How would you like to make about $200K to help alleviate poverty around the world? Turns out a lot of people like that deal–an astounding fact in today’s New York Times story that Paul Wolfowitz is using to justify his behavior in the on-going ethical controversy at The Bank. And this factoid underscores how poorly the MSM has covered the story.
  The Times, in a long story about the latest turn in this saga, buries this Wolfowitz defense:
Ms. Riza’s salary, in excess of $190,000, is in the same range as that drawn by about 1,000 other bank employees, Mr. Wolfowitz said.
 Come again? There are about 1,000 people being paid a grand total of $200 million in salary–one has to assume the numbers are higher and the salary figures don’t include fringe benefits, which I’m guessing are quite generous–at an organization whose stated purpose (more on that in a sec) is to combat poverty around the world? You got to be kidding. I know a number of organizations who could hire 3 full-time people for a total of $200K–and do a whole lot more than The Bank to help the poor.
 The point being missed in the coverage of the story is this: the World Bank, and its counterpart the International Monetary Fund, are crucial players in imposing the very economic system that leaves 2 billion people on the planet earning two dollars a day. I won’t give a whole history of the Bank and the IMF here–but suffice it to say that, to boil down the way these institutions operate: if a country wants money, in the form of a loan, it must “restructure” its economic system. That usually means opening up its economies to multi-national corporations, which, then, operate in a more “free market” environment. Translation: weakening of environmental laws, weakening if not outright elimination of laws having to do with foreign investment rights and, certainly, the elimination of most local government control over labor rights and basic minimum standards.
 Unstated by the MSM is that part of the responsibility for the massive debts that are being carried by the poor countries of the world–debts that are dooming hundreds of millions of people to outrageous living conditions–lay at the feet of the Bank and the IMF.
 Which brings me back to Wolfowitz’s defense: lots of people are raking in the bucks so why are people whining about my girldfriend’s pay. In one sense, I agree with him: it isn’t her salary that’s the problem. It’s the idea that hundreds of people, who are actually perpetuating poverty, are actually being paid, in this context, an obscene amount of money.
