Trouble is, every one has an agenda and its really hard to ever know the truth. I have no idea if this is self serving fantasy or reality.
If you want to offer alternative interpretations of the data, or point out specific methodological flaws, or whatever, by all means do so - but now you're just saying 'meh I don't like this guy's ideas, he must be a shill, but I guess we'll never know because nobody can know these things anyway' - the most toxic nihilistic and intellectually dishonest 'reasoning' imaginable.
(The World Bank is hardly a neutral figure. Otherwise, how could the Bush administration move the neoconservative Wolfowitz from the Pentagon to head the World Bank? Did the world's population directly vote him in? It most certainly is a "special interest group", in the sense that it acts in the interests of a tiny minority.)
That said, in-depth dissections of the claims themselves are certainly good, like this critique: (http://www.stwr.org/globalization/world-bank-poverty-figures...)
Seems full of questions rather than accusations, and I didn't see obscure mentioned anywhere.
This is pretty close to ad hominem. No substance, just casting aspersions on the Economist's character.
And a tortilla isn't a burrito. But if you put your Mexican fillings of choice in it and wrap it up it is.
An aspersion is in the eye of the beholder, of course. The poster says, don't trust them - they're capitalist. He then qualifies that by saying, well everyone has biases or agendas anyway. To me that doesn't really change the first part.