Below please find my op-ed for The Claremont Independent written before this weekend's commencement ceremony, which, in all honesty, was mercifully brief.
The Perks and Pitfalls of Wolfensohn’s Global Life
By Charles C. Johnson
You can tell a lot about our college’s hopes for its students by the president’s choice of commencement speakers. This year’s is a should-have been CMCer and we are could-be James Wolfensohns.
The “banker to the poor” was no Mother Theresa. He took no oath of poverty and amassed a $350 million fortune as consultant, bureaucrat, think tanker, and above all, banker. He all but coined the term “too big to fail” when he plotted to bail out Chrysler in the 1980s. He went on to become a worldly World Bank bureaucrat, who, not content with his own millions, misspent billions on liberal good works to make poverty history. It persists, despite him, or perhaps, to spite him. No matter. He got rich countries to write off $42 billion of debt incurred by poor nations assuring his place as “the Elvis of Economics,” as Bono, another past CMC guest, called him. He demands the U.S. government to spend, spend, spend on microfinance, foreign aid, debt relief, etc., etc. You might even say he’s nothing but a hound dog for liberal causes du jour.
After the World Bank, Wolfensohn turned to the Middle East, where his special talents made him “special envoy” to direct Gaza’s economy. He might have reasoned that with his knack for networking he could stop the Palestinians from murdering Israelis. When all else fails, name dropping beats bomb dropping, as Churchill might have said. Alas Wolfensohn’s bore offensive didn’t take because, as he told the Jerusalem Post in 2006, matters were “above my pay grade.” Initially blaming Hamas for murdering Israelis next door and even doubting whether America would take kindly to similar acts, he soon recanted and got right with diplo-speak by blaming Bush for not taking the peace process seriously enough. Bush’s real offense, though, is not taking Wolfensohn seriously enough.
If that weren’t enough to assure his seat at the world wonk table, he set about badmouthing America. America, he tells us, spends far too much on her own defense and too little on what the foreign policy glitterati call “foreign aid.” You know these lines by rote, if not by heart, if you’ve taken a Haley I.R. course… Terrorism is handmaiden to poverty and not ideology. Wolfensohn, who warned of a “tsunami” of poverty, said he had the cure for what ails us in the fight against terrorism – more money. We bailed out autos why not bail out third world tin pot despots?
By the time people realized that that policy failed – much as they are starting to realize that the Wolfensohn-endorsed microfinance project has also failed – the “force of nature” would blow over the next project for though he was an admitted “late developer,” he was an early – and masterly – networker. Despite his lackluster academic credential – he failed several university exams – he talked his way from a Sydney tenement to Harvard Business School. He got the job of World Bank president when Bill Clinton, at Wolfensohn’s Wyoming home, asked him what he would do there – not exactly a meritocracy.
Wolfensohn even found time for a little culture – playing cello before Carnegie Hall, with his pal Yo-Yo Ma, fencing for the 1956 Olympic team, and globe-trotting of the sort you might read in a CMC admission essay: “In July 1973 Elaine and I took a rare break from the mayhem of New York and Schroders. We were sailing on a 72-foot ketch from Panama to the Galapagos ... the voyage was memorable, and the night watches along with the stars and accompanying dolphins and occasional whales were an experience never to be forgotten.”
With a bit of pluck and a lot of luck, the self-described little fat boy, born to downtrodden British Jews in the Depression in Australia, aspired to greatness. He wanted to be a “global player” and plotted accordingly in his room: “What would I have to do to become prime minister, a leading banker, a judge of the Supreme Court, an Olympian, a Rhodes scholar? What would it look like to be Mr Justice Wolfensohn or governor-general Wolfensohn?'”
What, indeed! Unsurprisingly, the answer to this, and nearly every question confronted by Wolfensohn is money – and a lot of it. Money buys all sorts of things – acceptance, accolades, and even access, according to reports from an anti-corruption watchdog group.
Money is why, according to Bloomberg, Wolfensohn overlooked the shady finances of international fugitive and financial criminal, Viktor Kozeny, the infamous “pirate of Prague.” Kozeny, flush with cheating Czech taxpayers out of a billion dollars, turned to Wolfensohn to sanitize his next deal in Azerbaijan. Wolfensohn met with Kozeny twice and gave his coveted World Bank endorsement. Kozeny then went on to defraud investors to the tune of $182 million. According to the Government Accountability Project, Wolfensohn “lent his reputation and his institution’s support to precisely the kind of fraud and theft he so frequently denounced.” “None of the World Bank officials in a position to anticipate corruption was able to expose it, given that the bank president had helped to conceal it,” the report noted. He behaved less than admirably, which compounds the irony of having a financier with shady ethics ties at the same time Claremont considers an ethics general education requirement.
Wolfensohn refuses to tell that tale. He doesn’t namedrop there. Nor does anybody else, for that matter. Wolfensohn’s underling, Johannes Linn, tasked by Wolfensohn with investigating the alleged corruption on the part of Kozeny, became director of the Wolfensohn Center at the Brookings Institution when he left the bank. Later Linn denied ever having heard of Viktor Kozeny. But Beatrice Edwards of the Government Accountability Project, a nonpartisan watchdog group, points out that Kozeny was “the most notorious international financial criminal in the region. She considers it “unimaginable that Linn would not have heard of him.”
Of course that story didn’t make the cut in his book, A Global Life. Perhaps he learned once and for all that money, while it buys access to the clubs he wanted to join, cannot buy the things of the soul. For that, you need more than mere networking. “You can’t succeed with just a good Rolodex if you can’t deliver. You have to perform to the absolute highest standard.” And it sure helps if you have friends, even if fickle. In contrast to class-based Britain, Wolfensohn loves America: but even as he talks about how great America is, he namedrops. “The thing I revere about this country is that you can deal with people as people, regardless of their wealth. I could today call up Warren Buffet or whoever is the richest person in this country - I know most of them - for a coffee.”
We learn from Wolfensohn’s memoirs that he is a great many things and he will tell you about all of them but one thing he is not is a devoted family man. He lived as his memoir suggests – globally, not locally, copping to not knowing his children and confessing that while his cancer-stricken wife begged him not to take a job that led to being away from home, he took it anyway. Those were his “lost years.”
Some of us can’t afford lost years – these past few ones having often been lost enough. As we ponder commencement and family gathers, it is difficult not to be lost in thought about what is next. Here’s a thought: We ought to wish to be good husbands, good fathers, good co-workers, good sons, and good citizens. Our parents – like all good parents – gave us a better life. And so we don’t seek a global life, but a good one. If we are lucky, maybe it’ll be a great one.
The Perks and Pitfalls of Wolfensohn’s Global Life
By Charles C. Johnson
You can tell a lot about our college’s hopes for its students by the president’s choice of commencement speakers. This year’s is a should-have been CMCer and we are could-be James Wolfensohns.
The “banker to the poor” was no Mother Theresa. He took no oath of poverty and amassed a $350 million fortune as consultant, bureaucrat, think tanker, and above all, banker. He all but coined the term “too big to fail” when he plotted to bail out Chrysler in the 1980s. He went on to become a worldly World Bank bureaucrat, who, not content with his own millions, misspent billions on liberal good works to make poverty history. It persists, despite him, or perhaps, to spite him. No matter. He got rich countries to write off $42 billion of debt incurred by poor nations assuring his place as “the Elvis of Economics,” as Bono, another past CMC guest, called him. He demands the U.S. government to spend, spend, spend on microfinance, foreign aid, debt relief, etc., etc. You might even say he’s nothing but a hound dog for liberal causes du jour.
After the World Bank, Wolfensohn turned to the Middle East, where his special talents made him “special envoy” to direct Gaza’s economy. He might have reasoned that with his knack for networking he could stop the Palestinians from murdering Israelis. When all else fails, name dropping beats bomb dropping, as Churchill might have said. Alas Wolfensohn’s bore offensive didn’t take because, as he told the Jerusalem Post in 2006, matters were “above my pay grade.” Initially blaming Hamas for murdering Israelis next door and even doubting whether America would take kindly to similar acts, he soon recanted and got right with diplo-speak by blaming Bush for not taking the peace process seriously enough. Bush’s real offense, though, is not taking Wolfensohn seriously enough.
If that weren’t enough to assure his seat at the world wonk table, he set about badmouthing America. America, he tells us, spends far too much on her own defense and too little on what the foreign policy glitterati call “foreign aid.” You know these lines by rote, if not by heart, if you’ve taken a Haley I.R. course… Terrorism is handmaiden to poverty and not ideology. Wolfensohn, who warned of a “tsunami” of poverty, said he had the cure for what ails us in the fight against terrorism – more money. We bailed out autos why not bail out third world tin pot despots?
By the time people realized that that policy failed – much as they are starting to realize that the Wolfensohn-endorsed microfinance project has also failed – the “force of nature” would blow over the next project for though he was an admitted “late developer,” he was an early – and masterly – networker. Despite his lackluster academic credential – he failed several university exams – he talked his way from a Sydney tenement to Harvard Business School. He got the job of World Bank president when Bill Clinton, at Wolfensohn’s Wyoming home, asked him what he would do there – not exactly a meritocracy.
Wolfensohn even found time for a little culture – playing cello before Carnegie Hall, with his pal Yo-Yo Ma, fencing for the 1956 Olympic team, and globe-trotting of the sort you might read in a CMC admission essay: “In July 1973 Elaine and I took a rare break from the mayhem of New York and Schroders. We were sailing on a 72-foot ketch from Panama to the Galapagos ... the voyage was memorable, and the night watches along with the stars and accompanying dolphins and occasional whales were an experience never to be forgotten.”
With a bit of pluck and a lot of luck, the self-described little fat boy, born to downtrodden British Jews in the Depression in Australia, aspired to greatness. He wanted to be a “global player” and plotted accordingly in his room: “What would I have to do to become prime minister, a leading banker, a judge of the Supreme Court, an Olympian, a Rhodes scholar? What would it look like to be Mr Justice Wolfensohn or governor-general Wolfensohn?'”
What, indeed! Unsurprisingly, the answer to this, and nearly every question confronted by Wolfensohn is money – and a lot of it. Money buys all sorts of things – acceptance, accolades, and even access, according to reports from an anti-corruption watchdog group.
Money is why, according to Bloomberg, Wolfensohn overlooked the shady finances of international fugitive and financial criminal, Viktor Kozeny, the infamous “pirate of Prague.” Kozeny, flush with cheating Czech taxpayers out of a billion dollars, turned to Wolfensohn to sanitize his next deal in Azerbaijan. Wolfensohn met with Kozeny twice and gave his coveted World Bank endorsement. Kozeny then went on to defraud investors to the tune of $182 million. According to the Government Accountability Project, Wolfensohn “lent his reputation and his institution’s support to precisely the kind of fraud and theft he so frequently denounced.” “None of the World Bank officials in a position to anticipate corruption was able to expose it, given that the bank president had helped to conceal it,” the report noted. He behaved less than admirably, which compounds the irony of having a financier with shady ethics ties at the same time Claremont considers an ethics general education requirement.
Wolfensohn refuses to tell that tale. He doesn’t namedrop there. Nor does anybody else, for that matter. Wolfensohn’s underling, Johannes Linn, tasked by Wolfensohn with investigating the alleged corruption on the part of Kozeny, became director of the Wolfensohn Center at the Brookings Institution when he left the bank. Later Linn denied ever having heard of Viktor Kozeny. But Beatrice Edwards of the Government Accountability Project, a nonpartisan watchdog group, points out that Kozeny was “the most notorious international financial criminal in the region. She considers it “unimaginable that Linn would not have heard of him.”
Of course that story didn’t make the cut in his book, A Global Life. Perhaps he learned once and for all that money, while it buys access to the clubs he wanted to join, cannot buy the things of the soul. For that, you need more than mere networking. “You can’t succeed with just a good Rolodex if you can’t deliver. You have to perform to the absolute highest standard.” And it sure helps if you have friends, even if fickle. In contrast to class-based Britain, Wolfensohn loves America: but even as he talks about how great America is, he namedrops. “The thing I revere about this country is that you can deal with people as people, regardless of their wealth. I could today call up Warren Buffet or whoever is the richest person in this country - I know most of them - for a coffee.”
We learn from Wolfensohn’s memoirs that he is a great many things and he will tell you about all of them but one thing he is not is a devoted family man. He lived as his memoir suggests – globally, not locally, copping to not knowing his children and confessing that while his cancer-stricken wife begged him not to take a job that led to being away from home, he took it anyway. Those were his “lost years.”
Some of us can’t afford lost years – these past few ones having often been lost enough. As we ponder commencement and family gathers, it is difficult not to be lost in thought about what is next. Here’s a thought: We ought to wish to be good husbands, good fathers, good co-workers, good sons, and good citizens. Our parents – like all good parents – gave us a better life. And so we don’t seek a global life, but a good one. If we are lucky, maybe it’ll be a great one.
