On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 9:08 PM, ken hanly <[email protected]> wrote: > According to the Bank: > ""Nominations should be submitted by close of business on Friday, March 23, > 2012, and may be made by Executive Directors, or by Governors through their > Executive Director. Candidates must be nationals of the Bank’s member > countries.""" > There is only a week left for nominations. I have not seen anywhere a > list of people actually nominated. There is no indication that the Bank even > publishes who the nominees are. There are 25 Executive Directors in all.
No list has been published to my knowledge. The US has not yet named its nominee. Before this time, there was never more than one nominee before. I have been told that Sachs has been formally nominated, hopefully this fact will soon materialize in the press. I have not yet seen any indication that any country intends to make a formal nomination besides the US candidate and Sachs. For the last IMF race (which was the first IMF race) there were two candidates. > When all nominations are in the board decides on a short list of three > candidates. These candidates are to be identified. The next step: > "" Formal interviews by the Executive Directors will be conducted for all > shortlisted candidates with the expectation of selecting the new President > by consensus by the Spring Meetings of 2012.""" > When are these Spring meetings? April 20-22. http://www.imf.org/external/spring/2012/index.htm I wonder how much time there is to > consider all these nominations and interview the 3 short listed candidates. One month to do that and make the selection. > With 25 Executive Directors I wonder why they work by consensus and not > voting. At least 2 reasons: one, it serves the interests of the big powers, especially the US, to obscure the power relations. "Consensus" makes it sound all kumbaya and harmony, suggesting that everyone is happy. If there are votes, then it is on the basis of shares. So you could theoretically have a situation where there is a proposal, say, to cancel the external debts of poor countries, and 173 countries vote yes, and ten countries vote no, and the proposal fails. The ten countries wouldn't like the "optics" of that. I think that's the main story. Two, while the US has its own ED, most of the EDs represent many countries, and in a contested vote, the countries representing a single ED might not agree, so one would need some mechanism for dealing with that. That is a technical issue that could easily be resolved. I have long argued that there should be recorded votes (and published minutes.) I wonder if these rules are not simply window dressing and the real > process will be the behind the scenes consensus worked out by the big > powers. That would be the standard operating procedure. Indeed, the Jubilee 2000 campaign always targeted the G7 meetings, not the IMF/World Bank meetings, on the grounds that it was at the G7 - an effective majority of the shares at the IMF/WB - that the real decisions got made, which were then subsequently ratified by the IMF/WB. If you look recent at the New York Times article about the presidential selection, it was quite blunt about this. The US is going to make its choice, and Europe is going to support the US choice, and that is the end of the story, said the New York Times, which called it a "lock." > Sachs could very well throw a monkey wrench into the system assuming > he is nominated. That is indeed the plan/hope: to force them to fight in the open. I am told that the White House rep to Congress is "freaking out" about the Conyers letter, "very annoyed" at the "public pressure." So at least we did that. Hopefully we can do much more to annoy them. > Cheers, ken > > > > Blog: http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html > Blog: http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org [email protected] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
