World Bank Trouble

The only reason I'm posting this story is because it's a prelude to what will happen when dramatic UN reforms are pursued.

Anyway, Paul Wolfowitz, the man you anti-war activists have most reason to dislike, is the current president of the World Bank. He's got a bold anti-corruption reform plan for the Bank, but it's come to a screeching halt.

From Fox News:

...it’s little wonder that dramatic change as proposed by Wolfowitz has led to vitriolic dialogue. Wolfowitz’s first major decision — a rejection of loans to corrupt Congo — was supported only by the U.S. and Japanese directors.

Personalities aside, the main problem is the World Bank’s history and structure. It is, after all, an open-handed lending agency where half the governing board is made up of directors who represent borrowers — a concept that would be unthinkable in a private-sector bank. “I can’t recall a borrowing country ever voting against a loan [to its own country], or criticizing it, or voting against a budget,” says one current top insider. “We have no support reining in the budget.”

Indeed, by most accounts, the borrower-directors mainly see their job as simply getting as much money for their countries as possible — supervising a global pork-producing machine, where everybody votes in favor of one another’s projects and nobody abstains from voting for their own.

"This reflects a genuine governance conundrum,” says Robert Holland, a Dallas attorney and former CEO of Triton Energy, who served as the U.S. director on the World Bank’s board from 2001 until last May. “On the one hand, borrowers have a legitimate interest in the development prescriptions handed down by the bank. On the other hand, no characteristic of the bank that I have mentioned to my friends in the private sector produces greater astonishment than the fact that half the board represents borrowers. Their typical response upon hearing that is, ‘My God, the inmates are running the asylum.’" [Emphasis mine]

Likewise for the UN.