The Trump Putin Alliance on Ukraine

 

The Trump-Putin Alliance

The Trump administration policy has allied with Russia against Ukraine in its actions and negotiation posture. Since the Trump administration came into office, military aid to Ukraine has been cut by 99%. It cut all humanitarian aid to Ukraine shortly after taking office for education, healthcare, shelter, heat and power, war-displaced persons, HIV drugs, mental health services for war-distressed children, families, and veterans, and other services. In December, the US restored a token $2 billion of the former $63 billion USAID budget for humanitarian aid programs that is now being spent through UN programs trying to aid Ukraine and other war-torn countries like Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Also immediately upon taking office, the Trump administration closed US Justice Department programs to monitor and enforce sanctions against Russian frozen assets, influence operations in the US, and other sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Trump defunded US programs to document Russian war crimes, including cooperation with the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression Against Ukraine and the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which had identified and documented some 35,000 Ukrainian children forcibly abducted by Russia.

After repeatedly voting for UN General Assembly resolutions since Russia’s full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022 that affirmed Ukraine’s sovereignty and demanded that Russia halt its military operations and withdraw back to Russia, in February 2025, the US reversed course under the Trump administration on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine. The US, and its satellites including Israel, voted with Russia against a similar resolution condemning Russia’s invasion and demanding that Russian troops withdraw.

While Trump still allows Europeans to buy weapons they can send on to Ukraine, US shipment delays have left crucial Ukrainian air defense missile launchers without missiles to fire against incoming Russian missiles in recent weeks.

Trump’s alliance with Putin is rooted in their far-right ideological affinity for a world of imperial spheres of influence, authoritarian rule, and racist, misogynistic, and homophobic “traditional values.” Grifters on both sides have been bargaining to partition Ukraine between them like a piece of real estate. The Russian side has been led by Kirill Dmitriev, a Stanford and Harvard trained veteran of McKinsey and Goldman Sachs who runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and 15 years ago scammed purchasers of apartments in a building development in Kyiv out of their investments. On the US side are Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, all long engaged in money laundering the real estate investments of Russian oligarchs and other Russia business ties.

Russia is now pitching Trump’s team on a $14 trillion business deal that is contingent on the US forcing Ukraine to accept Russia’s negotiation demands. It would involve lifting Western sanctions on Russia, joint arctic oil and gas exploitation, Russia returning to the dollar-based payments system, preferential US access to the Russian market, compensation for US corporate assets lost in Russia during the war, US aid for Russian aircraft modernization, joint mining of lithium, copper, nickel, and platinum, and cooperation on nuclear power plants to power AI data centers. All of this scheming is being conducted behind the backs of the Ukrainians.

https://www.ukrainesolidaritynetwork.us/ukraine-still-stands/

 

 

How Politics is Changing / Corrupting the Way History is Taught

 California, the nation’s largest Democratic-led state, has passed a law restricting what teachers can say in the classroom, and has walked back an effort to require high school students to take classes in ethnic studies.

 

To supporters of these changes, they are a necessary corrective to what they see as a leftward tilt in the education establishment. But these developments have also set off alarms among free speech advocates, as the Trump administration pushes to punish speech it dislikes and to impose its patriotic vision of American history on schools.

 

How Politics is Changing the Way History is Taught.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/27/us/history-lessons-ethnic-studies-retreat.html

To win, they will have to come through us. 

Bernie and AOC Coming to Auburn California- Tuesday.

Bernie’s coming to Auburn on Tuesday, April 15, and you’re invited! He’ll be speaking alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about how our movement can come together to take on the Oligarchy and demand a government that works for all of us, not just the wealthy few.

This is going to be a great event, and we’d love to see you there. So, can you make it? Here’s everything you need to know:

Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here with Bernie Sanders in Auburn
With Special Guest Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Tuesday, April 15
3:30pm PDT Doors Open
6:00pm PDT Speaking Program Starts
Gold Country Fairgrounds and Event Center

209 Fairgate Road, Auburn, CA 95603 

AOC and Oligarchy

I am here to remind you all: we are not powerless in this moment.

People are starting to put the pieces together, 

And that’s important, because the same billionaires that are taking a wrecking ball to our country specialize in getting working people to turn on one another.

I understand that this disdain for working people, by some of the most powerful people in this country, doesn’t just come from them not being raised right.

There’s a word for this kind of thing: corruption.

I understand what it feels like to watch all of this stack up. When the system is stacked against you, it’s hard to feel like anything you do matters.

I can tell you: when I was waitressing, and struggling to put food on the table, for a while there, I tried to keep my head down, work my shifts, and accept that this is just how things are.

But that’s no way to live.

This is What Oligarchy Looks Like

,

“I like to give on a scale where I can see impact...” - David Koch

Earlier this year, a number of Republicans flew to California to make fundraising pitches to more than four hundred wealthy conservative donors attending a private conference hosted by the Koch brothers.

It’s worth taking a moment to ask the question, who are the Koch brothers, and what do they want?

The Koch brothers are the second-wealthiest family in America worth $82 billion. For the Koch brothers, $82 billion in wealth apparently is not good enough. Owning the second-largest private company in America is apparently not good enough. It doesn’t appear that they will be satisfied until they are able to control the entire political process.

This issue isn't personal for me. I don't know the Koch brothers, but I do know this. They have advocated for destroying the federal programs that are critical to the financial and personal health of middle class Americans.

Now, most Americans know that the Koch brothers are the primary source of funding for the Tea Party, and that’s fine. They know that they favor the outright repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and that’s their opinion. It’s wrong, but that’s fine as well.

But it is not widely known that David Koch once ran for Vice President of the United States of America on the Libertarian Party ticket because he believed Ronald Reagan was much too liberal. And he ran on a platform that included the following:

• “We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt and increasingly oppressive Social Security system.”
• “We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.”
• “We support repeal of all laws which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws…”
• “We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.”

Why and how health care is stalled

The Real Problem with The Senate's Small-State Bias
by Nate Silver
Five Thirty Eight: Politics Done Right
8/3/2009


As you all surely know, the Senate is not a terribly
democratic institution. A voter in Wyoming -- population
533,000 -- has about 70 times more ability to influence
the Senate's direction than one in California --
population 36.8 million. And the lack of
representativeness can be particularly acute when the
Senate is conducting business at the committee level.
Max Baucus's Table for Six, for instance, which may very
well determine the fate of efforts to reform health
care, is made up of members who collectively represent
about 6.5 million people, or around one-fiftieth of the
country's population.

This in and of itself is problematic for Democrats,
since there is a correlation between the size of a state
and how Democratic it tends to vote in elections for
national office, although the relationship is not as
strong as you might posit (Rhode Island, Delaware and
Hawaii are small states too). The bigger and more
structural problem, however, may have to do with the
ways that small-state senators raise funds, and in turn,
whose interests they are beholden to.

The chart below details the 20 current senators who have
received the highest percentage of their campaign
contributions since 2003 from corporate PACs, based on
data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
This data focuses on corporate PAC contributions and
individual contributions only; other, usually minor
sources of income (self-financing, transfers from other
campaign committees, contributions from ideological and
labor PACs) are treated as ambiguous and are ignored.
Data should be current through roughly May of this year.

What do these senators have in common? All 20 come from
states with below-median populations. In fact, you have
to go to #26 (John McCain) to find a senator from a
state with an above-median population, and #30 (Saxby
Chambliss) to find one from a state with an above-
average population.

The reason this occurs is because individual
contributions are easier to obtain in states with larger
populations. Although some people make campaign
contributions to candidates from outside their states,
most do not, and so a senator from Texas ought to have
an easier time eliciting funds than one from Idaho. On
the other hand, there is no relationship between the
amount of PAC contributions and the population of a
senator's state; PACs know that one senator's vote is
just as good as another.

What this means is that senators from small states tend
to be relatively more dependant on special-interest
money -- it makes up a larger share of their overall
take. Senators from the ten smallest states have
received, on average, 28.4 percent of their campaign
funds from corporate PACs, versus 13.7 for those in the
ten largest. There is a tendency to think of senators
from small states as being populists, and there are a
few instances in which this is accurate -- Jon Tester of
Montana and John Thune of South Dakota, for instance,
are relatively non-dependant on PAC money. But for the
most part, something the opposite is true, and senators
from small states in fact have more incentive to placate
special interests.

It is worth noting, by the way, that the six senators on
Baucus's mini-committee are especially egregious in this
regard. They rank #1 (Mike Enzi), #6 (Chuck Grassley),
#11 (Kent Conrad), #13 (Baucus), #14 (Jeff Bingaman) and
#20 (Olympia Snowe) in the share of contributions
received from corporate PACs (an average of 47.5 percent
of their funds overall).

One can think of several plausible reforms to redress
this imbalance. For instance, corporations might be
restricted from donating PAC money to a senator unless
they do a material amount of business in her state. In
addition, the proliferation of the Internet as a
fundraising tool has probably leveled the playing field
some, making it easier for populist-ish candidates like
Tester or Jim Webb to receive contributions from
activists all over the country.

This goes a long way toward explaining, however, why the
Senate tends to be more protective than the House of
corporate interests -- be they in the form of bank
bailouts, tax breaks, or whatever else (consider, for
instance, that H.R. 1424 -- the second take on the bank
bailout -- was approved with the votes of 74 percent of
the Senate but just 60 percent of the House). We don't
need vague notions about the "cultural" differences
between the two chambers to explain this -- they have
mostly to do with where the money is flowing in from.

A complete list of the source of campaign funds for all
100 senators follows below.

-- Ira Cohen

Insurance corporations try to kill health care reform

See: The excellent report on Bill Moyers Journal
Health Care;
The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that you're heading down the slippery slope towards socialism... I think that people who are strong advocates of our health care system remaining as it is, very much a free market health care system, fail to realize that we're really talking about human beings here, and it doesn't work as well as they would like it to... They are trying to make you worry and fear a government bureaucrat being between you and your doctor. What you have now is a corporate bureaucrat between you and your doctor... The public plan would do a lot to keep [health insurance companies] honest, because it would have to offer a standard benefit plan. It would have to operate more efficiently, as does the Medicare program. It would be structured, I’m certain, on a level playing field so that it wouldn’t [have an] unfair advantage [over] the private insurance companies. Because it could be administered more efficiently, the private insurers would have to operate more efficiently.”
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/07/assessing_a_public_option_for.html

The “public option” is central to many Democrats’ vision for health care reform, but it has attracted pointed criticism from supporters of the “single payer” model and opponents of federal intervention alike.

Larry Summers, $800 million, and the bankers

Living Large and in Charge

By Robert Scheer
April 7, 2009, Truthdig

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090407_robert_scheer_april_8_column/

Not surprisingly, Lawrence Summers is convinced that he
deserved every penny of the $8 million that Wall Street firms
paid him last year. And why shouldn't he be cut in on the
loot from the loopholes in the toxic derivatives market that
he pushed into law when he was Bill Clinton's treasury
secretary? No one has been more persistently effective in
paving the way for the financial swindles that enriched the
titans of finance while impoverishing the rest of the world
than the man who is now the top economic adviser to President
Obama.

It is especially disturbing that Summers got most of the $8
million from a major hedge fund at a time when such totally
unregulated rich-guys-only investment clubs stand to make the
most off the Obama administration's plan for saving the
banks. The scheme, as announced by Treasury Secretary Timothy
Geithner, a Summers protégé, is to clean up the toxic
holdings of the banks using taxpayer money and then turn them
over to hedge funds that will risk little of their own
capital. At least the banks are somewhat government-
regulated, which cannot be said of the hedge funds, thanks to
Summers.

It was Summers, as much as anyone, who in the Clinton years
prevented the regulation of the hedge funds that are at the
center of the explosion of the derivatives bubble, and the
fact that D.E. Shaw, a leading hedge fund, paid the Obama
adviser $5.2 million last year does suggest a serious
conflict of interest. That sum is what Summers raked in for a
part-time gig, in addition to the $2.77 million he received
for 40 speaking engagements, largely before banks and
investment firms, and on top of the $587,000 he was paid as a
professor at Harvard.

Summers was a top adviser to the Democratic presidential
candidate last year, and that might have enhanced his
speaking fees, which seem to have a base rate of $67,500, the
amount he received on each of two occasions when he appeared
at Lehman Brothers before that company went bankrupt. Lehman
had purchased a 20 percent stake in D.E. Shaw while Summers
was employed by the hedge fund, and it would be interesting
to know if the subject of the overlapping business came up
during Summers' visit to Lehman.

Lehman was only one on an impressive list of top financial
firms that consulted Summers during a troubled period.
Goldman Sachs was so interested in his thoughts that it paid
him more than $200,000 for two talks, even though it soon
needed $12 billion in taxpayer bailout funds. Citigroup,
which has been going through hard times, managed only a
$54,000 fee for a Summers rap. Merrill Lynch could pony up
only a scant $45,000 for a Summers appearance last Nov. 12,
but that was at a point when Merrill was in deep trouble,
with the government arranging its sale. Summers, anticipating
an appointment in the administration of the newly elected
Obama and perhaps wanting to avoid any embarrassment the fee
might bring, decided to turn over the $45,000 to a charity.

Why was someone as compromised as Summers made the White
House's point man overseeing $2.86 trillion in bailout funds
to the financial moguls whom he had enabled in creating this
mess and many of whom had benefited him financially? Will no
congressional panel ever quiz Summers about his grand theory
that the derivatives market required no government
supervision because, as he testified to a Senate subcommittee
in July of 1998: 'The parties to these kinds of contracts are
largely sophisticated financial institutions that would
appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from
fraud and counterparty insolvencies. ...'

Think of the sophisticates at AIG when you read that
sentence, and then ask why Summers is once again at large in
the public sector. Or take White House spokesman Ben LaBolt's
word for it that 'Dr. Summers has been at the forefront of
this administration's work - to put in place a regulatory
framework that will strengthen the financial system and its
oversight-all in an effort to help the families across
America who have paid a very steep price for risky decisions
made by Wall Street executives.'

The very same executives that Summers had previously assured
us could be trusted without any regulation. Why should we now
trust Summers any more than we trust them? Couldn't Summers
just take his ill-gotten gains and go hide out in some
offshore tax haven? If this was happening in a Republican
administration, scores of Democrats in Congress would be all
over it, asking tough questions about what exactly did
Summers do to earn all that money from the D.E. Shaw hedge
fund. As it is, with their silence they are complicit in this
emerging scandal of the banking bailout. Summers

It was Lawrence Summers, as much as anyone, who in the
Clinton years prevented the regulation of the hedge funds
that are now at the center of the explosion of the
derivatives bubble.

_____________________________________________
Larry Summers, chief economic advisor to President Obama

When Bush politicians decide- corruption

Katrina all over again.

EDUCATION & LABOR COMMITTEE
Congressman George Miller, Chairman
________________________________

Thursday, May 1, 2008
Press Office, 202-226-0853
Chairman Miller: Report Shows We Must Re-Evaluate Effectiveness of Reading First Program
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, issued the following statement on a new report on the federal Reading First program released today by the Institute for Education Services. The report found that the program has not made a significant difference in the reading comprehension levels of participating students. “From day one of the creation of the Reading First program, it has been corrupted by the Bush administration – plagued by severe mismanagement, poor implementation, and gross conflicts of interest. Despite these serious issues, I had nevertheless hoped that the program would produce better results than these. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent administering this program over the years. This report makes it shamefully clear that the only individuals benefiting from this significant investment were the President’s cronies – not the schoolchildren this program was intended to serve. Because of the corruption in the Reading First program, districts and schools were steered towards certain reading programs and products that may not have provided the most effective instruction for students. That may explain why we are seeing these results today.
“We all share the goal of helping all children learn to read. But this report, coupled with the scandals revealed last year, shows that we need to seriously re-examine this program and figure out how to make it work better for students. Our nation’s schoolchildren and taxpayers deserve a program that is both properly managed and successful in boosting the reading skills of students.”
The Reading First program was first created under the No Child Left Behind Act to help all children read at grade level by the end of third grade. An investigation conducted last year by the House Education and Labor Committee uncovered significant conflicts of interest among Department of Education officials and contractors involved with running the program. For more information on the results of that investigation, click here . ###

President creates new Czar : the Onion

President Creates Cabinet-Level Position To Coordinate Scandals

Billions over Baghdad

Two excellent reporters, Donald Bartlett and James B. Steele, tell the story of corruption in Iraq.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/10/iraq_billions200710

Bush/ World Bank and corruption

Published on openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net)
The world’s World Bank problem

By Robert Wade
Created 2007-07-10 14:52
The fight between the Americans and the Europeans over the fate of Paul Wolfowitz obscured the bigger question of whether the world still needs the World Bank. The immediate contest may be over and Robert Zoellick installed as the new president (nominated by the White House / United States treasury), but the question looms over everything the bank does.

Before addressing this question, however, two points should be made about the Wolfowitz affair [0]. First, the blame for the scandal that brought him down was not entirely on his side, and on its own it would not have led to his departure. In particular, the bank's ethics committee gave him muddled advice when he approached it about a conflict of interest between him being president and his then romantic partner being a bank employee.


But in any case, the ethics issue became the lightning-rod for much broader anger over the way he was running the bank [1]. He had brought in a small group of lieutenants from the Pentagon and United States vice-president's office who set about administering the bank in a brutal and highly ideological [1] way. He and they showed undisguised contempt for the senior managers (advised to run an important speech about the bank's role in governance reform past the relevant vice-presidents to get their buy-in, Wolfowitz replied: "Not past this lot. That would be like casting pearls before swine.")


Robert Wade is professor [2] of political economy at the London School of Economics. He worked as a World Bank economist in the 1980s.

He is the author of Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asia's Industrialization (Princeton University Press, 1990 [3]) and of "Is globalization reducing poverty and inequality?", in John Ravenhill, ed., Global Political EconomyOxford University Press, 2005 [4])

Also by Robert Wade in openDemocracy:

"Inequality of world incomes: what should be done? [4]" (14 November 2001)

"The invisible hand of the American empire [4]" (13 March 2003)

"Globalisation: emancipating or reinforcing? [4]" (29 January 2007The senior managers became cowed, and spent their time trying to figure out how to minimise their vulnerability, rather than exercise their professional judgment. Those who pushed back were invited to seek employment elsewhere. The lieutenants systematically corrupted the bank's checks and balances, especially in staff recruitment and promotion (though this process was already well advanced under James Wolfensohn [5]).

The second point relates to Wolfowitz's declaration (which he made with a straight face, and he highlighted as his biggest regret about resigning) that pushing forward the corruption agenda was his signature issue. It is true that in some countries and in some sectors corruption is a big problem, substantially lowering the productivity of investment and the legitimacy of the state. But Wolfowitz and his lieutenants defined the agenda in narrow and punitive terms, as though the bank should punish a country (refuse new loan proposals, for example) wherever corruption is uncovered.

But corruption is endemic in developing countries because they are developing countries. The corruption agenda has to be broad enough to include civil-service reform, and legal and judicial reform - yet the bank is hardly staffed up with experts in these areas. Moreover, the board and the staff also saw Wolfowitz as wanting to apply the corruption agenda selectively, as a cover for advancing United States-centric political objectives.

For example, two months after the United States was obliged to comply with an Uzbek government demand [6] that the US should withdraw its military forces in the country, the bank announced in March 2006 that new loan proposals for Uzbekistan were suspended [7], ostensibly for reasons of corruption in bank projects. The bank now does have a more sensible corruption agenda, which board and staff have endorsed. But it will take some time to recover momentum because of the way corruption has been discredited by the Wolfowitz team.

The challenge of reform

The new president, Robert Zoellick [8], is a good choice - if the choice had to be restricted to someone in the Bush circle.

Apart from the day-to-day challenges, the biggest challenge for the new team is to find a way out of the bank's crisis of relevance. Its market has changed fundamentally in the past decade, but the bank continues to operate in much the same way and with much the same products as a decade ago and more. The challenge to reposition itself is almost as big as that faced by the March of Dimes when a cure for polio was found.

The change in the bank's market was dramatically symbolised in May 2007 when the African Development Bank [9] held its annual meeting not in Africa but in Shanghai - an event which will be looked back on as a milestone in the history of the early decades of the 21st century.

In its traditional products - aid projects and economic policy advice to governments of developing countries - the bank faces an array of new competitors [10]. These include China and Korea, which have become big sources of financial assistance to poorer countries; private consulting firms; private investment banks; and private foundations, like the Bill & Melissa Gates Foundation [11]. But the bank retains a sizeable competitive advantage over these other entities based on three elements: its governmental guarantees, its own revenue base, and its global reach.

The bank can and should shift more of its activity into genuinely global problems, where private-capital markets are less likely to lend, especially for global-problem-reducing investments in low-income countries. For example, it can and should take a much bigger role in tackling one of the biggest questions of our time: how to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions. The bank has much experience of translating economic policies into investment plans and investment plans into investments on the ground. It should use this experience to take the general conclusions of the Stern report [12] (October 2006) and the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports [13] (2007); spell out what the general conclusions mean for specific countries, like China, Russia, India, Bangladesh, and Brazil; and then work with these governments to formulate concrete plans of action.

The bank would have to develop new financing instruments to accelerate the uptake of climate-friendly technologies [14]. For example, a carbon fund - or since the fund should not be tied only to carbon, a "climate stabilising and adaptation" fund. Such a fund could be used to encourage a developing country government to borrow from the bank for a power station and choose a state-of-the-art minimum carbon-emission technology even though more expensive than the standard one, with the fund rather than the government bearing the incremental cost. The fund could be used to accelerate climate-friendly technologies in power, transportation (eg railways in Africa), forestry, land use, and still more.

Some of the finance could come straight from World Bank reserves [15]. The reserves are currently $36 billion, while only $25 bn is needed to maintain the all-important triple-A credit rating. The fund would also receive grants from OECD governments and private foundations.



Also in openDemocracy on Paul Wolfowitz and the World Bank:

Alex Wilks, "US bank or World Bank? [15]" (26 March 2005)

Sidney Blumenthal, "Paul Wolfowitz's tomb [15]" (1 June If the world says no


To advance in this direction the bank [16] has to address another looming question: how to decouple itself from White House/treasury control. At a dinner party a few years ago Laurence Summers - then president of Harvard, and former US deputy treasury secretary, then treasury secretary - exclaimed enthusiastically that until he entered the treasury he had not realised just how useful were the bank and the International Monetary Fund [17] (IMF) for US foreign-policy objectives. His remark is all the more striking because he had earlier been vice-president for economics and research at the bank - so he was scarcely an outsider.

Certainly the US executive branch thinks that "we" still need the World Bank (though the Congress does not always appear to agree); and that we need the bank with its present governance arrangements, which give the US its dominance [18]. But as some developing countries gradually become more self-confident (China, Brazil and India for example) the hope is that their governments will in one way or another assert themselves more in the governance of both the World Bank and the IMF, and ease the organisations out of the heartland of the American empire [19].

Any shift may be galvanised by desperation. The Americans basically run both the World Bank and the IMF (the Europeans may appoint [20] the fund's managing director, but the Americans have a lock on the fund's number-two position, whose incumbent is often more powerful than the managing director). How long will it be before the bank's middle-income borrowers - seeing the organisation as US-dominated and concerned to impose upon them free-market policies advantageous to the US (or protective policies advantageous to the US, like intellectual-property protection [21] of the US type) - walk away, and deprive the bank of the interest revenue which is the main component of its revenue base?

How long will it be before the developing-country executive directors on the board of the bank and fund insist - as they could if their governments were not afraid of upsetting the Americans and Europeans - it is high time that an Asian, or a Latin American, or an African or a Canadian could lead one of these organisations? How long before they say (to echo Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz): "we are not in 1944 anymore"?

At least the board of the bank had the gumption to call Zoellick to something like an "interview" before agreeing to support [22] his nomination (even though their agreement was guaranteed just about whatever he said). A dedicated optimist might say that they were acting in the spirit of the Chinese proverb, "cross the river one stone at a time". Let's see whether Rodrigo de Rato [23]'s successor at the IMF is nominated after a search which includes non-European (and non-American) candidates.

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[2] http://www.lse.ac.uk/people/r.wade@lse.ac.uk/
[3] http://press.princeton.edu/titles/4724.html
[4] http://www.us.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Politics/InternationalStudies/InternationalPoliticalEconomy/?view=usa&ci=9780199265848
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[6] http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/pp073105.shtml
[7] http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/03/9cad79b2-b46f-4241-a165-6f279119f167.html
[8] http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/ORGANIZATION/EXTPRESIDENT2007/0,,enableDHL:TRUE%7EmenuPK:64822279%7EpagePK:64821908%7EpiPK:64822015%7EtheSitePK:3916065,00.html
[9] http://www.afdb.org/portal/page?_pageid=293,174339&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL&press_item=18954344&press_lang=us
[10] http://americas.irc-online.org/am/4364
[11] http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm
[12] http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change/sternreview_index.cfm
[13] http://www.ipcc.ch/calendar.htm
[14] http://www.wri.org/climate/pubs_description.cfm?pid=4292
[15] http://treasury.worldbank.org/
[16] http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521029018
[17] http://www.imf.org/external/about.htm
[18] http://www.bicusa.org/en/Issue.10.aspx
[19] http://newleftreview.org/?view=2305
[20] http://news.independent.co.uk/business/analysis_and_features/article2750528.ece
[21] http://www.computing.co.uk/vnunet/news/2188919/singles-top-piracy-offenders
[22] http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21385723%7EmenuPK:34463%7EpagePK:34370%7EpiPK:34424%7EtheSitePK:4607,00.html
[23] http://www.imf.org/external/np/omd/bios/rrf.htm


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Gonzales next?

Bush and friends loot federal reading program

The Bush administration has demonstrated its incompetence in its response to Hurricane Katrina, and in the administration of reconstruction in Iraq ("Imperial Life in the Emerald City," by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, )2006.

Now, they have once again demonstrated their incompetence and venal ways.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2006/10/04/
In the Reading First initiative they looted the federal treasury and money directed toward school improvement to hire young, inexperienced, political operatives and to pass money on to their family friends and associates .
Duane Campbell

Report finds Education Department improperly backed aspects of reading program

By NANCY ZUCKERBROD
Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Education Department officials and their contractors appear to have improperly backed certain types of instruction in administering a $1 billion-a-year reading program, congressional investigators found.

The Government Accountability Office report supports assertions by the inspector general of the Education Department, who has released several reports in recent months into the Reading First program.

The program is a key part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law. It offers intensive reading help for low-income and struggling schools.

The GAO, Congress' investigative and auditing arm, surveyed states to get their views on the program.

In a report due out Friday and obtained by The Associated Press, the GAO states that some states said they received suggestions from federal officials or contractors to adopt or eliminate certain programs or tests.

Federal law prohibits the department from requiring certain curricula or directing states to use specific programs.