- There's the fellow who oversaw WorldBank projects in Indonesia, and, unable to account for $25 billion, shrugged and explained,
"there is a trade-off between, shall we say, being pure and helping people," and also because "sometimes calling a spade a spade is not the best way" when it comes to confronting corruption.But Wolfowitz must go for the good of the bank, says he.
- There's the former #2 at the bank who promoted his wife from a staff assistant position to the technically complicated position of analyst and then to procurement specialist, at double the salary. Unlike our Wolfie, he made no effort to recuse himself.
- And why should he? According to a 2005 report, there were 581 couples at the bank whose relationships posed conflicts-of-interest.
There's more. I remain mystified by the disinterest of the blogosphere.
UPDATE: Posted at The Corner, a transcript of Special Report w/ Brit Hume. Kondracke & Krauthammer on Wolfie:
MORT KONDRACKE: He arrives in 2005 and he realizes that there's a conflict of interest problem because one of the bank employees is his girlfriend, so he goes to the ethics committee of the World Bank and says I want to recuse myself from everything to do with her. . . . [H]e signed off on this agreement whereby her pay, she went to the State Department, her pay was raised by $60,000, and the ethics committee signed off on this twice. Not once, but twice. And now it's all coming back and even the chairman . . . of the ethics committee who signed off on this who is one of his major accusers. . . .
KRAUTHAMMER: It'll depend on the bank, on the board, the hanging jury that's in place. And it is about politics. It's a frame-up of a first order. And the reasons are myriad. The first is that Paul Wolfowitz is an idealist. And as head of the World Bank he wants to actually help poor people.
And one of the reasons that money of those loans aren't helping the poor, is because the money gets ripped off on the way to the poor. So, he instituted a big anti corruption campaign and there's a lot of resistance in the bureaucracy of the World Bank because they get judged in how much money is pushed out the door, not on how many of the poor are helped. . . .
HUME: Will he survive this?
KRAUTHAMMER: I'm not sure. It's such a corrupt institution he may not.
