"Jeffrey Sachs is tipped to be the next president of the World Bank, and pledges to tackle global poverty... He is based at Columbia University's Earth Institute and acts as an adviser to the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, on how to achieve the millennium development goals, which set the world targets on poverty, education and health...

As a consultant in the late 1980s and early 1990s while an academic at Harvard, he advised Poland, then Russia, on their economic reforms... The consequences were disastrous, enriching a tiny coterie of oligarchs who bought up public assets on the cheap, and driving Russia towards defaulting on its debts."

-- London Guardian article

For more on the Earth Institute and the U.N. / Rockefeller "sustainable development" agenda, see our articles "Culling the Herd" and "The Earth Charter". Follow the links for related timelines, other articles, and the websites of the various organzations.

The restructuring of Russia succeeded in concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a chosen minority, some of whom have since emigrated to London and Tel Aviv. This is considered "disastrous" only by outsiders who are not members of the club.

"Shielded by the credibility of a Harvard advisory team [including Jeffrey Sachs] handpicked by Lawrence Summers, Moscow saw a mid-1990s credit crisis used to shift the ownership of state-owned assets to a handful of Russians. At the time, Summers was serving as Under Secretary for International Affairs...

[The] advisers urged that funds be borrowed from oligarch-controlled banks. As collateral, Moscow pledged shares in state-owned oil companies, the crown jewels of the Russian economy. When the loans defaulted, the shares were sold to those same oligarchs in rigged auctions. Portrayed as "privatization" by Summers and Harvard's accommodating advisers,...Mikhail Gorbachev estimates that the oligarchs stripped $1 trillion from Russia's struggling economy...

Summers succeeded Robert Rubin as Treasury Secretary in 1999, marking their success in repealing Depression-era laws that banned the merger of banks, brokers, insurance firms and investment banks. A former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, Rubin joined CEO Sanford Weill at Citigroup, the first financial institution to fully embrace the Rubin-led repeal."

-- Jeff Gates, 2008-11

UPDATE: In late March, Obama made the surprise appointment of Jim Yong Kim to replace outgoing World Bank president Robert Zoellick.