The Redhunter

The UN Reorganization Plan

Anything that has to do with the UN has got to be comple. The better, I think, to pull the wool over our eyes.

Kofi Annan's plan was best described by Wretchard of The Belmont Club, who called it a "Grand Bargain." I first wrote about this last March:

According to the Financial Times, (hat tip Belmont Club), what Annan has in mind is a kind of "grand bargain" (the FT article is subscription only, so I'm going on what Wretchard has on his site)

Mr. Annan's officials say the package basically proposes a bargain whereby rich countries help the poor to develop, by promoting the Millennium Development Goals, while poor countries help alleviate rich countries' security concerns. In both cases, Mr Annan says, action must be underpinned by respect for human rights.

Of course this means more money from the United States, Europe, and other developed nations. Don't count on any of them to support this.

And, as Wretchard points out, by "security", Annan means the Security Council. And forget about going around it. From the text of the UN report, Annan says "The task is not to find alternatives to the Security Council as a source of authority, but to make it work better"

Without going into details, Annan proposes increasing the size of the Security Council by adding members from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. He offers two proposals, which vary by the number and term of the new seats, and whether they are permanent or rotating.

This is not a plan for action; it is an attempt to permanently prevent action. With so many competing interests on the Council, gridlock would be enshrined forever.

If would also, of course, have the effect of diluting American power. As it is today, the council would not vote to enforce their own resolutions regarding Iraq.

Even if we buy the notion of a "grand bargain", it is hard to see how and deal would work. Is Annan saying that the underdeveloped nations could attempt to "buy off" their votes each time an Iraq-like situation arose? Does anyone seriously expect such a deal to work?

The good news is that the Bush Administration is firmly opposed to these measures. UN Ambassador John Bolton has put that organization on notice that the United States is firmly opposed to the plan. Simply put, the UN wants to usurp our sovereignty, and take for themselves rights such as when military force can be used. From todays Washington Post:

Bolton argued that the Security Council already had sufficient legal authority to send foreign troops to halt atrocities in places such as the Sudanese region of Darfur. He insisted that the U.N. charter "has never been interpreted as creating a legal obligation for Security Council members to support enforcement action." He also urged the deletion of language calling on nations to prevent "incitement" of mass atrocities, saying it runs counter to the U.S. First Amendment protections of speech.

Bolton wrote that the United States "stands ready" to intervene in select cases where governments fail to halt mass killings on their soil. But he said that world leaders should not "foreclose" the military option by the United States and other governments "absent authorization by the Security Council."

The U.N. doctrine of humanitarian intervention, known as the "responsibility to protect," has been promoted by Secretary General Kofi Annan, European governments and human rights advocates, who had been pressing U.N. members to accept greater responsibility for intervening in countries where atrocities are taking place. They have also been pressing to ensure a more central role for the Security Council in authorizing military action, a position that the Bush administration has strenuously opposed.

A Global Taxation Proposal

The plan it to put a tax on international airline travel. Both the EU and UN are behind it. The tax money will allegedly be used for fighting either "global poverty" or "aids", depending on which article you read. One thing you'll never find is "spreading democracy and overthrowing dictators."

Predictably, France is one of the prime instigators:

As a first step, France proposes to create a pilot scheme which would serve as a showcase of the feasibility of innovative financing mechanisms while, at the same time, contributing to meet urgent financing needs (such as the fight against HIV/AIDS).

Why plane tickets? As one of the main driving forces behind globalization, passenger air transport is a fast growing activity. While the industry may meet with temporary cyclical difficulties, traffic volume has increased by 7.4% since April 2004 and is currently projected to grow annually by an average 5% worldwide over the next decade.

In both developed and developing countries, airline passengers seldom belong to the poorest segments of the population. A contribution on plane tickets would therefore be progressive, a characteristic which could be reinforced if higher rates were to be set for business and first class passengers.

Translation: you, dear reader, have been stealing from the world's poor for too long and we're going to get you for it.

From what I can tell, all this is part of the UN's grand Millenium Development Goals (MDG), which you can read all about on a special section of the UN website. Of course, it all sounds so nice and wonderful. The goals run the complete gamut of do-good projects, such as "Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger", or "Promote gender equality and empower women" to "Develop a global partnership for development"

That last one sounds suspiciously like the socialist "New World Economic Order" that they tried to foist on us in the closing days of the Cold War. And you can be sure that most countries, especially the Arab ones, have no intention of granting women any meaningful rights.

The problem with all this is obvious; if they get the ability to impose one tax, more will follow. And they'll get higher and higher. Meanwhile, little good will actually follow. Not to mention that most of the money will go to line the pockets of third-world kleptocrats and UN bureaucrats. This may actually make the "Oil for Food" scandal look small by comparison.

Plan to Control the Internet

Companies in the United States, aided by enlightened government policies and research projects, were instrumental in developing the Internet. I have much personal experience in this field, having spent most of the 1990s working for some of the largest Internet Service providers.

What is this all about? Here you go:

UN bureaucrats and telecommunications ministers from many less-developed nations claim the U.S. government has undue influence over how things run online. Now they want to be the ones in charge.

While the formal proposal from a U.N. working group will be released July 18, it's already clear what it will contain. A preliminary summary of governmental views claims there's a "convergence of views" supporting a new organization to oversee crucial Internet functions, most likely under the aegis of the United Nations or the International Telecommunications Union.

At issue is who decides key questions like adding new top-level domains, assigning chunks of numeric Internet addresses, and operating the root servers that keep the Net humming. Other suggested responsibilities for this new organization include Internet surveillance, "consumer protection," and perhaps even the power to tax domain names to pay for "universal access."

Consider, too, that countries like Syria, China, Brazil, Ghana are the ones pushing for the change. They don't like that the big bad US has what they consider to be undue influence.

The actual UN report behind all this can be found here (hat tip Michelle Malkin. The good news is that the UN isn't united behind any particular plan:

"...the UN group couldn't decide what should be done about it. Instead of reaching a consensus, the nations participating in the discussions listed four possible options ranging from modest changes to creating an entirely new 'Global Internet Council' under the auspices of the United Nations.

The bad news is that they are united in saying that "no single government should have a pre-eminent role in relation to international internet governance"

I can think of about a hundred reasons why we the UN should have no role in the Internet. Investor's Business Daily does too:

Given its record of mismanagement and corruption, the U.N. shouldn't be handed the keys to the Internet. It's too precious a resource. We need look only as far as the oil-for-food scandal — possibly the largest fraud in history — for evidence as to why this is true.

Giving the U.N. control over the Internet would be giving it control over the future — which rightly belongs to entrepreneurs, inventors and dreamers, not faceless bureaucrats who can scarcely conceal their loathing for the free-market success the U.S. represents.

Tip of the Iceburg

The worst part is that this is just part of a long train of abuses:

* Oil-for-Food, the greatest financial scandal in modern history
* Peacekeepers in Congo, Somalia, Kosovo, and elsewhere raping and otherwise sexually abusing the very people they are supposed to be protecting
* Failure to provide relief to the victims of the recent tsunami, and then attacking the United States for forming a coalition of nations who were successful in bringing aid
* Failure to stop what is just about genocide in Sudan
* A Security Council that will not enforce it's own resolutions
* A Security Council that passes an ever-increasing number of resolutions to little or no effect on the world scene
* They put the worst human rights violators on the planet in on the UN Human Rights commission
* Iraq under Saddam was voted chair of the UN Committee on Disarmament
* A General Assembly that, in general, is virulently anti-Semitic and shows it in their actions and speech
* The World Conference on Racism, held in Durban South Africa 2001, turned into an anti-Semitic and anti-American hate-fest
* They promote fatally flawed treaties such as the Kyoto protocol on "global warming", which would have the effect of crippling the US economy
* The promotion of the World Court, whose purpose would be to prosecute Americans and Israelis, while largely ignoring third-world kleptocrats

What to Do?

As I've written before, marginalize the UN and build alternative organizations.