveland’s is that there were rules against the first because Riza was already at the World Bank. If Wolfowitz were highly qualified to be World Bank president and were doing an excellent job, it would be time for a simple reprimand. This doesn’t mean that what Wolfowitz did is a good and ethical thing–it is a bad and unethical thing. But it is not worth ending the tenure of an excellent and effective World Bank president.
But Wolfowitz is not an effective and excellent World Bank president. In a good world, this act of corruption would be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/05/martin_wolf_ask.html
Perhaps the reason he went ahead with the deal was due to his getting permission from the very people now bitching about it prior to taking th job. He told them about his friend and they OK’d the deal before he started. Why do you think the agreed to this deal as he is leaving…they got their tit in their own wringer.
He is just being pushed out after he started holding some of these pseudo countries to their word and making them toe the line on cleaning up their financial house.
And the one really pushing this is George Soros who wants to try and get Malloch Brown in there. He wants Brown in since he is the one behind the Oil for Food billion dollar rip off of the UN and Iraq money while he worked at the UN. Soros wants to be able to manage the Bank through Brown to his own hedge funds and currency manipulations.
Of course Republican sees nothing wrong with Wolfowitz’s deal – greed is the mantra of Republicans. Then they wonder why they got their butts kicked out in 2006. People have caught on to them.
Republican!!! Over here!! Get your head out of your ass and pay attention to the topic at hand, please!
Been nipping at the conspiracy-theory kool-aid again, ‘Pub?
He’s resigning case closed. What would you all be saying if Clinton had found Monica some nice little govt. job with a high salary?
Republican sez,”How come the extravagant pay checks that Democratic Party campaign sweetheart deals never get reported?”
What the hell does that mean?
“How could Hillary Clinton score a bonanza in Cattle Futures when everyone else took a bath?”
How could George Bush make a fortune dumping oil stocks when all the other stock holders lost their ass?
Mrbill,”Perhaps the reason he went ahead with the deal was due to his getting permission from the very people now bitching about it prior to taking th job.”
I’d like to see a source for that.
“And the one really pushing this is George Soros”
OOOOOhhh! George Soros!
I’d like to see some sourcing for that, too.
“The situation has been complicated by the fact that few people within the Bush administration understand what the World Bank does, says another official. This has meant that the administration’s shifting calculations have been mostly guided by day-to-day political deliberations rather than by an assessment of what would be in the longer-term interest of the US.
“Not many people care about the multilateral institutions or have a view one way or another,” said an official. “At no point has the administration sat down and said: “What do we think about the World Bank? How does it conflate with American interests?”
Some in the first camp fear that the US has now left it too late to retain the degree of goodwill it would need to ensure that Mr Wolfowitz’s [American] successor could help frame a positive agenda. “The longer the White House has delayed the inevitable the weaker its hand has become,” said one. “From a strategic point of view we could not have played this any worse.”http://www.ft.com/cms/s/cf5af306-03d2-11dc-a931-000b5df10621.htmlWith this administration, if it’s not one damn thing, it’s another. These people could fu*k up a train wreck.
In Wolfowitz’s resignation letter he got to list the number of accomplishments he had at the World Bank. In sum, he was a great guy, accomplished much, and was without guilt of anything. Makes ya wonder why they wanted to get rid of him so badly.
I guess Shaha is supposed to be a pretty sharp woman. I know, I know, if so, what is she doing hanging out with Paul? Her specialty knowledge is the relationship between the status of women in a culture and that society’s economic condition.
There was an article the other in the Washington Post about how peeved Shaha is about being known as Wolfie’s Bimbo. Advice to Shaha: find a non-neocon boyfriend. You will fare better, no doubt.
Republicant preaching about demos making gobs of money? How typically hypocritical.
One glance at, http://www.gimmiesometruth.com/tricks.htmland one can tell very easily how the crooks are.
Nothing Bush, his neocons, or his ilk have done anything worthwhile or necessary.
They carry the morality of a busted washing machine.
Of course Reich-wing republicant thinks it’s okay for Mr Wolfowitz to adorn his main squeeze with unethical dinaro: Money talks, ethics walks.
Why, if some democrat can be tossed in the mix, it must be okay. The republicans would NEVER do such a thing . . . well, except maybe:Tom Delay,Karl RoveI. Lewis “Scooter” LibbyCondoleezza RiceStephen HadleyAndrew CardAlberto GonzalesMary MatalinAri FleischerSusan RalstonIsrael HernandezJohn HannahScott McClellanDan BartlettClaire BuchanCatherine MartinJennifer MillerwiseDavid WurmserColin PowellKaren HughesAdam LevineBob JosephVice President Dick CheneyPresident George W. BushAnd, of course, who can forget that pillar of the Reich-wing . . . dada . . . Abramoff: The House That Jack Built
I’m thinking the same thing, J. M.
Another Bush pal crushed like a bug.
Let’s count them down, shall we?
Rumsfailed: fight smart not hard in Iraq . . . SH*TCANNED
Ashcroft: I don’t fly commercial the month before 9-11 . . . SH*TCANNED
John Bolton: Send a jerk to the UN because we CONs hate the UN . . . SH*TCANNED
Ken “Kenny Boy” Lay: CEO of Enron and Bush’s biggest donor . . . FOUND GUILTY and died.
Jerry Falwell: primary architect of the unholy alliance between fundy intolerant Christians and power politics . . . DEAD
Gale Norton: the right to pollute Sec’ry of the Interior . . . SH*TCANNED
Douglas Feith: Under Secretary of Defense for Policy who claimed connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq . . . SH*TCANNED
Ahmed Chalabi: Bush’s first choice for puppet in chief of the puppet government of Iraq . . . won 2 percent of the Iraqi vote and SH*TCANNED
Richard Armitage: Colin Powell’s second in command . . . although he can bench press 300 pounds, he was still SH*TCANNED
Colin Powell: threw away a magnificent career repeating Bush’s WMD lies on the world stage at the UN and so he was SH*TCANNED
Michael Powell, son of ass kisser above, Chairman of FCC until he was SH*TCANNED
Jack Abramoff: major fund raiser for the Republican party, Bush claims not to remember ever meeting him despite the many photos on different dates . . . FOUND GUILTY
Lt Gen Jay Garner: Director of Iraqi Reconstruction . . . “we ought to get pround and stick out our chests and suck in out bellies and say, ‘Damn! we’re Americans!’” SH*TCANNED
Richard “The Prince of Darkness” Perle: Gucci clad Chair of the Defense Policy Board believed we’d be seen as “liberators in Iraq” SH*TCANNED
Paul O’Neil, Secr’y of the Treasury: SH*TCANNED
Ari “The Liar” Fleischman, WH Spokesman: SH*TCANNED
Scotty “I’m Obviously Gay” McClellan, 2nd WH Spokesman: SH*TCANNED
Andrew Card, chief lobbyist for GM and WH Chief of Staff: SH*TCANNED
Ken Mehlman, Chairman of Bush’s re-election committee and the Republican National Committee, this homosexual served politicians who worked to deny gays marriage rights: SH*TCANNED
Vice Adm. John “Convicted Felon” Poindexter, Director of Information Awareness Office: despite his excellent experience of lying to Congress and destroying evidence, he too was SH*TCANNED
Thomas White, Secr’y of the Army, hold the phone, Martha, and pass the bourbon, this guy had the perfect background to run the Army . . . he was an Enron exec who cashed out 12 million in stock before the crash. SH*TCANNED
Mitch The Blade Daniels, Director of Management and Budget, under investigation for stock dumping (imagine that!) SH*TCANNED
Lewis “Scooter” Libby, despite the CONs saying that Prosecutor Fitzgerald “had nothing,” Scooty Scoot was FOUND GUILTY.
George Tenet, CIA Director, author of new tell-all book about how stupid Bush is. SH*TCANNED
Christie Todd Whitman, EPA Director, replaced agency global warming data with bogus revised “study.” SH*TCANNED
Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, Speaker of the House, under investigation for campaign finance law violations (aides are already convicted), he tried to take himself off the ticket in the last election but was forced by lawsuit to stay on. REJECTED BY VOTERS
This is the short-list.
In Wolfowitz’s defense I would note a very interesting interview on PBS NewsHour with Andy Young. Young noted that, since leaving the White House, Wolfowitz had done a lot of good things at the Bank.
“ANDREW YOUNG, Co-Chairman, Good Works International: Well, first of all, I think she said herself that this is not about the girlfriend, and that’s what people have been responding to.
This is a professional woman who was at the World Bank six or eight years before Wolfowitz got there. She was a ranking member. She’s a British woman, who’s a Muslim, who’s fluent in Arabic, and in almost any corporation in the world she could make a half-a-million dollars. She’s at the bank because of her competence.
Paul Wolfowitz coming created a conflict, which he went to the ethics committee to try to solve. The ethics committee would not let him recuse himself, so they put him in this trick. And now they want to use this trick to undermine his leadership.
I think what they’re doing is undermining the credibility, and particularly the Dutch. They have a reputation for tolerance, for generosity, for forgiveness, and an expansive view of the world that I’ve always admired. They were very helpful to us in Atlanta. They were very helpful in the Holocaust, and now, for them to be caught in this bureaucratic crap, is embarrassing to me.”
MUCH MORE AT:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/international/jan-june07/wolfowitz_05-15.html
I don’t think I need to point out that Andy Young is hardly a “rightie”.
Capn,Short list is correct. The alibi I like the beat is I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s infamous, “I forget.” That about sums up this administration, along with it’s jack-boot followers.
Capn,Quite the list.
Isn’t it getting pretty smelly in the repub camp?
Where’s germ to defend the nuts?, where is pub to defend GWB?
You guys have some very difficult jobs, it is past time to get to it!
There is nothing to defend. I’m sure the finger pointers have show favoritism and even nepotism. They got him out of their personal agenda any way they could. Just wait a few months, the finger pointers backsides will be shown.
Hey Capn, don’t forget about the gay male prostitute Jeff Gannon that the White House put into the press corps. He was canned but found a new job as a spokesman for the American Bible Society.
Hey, you forgot Ted “I am not a gay meth head, I am a Focus on the Family Publican” Haggard!
When Jerry Falwell died–and this almost never happens for me, no matter who it is–I felt no sadness. What a mean piece of shit that man was.
Hey, Pubican! Break out some more of those tidy All- The-Republican-Scandals-Are-Actually-Made-Up-By-The-Liberal-Media stories for us, woncha?
Let us now keep the eyes on the ball!
If we want good government results that have a chance of doing what is humanly good for humanity, in a shrinking world, that could only happen through more credible and better governed multinational institutions. But in this case, while rolling up or shirtsleeves to get going at it, we must also learn about how to prioritize our efforts.
Instead of beating the good guy on the head, just because he is more amenable to being beaten on the head, and start with a World Bank and that no matter Wolfowitz, and some others, in relative terms, still stands out as a shining example of relative good governance in the world, we should all concentrate more on where good governance is much more lacking and much more needed, namely the United Nations.
May I humbly suggest we keep our eyes on the ball!
Per KurowskiChairmanThe Voice and Noise Foundation for International Development and Global Strategic Action
I was shocked to hear this guy even has a girlfriend… This guy is how old and he has a girlfriend? How junior-highish is that?
Once again we see another politician who has let his sex life interfere with his job. Is this guy really that stupid to let his sex life bring him down?
It was really about Wolfowitz’ arrogance, reliance on cronies, and lack of administrative competence. From the Washington Post,http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/17/AR2007051702376_pf.html :
“Everyone who has been appointed president of the World Bank knew almost nothing about the bank, its business and its operations,” said Moisés Naím, the former executive director of the bank who is editor of Foreign Policy magazine.
As member governments grumbled their displeasure at Wolfowitz’s appointment by Bush, bureaucratic expectations were perhaps lower than usual. Wolfowitz’s outreach was encouraging, but it came with signs that eventually became part of the indictment of his leadership.
Beyond the dispute over Riza, the negative stories about Wolfowitz now flowing from the bank focus on his travel and perceived self-promotion, his distance from the staff and his unilateral decision-making.
Everyone agreed with Wolfowitz’s emphasis on stopping corruption in the governments that received World Bank loans. But when Wolfowitz unilaterally canceled loans in Cambodia, Congo Republic, India, Kenya and other countries on corruption grounds, the executive board ordered him to come up with a coherent policy — and then rejected his proposals.
Wolfowitz’s emphasis on increasing the World Bank footprint in Iraq was a contentious subject with staff members who argued that Iraq was dangerous and, because of its oil reserves, too rich for lending.
Although he indicated at the start that he planned to limit his travel, Wolfowitz spent much time on the road. One senior bank official expressed horror at Wolfowitz’s suggestion, when logistics for an Africa trip seemed troublesome, that he would simply hop on a Defense Department plane.
“Several of us said: ‘Uh, we don’t think so. Actually, this is an international institution,’ ” the official recalled. “It was a kind of odd blindness that took people aback.”
Many staffers expressed outrage at the media entourage that Wolfowitz brought along on his travels with the apparent purpose of raising his profile on the institutional Web site. Kevin Kellems, who joined Wolfowitz at the bank by way of Vice President Cheney’s office, managed his public persona.
Kellems’s unpopularity with bank staff and managers, however, paled beside that of Robin Cleveland, a former White House Office of Management and Budget national security official brought in by Wolfowitz as a “senior counselor.” He delegated much of his managerial authority to her. It was Cleveland — with no international development experience and a demeanor widely considered abrasive — who often met with senior staffers on behalf of Wolfowitz.
In his statement to the bank board on the Riza deal earlier this month, Wolfowitz seemed to recognize that “what this is really about” was “my leadership and management style.” He said that “there are some significant things that I need to change in order to regain the trust of the staff.” He had “relied too long on advisers who came in with me from the outside.”
Wolfowitz acknowledged the need for “more direct and frequent engagement with staff on substance,” he said, adding: “I truly believe I can do much better.”