Today's WaPo has an article about a leaked World Bank report showing that Wolfowitz broke bank rules -- clearly the World Bank still thinks that it can shame Wolfowitz into resigning. They can't; he's George Bush's man and Bush's men apparently are incapable of shame. See, e.g., Alberto Gonzales. You can have their jobs from them when you pry them from their cold, dead hands. An option which becomes more attractive by the minute.
But what really struck me was this:
Monday was also shaping up as a test of the board's will on a controversial new bank strategy on health, nutrition and population.
In recent months, World Bank employees have shaped the strategy, which directs the institution's lending, to include the ready availability of "sexual and reproductive health services" for women in poor countries. That bit of jargon is widely known in some countries to refer, among other things, to access to safe and legal abortions.
But in recent weeks, Juan Jose Daboub, a conservative Christian whom Wolfowitz appointed managing director at the bank, directed the staff to delete that reference, effectively eliminating the endorsement for access to safe abortions, according to two bank officials. Daboub did not return calls.
In a letter sent last week to the bank vice president overseeing the strategy, several members of the governing board, including those representing Germany, France and Britain, demanded that the original language be restored, asserting that the bank would otherwise be breaking with a 1994 consensus embracing family planning.
This week, the American representative on the board, Eli Whitney Debevoise II, pressed again to remove the reference to "services" and replace it with "care," to eliminate any potential endorsement for abortion, the officials said. Debevoise did not return phone calls.
That's who that cowboy, that good ole' boy with whom you'd just love to sit down and have a beer, that man of the people who saved us from that elitist John Kerry, George Bush appointed to be the American representative to the governing board of the World Bank: Eli Whitney Debevoise II. And that's who gets to decide that some poor woman living in a shack in Africa or India or South America will have to bear one more child than she can care for, or feed, or even carry to term. Eli Whitney Debevoise II.
Young Mr. Debevoise comes from, well, shall we say, circumstances that were significantly removed from those of a poor, pregnant woman living in the Third World. The first Mr. Eli Whitney Debevoise (1899-1990) co-founded the New York law firm of Debevoise & Stevenson (later Debevoise & Plimpton) in 1931. During World War II he served as chairman of an Alien Enemy Hearing Board in New York City, where he ruled on the eligibility of aliens to remain in the country during the war. From 1950 to 1953 he was appointed deputy general counsel with the High Commission for Germany - Office of General Counsel (HICOG-OGC). His namesake, after spending time at Yale and Harvard, became a partner at Arnold & Porter. He testified just last month that he was eager for the great privilege and the responsibility to represent the United States at the World Bank Group institutions.
Hey, who could possibly be in a better position to decide what's good for Third World women? Please. Shoot me now.
2 comments:
Yuk. I;m judging totally by appearances now, but that face gives me the creeps.
Speaking as a Third World Woman, I curse his mother as a hamster, and may his father forever smell of elderberries.
Going on speaking as a Third World Woman, who has experienced both the good and the abysmal in terms of healthcare, I'm very much in favour of us getting our own houses in order, with less reliance on the First World.
I realise that's a pipe dream for now, but that's one of the things Witches are really good at- dreaming pipes into existance.
Love,
Terri in Joburg
I am so pissed at the SCOTUS decision that I refuse to even think about it. Just gets my blood pressure us and there is absolutely nothing I can do.
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