From one wolf to another.

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 economy. "Economic hit men," Perkins writes, "are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other foreign 'aid' organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization"

So what is Wolfowitz going to do about all of this? More of the same, of course. Right out of the gate, he's pushing for huge new aid packages for African dictators, and on June 3, he met with Bill Clinton, who has been appointed Special Envoy for tsunami disaster aid. Meanwhile former World Bank boss Wolfensohn has been appointed Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement in Palestine.

Reform-minded optimists suggest that Wolfowitz' superior managerial skills may help clean up the "mess" at the World Bank left by Wolfensohn. But the World Bank can never be reformed; it's doing precisely what it was designed to do.

Back in 1963, political analyst Dan Smoot explained what the World Bank/IMF apparatus was really designed to do: * "Strip the United States of its gold reserves";

* "Build up the industrial capacities of other nations";

* "Remove markets from American producers";

* "Entwine America's affairs with those of other nations so that the U.S. could no longer act independently."

That is precisely what has been happening. Like the UN itself, the World Bank and IMF cannot be reformed.

On May 23, a week before leaving the World Bank helm, Wolfensohn was in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where he was the main speaker at a "Special Symposium in honor of David Rockefeller's 90th Birthday." This was apropos, since the 1944 Bretton Woods conference that set up the World Bank/IMF monstrosity to assist the United Nations in building world government was presided over by CFR members Harry Dexter White and Virginius Frank Coe. (White and Coe, incidentally, were also Soviet agents.) And the Rockefeller economic hit men of the CFR have run those institutions ever since. Both Wolfensohn and Wolfowitz are longtime CFR members who have served the Rockefeller one-world schemers very well.

As the eminent free market economist Henry Hazlitt noted many years ago, the world cannot hope to attain economic sanity until the World Bank/IMF monster is abolished.