Another Bush Slime-ball Caught

Another of Bush' cronies has been shown to be the slime-ball he is. Wolfowitz, the man we can thank for the Iraq debacle, went to the World Bank to root out third world corruption, and spread a little manure of his own by giving his girlfriend a big fat raise.
Al Jazeera

"I take full responsibility for the details of the agreement," he said, after explaining that he had followed advice given by the bank's ethics committee on the employment of his Libyan-born partner, Shaha Riza.


She was transferred from the World Bank's communications office to the US state department in line with bank regulations to avoid a conflict of interest after Wolfowitz's appointment in mid-2005. While still on the World Bank payroll, she was rapidly promoted and ended up with a $200,000 package - more than Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state.


Wolfowitz acknowledged that the situation surrounding Riza "had the potential to harm this institution" and stressed that he had initially wanted no involvement in her employment terms. Given his romantic involvement with her, he faced a "painful personal dilemma when I was new to the institution" but had made a "good-faith effort to promote my understanding of that advice" of the ethics committee.


The committee's advice had been to "promote and relocate" Riza out of the World Bank, he said, although that is disputed by some bank staff. According to a Financial Times report published on Thursday, Wolfowitz personally ordered the hefty pay rises given to Riza. It cited two people who had seen a memo from Wolfowitz to the head of human resources spelling out the terms of the package.

The truth is, Wolfowitz was given a golden parachute by Bush to reward him for falling on his sword for Bush. He was never the right man for the job, he just wanted to be near his girl friend and to make the world safe for multi-nationals.
MSNBC.com

Some experts in international development praise what Wolfowitz tried to do at the World Bank, demanding that governments, especially in Africa, reduce corruption as a condition of receiving bank funds. But rather than moving the whole bank in that direction—creating a broad-based consensus as a savvy manager might do—Wolfowitz sought to achieve this goal by bringing in a coterie of ideologically pure acolytes who proceeded to offend most World Bank careerists. Even while claiming, as he did in his e-mail message, that “I believe deeply in the mission of the institution,” Wolfowitz seemed to have little use for or trust in the institution. “He set out with a series of objectives that I think were pretty reasonable, but he built up a lot of antibodies within the World Bank and among the executive directors,” says Dennis de Tray, a Washington-based economist and former World Bank official. “Wolfowitz and the cabal sent signals to the staff that their expertise was unneeded and uninteresting.” So powerful did the internal rebellion against Wolfowitz’s tactics grow—well before the Riza story broke—that Britain, a stalwart U.S. ally, led a campaign to remove Wolfowitz’s sole decision-making authority on bank lending.


Wolfowitz’s entire career in Washington, dating back nearly 40 years, has been largely about leading small right-wing insurgencies against establishment thinking. In 1969, he joined forces with fellow neocon Richard Perle for the first time when the two ran a committee that sought to undermine the Nixon-Kissinger push for an antiballistic-missile treaty.