UN Face for the 21st Century (TOON)

[mr blur]

[DemInDistress]

1. speaking of Bolton have you seen this...

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0913-36.htm

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.

The administration publicly complained that the document’s section on poverty was too long and instead called for greater focus on free-market reforms. But those free market reforms did not include encouraging corporations to promote the public good. On the contrary. Bolton wanted to eliminate references to “corporate accountability.” And he went even further, trying to strike the section that called on the pharmaceutical companies to make anti-retroviral drugs affordable and accessible to people in Africa with HIV/AIDS. Bolton’s message that corporate profits should take preference over social needs offers no comfort to the 30,000 poor who die daily from needless hunger and curable diseases.