Posted on 02/11/2006 6:02:20 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
The United Nations says it can end poverty, stop global warming, and end the threat of contagious disease while also unlocking $7 trillion of hidden wealth from developing nations in the process. If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is.
In a new book launched with great fanfare at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, The New Public Finance: Responding to Global Challenges, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) claims to offer “innovative financial mechanisms that could dramatically reduce the cost of managing global risks can now be implemented by governments across the world.” The New Public Finance, according to the UNDP, emphasizes five policy approaches, which it describes as follows:
* Enhanced risk management to reduce the cost of response to international crises;
* Increased public-private partnership to leverage private finance;
* An emphasis on incentive-based international cooperation;
* The development of new products for trading on international markets, similar to those for carbon emissions; and
* The promotion of a more productive use of public revenue, focusing on social returns on investment, locally or globally, rather than expenditures.
If you think that such rhetoric means that this influential UN agency is now embracing market-based, capitalist solutions to difficult global socio-economic problems, think again. The UNDP has a long record of advocating precisely the opposite approach, one that focuses on redistributing the world’s wealth in the interests of “social justice.” Although packaged more attractively by using free market, incentive-oriented terminology, its latest plan is no different in substance than all the ones that the United Nations has generated for many years.
Indeed, the overview section of The New Public Finance says it all: “The equity or distribution branch of public finance, seen to support society in realizing its goals of fairness and justice, may sometimes have to achieve its objectives through income redistribution and transfer payments.” (Emphasis added.)
There is nothing new about this kind of public finance policy at all. It is as old as the socialist wealth redistribution dogma that underlies it.
Countries like the United States must give up control of their own economic policies in favor of global solutions because, as The New Public Finance puts it, “many global issues today are not natural global public goods but globalized (formerly essentially national) public good.” The independent, sovereign nation-state, “reflecting the choices on desired state action by national constituents,” is a relic of the past. Emerging in its place, the UNDP tells us, is something called the “intermediate state” – a hybrid globally interconnected entity “reflecting the choices on desired state action by international constituents.”
Global taxes are seen as a means for financing the new global paradigm that the UNDP has in mind - on everything from Internet usage to carbon fuel taxes to currency transaction fees to airline ticket fees. Included in The New Public Finance’s “Inventory of Financing Arrangements for International Cooperation,” for example, is “a tax on currency transactions that would be applied uniformly by all industrial countries.” This is the so-called “Tobin Tax,” named after the Nobel Laureate Yale economist James Tobin who first proposed such a tax years ago and which the United Nations has included on its revenue-raising agenda ever since. Also included in the UNDP financing inventory is a disguised internet tax, known as the Digital Solidarity Fund, whose financing mechanism relies in large part on mandatory surcharges imposed on high tech companies as a condition to having their contract bids accepted by participating local governments. Taxing the Internet to raise money for UN programs is not a new proposal either. It is just being dressed up differently. Indeed, back in 1999, the UNDP advocated an internet usage tax that it believed could raise as much as $70 billion dollars for the UN to spend as it saw fit. That would come to more than $150 billion dollars a year today in light of the growth of Internet traffic since 1999.
Just take a look at the UNDP’s most recent annual Human Development Report, which it issued on September 7, 2005, for more clues to its real thinking. In that report, the UNDP hammered away at two recurrent themes. First, it presented its simplistic diagnosis of the world’s problems: “Extreme inequality in wealth between countries and within countries is identified as one of the main barriers to human development.” In short, an “unequal world” is inherently immoral, no matter what the cause. Second, the UNDP offered its cure-all remedy: the richer countries, especially the United States, must give whatever money it takes to eliminate the disparities. “Aid targets without binding schedules,” says the UNDP, “are not a solid foundation for poverty reduction planning…Aid policies should reflect a commitment to reduce inequalities in human capabilities and income.” After all, according to the Socialist ideology prevalent at the UNDP and the rest of the United Nations establishment for that matter, we are talking about “universal entitlements, not optional or discretionary allowances.” (Emphases added.)
Never letting facts get in the way of its redistributive ideology, the UNDP ignores the endemic corruption and poor governance plaguing many of the countries that it claims have a “universal entitlement” to receive ever more unconditional help from us. Indeed, the agency goes so far as to blame the donor countries for even bringing up this unpleasant subject. It declared that “publicly expressed fears about governance are often smokescreens behind which donors seek to justify the unjustifiable: a legacy of indifference, neglect and failure to deliver on past pledges.”
Well, tell that to the African Union, which believes that corruption is a major problem in Africa that has impeded economic progress there. The African Union estimated that corruption alone has already cost Africa nearly $150 billion dollars a year. True development requires the nutrition provided by personal freedom and a predictable and transparent economic system, sustained and nurtured by honest government.
In many of the poorest developing countries, their corrupt, autocratic governments own all land and provide leases to the peasant tenants who till the soil for pennies a day. This alone prevents any chance for the peoples of these lands to get out of their poverty trap.
Instead of blaming the West for problems that are not of our making, the UNDP should focus on encouraging local entrepreneurship. They should listen to world-renowned Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto, who has argued for unleashing the potential of capitalism. The key is securing legally recognized property rights for the poor by giving the peasants formal legal title to their own land – land in which they can invest and borrow against. The poorest people in the world may well have trillions of dollars worth of unrealized assets that can potentially be monetized for their benefit – if they are fully integrated into their own countries’ legal systems. And the industrialized world can help here by providing more open markets to exports from undeveloped countries. How about, for example, agreeing to remove trade barriers to exports of African agricultural products that are grown on lands for which the farmers tilling those lands are provided secure, formally recognized legal title by their governments?
In sum, the United Nations should give up its zero sum wealth redistributionist schemes. It should either get out of the way altogether or work constructively with those countries that are willing to voluntarily cooperate in helping to stimulate conditions for economic growth in the developing world – capitalism and good governance are the best anti-poverty programs of all.
Here we go again. The UN should be cleaning up itself first.
The UN should be compressed and carved into logs.
It's cold in the Northern states, you know.
Yeah, too bad we continue to "enable"
I LOVE IT!!!
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."-- Hillary Clinton
--no doubt while pocketing a hefty "maintenance fee" for yourself. -- grey_whiskers
that's some scary stuff.
ping
Where is Ted Turner on this I am sure he will give them millions of dollars he earned here and bad mouth this country in the process!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1574836/posts
The UN Plan for Your Mental Health (UNESCO)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1563271/posts
Healthy People 2010
There is only one solution:
We need to withdraw from the UN and throw them out of our country. We can announce that we are starting a new organization for nations to meet and discuss differences; however, membership will be limited to nations that have legitimately elected democratic governments that follow the rule of law. And each member's national sovereignty must be held inviolate.
In the late 1990's, a document called the "Earth Charter" was drafted by a group of prominent Humanist-Socialists including:
Steven Rockefeller:
Philosophy professor. Nephew of billionaire globalist David Rockefeller. Chairman of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Scholar on the works of Humanist patriarch John Dewey.
Maurice Strong:
Canadian billionaire and energy industry executive. Long-time U.N. officer and "assistant" U.N. Secretary-General. Organizer of the U.N. Rio Earth Summit and promoter of subsequent "environmental" programs for global management.
Mikhail Gorbachev:
Former premier of the Soviet Union and chairman of the Russian Communist Party. Head of the Gorbachev Foundation and the "environmental" group Green Cross International.
In place of the simple elegance of the rules for self-government and social stability expressed above, the Earth Charter calls for the imposition of a global tyranny over every aspect of human activity which becomes evident once you strip away the rhetorical devices and eco-socialist jargon.
We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace... An unprecedented rise in human population has overburdened ecological and social systems... Fundamental changes are needed in our values, institutions, and ways of living. We must realize that when basic needs have been met, human development is primarily about being more, not having more. We affirm the following interdependent principles for a sustainable way of life as a common standard by which the conduct of all individuals, organizations, businesses, governments, and transnational institutions is to be guided and assessed...
In order to build a sustainable global community, the nations of the world must renew their commitment to the United Nations, fulfill their obligations under existing international agreements, and support the implementation of Earth Charter principles with an international legally binding instrument on environment and development.
These assertions are self-evident conclusions in the minds of the authors, not subject to question or debate. The program calls for all individuals to be "guided and assessed" by an unspecifed group of managers and to accept a subsistence level existence, regardless of their individual aspirations. The hypocrisy of these billionaire globalists preaching about the virtues of universal poverty is mind boggling!
In almost every statement in this manifesto, there is at least one vague term that lacks specific definition. What is "sustainable" and what isn't? What is "economic justice"? These so-called principles are so loosely defined that no one in their right mind would support them, except for those who intend to use them as a cover to justify a dictatorship. Let's examine some of the specific proposals.
3.a. Ensure that communities at all levels guarantee human rights and fundamental freedoms and provide everyone an opportunity to realize his or her full potential.
3.b. Promote social and economic justice, enabling all to achieve a secure and meaningful livelihood that is ecologically responsible.
The problem with vague catch phrases like "fundamental freedoms" and "social and economic justice" is that they sound good but have no meaning until they are defined. Perhaps it is assumed that the global citizens are either so conditioned or so ignorant that definitions are no longer required.
The "fundamental freedoms" in this system do not (and cannot) include liberty, property or privacy; they conflict with the requirements for implementing "economic and social justice". The only individual freedom in this system is an Orwellian "freedom to conform".
5.a. Adopt at all levels sustainable development plans and regulations
5.b. Establish and safeguard viable nature and biosphere reserves
5.c. Promote the recovery of endangered species and ecosystems.
5.d. Control and eradicate non-native organisms harmful to native species and the environment.
5.e. Manage the use of renewable resources such as water, soil, forest products, and marine life.
5.f. Manage the extraction and use of non-renewable resources such as minerals and fossil fuels.
6.a. Take action to avoid the possibility of serious or irreversible environmental harm even when scientific knowledge is incomplete or inconclusive.
More vagueness. Who decides what is sustainable, viable, and/or endangered? Who is going to manage all the world's resources? What would prevent humans from being classified as "organisms harmful to the environment" which need to be eradicated? Who decides when there is a possibility of "harm", especially in the absence of scientific evidence?
7.c. Promote the development, adoption, and equitable transfer of environmentally sound technologies.
7.d. Internalize the full environmental and social costs of goods and services in the selling price
7.e. Ensure universal access to health care that fosters reproductive health and responsible reproduction.
7.f. Adopt lifestyles that emphasize the quality of life and material sufficiency in a finite world.
What is an "equitable transfer"? Will social costs include the bloated and corrupt world government bureaucracy? Who will decide what is "responsible reproduction"? Is forced abortion an acceptable policy? How about genetic screening to eliminate undesirables? Who will decide what constitutes "material sufficiency" for you, comrade?
9.a. Guarantee the right to potable water, clean air, food security, uncontaminated soil, shelter, and safe sanitation, allocating the national and international resources required.
9.b. Empower every human being with the education and resources to secure a sustainable livelihood, and provide social security and safety nets for those who are unable to support themselves.
How will "food security" be guaranteed? Which resources will be allocated and who will be forced to provide them? What is a "sustainable livelihood"? Who controls access to the "social security" gravy train?
10.a. Promote the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations.
10.b. Enhance the intellectual, financial, technical, and social resources of developing nations, and relieve them of onerous international debt.
10.d. Require multinational corporations and international financial organizations to act transparently in the public good, and hold them accountable for the consequences of their activities.
What is an "equitable distribution" and who will manage it? Is it "economic justice" to force one group to pay the debts of another? Which minority group gets to define the "public good"?
12. Uphold the right of all, without discrimination, to a natural and social environment supportive of human dignity, bodily health, and spiritual well-being, with special attention to the rights of indigenous peoples and minorities.
12.a. Eliminate discrimination in all its forms, such as that based on race, color, sex, sexual orientation, religion, language, and national, ethnic or social origin.
There can be no "social environment supportive of human dignity, bodily health, and spiritual well-being" without discrimination. Is every conceivable "sexual orientation" or perverse lifestyle acceptable? What about religions that advocate the extermination of all non-believers? Why should any "minority" be treated as a special case? Isn't that a form of discrimination?
13.c. Protect the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, peaceful assembly, association, and dissent.
13.e. Eliminate corruption in all public and private institutions.
13.f. Strengthen local communities, and assign environmental responsibilities to the levels of government where they can be carried out most effectively.
Does "freedom of opinion and dissent" include the right to actively oppose the collectivist dictatorship? Does "freedom of association" include the freedom to discriminate in one's choice of associates? How will corruption be removed from the global government bureaucracy? How is the local community strengthened by top-down "assignments"?
14.c. Enhance the role of the mass media in raising awareness of ecological and social challenges. 14.d. Recognize the importance of moral and spiritual education for sustainable living.
Which "social challenges" and pet projects will be advertised? What "spiritual education" is required for "sustainable living"? Will forced re-education camps be required for those with differing belief systems?
15. Treat all living beings with respect and consideration. 15.c. Avoid or eliminate to the full extent possible the taking or destruction of non-targeted species.
If all living beings deserve respect, then what is a "targeted" species? Who decides? Are humans exempt from that classification?
16.c. Demilitarize national security systems to the level of a non-provocative defense posture, and convert military resources to peaceful purposes
Who will enforce the "peace" and how? What defense will we have when the global security system becomes even more corrupt and oppresive than it already is? Ask the victims of any U.N. "peacekeeping" mission.
The Ark of Hope
The Earth Charter was inscribed on papyrus paper and enshrined in a wooden box called the "Ark of Hope" which was decorated with neo-pagan, politically correct artwork and paraded around the world by a troupe of believers. According to the official description, the carrying poles for the Ark are "unicorn horns" which ward off evil spirits. (I'm not making this up, see for yourself.)
In 2001, it was carried from Vermont to the "Interfaith Center" in New York City shortly after the World Trade Center incident. In 2002, on the the 10th anniversary of the U.N. Rio Earth Summit, it was taken to South Africa for the U.N. Johannesburg Conference on Sustainable Development, where it was presented to the delegates for adoption.
This is just the same-ol' same-ol' larceny on a grand scale.
The problem I'm seeing with that is, the American businesses seem to have become almost a monopoly of sorts that now fund the UN programs.
I'm wondering if the sudden incidences of people's data being made public by some error, companies suddently announcing 30,000 layoffs, and such have anything to do with protesting type activisms.
Bolton will call this turd a turd.
That's a special class of stupid.
With a foreword by Friedrich Engels and margin notes by Karl Marx ...
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