From one wolf to another.(James D. Wolfensohn of World Bank replaced by Paul Wolfowitz)

James D. Wolfensohn stepped down as president of the World Bank on May 31, after having held that post for 10 years. He has passed the World Bank baton to Paul Wolfowitz, a longtime Washington Insider whose most recent stint has been as deputy secretary of defense. The Wolfensohn-to-Wolfowitz rotation at the World Bank rated barely a blip on the Big Media radar screen, but I submit that it just might be slightly more important than the months-long 24/7 coverage of the Michael Jackson trial, or the who's-sleeping-with-whom Desperate Housewives episode updates that pass for network "news" these days.

After all, the World Bank president is in charge of handing out about $20 billion annually in "aid," and even in today's milieu of trillion-dollar-plus federal budgets, that's not exactly chump change. Much of it, of course, comes courtesy of the U.S. government, which, incidentally, has no constitutional authority to tax Americans for foreign aid, regardless of how grand the cause may sound. But, over the past 60 years, U.S. presidents and Congress have not let minor details like constitutional authority stand in the way of the World Bank's "noble mission," as Mr. Wolfowitz put it in his March 31 acceptance speech.

"Nothing is more gratifying than being able to help people in need and developing opportunities for all the people of the world to achieve their full potential," Wolfowitz said on that occasion. Ah yes, so grand, so noble, so ... utopian and utterly deceptive. This is the same phony compassion appeal his predecessors have been dishing out for six decades, while wreaking immeasurable economic, social, and political harm across the planet.

In 2001, William Easterly, one of the World Bank's top economists, exposed some of the institution's dirty linen in his book, The Elusive Quest for Growth. In a Financial Times op-ed, he summarized: "Contrary to conventional wisdom, aid to the developing world has been a big disappointment." The one trillion dollars, he said, "spent on aid since the 1960s, with the efforts of advisers, foreign aid givers, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have all failed to attain the desired results." A trillion dollars! Now, that certainly is not chump change. As Easterly pointed out, the World Bank/IMF masterminds have flitted from one faddish panacea to another: infrastructure development, education, population control, debt forgiveness, etc. The result? "None has delivered as promised."

Now comes John Perkins, with even more serious charges in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Perkins now regrets the role he played as an "economic hit man" helping the predecessors of Wolfensohn and Wolfowitz ravage the world ...