Tag: World Bank

Trayon White: A disgrace even by the usual Democratic city government standards

Trayon White

Is he dumber than he is anti-Semitic, or more anti-Semitic than he is dumb? Your call.

First, on March 16 of this year, Trayon White, a member of the city council in Washington, D.C., posted a Facebook video of a snowfall along with a comment of his own suggesting that “the Rothschilds” are “controlling the climate to create natural disasters that they can pay for to own the cities, man.” It soon emerged that this was not the first time he had expressed the opinion that Jews run the weather.

Baron David René de Rothschild, current French chairman of N. M. Rothschild & Sons

International outrage led him to issue an apology. No sooner had the leaders of Jewish organizations accepted the apology and claimed to regard it as sincere did the City Council release video of a February 27 breakfast event at which White had accused the Rothschilds of controlling the federal government and World Bank. White apologized for this, too, writing that “Somehow, I read and misconstrued both the Rockefeller and Rothchild [sic] theories. At that breakfast, I indeed misspoke, was really misinformed on the issue and ran with false information. I think I heard other similar information before about the theory around the World Bank and put it all together.” Makes sense to us! No, seriously, let bygones be bygones. No reason to deprive the people of Washington of such a stellar intellect simply because he got a little confused.

The late Mayor Marion Barry

White, by the way, is a protégé of late Washington mayor Marion Barry, most famous for having been convicted of smoking crack. White is also a former member of the U.S. capital’s Board of Education, which to anyone familiar with public education in D.C. will not be all that surprising. He’s also donated money to Louis Farrakhan’s rabidly Jew-hating Nation of Islam. 

Anyway, after his Rothschild remarks, White, as an act of “conciliation” with the Jewish community – i.e., a PR move – agreed to take a 90-minute guided tour of the Holocaust Museum. Great idea, right? Nope.

U.S. Holocaust Museum

As the Daily Mail reported, when he saw a 1937 picture of “a woman surrounded by Nazi soldiers with a sign hanging from her neck that read: ‘I am a German girl and allowed myself to be defiled by a Jew,’ White asked, ‘Are they protecting her?’” The tour guide explained that they were not: they were marching her down the street to shame her. “Marching through,” replied White, “is protecting.” The guide, with what reads like a patience that passeth all understanding, said, “I think they’re humiliating her.”

And then, 90 minutes apparently being too much of a test of his attention span, he left the tour before it was over. He claimed to have a meeting to get to, but was later “seen walking around aimlessly outside of the museum.” Meanwhile one of his aides, who had decided to stick with the tour to the end, replied to a mini-lesson about the Warsaw ghetto by asking if it was like “a gated community.”

Rafael Shimunov

If there was anything more reprehensible than White’s unashamed display of bigotry and ignorance, it was the readiness of some members of the Washington, D.C., Jewish community to stand by him. In the Forward, Rafael Shimunov, an official of the Working Families Party, co-founder of ResistHere, and veteran of a long list of left-wing activist groups, argued that “many in the DC community and the Jewish community need to examine how easily they found themselves mocking a black man who has devoted his life to the public service of America’s most vulnerable.” Nice try, but no dice. It is preposterous that a fool and knave like White can hold high elective office in Washington, D.C. The best thing he can do to serve“ America’s most vulnerable” is to quit his job and work for the election of somebody with a minimally acceptable I.Q., education, level of intellectual curiosity, and moral compass. 

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Who was Maurice Strong?

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Maurice Strong

When Maurice Strong died on November 27, mainstream news media, global-warming activists, and international bureaucratic types around the world began churning out the superlatives. In his own home country, for instance, the Toronto Star, beneath a headline extolling him as “a model of vision and persistence,” called him “remarkable” and “legendary” while praising his “extraordinary insight and persistence” and “extraordinary far-sightedness.”

Who was Maurice Strong? Here’s a brief bio. Born into a poor Alberta family in 1929, he went into business and enjoyed early success, striking it rich in the oil and gas game and being named, in 1976, by Pierre Trudeau, as head of Petro-Canada, that country’s newly established national oil company.

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At the UN Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm, 1972

Strong went on to serve as an executive or board member at major firms around the world. He also became one of the top-level UN bureaucrats of all time. His CV consists largely of a mind-bogglingly long list of commissions, conferences, councils, forums. He was the first head of the UN Environmental Programme. He served on the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development. He co-chaired the Earth Charter Commission, chaired the World Resources Institute, was a director at the World Economic Forum, and was a senior advisor to the president of the World Bank. His shining hour – about which more presently – was perhaps his role as Secretary General of the 1992 UN Earth Summit, aka the Rio Conference.

For some observers, as we’ve seen, Strong was a hero – specifically, an environmental hero. The New York Times called him “the planet’s prime custodian”; the Toronto Globe and Mail, in its obituary, celebrated him as “the last of the mythic founders of the international environmental movement”; the Guardian hailed him as “the founding father of international cooperation on the environment and sustainable development.”

strong3When you scratch the surface of the man’s career, however, the picture becomes more problematic – a lot more problematic. James Delingpole, remembering Strong’s life at Breitbart News, said he was “[o]ne of the most dangerous men of the Twentieth Century.” Why dangerous? Well, for one thing, as Delingpole put it, Strong probably did more than anyone else in our time to make the world “more expensive, inconvenient, overregulated, hectored, bullied, lied-to, sclerotic, undemocratic.” And he did all this in the name of “climate change,” which, thanks to him, notes Delingpole, “is now so heavily embedded within our system of global governance that it is now almost literally impossible for any politician or anyone else whose career depends on the state to admit that’s it not a problem.” 

strong4And Strong did all this from his various perches at the UN – an institution that Delingpole described as Strong’s “perfect playground,” a place “where, he quickly realized, he could achieve his dream of a world of global governance by a self-appointed elite. And the best way to go about this, Strong understood, was by manipulating and exploiting international concern about the environment.” Delingpole wasn’t making this up; Strong himself argued explicitly that if we wanted to save the planet, the inhabitants of the affluent West would have to make radical lifestyle changes – changes that most of those people would not be willing to make unless forced to do so by international organizations vested with the power to force them. 

But was Strong really devoted to the environment? Or was something else going on here? We’ll get around to these questions next time.

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Joseph Stiglitz: Greeks bearing gifts

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Joseph Stiglitz

During the last couple of days, we’ve been pondering the career and views of big-government economist Joseph Stiglitz. We started out on Monday by mentioning Stiglitz’s glittering résumé. Here’s a little P.S. about that résumé: writing last year in National Review, Eliana Johnson noted that while it ran (at that point) to 56 pages, it omitted a good deal of Stiglitz’s speaking and consulting activity – even though, at $40,000 per lecture, he earned most of his income from that activity. These omissions, noted Johnson, were in direct violation of the transparency rules in effect at the Columbia Business School, where Stiglitz teaches. They also hid what any sensible observer would recognize as clear conflicts of interest. 

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Angela Merkel

What kinds of omissions – and conflicts of interest – are we talking about here? Well, one of them involves Greece. Over the course of the Greek financial crisis, Stiglitz has weighed in repeatedly on the subject – consistently on the side of the Greek government. While other economists argue that Greece brought on its own economic woes by spending far more money on generous welfare benefits and the like than it could afford, confident that Germany and other rich EU members would keep making up the shortfall, Stiglitz has depicted Greece as an innocent victim and its EU partners (which eventually got sick of picking up the tab) as heartless heavies.

Germany, he charged in July 2015 at an international development financing summit in Addis Ababa, lacked “solidarity” with Greece. “Asking even more from Greece would be unconscionable,” he said. In response to Western leaders who criticized Greece for failing to collect taxes, he accused those same leaders of being hypocrites for “trying to undermine” his own efforts to institute an international tax system.

The same month, in an article for Time, Stiglitz even went so far as to compare Angela Merkel’s Germany to Hitler’s:

The U.S. was generous with Germany as we defeated it. Now, it is time for the U.S. to be generous with our friends in Greece in their time of need, as they have been crushed for the second time in a century by Germany….Greece needs unconditional humanitarian aid; it needs Americans to buy its products, take vacations there, and show a solidarity with Greece and a humanity that its European partners were not able to display.

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Stiglitz and Papandreou at a 2013 Columbia University forum

As if that weren’t enough, Stiglitz wrote a New York Times op-ed – also in July 2015 – casting Greece as a “sacrificial lamb” victimized by what he calls the “troika” – the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission.

What Stiglitz failed to acknowledge in these pieces – and elsewhere – is that he’s not a neutral observer of the Greek economic disaster. Far from it. From 2009 to 2011, he worked as a paid advisor to Greek prime minister George Papandreou, whom he’s described as a friend. In February 2010, while serving in that advisory position, Stiglitz actually said this about Greece: “There’s clearly no risk of default. I’m very confident about it.” Was he speaking as an honest, responsible analyst, or as a paid flunky? 

(A flunky, one might add, who was cashing checks from a government that should instead have been using that money to pay down its debts.)

More tomorrow.

 

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Joe Stiglitz, big-government guru

Looking at his résumé, you’d almost think he could part the Red Sea. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge; he’s taught at Yale, Stanford, Oxford, Princeton, and Columbia; he chaired President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors; he was chief economist at the World Bank; and he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

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Joseph Stiglitz

He’s served as an economic advisor to the UN and other international organizations as well as to heads of government around the world. In 2011, Time Magazine named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

But exactly what kind of influence does Joseph Stiglitz wield? What kind of advice does he dispense?

The first thing that’s important to know is that he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian. Meaning what? Meaning, for one thing, that he’s a guy who blamed the 2008 world financial crisis on U.S. economic deregulation – never mind that, as Samuel Gregg wrote in 2010, Western Europe’s hyper-regulated economies were at that point “in even worse shape than America’s” and Greece, “one of the most regulated and interventionist economies in the entire EU,” was “on financial life support.”

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Stiglitz in Australia earlier this year

He’s a guy who argued that the solution to the 2008 world financial crisis – the way to create jobs and increase employment – was to increase direct government spending, even though, as Matthew Continetti warned in the Weekly Standard, such spending would inevitably “create even larger deficits and add to an already high national debt.”

He’s a guy who summed up the financial crisis in 2009 by saying that one of its “big losers” was “support for American-style capitalism” and that this loss of support had “consequences we’ll be living with for a long time to come.” Two words: wishful thinking. Stiglitz (as we’ll see) would like nothing better than to see support for “American-style capitalism” disappear entirely.

DAVOS-KLOSTERS/SWITZERLAND, 31JAN09 - Joseph E. Stiglitz, Professor, Columbia University, USA, at the Annual Meeting 2009 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 31, 2009. Copyright by World Economic Forum swiss-image.ch
Stiglitz at Davos, 2009

He’s a guy who’s tirelessly tried to sell the argument that inequality of income and wealth lies at the root of virtually all economic problems – even though, as Patrick Brennan noted in National Review in 2012, there’s “almost no evidence that economic inequality causes financial crises.”

He’s a guy who has praised as a “miracle” the modest economic success of the big-government island nation of Mauritius while ignoring, as Reihan Salam pointed out in 2011, the truly spectacular performance of a country like Singapore, whose hands-off approach to the private sector is utterly at odds with Stiglitz’s prescriptions.

Gregg calls him “an old-line modern liberal,” charging that his response to the 2008 crisis was “worthy of FDR or LBJ.” In fact, the word socialist suits Stiglitz far better than liberal. 

Why? We’ll start answering that question tomorrow. 

 

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