"Looking South"

Hey, this sounds like a good idea:

The Bush Administration in general, and Paul Wolfowitz in particular, would have you believe that 1,500 Americans have died, perhaps 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, and more than $200 billion has been spent on invading and occupying Iraq, in the name of “democracy”.

Funny then that Paul Wolfowitz is now being promoted in a secret, opaque, closely held process that freezes out most of the world. Of special note, the selection of the new World Bank head freezes out the 1 billion people who live on less than $1 per day, and the 3 billion who live on less than $2 per day. It freezes out the entire Southern hemisphere­Africa, Asia, South America. In fact, it freezes out everyone who is not a Bush loyalist in the U.S., or a nervous European elite.

It is as if fighting world poverty were a ping-pong game between the U.S. and Europe, a game in which the poorer nations are not even allowed to enter.

But why? Why should the world’s poorest people be excluded from the process of selecting one of the most important leaders who will affect their lives? Why are the nations most controlled by World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies not allowed to nominate, or even participate in any meaningful way, in the selection of new leadership?

Is Nelson Mandela less qualified to run the World Bank than Paul Wolfowitz? Or how about one of the Brazilians behind the Lula government’s innovative proposal to eliminate hunger by taxing international arms sales? Or, since we know that the most direct route to fighting world poverty is to empower and educate poor women, why not a woman from the South to lead the World Bank, say, Arundhati Roy of India, or Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya, two women who actually know something about helping poor people?

Why not choose representatives from the World Bank from the regions of the world that the World Bank is supposedly designed to serve. As Jesse points out, there are numerous people from those regions who are intelligent, knowledgeable, and dedicated. Furthermore, they would have a vested interest in having the World Banking acutally helping to bring them out of poverty and into something more comfortable, as opposed to exploiting them on behalf of Western countries.