Maravi

Neo-Conned Again! Zoellick Replaces Wolfowitz in Move to Keep the Bank in Corrupt Rut.

For Immediate Release
Contact: Sameer Dossani 202 340 0216; Ruth Castel-Branco 202 489 2273
Neo-Conned Again! Zoellick Replaces Wolfowitz in Move to Keep the Bank in Corrupt Rut.

President Bush’s announcement today of Robert Zoellick’s nomination for the position of World Bank President is, according to campaigners, a challenge to the World Bank’s board. “The board can go along with the U.S., or it can demonstrate that the slogans and principles the World Bank espouses are not just empty words. Board members must now demonstrate, through nominating better-qualified individuals, that there is a better way to run this institution,” said Ruth Castel-Branco of the 50 Years Is Enough Network.

“With the departure in disgrace of Paul Wolfowitz, the Executive Directors of the World Bank have an opportunity to demonstrate what meaningful reform would look like,” said Soren Ambrose of Solidarity Africa Network in Nairobi, Kenya. “The fact that President Bush wants to keep the system unchanged is no reason for countries like Brazil or Australia, which have called for an open selection process, to go silent. Otherwise they, along with the Europeans who get to name the head of the IMF in return for their silence, will have joined the coalition of the willing.”

Sameer Dossani, Director of the 50 Years Is Enough Network, noted that alternative nominations will be important for establishing a more engaged and critical role for the board, even if they don’t succeed in preventing Zoellick from winning the post. “We need to see tangible proof that members of the board will oppose the neo-conservative ideology that animates both Wolfowitz and Zoellick,” he said. “While no one could be as outrageous as Wolfowitz, the architect of the Iraq war, Zoellick is a full-fledged neo-conservative too, a supporter of invading Iraq since 1998. The best that can be said for him is that, like Wolfowitz, he’ll be an appropriate symbol of what the World Bank has become – an agency dedicated to entrenching U.S. economic domination.”

Zoellick served as the U.S.’s chief trade negotiator for Bush’s first term. . “He earned a reputation as a powerful bully in middle- and low- income countries,” said Jessica Walker Beaumont of the American Friends Service Committee. “His condescending lectures about ‘can-do and won’t-do nations’ at the 2003 WTO summit in Cancun, when the US didn’t get its way, became notorious. It’s hard to imagine that, after defending US corporate profits so zealously, this is the person who is going to champion development on behalf of the world’s poor.”
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Ruth Castel-Branco

Outreach/Communications Coordinator



50 Years Is Enough Network

3628 12th St. NE

Washington, DC 20017

Phone: + 1 202 463 2265

Email: ruth@50years.org

www.50years.org

Labels: PAUL WOLFOWITZ, World Bank, ZOELLICK

posted by MrK @ 12:15 AM