Wolfowitz's Tenure in Indonesia Eyed

[cal04]

The controversy surrounding World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz spotlights a lack of ethics that was apparent two decades ago when he was U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, say critics who recall how he failed to speak out against corruption and rights abuses.

Today, as head of the bank, Wolfowitz has been arguing that corruption is crippling the world's poorest nations. But that was ``the very thing he closed his eyes to'' when he served as ambassador from 1986 to 1989 during the regime of the dictator Suharto, said pro-democracy activist Binny Buchori.

``He's a hypocrite,'' she said. ``He should quit.''

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But Jeffrey Winters, a professor of political economy at Northwestern University, said that Wolfowitz's past career already showed he was ill fit to run the World Bank.

(snip)
`The foxes were running wild in the financial chicken coop and no one, including Wolfowitz, pressured the Indonesians to design safeguards to protect the public's deposits,'' he said. One result was the 1997-98 financial crisis ``that plunged tens of millions into abject poverty.''

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6607704,00.html

[acmavm]

1. And he helped lie us into a war that is leading this country down the

same path. No money for the aged, sick, poor, OUR infrastructure, the people who are supposed to protect our food supply, our borders, our schools, not a damn thing for the people of this country. But he sure helped the criminals who stole everything this country had to start (and maintain) the conquest of a country with possibly the world's largest oil supply under their land.

Why is anybody at all hesitating to dump this lying bastard?

[maddezmom]

2. 2 decades ago

think of how much harm he's done since then

[struggle4progress]

3. k-n-r

:kick:

[yellowcanine]

4. I thought it was a kind of cynical joke that he was going to "clean up" corruption at the WB

when he was one of the architects of "rebuilding Iraq" program with its rampant corruption.