Why?

The answer according to the US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, is in order (at least partly) to ensure the recipients’ supporting votes in that assembly.

But how’s that working out?

From Breitbart:

The U.S. State Department has released a report on the voting behavior of other countries at the United Nations — and has identified the top ten best and worst countries in terms of voting for or against the U.S., respectively.

The April 26 report, Voting Practices in the United Nations 2017, was prepared after the Trump administration made clear it would consider cutting aid to countries that voted against the U.S. in UN institutions. That warning came after the UN General Assembly voted 128 to 9 (with 35 abstentions) last December to oppose President Donald Trump’s decision to relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to the capital city of Jerusalem.

“They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, and then they vote against us. Well, we’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care,” the president said.

His warning was reiterated by UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who said after the vote: “We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations and we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.”

The report on UN votes is prepared annually, but has additional significance this year due to those warnings.

In 2017, the best U.S. ally at the UN was Israel, and the worst U.S. enemy at the UN was Zimbabwe.

The report also notes the best ten: “The 10 countries with the highest voting coincidence with the United States were, in descending order: Israel, Micronesia, Canada, Marshall Islands, Australia, United Kingdom, France, Palau, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic.”

It also notes the worst ten: The 10 countries with the lowest voting coincidence with the United States were, in ascending order: Zimbabwe, Burundi, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Bolivia, and South Africa.”

According to the USAID website, the latter countries received the following amounts of U.S. aid, across all agencies, in fiscal year 2016 (the last year for which full records are available, rounded to the nearest million):

• Zimbabwe: $261 million
• Burundi: $75 million
• Iran: $3 million
• Syria: $916 million
• Venezuela: $9 million
• North Korea: $0
• Turkmenistan: $3 million
• Cuba: $16 million
• Bolivia: $1 million
• South Africa: $597 million

The total was close to $2 billion.

Haley said last week, upon release of the report: “This is not an acceptable return on our investment. When we arrived at the UN last year, we said we would be taking names, and this list of voting records speaks for itself. President Trump wants to ensure that our foreign assistance dollars – the most generous in the world – always serve American interests, and we look forward to helping him see that the American people are no longer taken for granted.”

Of the ten countries voting least often with the U.S., South Africa may already be feeling the consequences.

On Monday, South Africa learned that the U.S. would not be exempting it from new steel tariffs. The South African government released a statement in protest against the U.S. decision: “South Africa is concerned by the unfairness of the measures and that it is one of the countries that are singled out as a contributor to US national security concerns when its exports of aluminium and steel products are not that significant.”

The there’s the $320 million a year that goes to Mexico, where it is funding “human right abuses”.

USAID, an “independent agency” of the US government, is the spigot.

From Wiki:

USAID’s programs are authorized by Congress in the Foreign Assistance Act which Congress supplements through directions in annual funding appropriation acts and other legislation. As an official component of U.S. foreign policy, USAID operates subject to the guidance of the President, Secretary of State, and the National Security Council.

But who are the actual decision makers? Almost certainly denizens of the Swamp: Obama appointees, Hillary Clinton voters, Muslim Brotherhood fans, Iran “deal” supporters, President Trump haters (crocodile-green with envy) …

When Zimbabwe was Rhodesia, it was a land of plenty. All citizens, black and white, benefited from the skill and labor of whites and blacks on the white-owned farms. (Note: the country had no apartheid laws.) Then, with the dynamic aid of socialist Britain, it fell under the dictatorship of communist Robert Mugabe. He sent gangs of “veterans” – ie. murderers – to seize farms owned by whites. The farmers, their families, their black servants were slaughtered. Often they were tortured first. For the fun of it. And the land became unproductive.

Now, South Africa …

Our Facebook summary of a Daily Mail article tells the story:

White South African farmers will have their land confiscated after a landslide vote in parliament. The motion was brought by the murderous radical Julius Malema, but the policy was also a key factor in the new president Cyril Ramaphosa’s platform after he took over from Jacob Zuma in February. It passed by 241 votes to 83. In 2016, Malema told his supporters he was “not calling for the slaughter of white people – at least for now”. Freedom Front Plus party leader Pieter Groenewald said the decision to strip white farmers of their land would cause “unforeseen consequences that is not in the interest of South Africa”. The deputy chief executive of the civil rights group Afriforum said the motion was a violation of agreements made at the end of apartheid.

A few facts:

Many of the white farmer families have owned their farms for hundreds of years. In many cases it is all they have. Now it is to be taken from them without compensation.

They did not “steal” it from any of the Bantu tribes, who came overland from the north and encountered white settlers arriving by sea at about the same time. The only native people of South Africa were the Khoikhoi (or Bushmen). The Bantu were not farmers but herdsmen.

Large areas of the land already redistributed by the ANC government to black owners – 2.8 million hectares [1 hectare = just under 2 and a half acres], for which the government paid R20.5bn – are today under-utilized or fallow.

Ilana Mercer – South African born libertarian – writes at Townhall, pointing out that this legalized crime of expropriation has long been foreseeable:

Up until, or on the day, a predictable calamity unfolds in South Africa, you still find Western media insisting that,

* No, there’s no racial component to the butchering of thousands of white rural folks in ways that would make Shaka Zulu proud.
* No, the mutilated, tortured bodies of Boer and British men, women and children aren’t evidence of racial hatred, but a mere artifact of good old crime. No hate crimes. No crimes against humanity. Move along. Let the carnage play on.

And the latest:

To listen to leftist, counterfactual, ahistoric pabulum served up by most in media, a decision by South Africa’s Parliament to smooth the way for an expropriation without compensation of private property came out of … nowhere.

It just so happened — pure fluke! — that the permanently entrenched, racialist parties in parliament used their thumping majorities to vote for legalizing state theft from a politically powerless minority. Didn’t see that coming!

And still they beat on breast: How did the mythical land of Nelson Mandela turn into Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness?

How did that country’s vaunted constitution yield to “the horror, the horror” of land theft?

Easily, even seamlessly — as I’ve been warning since the 2011 publication of  Into the cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, which provided the analytical edifice for what’s unfolding. …

One of Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidential campaign promises was to finally get down to the business of the people: stealing private property. Since replacing Jacob Zuma as president, Ramaphosa has openly endeavored to speed up the transfer of land from white to black owners after his inauguration two weeks ago. Yet, this inherently aggressive, coercive act was studiously finessed by the news cartel. Before Ramaphosa, Zuma too had “called on parliament to change South Africa’s Constitution to allow the expropriation of white-owned land without compensation”. 

Unlike so many celebrity journos involved, both men know that said constitution is no bulwark against state expropriation. Or against any “public” or private violence, for that matter. As a protector of individual rights to life, liberty and property, the thing is worse than useless — a wordy and worthless document.

Take Section 12 of this progressive constitution. It enshrines the “Freedom and Security of the Person”. Isn’t it comforting to know that in a country where almost everyone knows someone who has been raped, robbed, hijacked, murdered, or all of the above, the individual has a right to live free of all those forms of violence?

Here’s the rub: Nowhere does the South African Constitution state whether its beneficiaries may defend their most precious of rights. Recounted in Into The Cannibal’s Pot is example after example of innocent victims of crime punished and prosecuted by those who swore to uphold the constitution. These victims are punished for merely and minimally defending their so-called constitutionally enshrined rights.

The African National Congress (ANC) has always, not suddenly, disregarded the importance of private property, public order and the remedial value of punitive justice. …

The ANC under its leader Nelson Mandela was, and the ANC remains, essentially a communist party. It made concessions to capitalism because its leaders were persuaded that the economic consequences for the country if it did not would be catastrophic. Now, it seems, such a catastrophe looks less forbidding to them.

As for equality before the law: The South African Bill of Rights is contemptuous of it. It enshrines group rights and allows for compensatory and distributive “justice”.

In other words, it is all for “social justice” which is not just at all.

The state’s confiscatory powers may be used to redress “past injustices”. “To promote the achievement of equality; legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken.”

The Constitution already allows a good deal of mischief in the name of the “greater good”, land expropriation included. Thus the Expropriation Bill of 2008: It’s the precursor to the current land expropriation process. Where, pray tell, was the news cartel when it was floated as an impetus for land nationalization?

With the 2008 Bill, the dominant ruling party had empowered itself — and “any organ of state, at any level of government” — to take ownership and possession of property “simply by giving notice to the expropriated owner”. The state would make the “final” determination of the compensation due, subject only to a limited form of court review. Both movable and immovable property has always been up for grabs — “livestock and farming implements, residential homes, business premises and equipment, patents, and shares”. The 2008 Bill was temporarily shelved before the 2009 elections, but not forgotten. It led naturally to talk about nationalization.

In March 2010, a plan was tabled in Parliament for turning “all productive land into a national asset leased to farmers”.  Such sentiments are hardly new. True to a promise made in Mandela’s 1955 communistic Freedom Charter, the ANC has already nationalized the “mineral wealth beneath the soil” and the water rights. …

The result of nationalizing water rights: the Cape peninsula, one of the most fertile regions of the entire planet, full of vineyards, famous fruit farms, nature reserves where a vast variety of wild flora has flourished, is now afflicted with drought. The City of Cape Town itself is running out of drinking water!

Israeli experts, who can turn a desert into a garden, offered to come and solve the water problem, but the ANC-led authorities refused because they hate the Jews. Because “Palestine”. (See the Reuters report here.)

Note: More Jews were imprisoned and died for the cause of black liberation in South Africa than any other “white demographic”.

All along had the entrenchment of a property clause in the South African Constitution angered judicial activists, who conflate the protection of private property with the entrenchment of white privilege. Their fears were overblown. Back then, I wagered that nationalization would necessitate but a minor tweak to the Constitution, since the latter already allows all the mischief mentioned. …

Since the dawn of “freedom” in South Africa, commercial farmers, mostly white, have been terrorized and threatened with land claims. As if this were not bad enough, they can now expect nationalization.

In case Zimbabwe is a distant memory, the nationalization of South Africa’s farms will increase unemployment in the agricultural sector, and with it, rural poverty. That will guarantee mass migration to the cities, with all the attendant problems which this exodus poses. Also, it will undermine South Africa’s ability to meet its food needs and deter investment in the country.

There will also be much blood spilt. Famine and Death will stalk the land. As many an example of communist rule attests.

But Communists never have to say “sorry”.