Posted on 04/04/2003 10:47:11 AM PST by TLBSHOW
U.S. Will Pay Increased UN Dues -- Despite All By John Gizzi
Despite the refusal of the United Nations Security Council to enforce its own resolutions calling for disarmament of Iraq, the administration is standing by the budget request it made in January to pay for a $90 million increase in the annual U.S. dues to the United Nations.
The budget proposal submitted to Congress by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requests an appropriation of $322 million for UN dues in Fiscal Year ’04. That’s up from the $232 million in ’03, according to the OMB. (The U.S. is assessed dues amounting to 22% of the overall UN budget each year.)
Asked on April 2, whether the administration had any plan to rollback the increase in UN dues, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, said, “Nothing that anyone’s brought to my attention.”
Some conservative lawmakers indicated they are also ready to pay the increased UN dues. A spokesman for Rep. Joseph Knollenberg (R.-Mich.), a member of the Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee (which has oversight over UN funding), said, “Mr. Knollenberg was certainly disappointed in the UN recently, but he is not willing to turn his back on it.” The spokesman said Knollenberg in all likelihood would support the increase.
Similarly, Rep. George Radanovich (R.-Calif.) told me, “The UN has shown how ineffective it is after passing 17 resolutions that were ignored by Iraq.
They’re [sic] League of Nations-like.” But he also signaled he would probably go along with the administration on this issue. “The President has to deal with the world community and the UN will have to have some kind of role in order to bring the rest of the world around [on a postwar Iraq],” he said.
Two other members voiced reservations about the UN’s role in post-war Iraq. “There are plenty of alternatives to the UN and we shouldn’t automatically assume the UN will be the end-all in Iraq after the war,” said House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.).
“The UN should need to prove it has a role,” echoed Rep. Jack Kingston (R.-Ga.), a Member of the House Appropriations Committee. “It was totally irrelevant leading up to the war, and contributed to the war in that respect. It ignored 17 of its own resolutions about Saddam Hussein and in twelve years never got serious about weapons inspections. It’s very much like them to come around to the battlefield when the soldiers are dead and then to claim victory. You won’t find leadership from the UN any more than you will find fairness or pro-American statements.”
Unlike their pissant countries, the money sitting in Fed coffers is OURS, not some tinpot dictator's.
The quicker we shake the dust of that worthless institution off of our boots, the happier I'll be.
The UN is an organization that confers rights to citizens and can just as easily revoke them. What is it that makes you think that empowering any organization that is so founded (much less one that claims sovereignty over American citizens) is a good idea no matter what the purpose?
The UN is essentially a tool of corporate organized crime, and not much more. There is NOTHING to be gained by using or involving that gang of thugs in anything we do. UN bureaucrats will merely act to discredit and eventually enslave us.
It claims to. Have you ever read the Universal Declaration on Human Rights? Have you ever read the Charter for Global Democracy? Have you ever read the Earth Charter?
I didn't think so. I suggest you do a little homework, starting here.
Corporate organized crime and gang of thugs seeking to enslave us? Evidently you haven't been paying attention.
Really? I wrote an entire book on the topic. Those reviews aren't a group of chumps, are they? No, the problem is that you believe what they say, rather than observe what they do.
President Bush made it perfectly clear, as did the rest of the administration, that we seek to work through the UN. The intention, I'll say again, is to retake control over it and use it for our own ends. Which happen to be the betterment of all mankind, even if the French and smaller nations like Libya and Syria can't understand that.
You are about fifty years behind the curve. The purpose of the UN is NOT the betterment of mankind; it is to destroy American sovereignty and institute global socialism. It's founding documents reflect that in every respect. The NEW UN Chartering documents, ALL adopted without ANY consultation to American citizens, are even worse. They promise a world government of the rich, by the rich, and exclusively for the rich using their your tax money to guarantee their shaky investments in dependent client dictators in the third whirled (those who control the world's NGOs by virtue of their tax-exempt foundations). It's organized fascist racketeering on a grand scale. Consider that the vast bulk of the American delegation from the Roosevelt administration attending the chartering convention were communists.
I really do suggest you do that homework (especially the link to Sovereignty International).
(1) ignore it.
(2) opt out of it
(3) take control of it.
You forgot: "Cut off the money." If we do it and Japan does it also, that is 45% of the UN budget. Seeing as the UN failed to verify North Korea's use of their nuclear reactor on two occasions, Japan's following our lead is quite likely. As it is, Bush is increasing their funding and bringing us back into UNESCO after Reagan got us out. What, pray tell, did Bush get in return for caving on that one? 1441? What did that get us? So you see, it isn't the picture you thought it was, is it?
That the Bush administration has elected to do (3) suggests that the danger is not all that great.
Republican administrations have a record for taking care of their campaign donors (see tax-exempt foundations of the owners of multinational corporations). Republican administrations have done more to empower the UN over American citizens than you realize. They gave us the Endangered Species Act, NEPA, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act... all pursuant to treaties held at the UN. I don't suppose you knew that.
Hence my book proposing a free-market environmental management system, because government is too corrupt and too inept to be given a job that important. It's time to take the power to control land use away from government, because such power is sufficient to socialize the entire economy and power in the hands of politicians is power for sale (See Organized Crime: Racketeering, Malfeasance, Tax-Evasion, and Fraud).
Otherwise we really would have walked away from the Security Council back in September.
Way too glib, and too trusting. You over-estimate the courage of Carl Rove. I suggest you do the homework.
I don't believe this for a minute...Conservative lawmakers would vote against it...Again, they are pretending that Republican means conservative...
Nonsense. You just want that to be true to hold onto your thesis.
No, in order for a government to protect the unalienable rights of citizens, I merely think that a government MUST be accountable to those citizens. For that to be possible, nations MUST be sovereign, not just ours, all of them. I am thus an internationalist, not a globalist. If I was an isolationist, why would I apply for an international patent?
As a follower of the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt (which includes an interest in things like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, rather than no bald eagle and a poluted Hudson River), I see no problems in tackling the problems of the world through an international body that _we_ control and dictate.
You clearly follow that which never was as it has been portrayed. For example, the first National Park, Yellowstone, was in fact a political payoff, a paean to the railroads, and in effect our nation's first instance of state-subsidized eco-tourism. What it accomplished was to forever prevent any landowner from going into competition with the government in a socialist land entertainment business which has created the shortage of open space and entertainment value we see in lands adjacent to urban areas today.
The habitat management consequences of regulatory enterprise have not been as advertised either. You need to learn more about how laws such as the ESA are being used for power and profit, instead of believing the advertising that they are about endangered species at all. The system has in fact become a bureaucratic entitlement program, where distress in species is used to justify increasing scope of regulatory power that then becomes power for sale. Endangered species are being deliberately maintained in that state of distress for a whole raft of political purposes: whether to increase budgetary allocations, take resource businesses out of production as a political payoff, take land from agricultural producers at a discount to convert its use to development for fat profits... It has become a corrupt and inept system that destroys the very ecosystem attributes it purports to protect. I document that assertion extensively in my book.
Further, I spend probably the equivalent of a full time job doing habitat restoration process development on my land. In fact, my book was written for environmental reasons, so your specious inference that I don't care about such things would be offensive were you not so obviously ignorant. Perhaps you should read the opinions of the reviewers of my book to see how far from reality your wishful projections really are. The book truly represents a novel way to balance competing risks in the use of natural resources, including managing habitat for endangered species as a service business.
What I discovered in the process of writing it led to the concerns about organized political corruption in the UN I have related to you. It wasn't an intentional discovery, I assure you. It was in fact, a most depressing thing to learn. The dirty dealings that got us to this point were intended and took many decades to accomplish.
Not what you thought, was it?
The fiscal excesses of your hero, Teddy Roosevelt, in the interests of his fat-cat friends gave us the financial meltdown that led to the Federal Reserve Act. He completed his assigned task with a "Ross Perot" gambit to insure that Wilson became President, putting the power to coin money (unconstitutionally) in the hands of private individuals, who immediately initiated the forces that led to the ultimate bankruptcy of the United States in 1933 (appropriately under the aegis of his nephew). Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin, did more to damage the Constitutional Republic than any presidents since Lincoln (no I'm not talking about slavery; it's the language of the 14th Amendment, something Lincoln came to regret; it was demanded by those who held the debt for the Civil War, intending to cash in on a nation in hock).
If the events of the past generation and a half have left the UN a sham of its former self, I suspect we have a lot of work to do in getting it back under our (read: western liberal capitalist democracy) control again.
Generation and a half? The Constitution has been under attack since before the ink was dry! This is (or was) a republic, where the rights of individuals supercede the majority claim as exercised by a civic agent.
Achieve what we can through the UN, but fear not the use of power and force in our own name when our interests are threatened.
You thus glibly negate the entire reason and justification for the Constitution, which was to limit the powers of a central government, preferring a global government accountable to no one.
No thank you. Go do your homework.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.