On Eve of World Summit, Hurricane Bolton Threatens to Wreak Havoc on ..

[struggle4progress]

.. the Global Poor

by Medea Benjamin

One of the truly heart-warming reactions to the suffering wrought by Hurricane Katrina is the response from the international community. The Red Cross received thousands of donations from individual foreigners—rich and poor—whose hearts went out to the victims. The governments of over 60 nations offered everything from helicopters, ships, water pumps and generators to doctors, divers and civil engineers. Poor countries devastated by last year’s tsunami have sent financial contributions. Governments at odds with the Bush administration—Cuba, Venezuela and Iran—offered doctors, medicines and cheap oil. The international response has been so overwhelming that the United Nations has placed personnel in the Hurricane Operations Center of the US Agency for International Development to help coordinate the aid ...

... One of the major items on the agenda is global poverty. Back in 2000, 191 nations listened to the desperate cry of the world’s poor and developed a comprehensive list to eradicate poverty called the Millennium Development Goals. The goals, to be achieved by 2015, were to reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality, stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, improve maternal health and reverse the loss of environmental resources. To achieve these ambitious goals, the rich countries made a commitment to spend 0.7 percent of gross domestic product on development. The upcoming Summit was supposed to review the progress toward achieving these goals.

But even before the first world leader landed in New York, John Bolton threw the process in turmoil. In a letter to the other 190 UN member states, Bolton wrote that the United States “does not accept global aid targets”—a clear break with the pledge agreed to by the Clinton administration. (While some countries, including Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg have already reached the aid target of 0.7 percent, the United States lags far behind, spending a mere 0.16 percent of its GDP on development.)

Bolton wanted these goals to be eliminated from the document being prepared for the World Summit leaders to sign. In fact, Bolton stunned negotiators when less than one month before the Summit, he introduced over 500 amendments to the 39-page draft document that UN representatives had been painstakingly negotiating for the past year ... http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0913-36.htm

[sarcasmo]

1. Bolton's U.N. appointment will be the final dagger in * Armor.

[napi21]

2. Did Bolton have a hand in having the German planes turn around

and the water purifa=ication equipment being kept sitting on the tarmac? I didn't think of him, but I'm not surprised!