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Conyers Urges Obama to Nominate Jeff Sachs to Lead the World Bank
President Obama has a historic opportunity to help reform the World Bank, by nominating development expert Jeffrey Sachs to be the World Bank's next president. Sachs has said that as president he would sharpen the focus of the Bank on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for reducing poverty and extending access to health care and education. Coming from Sachs, this pledge is change you can believe in, because for years Sachs has a leading international advocate of efforts to achieve the world's poverty reduction goals, currently serving as an adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
Sachs speaking at a school in the village of Ruhiira, Uganda, January 2007. Ruhiira is participating in Sachs's Millennium Villages Project. (Photo: Guillaume Bonn)
Now Members of Congress are starting to speak up.
Michigan Representative John Conyers is circulating a letter to President Obama, urging him to nominate Sachs. Signers of the letter so far include Reps. Hansen Clarke, Jesse Jackson, Jr., Barbara Lee, Zoe Lofgren, Jim McGovern, Lynn Woolsey, Raul Grijalva, and Eleanor Holmes Norton.
Many Members of Congress have worked closely with Sachs for years on initiatives to cancel the crushing external debt burden of poor countries; end the World Bank's imposition of user fees that block access to primary health care and education; compel the World Bank to make grants, rather than loans, in the poorest countries; compel the World Bank to support efforts to make essential medicines available in poor countries; and other pressing development challenges. It is natural that these Members of Congress should support Sachs' candidacy.
Sachs' public and worldwide campaign to lead the World Bank is unprecedented, but is entirely appropriate to our time. Until now, the leadership of the World Bank has been determined behind closed doors by the U.S. Treasury Department and European finance ministries.
But Sachs has taken his case to the public, announcing his candidacy with an op-ed in the Washington Post and with an interview on CNN. His candidacy is supported by Kenya, East Timor, Malyasia, and Jordan.
Since the World Bank was founded, no-one has ever tried to "campaign" for the position of President by trying to get support from the public and from developing countries. That already creates a different dynamic, suggesting that public opinion matters, and that the opinions of developing countries matter.
But Sachs is also trying to get the support of the Obama administration, and that's why Conyers' letter is so important. The default case -- in the absence of public and Congressional engagement -- would likely be that the administration choice would be largely determined by the interests of Wall Street. The two names most cited in press speculation have been Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner. Both Summers and Geithner can be expected to prioritize Wall Street interests -- that's why their names dominate press speculation. Of course, implementing the Millenium Development Goals isn't at the top of Wall Street's agenda.
If Congress and the public want something different, the time to speak up is now, before the Obama administration announces its choice. This is the time of maximum influence. You can ask your Representative to sign Conyers letter in support of Sachs' nomination here.
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14 Comments so far
Show AllAfter a little research on Jeff Sachs, I discovered that there is a link between industrial strength agriculture, GMO's (Monsanto), and foreign farm/land grabs, particularly in Africa. I find this disturbing. Which is the lessor of two evils? Control by Wall Street or control of the world food supply by Monsanto? Seems that the global 99% are in a no win position.
Sachs certainly has come a long way. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Sachs was an advisor to the Russian government. His recommendations involved opening the doors to market intitiatives and privatizing industries. The result was the creation of Russian billionaires who, thanks to cronyism with officials, were able to buy industries cheaply.
Perhaps he has seen the errors of his ways, but his record is not encouraging.
Jeffrey Sachs? John Conyers?
I've always wondered why a certain highly trenchant and relevant idiomatic expression has become somewhat obscure: "time-server".
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* time-serv·er (tīm'sûr'vər) pronunciation
n.
One who conforms to the prevailing ways and opinions of one's time or condition for personal advantage; an opportunist.
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If I were to publish a dictionary, I'd have to include a fold-out, or even an appendix resembling a high-school yearbook, of illustrations to accompany this definition.
And here are two more smiling, airbrushed faces to include in that rogue's gallery.
Thanks for adding a new term to my vocabulary.
This is a golden opportunity to restructure the World Bank and make it a real instrument of change for the better. There are too many questions about Jeffrey Sachs' background. But Summers or Geithner? Surely they cannot be serious contenders. The best they deserve, after all they have wrought on an unsuspecting world, they should be stripped of all their assets and consigned to the remainder of their lives on welfare. If that wouldn't be a fitting end in hell for those bastards, I don't know what would!
Conyers and the other "progressives" shows h their true colors again. What hypocrisy. The rabid neo-liberal bankster puppets strike again. The Sachs propaganda piece that appeared here last week was not a coincidence?
With "progressive democrats" like that, we don't need no neo-fascist authoritarian kleptocrats.
Very disappointed to see Barbara Lee on the list.
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Yeah, just perfect, one of the architects of neoliberalism to lead the World Bank. Is our ignorance as a public so profound, and our memories of historical events so shallow, that we would stand quietly by while this man's name is openly considered to lead the World Bank? This is utterly Orwellian.
The neoliberals have run the world bank for a long time. Take a look at Larry Summers' December 12, 1991 memo on dumping toxins in the third world:
'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.
The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.
http://www.whirledbank.org/ourwords/summers.html
Evil anyone?
I don't know enough about Sachs to comment on him personally (and don't want to research him) but I know this -- If Sachs truly is the saint-like figure this article portrays, who would help the poor and the oppressed, then no way will Obama appoint him. But if he is another corporate shill for the 1% like Summers and Geithner, Obama will give him the keys to the bank.
I would elect economist, Michel Chossudovsky, to run the World Bank. He is one a few who could do it well and in the interest of the 99%. You can find him at http://www.globalresearch.ca/.
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Agreed. He'd be a much better nominee than Jeffrey Sachs!
In Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine she mentions that Bono refers to
him as "my professor" when it comes to third world debt.
The World Bank's purpose is to re-engineer the global economy to meet the needs of transnational corporations. To take over the organization in order to re-engineer in someone else's image is folly.
The only thing to do is destroy the World Bank.
Marxism, socialism and climate change:
The same contradiction has been on display in the wake of the global financial crisis. The response of every capitalist power to the crisis that erupted one year ago was to put in place measures to protect its own economy and financial system above all else. Now it has emerged to the surface once again at the Copenhagen summit, as each of the major powers attempts to shove off the costs of climate change onto its rivals, minimise its own costs and secure the maximum benefits from any emissions trading system that may be established.
In his book Commonwealth, Economics for a Crowded Planet, the American economist Jeffrey Sachs pointed to the significance of this issue for the survival of civilisation. “The defining challenge of the twenty-first century,” he wrote, “will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet. That common fate will require new forms of global co-operation, a fundamental point of blinding simplicity that many world leaders have yet to understand or embrace… In the twenty-first century our global society will flourish or perish according to our ability to find common ground across the world on a set of shared objectives and on practical means to achieve them.”
Sachs warned that a “clash of civilisations” could develop over rising tensions fueled by scarce energy resources, economic inequalities, and environmental problems, which “could be our last and utterly devastating clash.” He continued: “The paradox of a unified global economy and divided global society poses the greatest single threat to the planet because it makes impossible the cooperation needed to address the remaining challenges. A clash of civilisations, if we survived one, would undo all that humanity has built and would cast a shadow for generations to come.” Sachs, a committed opponent of Marxism, is nevertheless forced to recognise that the central contradiction of the world capitalist system identified by Marxists, threatens the very existence of mankind...
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/etnb-d22.shtml