-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: May 19, 2007 2:26:47 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Job Opening: Thief-in-Chief of Money Changers. Resumes Here.
White House to Quickly Replace Wolfowitz
By JEANNINE AVERSA
AP
http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/white-house-to-quickly-
replace-wolfowitz/20070511191309990001
WASHINGTON (May 18) - Trying to put a controversy behind it, the
Bush administration was wasting no time finding a successor to
World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, who will resign over his
handling of a pay package for his girlfriend.
Wolfowitz on Thursday announced that he would step down at the end
of June, his leadership undermined by a furor over the compensation
he arranged in 2005 for Shaha Riza, a bank employee.
His departure ends a two-year run at the development bank that was
marked by controversy from the start, given his previous role as a
major architect of the Iraq war when he served as the No. 2
official at the Pentagon.
It also ends a potential political headache for President Bush, who
had named Wolfowitz to the post.
The Wolfowitz flap had been seen as a growing liability that
threatened to tarnish the poverty-fighting institution's reputation
and hobble its ability to persuade countries around the world to
contribute billions of dollars to provide financial assistance to
poor nations.
The bank "needs to rebuild it credibility immediately, regain its
focus and devote its full attention to its clients," said the
bank's staff association, which, along with former bank officials,
aid groups and some Democratic politicians, had wanted Wolfowitz to
resign.
The White House said it would move quickly to name a new candidate
to run the bank.
Bush "will have a candidate to announce soon, allowing for an
orderly transition that will have the World Bank refocused on its
mission," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.
Bush's selection must be approved by the World Bank's board.
Among those mentioned as a possible replacement for Wolfowitz were
former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick*, who was Bush's
trade chief; Robert Kimmitt*, the No. 2 at the Treasury Department;
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson*; and Stanley Fischer*, who once
worked at the International Monetary Fund and is now with the Bank
of Israel.
A White House official wouldn't comment on possible candidates,
saying "any reporting on potential names is pure speculation."
The 185-nation bank, created in 1945 to rebuild Europe after World
War II, provides more than $20 billion a year for projects such as
building dams and roads, bolstering education and fighting disease.
The bank's centerpiece program offers interest-free loans to the
poorest countries.
By tradition, the bank has been run by an American. The Bush
administration keenly wanted to keep that decades-old practice
intact as it dealt with the Wolfowitz situation. The United States
is the bank's largest shareholder and its biggest financial
contributor <<as well as its biggest manipulator>>.
.
------------
*Robert Bruce Zoellick
was a United States Deputy Secretary of State, resigning on July 7,
2006. He had served as United States Trade Representative, from
February 7, 2001 until February 22, 2005. He has also served on
Secretary William Cohen's Defense Policy Board.
He announced his resignation on June 19, 2006 to join the
investment bank Goldman Sachs as a managing director and chairman
of the company's International Advisors department.
Robert Zoellick also serves or has served as a board member for a
number of private and public organizations: Alliance Capital, [Arab-
owned] Said Holdings, and the Precursor Group, as a member of the
advisory board of Enron, and a director of the Aspen Institute's
Strategy Group. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations
and the Trilateral Commission.
Zoellick served in various positions at the Department of the
Treasury from 1985 to 1988, including Counselor to Secretary James
Baker, Executive Secretary of the Department, and Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Financial Institutions Policy.
During George H. W. Bush's presidency, Zoellick served with
Secretary of State James Baker as Under Secretary of State for
Economic and Agricultural Affairs, as well as Counselor to the
Department (Under Secretary rank). In August 1992, Ambassador
Zoellick was appointed White House Deputy Chief of Staff and
Assistant to the President. Zoellick was also appointed the
President's personal representative for the G-7 Economic Summits in
1991 and 1992.
During the 2000 U.S. Presidential election campaign Zoellick served
as foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush as part of a
neoconservative group led by Condoleezza Rice that called itself
The Vulcans. <<Paul Wolfowitz had also been a member of that group.>>
Zoellick was one of the signatories (with Donald Rumsfeld, Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John R.
Bolton, Richard Armitage, William Kristol) of the Project for a New
American Century's 1998 manifesto calling for "removing Saddam's
regime from power."
-----------------------
*Stanley Fischer
obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. at the London School of Economics from
1962-1966 and his Ph.D. at MIT in 1969, all in economics. He was a
professor at MIT from 1977 to 1988, where he authored two popular
economics textbooks: Macroeconomics (with Rudiger Dornbusch and
Richard Startz) and Lectures in Macroeconomics (with Olivier
Blanchard).
From January 1988 to August 1990 he was Vice President, Development
Economics and Chief Economist at the World Bank. He then became the
First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund,
from September 1994 until the end of August 2001. After leaving the
IMF, he served as Vice Chairman of Citigroup, President of
Citigroup International, and Head of the Public Sector Client
Group. Mr. Fischer worked at Citigroup from February, 2002 to
April, 2005.
He became Governor of the Bank of Israel on May 1, 2005, after
being nominated by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Finance Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. He has been involved in the past with the Bank
of Israel, having served as an American government adviser to
Israel's economic stabilization program in 1985. Mr. Fischer has a
basic knowledge of Hebrew and has close ties to Israel. Fischer
had been a visiting professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in
1972, and as a close friend of former Bank of Israel governor Jacob
Frenkel, he became a frequent adviser to the Israeli government on
financial issues
Mr. Fischer is now become an Israeli citizen, exercising his right
as a Jew to do so under the Law of Return, the aforementioned
action being a prerequisite to this appointment. The U.S. says he
will not have to renounce his American citizenship in order to
assume the role.
From a Russell Sage Foundation interview with Fischer:
http://www.citigroup.com/citigroup/features/fischer040813.htm
"I visited the Bank of Israel in 1979. My real opportunity came in
1983 when [Reagan's Secretary of State] George Shultz asked me join
an advisory group he was creating on the Israeli economy. I had in
the meantime become somewhat of an American expert on the Israeli
economy.
"That was when I got into the policy game. It was a very fortunate
introduction. It’s extremely unusual to have the Secretary of State
take some young guy he doesn’t know and appoint him as an adviser,
and then let him have an active role. Herb Stein and I were
appointed as George Shultz’s advisers on the Israeli economy. On
the occasions Herb and I traveled to Israel, we essentially had
George Shultz’s authority behind us. We could say, “The Secretary
of State believes this.”
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/HF17Dj01.html
Having served as secretary of labor in 1968 and head of the Office
of Management and Budget in 1970, George Shultz was appointed
treasury secretary by Nixon in 1973. During his tenure, Shultz
shifted his attention to the international arena to deal with a
renewed dollar crisis that broke out in February 1973. Shultz
organized an international monetary conference in Paris in 1973 to
formalize the 1971 US decision to close the gold window and abolish
the fixed-exchange-rate system, which had actually begun to
collapse in 1971, causing all key currencies since to float.
The year 1973 was a very bad one for the US economy. The
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries induced an oil
crisis, pushing the US economy into a severe recession not seen
since 1929, with industrial production shrinking 15%, unemployment
reaching above 9% and economic output declining 6%.
Shultz resigned shortly before Nixon did, only to return to
Washington in 1982 as president Ronald Reagan's secretary of state.
William Simon, deputy secretary of the Treasury under Shultz,
served concurrently as the director of the Federal Energy Office
during the oil crisis of 1973. He was named as the 63rd secretary
of the Treasury by Nixon in 1974 and continued under president
Gerald Ford after Nixon resigned.
Domestically, Simon faced a worsening economic slump as he took
control of the Treasury. In response to the oil crisis, he strong-
armed oil-producing nations to deposit their petrodollars in US
banks but discouraged them from direct investment in US
corporations. This led US banks to lend the petrodollars to
developing economies that could only repay the loans with earnings
from exports to US markets. This was the beginning of
globalization, as the dependence of the emerging economies on US
markets for consumer goods forced them to open their financial
markets to US capital denominated in dollars.
As treasury secretary, Simon continued the policies begun under
Shultz of pressuring Europe, Japan and the Soviet bloc with US
financial prowess, keeping international economic policy initiative
in US hands to ensure a competitive advantage for the United States.
-------------------
*Robert M. Kimmitt
served from 1989 to 1991 as Under Secretary of State for Political
Affairs, and for his service during the Gulf Crisis and War,
President George H. W. Bush presented Mr. Kimmitt with the
Presidential Citizens Medal, the Nation’s second highest civilian
award.
From 1985 to 1987, Mr. Kimmitt served as General Counsel to the
U.S. Treasury Department. Before that, he served at the White
House as National Security Council Executive Secretary and General
Counsel from 1983 to 1985, with the rank of Deputy Assistant to the
President for National Security Affairs. From 1976 to 1977 and 1978
to 1983, Mr. Kimmitt was a member of the NSC Staff.
Before rejoining the government, Mr. Kimmitt was a managing
director of Lehman Brothers.
From 1998 to 2005 he was a member of the Director of Central
Intelligence’s National Security Advisory Panel. He also served as
a member of the Panel of Arbitrators of the World Bank’s
International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes.
Mr. Kimmitt received a law degree from Georgetown University in
1977, where he was editor in chief of Law & Policy in International
Business. From 1977 to 1978, he served as law clerk to <former FBI
Assistant Director] Judge Edward A. Tamm of the United States Court
of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
-------------------------
*Henry Merritt "Hank" Paulson Jr.
is the United States Treasury Secretary and member of the
International Monetary Fund Board of Governors. He previously
served as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman
Sachs, one of the world's largest and most successful investment
banks.
Paulson was Staff Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense
at The Pentagon from 1970 to 1972. He then worked for the
administration of U.S. President Richard Nixon, serving as
assistant to John Ehrlichman from 1972 to 1973.
He joined Goldman Sachs in 1974, becoming a partner in 1982. His
compensation package, according to reports, was US$37 million in
2005. His net worth has been estimated at over $700 million.
Paulson's three immediate predecessors as CEO of Goldman Sachs —
Jon Corzine, Stephen Friedman**, and Robert Rubin — each left the
company to serve in government: Corzine as a U.S. Senator, and both
Friedman and Rubin as chairman of the President's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board.
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2006/05/31/
business/paulson.php
When Josh Bolten became White House as chief of staff in April,
word has it that he was instrumental in persuading Henry Paulson,
his former colleague at Goldman Sachs, to accept the post of
treasury secretary, replacing John Snow.
Bolten had originally joined the White House as President George W
Bush's deputy chief of staff to handle domestic policy. However, as
the administration soured on the independent-minded national
economic adviser Larry Lindsey, Bolten gradually began increasing
his influence over economic policymaking by framing economic issues
for presidential consideration. Bolten is credited as the chief
architect of the Bush tax cuts as well as the hiring of another
former colleague from Goldman Sachs, Stephen Friedman, to replace
Lindsey as assistant to the president for economic policy.
At Goldman, Friedman was a fearsome strategist for corporate
takeovers. He was co-director along with Robert Rubin from 1990-92
and sole director from 1992-94 after Rubin left for Washington to
become treasury secretary under president Bill Clinton. After
leaving Goldman Sachs in 1994, Friedman became a senior principal
for March & McLennan Capital, an investment-insurance unit whose
parent company faced a government probe into bid-rigging and price-
fixing that has since been settled out of court.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/HF17Dj01.html
Why Paulson accepted the Treasury job
It is possible that Henry Paulson sees an uphill battle in the next
few years as the US economy slows. Paulson is a banker and bankers
are interested in the state of the market, not the economy per se.
In two and a half years, a treasury secretary can, with the full
power of the Treasury behind him, have a chance of saving the
market from imminent collapse from its current structural imbalances.
The formula is to accelerate the crash in order to gain a fast
recovery later. The prospect of Paulson engineering a sharp
correction in the equity market right after the mid-term
congressional election is almost certain. The strategy is to remove
the structural bottlenecks and to weed out the weaknesses and have
the market resume its upward path by June 2008.
This strategy is doable with government intervention, but it will
require a crash to create a serious enough emergency to make
government intervention patriotic, possibly including massive
bailouts of several troubled giants such as General Motors, General
Electric and Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association)
and big money-center banks up to their necks with credit-derivative
exposures.
See what's free at AOL.com.
www.ctrl.org
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