By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, January 8 -- After Evo Morales of Bolivia took the gavel of the Group of 77 from Fiji on January 8, Inner City Press asked him what he and the G77 could do about the International Monetary Fund, ostensibly a part of the UN system.
Morales began his response with a story: "When I got to the presidency, the IMF had an office inside the Bolivian central bank. The IMF would say, we'll lend you $30 million in exchange for the privatization of services, and giving resources to the transnationals."
He then made a mutli-lingual joke, that Bolivia had bee run by "los Chicago boys ahora son Boliviano Boys." There was laughter. On the question of layoffs at the UN, Morales seemed to conflate them with term limits in countries' foreign services. But those getting termination notices at the UN are workers, in the Publishing section. We'll have more on this.
Two months ago, that Bolivia would come to head the Group of 77 was first reported on November 6 by Inner City Press. Today, Evo Morales was in New York to accept the hand-over from Fiji's foreign minister.
In the interim, between Christmas and New Years, a UN budget deal was concluded which resulted in UN staff getting "notices of termination" -- layoff letters -- handed to them on January 6.
(The UN spokesperson on January 7 refused to confirm the layoff letters, referring instead to a Town Hall meeting Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will have on January 9 at 9:30 am, 24 hours after meeting Evo Morales. But Inner City Press has now published one of the layoff letters, here.)
While the Group of 77 works on a number of issues within the UN system, it is a major player in UN budget negotiations, as evidenced by Fiji's omni-presence in the UN's North Lawn building throughout December, and Algeria's the year before.
Closing speeches in December made much of Ban Ki-moon in March 2014 "getting his way" on a mobility plan not fully accepted by staff, and on a corporate partnership scheme headed by long-time American UN official Robert Orr (a sample partner, here, at UN January 7 with no read-out yet.)
What positions will Bolivia-led G77 take on these? On the current layoffs, and those to come? We will be covering this.
"Game on," one G77 Permanent Representative told Inner City Press back in November. The G-77 sources said the timing is propitious, including given Bolivia's standing up on issues like the searching of Evo Morales' plane.
(On the night of January 7, amid frigid temperature, Morales' plane landed without incident, as tweeted by Bolivia's Permanent Representative Sacha Llorenti.)
They said, again speaking exclusively to Inner City Press, that while in the past the UN Secretariat's budget proposals were closer to the side of the developing world, and then richer countries tried to scale them back, now "Ban Ki-moon has sided in advance with the rich."
Similar cuts are proposed in the UN Development Program and also UNICEF, with talk of "nodes," under Anthony Lake, outsourcing and off-shoring jobs from New York. These were denounced by many speakers at an October 31 meeting of the Staff Union. Click here for that.
Y ahora de verdad, Bolivia. Watch this site.
