Subject: Cartoon #84 - The Soul-Wringing at The World Bank.

The Institution that was established to help the poor of the developing countries, has traditionally helped the rich in the developed countries, and handed take-outs to the leaders of the developing countries so they can take them to the Swiss banks. So, what is this upheaval for - is this the first time money was taken instead to a US bank?

For years we watched how the World Bank was helping only the mega-projects for infrastructure building and mining and drilling, and readying minerals and oil for export - that is what they defined as development, while the local environmentalists called it rather as the destruction of a local economy that worked fine before the Bank’s arrival, and poured the dispossessed into the urban slams after the Bank’s arrival. In countries with an indigenous population that had no papers for their right to the land that they and their ancestors held for hundreds of years, the problem became in practice genocide. Nobody at the Bank cared about these side-effects.

Now the Bank found a culprit in someone who tried indeed to change the internal culture at the Bank, but might have had personal problems in his social life. We have seen this before in other institutions in the Pennsylvania Avenue neighborhood of Washington DC, and we usually were sorry when such a person was pushed overboard.

Looking for Paul Wolfowitz replacement, the papers mention among the candidates Dr. Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official who is an Afghan who holds also the US citizenship - something that seems to be an unwritten precondition.. He is now with the University of Kabul. He was one of the candidates for UN Secretary-General and we listened to him at the Asia Society in New York. He sounded well informed on issues of Sustainable Development, and not being a front runner for the position of UNSG he was quite outspoken.