Today's Stories

March 11 , 2009

Mike Roselle
From Birmingham to Coal River: Why is the Environmental Movement So Timid?

Paul Craig Roberts
The Criminal Injustice System

Henry A. Giroux
Academic Labor in Dark Times

March 10 , 2009

Franklin Spinney
What Israeli Peace Process?

Vijay Prashad
What Did Hillary Clinton Do?

Stan Cox
There's No Free Lunch on Your Browser: the Internet's Energy Drain

Zoltan Grossman
Coffee Strong: Listening to the G.I. Voice at Fort Lewis

Reuven Kaminer
Pure and Unadulterated Racism

Jonathan Cook
Memoricide in the West Bank

Dave Lindorff
Business Rules

Brian McKenna
How Anthropology Disparages Journalism

Harvey Wasserman
Is This the End of the Age of the Automobile?

Corey Pein
He Told You So

Website of the Day
AIG and Systemic Failure: $1.6 Trillion in Insured Deriviatives

March 9 , 2009

Pam Martens
Madoff and the Sorkin Affair

Ralph Nader
Too Big...Period

Peter Lee
Meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: the US's Worst/Best Hope for Afghanistan?

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Charade

Peter Morici
Fixing the Banks: Treasury's Doomed Strategy

Dean Baker
Why Do We Need a Private Health Insurance Industry, Anyway?

Steve Ault
Kiss Thailand's Tolerance for Gays Goodbye

Stephen Lendman
Guantánamo Under Obama

Farooq Sulehria
Tennis Without Spectators

Belén Fernández
Chávez, a Cockfight and the Caracazo

Website of the Day
How Lincoln Learned to Read

March 6-8 , 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Harlots High and Low

Chris Floyd
Tangled Up in Karl

Uri Avnery
Remember Ophira?

Dave Lindorff
Kiss the Banks Goodbye

Mark Weisbrot
The Crisis vs. the Dogma

David Ker Thomson
Against Work

Phil Aliff
Soldier Suicides

Rebekah Ward
Georgia Injustice: Another Young Life Wrecked

Tracey Briggs
How Capitalism Feels in the Head

Dean Baker
Depression Nostalgia?

Daniel P. Wirt, M.D.
Remove the Handle From the Health Insurance Misery and Death Pump

Carl Finamore
The Recovery Plan: Save Us From Those Who Would Save Us

Wajahat Ali
The Pakistani Monster

David Michael Green
Smart is the New Stupid

David Macaray
The Minimum Wage Revisited

Michael Dickinson
On Financial Fools Day

Susie Day
Line in the Sand

Bob Sommer
Echoes of the Townhouse Explosion

Ben Sonnenberg
No Forgiveness for the Bourgeoisie: Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel"

David Yearsley
Sonic Fakery in "Slumdog" From the Mozart of Chennai

DC Larson
They're Writing Those Depression Songs, Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Live Truth: Music Sans Headphones

Poets' Basement
Dominquez, MacNeil and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Environment & Obama: a Conversation with Jeffrey St. Clair

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

Benjamin Dangl
Striking a Blow Against the Beer Cartel: a Grassroots Victory in Utah

Christopher Brauchli
The New Leaders of the GOP

Website of the Day
The Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Is Nancy Pelosi Really Against War Crimes?

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

Anthony DiMaggio
From Bush to Obama: Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Dennis Ross and Iran: the Fox and the Chicken Coop

Mischa Gaus
The Banks' War on Workers

Felice Pace
The Economy and the Big Picture

Mike Whitney
Is Free Market Capitalism Possible Without Accountability?

Lee Sustar
Blaming the Autoworkers

Peter Lee
The Other Side of the Coin in Afghanistan

Nicole Colson
Ruining Young Lives for Profit

Roger Burbach
Et Tu, Daniel? The Betrayal of the Sandinista Revolution

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah Has No Robes

Missy Beattie
Owning Disaster

Dave Lindorff
America's Stupid Health Care Debate

Robert David Steele Vivas
Intelligence for the President--and Everyone Else

John Ross
Teotihuacan Gets Mickey-Moused

Ralph Nader
Civic Heroism Awards

Yves Engler
Haiti's Harsh Realities

Alan Farago
The Story of Leonard Abess, Banker

Zulfikar Majid
Understanding Kashmir

David Yearsley
Don't Stay Up Too Late, Johan!

Charles R. Larson
Sleeping with Dogs

Kim Nicolini
Spitting at Dark Times: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Wanna Be a Garage Rock Star

Poets' Basement
Puthoff, Payne, Gaffney and Gray

Website of the Weekend
Sleep Now in the Fire

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

March 11 , 2009

Different Image, Same Tune?

Reforming the World Bank

By MITU SENGUPTA

The World Bank’s Governors has approved the first of a series of reforms aimed at amplifying the voice and influence of developing countries inside the World Bank Group. 

The centrepiece of these much-awaited reforms, announced in mid-February, is an additional seat for Sub-Saharan Africa on the Bank’s Board of Executive Directors, a change that will allow developing countries a majority on the Executive Board.  The reforms, which also seek to bring the share of developing countries in Bank voting power up to 44 percent, now sit with the Bank’s 185 member countries for final approval.

Well-meaning people from across the world have fought long and hard to improve the representation of developing countries on the Bank’s board.  They have rightly pointed out that while the Bank’s decisions have a profound impact on the world’s poor – most of who live in developing countries – its board has always been dominated by the richest and most powerful states, which do not, in fact, borrow from the Bank. Its top five shareholders, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, are the key players, and have one seat each on its 24-member board (the remaining 19 are divided among clusters of countries organized along regional lines).  The “big five” command about 40 percent of the Bank’s votes, and together with other industrialized countries, about 60 percent.  Owing to a postwar bargain struck between the US and the major European powers, furthermore, the Bank’s president is always an American citizen nominated by the US government. 

For an organization committed to “working for a world free of poverty,” this makes for an embarrassingly colonial image, and one that many insiders, who have backed the reforms, would rather see corrected.        
For critics of the Bank, however, it may be far too soon to breathe a sigh of relief.  There is reason to suspect that the Bank’s reforms are little more than institution-preserving mechanisms, cobbled together in the face of mounting criticism of its undemocratic internal practices and ill-conceived policies.   It is unlikely that the additional seat for Africa, or the broader commitment to improving the organization’s “accountability” and “transparency,” will lead to any significant change in what the Bank does and how it thinks.  There are several immediate reasons why.

First, the Bank’s Executive Board is not, in fact, the organization’s primary decision-making body.  The Bank is often described as a staff-driven organization, which is another way of saying that it is the Bank’s staff and senior management who have the power that counts.  It is they, not the Executive Directors (EDs), who have permanent careers in the organization (some vice presidents have served the Bank for more than thirty years). EDs are in for shorter, 4-5 year terms, and can expect to be recalled if there’s a change in government in their home country. 

It is the staff, furthermore, that negotiates directly with borrowing governments and hammers out the resultant agreements.  EDs typically nod through already-polished proposals that arrive before them, and are not privy to the debates over alternatives that may arise among staff.  Of course, neither is the public.  Indeed, no amount of publishing board decisions, minutes, and voting records in the name of “transparency” can compensate for the fact that the Bank’s most important work is done behind closed doors, through informal and fluid processes that are never captured by its official documents.    

Apart from not having much power, the Bank’s EDs have little incentive to function as genuine representatives of the countries that have sent them to Washington.  It is the Bank that pays for their ample salaries, pension plans and boundless first-class travel.  Not surprisingly, some EDs choose to stay on with the Bank when their terms end, and move into senior management positions – a more attractive option, no doubt, than returning to a “transitional” country as yet another poorly paid public servant.

It also doesn’t help that the Bank’s EDs are almost always elite economic policy officials – former or recently serving finance ministers and central bank heads – rather than representatives of sectors such as health, education or agriculture, which are usually the most adversely affected by the Bank’s programs.  Many are ardent neoliberals who are more likely to advocate on behalf of the Bank than to entertain the complaints of those that oppose it.  In fact, some, who do return home, use their connections in Washington to strengthen their position against domestic opponents, especially those on the Left.   
Incidentally, even though the Bank habitually describes its interlocutors in developing country as “development partners,” it negotiates its most vital deals with the elite economic policy officials of borrowing countries.  Its lofty goals of “ownership by the societies affected” and consultation with “civil society” are likewise hollow.  While the NGO-World Bank committee has admittedly become more active in recent years, in most cases, the Bank speaks with pre-selected NGOs that are relatively friendly.  Some of these are headed by former (and in some cases current) government officials that are already known to the Bank.  More militant groups, with links to radical segments of the Left and labour, are studiously left out. 

It’s the ideology that counts…

The selection of staff and senior management at the Bank has never been “transparent.”  What is well-known, however, is that ideological positioning is more important in their appointment and promotion than are academic credentials or, for that matter, even skin colour.  The Bank, like the IMF, its neighbour across Washington’s 19th street, employs mainly economists, or more accurately, neoclassical economists, most of who are cherry picked from elite universities in the West, and many of who are developing country nationals.  In fact, the Bank’s always inducted plenty of developing country nationals into senior posts – even in the 1980s, the heyday of “structural adjustment” – so long as they’ve carried the requisite degrees from a Harvard or a Cambridge, and demonstrated a preference for Friedman over Marx. 

If anything, the colour scheme at the top has become even more varied in recent years.  Today, nearly two-thirds of the Bank’s staff and nearly 42 percent of its managers are from developing countries.  Seven of the current president Robert E. Zoellick’s nine senior appointments are from developing countries (Zoellick assumed office in July 2007).  But even though the Bank’s cafeteria probably serves more curry and couscous than it’s done before, there’s been no perceptible shift in the institution’s orientation.  The Bank still promotes growth as the highest good of economic policy, and continues to take a dim view of labour unions and government spending, other than on a few “targeted” poverty reduction programs.  This suggests, once again, that a stock commitment to “representation” will not translate automatically into the Bank’s acting or thinking differently.  Nor will it be any less swayed by the demands of its largest shareholder, the United States.

Indeed, when the Bush administration appointed neoconservative icon Paul Wolfowitz as the Bank’s president in 2005 – ignoring a wild public outcry as well as grumbling among insiders (who felt the ham-handed turn would damage the institution’s still-fragile reformist image) – it drove home the true nature of the institution’s relationship with the US government.  Bush made it plain, as only he could, that the country that pays the proverbial piper also expects to play his tune (fortunately, for the Bank’s image-keepers, Wolfowitz became embroiled in various scandals and resigned his post in 2007).
It is tempting to shrug off the Bank’s impending reforms as a shallow move, but one, nonetheless, that’s in the right direction.  There are, however, some troubling implications. 

The impression of improved “governance” may be used to justify a further expansion of the Bank’s already far-reaching and extraordinarily intrusive mandate.  The conditions it attaches to its loans can affect basic decisions about the budget in borrowing countries, along with other issues that normally lie within the sole jurisdiction of national governments, such as judicial and civil service reform.  As explained by Ngaire Woods, a reputed scholar in the field, no matter how thoroughly international institutions are reformed, they cannot be made as democratic as national governments.  One should be wary, therefore, of shifting decision-making from potentially more accountable governments to the “necessarily democratically stunted international organizations.” 

Another equally worrying implication is that these reforms will help the Bank further depoliticize its image, and promote itself as a value-neutral organization, stacked with “experts,” that is committed to rational problem-solving on behalf of the world’s poor.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  The Bank always was, and still remains, a keen ideological warrior with mammoth resources.  The Bank’s incursion into the policy terrain of national governments has tended to pull it into combat with opponents in both civil society and the state.  Resistance has been especially fierce in countries such as Argentina, Mexico and India, which have a strong Left and nationalist commitments to state interventionism. 

The Bank’s strategy, in these cases, is not one of winning over hearts and minds, as the pretty platitude of “ownership by the societies affected” might suggest.  Rather, the Bank has functioned as a formidable political strategist, by creating its own allies within the state – in core economic ministries such as Finance – and equipping them with the necessary wherewithal to marginalize domestic opponents.  Rewards for allies have included vigorous lobbying on their behalf, privileged access to the Bank’s incomparably well-funded research, and, most importantly, the promise of jobs at headquarters in Washington, especially if the political heat at home gets too hot to bear (this, ironically, has helped the Bank improve its record of “representation”). 

Mitu Sengupta, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics & Public Administration at Ryerson University in Toronto.

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