<p>It matters spectacularly. There are quotas by country in proportion with the amount of money provided by that country. It is spectacularly difficult to get a good position on staff at the Bank as an American. </p>
<p>She may have had a disastrous resume, but she must have been doing something right I imagine as a contractor – maybe she was sleeping with her boss. : )</p>
<p>Periodically, consultants (perhaps even Americans) will be hired as full-time hires, but their roles are typically slow-track and often not very well paid.</p>
<p>But as far as your position goes, to anybody on the outside with objectivity towards your two statements, I think it really looks like it shifted.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It may have been because of politics, but it was based on his malfeasance and inappropriate behavior. Chalking it up to politics suggests it was without basis.</p>
<p>See, that’s what’s bothered me all along. The strong sense of entitlement. I can get why it’s natural for Reza to feel this entitled, but I don’t get why other people feel that she’s entitled to have rules broken on her behalf. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But she’s still on the World Bank payroll, still at the rank and salary Wolfowitz gave her, and I believe that they still intend to give her the other promotion he guaranteed she would be just given instead of having to compete for it like everyone else. Her financial situation is much, much better than before all this happened.</p>
<p>Seems to me that the people who are f***ed are WB employees who didn’t have a powerful SO to give them extraordinary things. And the supervisor who was denied the basic authority even to evaluate her performance.</p>
<p>Bedhead, I truly, sincerely hope she wasn’t/isn’t sleeping with her boss. He’s ugly as sin, and not very interesting. She’d have more fun and find it more tolerable to engage in oral congress with the smellier occupants of the Washington Zoo. </p>
<p>Having said that, there appear to be many, many inconsistencies specific to pay, benefits, support, etc. within that organization. Some staff will have the equivalent of gold-plated pencil sharpeners; others will have to struggle to get assigned even one used pencil. I suspect that’s part of what caused Riza to become so angry and vocal. I wish a thorough house cleaning would take place - the fiscal abuse and waste appears to be incredible, especially for an organization that’s supposed to be in the business of lifting people and cultures out of poverty. Perhaps the Europeans can influence that.</p>
<p>And yet when the Ethics Board tried to enforce the rules for Reza, you said they owed her money and an apology. You can’t have much of an ethics campaign if you follow people around apologizing for enforcing the rules, much less giving them money.</p>
<p>So throughout an entire organization of 10,000 employees, no one follows any rules? They can come and go as they please, do what they want, and supervisors have no control over their staff and no authority to evaluate their performance? The Ethics Board has never ever made any rulings that an employee didn’t like? No one’s ever been disgruntled?</p>
<p>I find that incredibly hard to believe. It wouldn’t work for an organization of 10, much less 10,000.</p>
<p>Financial Times op ed piece on the matter - "World Bank affair ‘sign of US impunity’ ": </p>
<p>The controversial nature of Paul Wolfowitz‘s tenure at the World Bank can be traced to a culture of impunity and US exceptionalism that has characterised the Bush administration and dominated the direction of its foreign policy, according to academics and former officials.</p>
<p>Critics agreed with the verdict of the World Bank special panel - set up to investigate the circumstances surrounding the pay rise and secondment to the State Department of Mr Wolfowitz’s girlfriend at the bank - that he had “from the outset cast himself in opposition to the established rules of the institution”.</p>
<p>Conyat, in one very small example, World Bank supposedly has a “rule” that employees cannot accept meals, gifts, etc. from vendors etc. So I’ll have lunch and/or dinner with various people at different times. I ALWAYS ask for the check and offer to pay, because that’s what my business protocol dictates. It’s up to the other party to decline if their business protocols and rules do not permit them to accept a meal. In the past couple of years, two people decline, citing rules, and ask for separate checks. Everyone else accepts, and lets me pay, repeatedly. And several of the group work for the same boss - so evidently one employee of this boss follows the rules, and nine or so do not…I supposed it’s possible that the boss and human resources only told one employee the rules, and not the others, but, I doubt it.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter to me who pays for what, but, this appears to be an organization where at least one rule is either unknown, or selectively ignored. And if there’s one, there’s almost certainly 20 or so others.</p>
<p>You know who really got f***ed? The World Bank’s general counsel, who was placed in the unenviable position of having to bring bad news to the king.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Wolfowitz waged his first fights even before he took office, when he demanded provisions in his contract that would allow him to write a book about Iraq and accept fees for public speeches.</p>
<p>When these were rejected, he soured on the office of the general counsel, Roberto Da</p>
<p>LTS, as to your lunch example, it’s not clear to me that the supervisor knows that some employees are breaking the rules and is looking the other way. </p>
<p>And by the way, have you actually seen the rule so you can be sure that there is no minimum dollar limit above which meals can’t be accepted? Some organizations try to give a little flexibility so that employees don’t have to offend people for whom offering food is an important part of the culture.</p>
<p>You’re entitled to do whatever you want when you go out to lunch, but you do realise I hope that it puts people in a very difficult position when you offer them things that they know they aren’t supposed to accept? Especially food, when people don’t know if they’ll be offending you.</p>
<p>Without disclosing your firm, you said you were a vendor. What do you do? </p>
<p>If you really have a lot at stake with the World Bank in the way of business, you are frankly showing questionable judgement to make your actions anything but above-board. Because you could be giving one of your competitors license to claim that you bribed officials in the process. If it’s all that corrupt, other more corrupt people are probably being much more effective than to buy an official the odd lunch or dinner. The fact is, too, that if you’re hanging out with folks in Washington, you are very unlikely to be getting access to the people who are actually making decisions of consulting contracts with firms or supply contracts with vendors.</p>
<p>As a general rule, I don’t think the World Bank is terribly corrupt or that it engages in really selective enforcement of rules in terms of its own staff. I do think that in this instance with Wolfowitz it should have done better.</p>
<p>Where really bothersome corruption can occur with the WB’s involvement is in lending to countries like Indonesia. Well-placed, well-connected government officials will sometimes get power over these funds and who ends up paying are the countries taxpayers who have to pay the debt back some portion of which has been used to enrich corrupt officials.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Uh, I never once implied that I thought it was okay for her to break rules on her behalf, to wit my quote from below:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But maybe you aren’t directing your statement at me, though it seems like you are.</p>
<p>Nope I didn’t mean you, sorry, I thought that was obvious. </p>
<p>But there have been at least a couple of people who insisted that Reza was entitled to all the things that Wolfowitz showered on her in defiance of bank rules.</p>
<p>Thanks for this quote by Danino that I had read before. It is this arrogant self-righteousness that made Wolfowitz the author of a war that has killed hundreds of thousand, or one of the main authors at least, that really belie his low-key demeanor and make him a dangerous and horrible person.</p>
<p>Bedhead, if a vendor is hawking pencils or copy machines or coffee service doesn’t matter, the point is, there are inconsistencies in this organization, and it needs to be cleaned up. If the president gets fired for his actions, then, while they’re at it, they should clean up the entire organization. </p>
<p>I do not think the bank is intentionally corrupt, but, I DO think that their compensation and expenditure practices are not in concommitance with the organizational mission. Hopefully a new broom will sweep very clean.</p>
<p>Bedhead, I don’t think he’s dangerous or horrible, but, I very much DO think he is very iconoclastic and individualistic - very American qualities that he takes to the edge and often crosses the line. I also suspect he’s dishonest or has been dishonest on more than one occassion during his time with the bank. But even without the dishonesty, he is old enough and has worked long enough to understand his own management style; Bush had to know too, and they surely both had to know that he wasn’t a suitable match for this organization.</p>
<p>I hope the next president is far better suited and a better fit for the job. It would be interesting to see what sort of a president other countries might appoint, and I for one wish they would be given the opportunity to do so.</p>
<p>A man who believes in his own absolute rightness, as Wolfowitz appears to do, and will lie when confronted with his own bad behavior or failures, as he has so often done, is dangerous when he gets his hands as much on the reign of power as he had them in the early Bush Administration. Maybe that Slate article about math majors had it right after all.</p>
<p>He’s been really dishonest about his failures with respect to the Iraq War, and now that he’s cut loose expect a long series of public comments from him saying that all the things the Bush Administration did in Iraq had nothing to do with his brilliant conception for the war.</p>
<p>You see, in my view, the war was more stupid in its conception than it was in its poor execution (good execution can’t save a really bad concept). Anyway, we may disagree on that. And it had nothing directly to do with his WB tenure, although his behavior at the World Bank betrayed the same troubling signs that his failures with respect to Iraq did.</p>
<p>The article in Slate has a good example of why Wolfowitz was dangerous.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In other words, Wolfowitz thought that being a neocon thinktanker made him more of an expert on military strategy than the Army Chief of Staff (!) </p>
<p>And he didn’t even bother to check the history books to make sure the general he sneered at was wrong. </p>
<p>This kind of arrogance–and contempt for people who really were experts–was extremely dangerous in someone who was in “a key position of influence” over policy.</p>
</p>