United Nations - Reform or Dissolve

Cliff Kincaid, FSM, March 5^th, 2007 – John Bolton may not be a part of the UN anymore, but he still is an advocate for change within the UN …

Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton received a sustained standing ovation Thursday night, as he told a national conference of conservatives that “reform” of the United Nations had failed and that the U.S. has to assume a radically different approach to funding the world organization. He called for an end to “assessed contributions” to the U.N. and urged a completely voluntary system of paying for the activities of the world body. Bolton’s proposal leaves open the distinct possibility that an objective assessment would determine that it does not deserve one red cent in “voluntary” support from American taxpayers. The out-of-control nature of the world organization is reflected in the fact that the U.S. pension fund has grown to a staggering $37 billion, and that John Kerry’s equally liberal sister Peggy still runs non-governmental organization (NGO) affairs at the U.S. Mission to the U.N. Technically, Bolton, when he was U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., was her boss. But he couldn’t fire her because she is part of the permanent bureaucracy. Peggy Kerry has held the position of NGO liaison at the U.S. mission during the entire Bush Administration but took time off during the 2004 presidential campaign to solicit votes for her brother. The situation is dire. Unknown to most Americans, because the major media treat the U.N. as a sacred cow deserving more money, an international tax on airline travel is being collected, under the guidance of Ira Magaziner of the Clinton Foundation, and a global carbon tax amounting to 35 cents a gallon of gas is coming. Senator James Inhofe has led efforts to withdraw U.S. funding to the world body if it continues advocating global tax schemes on the American people, but Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wants to provide even more money for U.N. peacekeeping operations. … Most people think the U.S. “contribution” to the U.N. amounts to a couple billion dollars a year. But Senator Tom Coburn has documented that the U.S. funded portion of an annual U.N. budget of $15-$20 billion amounts to between 25 and 30 percent. Under Bush, funding for the U.N. system has grown from $3.1 billion in 2001 to $5.3 billion in 2005. Free to speak out, since his resignation in the face of the refusal of a hostile Senate to confirm him, Bolton told CPAC that former U.N. chief Kofi Annan was incompetent and should have been fired. Annan was allowed to retire when his second term as U.N. Secretary-General expired. He was replaced by South Korea Ban Ki-moon, a big backer of the international airline tax and other such schemes, usually dubbed “solidarity contributions” for global purposes.

Now you know why John Bolton resigned, not because of his inability to deal with the assignment as ambassador or butt heads with the Democrat-controlled Congress – but because he can continue his crusade against the body politic at the UN without having to be stifled because of an elected position.

Cliff Kincaid is participating in a CPAC panel entitled: Is it Worth Fixing? …

The answer is no, considering how it continues to serve as a forum for America-bashing. In one of the most recent examples, it was reported that Mexico is drafting a resolution for the United Nations Human Rights Council criticizing the U.S. plan to build a border fence. Before that, Mexico took the United States to the U.N.’s International Court of Justice, complaining about the treatment of Mexican criminals, including convicted killers, by U.S. authorities. The U.N. ruled against America. Just recently, Mexico’s Congress condemned the United States because workers building a section of fence between two countries went 10 yards into Mexico. At the same time, the United Nations is founding former Clinton advisor and Carter official Robert Pastor’s plan to build a “North American Community,” which strikes some observers as a virtual merger of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. The absurdity of Pastor’s plan, which is being implemented by the Bush Administration without the approval or even input of Congress, was demonstrated at his own recent conference on development of a North American legal system. Alberto Székely, a career Ambassador with the Mexican Foreign Service, described Mexico as “a country where the contravention of the law is the daily rule rather than the exception.” He said the Mexican legal system is characterized by official corruption, including widespread influence peddling, graft, racketeering, bribery, payoffs and kickbacks. He said Mexico is also characterized by systematic police brutality, extrajudicial executions, deplorable incarceration conditions, widespread torture and violation of fundamental human rights. … he succeeded in drawing attention to how the U.N. serves as a fig leaf behind which corrupt governments posture as human-rights defenders. And that is another reason why the U.N. can only be “fixed” when it is dead and gone.

An entity like the United Nations was once tried, initiated by Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary in which President Woodrow Wilson adopted, called The League of Nations – it failed. Now the United Nations has not only outlived its usefulness, but rogue nations are running it and corrupt officials have an agenda to make it the world body politic entity. Remember that UN leaders are not elected by public vote. How completely dangerous would that be? As I have advocated before, there is no reforming of the UN, it is time to stop all funding, evict them from the UN building on American soil, and put the UN building up for sale. If they want a UN, let them pay for building a new one somewhere else in the world. The United Nations is a waste of time and useless.

Since the end of World War II and the founding of the United Nations, over 80 million people[1] have been killed in racial, religious, and political genocides around the globe. This number is far greater than those killed by the Nazi in death camps and other circumstances from 1939 to 1945. But the UN’s incompetence goes beyond its “peacekeeping” missions. It has failed in its tasking against starvation and disease – wasting millions of dollars, and now the UN wants to levy taxes upon the world citizens so it can continue wasteful spending. In the 1980s during the Ethiopian famine, the UN spent over $75 million building and upgrading apartment complexes for UN administrators and aid workers in Ethiopia instead of where the funding was supposed to be spent. Efficiency? The food supplies were rotting on the docks because of lack of transportation vehicles to distribute the food source, much less get if off the docks. And in another incident, in East Timor, the UN spent over $50 million to build hotels and supermarkets for foreign visitors while the local hospitals were being neglected – the reason why funding was funneled to East Timur in the first place. The UN receives charity funds as well as proceeds out of taxpayer funds – and too much of it goes to the administration instead of to what the funds were collected for in the first place. Thus, the reason why I do not give any funds to the United Way - or anything connected with the UN because of their inexcusable behavior.

The UN will never work as it was designed when nations who are guilty of human rights violations has a chairman sitting on the United Nations Human Rights Council with voting authority.

 ENDNOTES:

---

[1] http://www.genocide.org/