to Wreak Havoc on 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.

Unbeknownst to the US public, however, at the very time impoverished Americans are being showered with support from the world
community, the Bush administration’s newly appointed UN ambassador, John Bolton, has been waging an all-out attack on the
global poor.

Tomorrow, September 14, over 175 heads of state will gather in New York for the World Summit. 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

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