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Today's
Stories
March 22, 2005
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Democracy--or is it the US Military--on the March
Greg Moses
A Palm Sunday Chat with Sis Levin
John Farley
Bush's Culture of Life: Let the
Insurance Companies Pull the Plug When the Sick Cost Too Much
Ron Jacobs
Halt
the Anniversary Rallies and Stop the Damn War
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
An
Immoral and Illegal War: Destroying Iraq Isn't Enough for Them
Dave Lindorff
"Saving" Schiavo; Killing the News
James Petras
Fateful
Quadrangle: Cuba and Venezuela Face Off Against the US and Colombia
March 21, 2005
John Walsh
In
the Bars on the Road to Fayettevile: War Support Paper Thin
Werther
The
Legacy of George Kennan, Chief Architect of the Cold War
Mike Stark
Where is the "Culture of Life" in Maryland? Time is
Running Out for Vernon Evans
David Swanson
Feeding
Tubes for the Third World: Put the Hungry into Comas, Then Feed
Them!
James T. Phillips
Happy Meals: Behind the Grill at a Baltimore Diner
Mike Ferner
Serving,
Refusing, Impeaching
Robert Jensen
The World Waits for an Answer
Paul Craig
Roberts
A
Threat Greater Than Terrorism
Stew Albert
Vegetable Nation
Website of
the Day
American Press Blotter: Jacko, Terry and Steroids vs. the World
March 19, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Three-Card
Monte and the One-Party State
Tom Reeves
Exposing the Coming Draft: a Draft by Any Other Name is Still
Wrong
Saul Landau
The Grandchildren of Roy Cohn: the Politics of the Repressed
Alan Maass
Making Bankruptcy a Life Sentence
Ron Jacobs
Submit or Else: the Nuclear Demon that Won't Go Awayy
David Green
The Holocaust Industry Comes to the University of Illinois
John Blair
Hey, Dick! I'm Still Free: a Blow for Freedom of Speech in Indiana
Steve Greenfield
The Decline of the Green Party: the Numbers are In
Ben Tripp
Nature isn't Real
Mike Roselle
A History of White People in the Conservation Movement
Joshua Frank
Hope in Red State America: Lessons from the Big Sky Country
Mark Weisbrot
The World Bank: a Bigger Problem Than Wolfowitz
Dave Lindorff
Congress on Steroids
Sarah Schaffer
Lula's Nukes: Bush Bullies Iran, Ignores Brazil's Nuclear Ambitions
Warren Hastings
Why the Queen Should Chop Off Tony Blair's Head for Treason
Poets' Basement
Lodge, Albert. Landau, Engel, Davies, Capaccio
March 18, 2005
Dave Zirin
The
Congressional Urine Testers: Baseball's Theater of the Absurd
Richard Thieme
The
Church Committee Candidate: I was a Victim of the KGB
John Walsh
Misdirecting the Anti-War Movement
David Swanson
Hunger
Striking for a Living Wage at Georgetown
Ben Terrall
In
the Spirit of Rachel Corrie: Confronting Caterpillar in San Leandro
David Boyle
Just Say "No" to Harvard
Dorreen Yellow Bird
Coping with Teen Suicide on the Standing Rock Reservation
Mokhiber /
Weissman
Global Bully Goes to Guatemala
Greg Moses
They
Don't Shoot Donkeys...Do They?
Website of
the Day
800
Protests: Find One Near You
March 17, 2005
Christopher
Brauchli
Rendered
Unto Caesar: the Etymology of Torture
Bill Quigley
The St. Patrick's Four and the Resistance to the War in Iraq
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Herds: Willing to Kick Anyone in the Face
Gary Bass / Adam Hughes
Inside the Bush Budget: Rhetoric vs. Reality
Dave Lindorff
The Incredible Shrinking Coalition
Jude Wanniski
Wolfowitz at the World Bank: a Perfect Fit
Alexander Billet
Irish Republicanism at the Crossroads
John Ross
Wal-Mart
Invades Mexico
Website of the Day
Campus Resistance
March 16, 2005
Ralph Nader
Filling
the Congressional Cop-Out Gap: an Idea for Local Peace Activists
William Cook
Resurrecting the Neo-Con Failures
Kevin Zeese
Two
Years of Occupation: Both US and Iraq are Worse Off
Jackie Corr
Why is Dick Cheney Laughing? The New Tax Cut Patriotism
Alan Maass
Bush's Class War Budget
David R. Kolker
Jailed Without Charges in Haiti
Cindy Ellen
Hill
Speculative Policing in Northern Ireland
Paul Craig
Roberts
America's
Has-Been Economy
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March 22, 2005
Wolfowitz's Hidden Patron
Dick
Cheney's Oil Change at the World Bank
By
JIM VALLETTE
He wasn't in the room when President
George W. Bush announced it on Wednesday, but somewhere, Vice
President Dick Cheney must have been smiling--well, smirking--when
the commander-in-chief's voice coupled the improbable name Paul
Wolfowitz with the title "President of the World Bank."
Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary
Wolfowitz have long worked hand-in-glove on a global quest for
U.S. domination over world affairs. This latest action is as
bold as the invasion of Iraq two years ago.
Dick Cheney, a long-time beneficiary
of World Bank largess, has moved to take ownership of the world's
development coffers through his man, Wolfowitz. For his part,
Wolfowitz will have a chance to extend his Iraq reconstruction
theories to the global level. These concepts mostly involve U.S.
control over energy resources. While the Bank, over which the
U.S. holds de facto veto power, has done a lot for the nation's
oil interests over the years, his nomination is a clear signal
that the administration craves more.
"Wolfowitz's words and
deeds are antithetical to World Bank pretenses of multilateralism
and development," said long-time World Bank critic John
Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies. "Between
this and John Bolton's nomination as ambassador to the UN, it's
March Madness on Pennsylvania Avenue."
Like others in the Bush administration,
Wolfowitz is consistent. In and out of office, he has articulated
a clear vision of U.S. being the world's only superpower, fueled
by free-flowing Persian Gulf oil.
Flash back to the early 1990s.
Dust settled where the Berlin Wall once stood. The old world
order was gone. Then-Defense Secretary Cheney tabbed Wolfowitz--his
Assistant Secretary for Policy--to plan new national security
strategies that reflected the preeminence of corporate quests
in the extension of U.S. military might. Wolfowitz and Cheney
prioritized defending Middle East oil fields, which they said
"ranks above South America and Africa in terms of global
wartime priorities." Wolfowitz fine-tuned this new world
order in, writing: "In the Middle East and Southwest Asia,
our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power
in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's
oil."
After Cheney and Wolfowitz
left office following the first President Bush's defeat at the
polls, both men continued to push for U.S. corporate access to
global oil resources. Cheney, through his stint as CEO of Halliburton,
parlayed his political connections into company deals in democracy-rich
places like Burma and Turkmenistan. "The problem is that
the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources
where there are democratic governments," he grumbled to
his critics. He had the World Bank, which financed projects in
Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Chad, and Kazakhstan, to thank for some
part of his Halliburton paycheck.
Wolfowitz, meanwhile, articulated
the intellectual side of their shared agenda. As dean of the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, he gravely
predicted the world's fate with Middle East oil resources threatened
by Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. In 1994, he
expressed the new preemptive doctrine, saying "By and large,
wars are not constructive acts: they are better judged by what
they prevent than by what they accomplish."
His was the clearest voice
in a chorus of ex-Reagan and Bush officials calling upon Clinton
to strike Hussein as the decade progressed. "The Persian
Gulf with its vital oil resources is critical to us," he
told Jim Lehrer in 1996. "That's absolutely central to constructing
the kind of world that will be safer in the next century."
Wolfowitz started warning European
governments and oil companies doing business with Iraq. "Companies
that want to develop Iraq's enormous oil wealth should line up
with a government of free Iraq instead," he wrote in 1997.
He sought congressional support
for a plan to install Ahmed Chalabi's Iraq National Congress
in Southern Iraq, and lashed out at European countries that opposed
military measures. The French and Russians, he testified in September
1998, should understand "that the fabulous--and they are
fabulous--oil resources of Iraq... will be ultimately in the
control of a Government of Fee Iraq."
Cheney and Wolfowitz placed
their bets on Saddam's demise. With another Bush in office, they
rolled the dice.
Wolfowitz never really emphasized
eliminating global poverty--the World Bank's stated mission--as
a national strategic priority. Bush points to Wolfowitz's stint
as U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia as proof of his "commitment
to development." But as an envoy he obsessed about gaining
U.S. corporate access to Indonesia's energy resources in the
1980s, at a time when strongman Suharto banned opposition, and
skimmed plenty from World Bank and other development finance
groups.
Wolfowitz's main "development"
experience is actually in post-invasion Iraq. After the invasion,
he stomped through Europe, demanding that its governments cancel
Iraq's debt. When Europe balked, he signed an order saying that
anyone not involved in the military coalition would be barred
from Iraq reconstruction contracts. A recent Inspector General
audit of coalition reconstruction funds found the coalition "did
not establish or implement sufficient managerial, financial,
and contractual controls to ensure (development) funds were used
in a transparent manner. Consequently, there was no assurance
the funds were used for the purposes mandated by" the UN.
But Cheney and crew, with the
unbounded joy of spring, remain on the charm offensive, trying
to secure the economic crown jewel.
Cheney and Wolfowitz understand
that global hegemony requires control over the three pillars
of power: military, political, and economic. The World Bank sets
the terms of global development. When developing countries started
demanding a decrease in U.S. political power in the institution,
when the Bank balked at supporting Wolfowitz's reconstruction
and debt cancellation plans for Iraq, and when a Bank-commissioned
study recommended getting out of the oil business, the World
Bank became a natural target for a hostile takeover.
Cheney wants in. There's no
stopping him now, unless Europe, industrialized Asia, and the
Global South decide to put up a fight.
Jim Vallette is research director of the Sustainable
Energy and Economy Network (online at www.seen.org)
at the Institute for Policy Studies and a Foreign Policy In Focus
analyst (online at www.fpif.org).
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