I read a good article in the opinion section of the WSJ a couple days ago about corruption in the World Bank's dealing with Kenya. It's an interesting follow-up to my previous post about profit-motivated capitalism being better than philanthropy. The WSJ article highlights several recent examples of how money was being misused by both Kenyan officials and the World Bank themselves. It was that corruption that prompted Paul Wolfowitz in 2006 to withhold $260 million in lending to Kenya in an attempt to link future lending with guarentees of changes in Kenya. Wolfowitz was forced out and lending increased dramatically as he left. And of course, corruption did not abate in Kenya. The problem with disbursing funds without appropriate guarentees of change or oversight to ensure those changes are carried out is that it feeds a culture of corruption. And, as I've mentioned before, it's that corruption and lack of rule of law that is holding people back from helping themselves.
I found this opinion piece ( Democrats aren't innocent bystanders ) interesting on how both Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for polarizing the electorate and undermining some of its faith in democracy. It references two other posts that were pretty good as well: The Disease of Delegitimization The Weimarization of the American Republic The second article is really long and heavy on history. But given all of the comparisons people make between the current times and those of post-WWI Germany, I found it interesting to dive in to understand where the comparisons are coming from and how close we really are. The short answer is that we aren't that close (phew). Seems like post-WWI Germany was incredibly fragile. This was a good excerpt that summarized it: So, unlike the 60s, you have a dynamic in which both sides are behaving like radicals, in which the establishment isn’t yelling “stop,” and in which oikophobia is more evenly distributed, relative to its Boo...
Comments