European business leaders have traditionally taken home far less compensation than their American counterparts. But European executive compensation has been rising, and these pay increases have citizens in European nations deeply concerned. In fact, public outrage on both sides of the Atlantic has contributed to an unprecedented political debate over what to do about excessive executive pay.
Yania Marcelino was a six-year-old girl in the Dominican Republic when her mother left their family to find work in another country. She went first to Puerto Rico, then later to New York City to work as a seamstress. There she began sending money back to Marcelino and her three siblings and four cousins. The children often had to travel 15 or 20 kilometers to get to the wire transfer agency, and sometimes the money sent was lost.
It’s all but official. Paul Wolfowitz, the neocon who helped give us the Iraq War only to be sidelined to the World Bank where he ended his presidency mired in a corruption scandal that led to his forced resignation, will officially step down on June 30. The next day, on July 1, he will be replaced by Robert Zoellick, another neocon who advocated invading Iraq in the 1990s. This is a man who ran amok in his role as U.S. Trade Representative.
Foreign Policy In Focus asked the Microcredit Summit Campaign’s Sam Daley-Harris to respond to the question of whether microcredit is the solution to global poverty or whether its benefits have been oversold. Robert Pollin, who also provided this FPIF analysis of microcredit’s plusses and minuses, responds to Daley-Harris below. Finally, Felicia Montgomery also of the Microcredit Summit Campaign responds to Pollin.
Making credit accessible to poor people is a laudable aim. But as a tool for fighting global poverty, microcredit should be judged by its effectiveness, not good intentions.
The problem with the World Bank is much bigger than its president, Paul Wolfowitz.
Before Robert Zoellick is confirmed as president of the World Bank Group, his bosses on the World Bank’s board should ask him a simple question: Are you, like your predecessor Paul Wolfowitz, aiming to get rich off of eliminating poverty?
Nine days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, I opened up The Washington Post and stared right into the flinty mind of one Robert B. Zoellick, the Bush administration’s pick for new World Bank president.
The scandal over the salaries paid to World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz’s friends and lover opened the door to good questions about both the bank and its president. Wolfowitz’s resignation answered some of them, but one of the best questions of all has yet to be asked: is there a larger problem with an institution claiming to be “working for a world free of poverty” paying those salaries to anyone?
The World Social Forum’s primary achievements are gathering the multiplicity of movements fighting neoliberal capitalism and imperialism, and maintaining the open space to keep alive mutual education and networking. But aside from the kinds of adverse power relations critiqued by grassroots activists in Nairobi, the WSF’s main disappointment remains our inability to converge on strategy, generate agreed-on joint actions, and forge cross-sectoral ties.