President Trump descends upon Evil HQ 3

We have posted many articles about the United Nations Organization and its corruption. (Put “United Nations UN” into our search slot to find them.) And we have routinely ended them with these words: The U.N. must be destroyed.

Is there a possibility that President Trump will fulfill our wish and banish the U.N. from Turtle Bay? It could find refuge in some dying European country or Third World hellhole, there to pant for a while on life-support, exuding its stink of corruption, until it finally expires, dissolving in its own putrescence.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

President Trump will present a set of wide-ranging reforms for the United Nations this week that will actually force the dysfunctional organization to begin living up to its lofty ideals. This may be the corrupt, badly disorganized U.N.’s final chance at survival.

Trump had harsh things to say about the U.N. during last year’s election. Sadly for the U.N., none of them was fake news or an exaggeration. The U.N. is corrupt. The U.N. is ineffective. The U.N. is wasting billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Trump — and his able ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley — have proposed a 10-point reform plan that could be the last chance for the U.N. to ditch its legacy of failure and actually become a responsible global organization. Right now, the U.S. is footing the bill for the U.N.’s ongoing extravaganza of waste and corruption. American taxpayers fork out 22% of the U.N.’s operating budget, and an estimated 28% of its peacekeeping tab. There are 193 members of the U.N., virtually all of the world’s nations. The U.S. spends more than 176 of them combined on the regular budget, and more than 185 on the peacekeeping budget.

The U.N.’s reliance on the U.S. must end. The U.N. likes to say its budget is just $9 billion or so. In fact, it’s vastly larger than that. As it admits in its own budget documents, in 2016 it spent nearly $49 billion, which represented a rise of $10 billion during the Obama years. The U.S. is putting up about $10 billion of the total. And what do you get for your money? Let’s just say that incompetence can be very expensive.

There are over 22,000 U.N. workers, most of whom get tax-free money, lavish benefits and such perks as immunity from parking tickets in New York. U.N. employee crimes are almost never prosecuted. The perpetrators are usually just sent home.

The average U.N. employee makes about a third more than others doing the same job. These are cushy positions, with virtually no accountability.

This theme shows up in how the U.N. does its own job. As has been noted elsewhere, the U.N.’s poor performance as an organization is well-documented. An academic study that looked at the best and worst practices by aid organizations ranked the U.N. near the bottom. OK, but how about the peacekeeping function, for which the U.N. often comes in for praise? To be polite, it’s not exactly keeping the peace. For instance, studies and audits have discovered rampant mismanagement, fraud and corruption in U.N. peacekeeping procurement. And in a study conducted by the U.N. itself, eight of nine peacekeeping operations charged with protecting civilians didn’t even respond to 406 of 570, or 80%, of incidents “where civilians were attacked”.

As Heritage Foundation Fellow Brett Schaefer, who has documented these and other U.N. excesses in damning detail, noted back in 2015: “U.N. personnel have been accused of sexual exploitation and abuse in Bosnia, Burundi, Cambodia, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. [See this appalling report from South Sudan dated April 2016 – ed] Recent news stories from the Central African Republic and Haiti indicate the problem is still far too common and the U.N. is more interested in concealing the issue than in confronting it.”

Given all this, it’s pretty clear this is not an aid organization. It more resembles a criminal enterprise.

It didn’t start this way. It began its institutional life with the highest of ideals and the loftiest of ambitions in the aftermath of World War II. But an organization is only as good as its members and its leadership. Given that many members of the U.N. are corrupt dictatorships, and that the body’s own top leadership has included both former Nazi war criminals and far-left apologists for terrorists, it should be no surprise that the U.N. is as bad as it is. In recent years, the U.N. has shown a bizarre fixation with condemning Israel, the only true democracy in the Mideast, as an impediment to peace. 

This shouldn’t, and can’t, go on. That’s where Donald Trump comes in. Along with greeting world leaders and delivering a much-anticipated speech to the U.N. on Tuesday, he’s meeting behind the scenes with leaders on his 10-point reform plan. Among other things, the plan seeks to end the needless duplication of various U.N. functions by others, while pushing more action away from the U.N. itself and into the field. It will also give U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres authority to reform and streamline the U.N.’s bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the Trump White House also has let it be known that it would like the fiscal burden to be spread more evenly among members. The U.S. can’t be the world’s Sugar Daddy forever. Maybe it’s a positive sign that more than 100 of the U.N.’s 193 members have signed on to Trump’s reforms. Maybe they too see this as a last chance. Maybe. And if nothing happens? In the past, Trump has suggested that, absent action by the U.N. to reform, he might cut U.S. contributions sharply. Carrot and stick. Whether this will work or not isn’t clear. Anne Bayefsky, a longtime critic of the U.N., is skeptical. At Fox News she wrote: “It’s an old U.N. game trotted out whenever Americans get fed up with throwing money down the U.N. drain or paying for a global platform used to trash the USA’s best interests and spew anti-Semitism. It goes by the name of ‘U.N. reform’.  And President Trump appears to have taken the bait — hook, line and sinker.”

Perhaps so. But Trump says he wants to “make the U.N. great”. He’s giving the U.N. the chance to reform.

If it refuses — or goes back to its anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Western ways — don’t be surprised to see Trump defunding the U.N. and asking it politely to leave.

What a splendid surprise it would be! And although the U.N. does not deserve politeness, smiles and waves would be fine just so long as the filthy thing keeps moving away over the far horizon.

The U.N. must be destroyed.

Posted under Africa, Haiti, Sudan, United Nations by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Tagged with , , ,

This post has 3 comments.

Permalink

A better world 63

Even skeptics might acknowledge that the world would be better without the United Nations.

Is a start being made on demolishing the UN, or at least a wing of it?

News comes from The Hill:

A key House Republican is quickly pressing forward with her goals to scale back U.S. funding for the United Nations.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Hill that oversight would be a key function of the panel, particularly funding to the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) that is “a waste of taxpayer dollars.”

I’d like to make sure that we once and for all kill all U.S. funding for that beast,” she said last month. “Because I don’t think that it advances U.S. interests, I don’t think that that’s a pro-democracy group, it’s a rogue’s gallery, pariah states, they belong there because they don’t want to be sanctioned.”

Lovers of all things UN – leftists, the State Department, Obama and his shills, global warmists, world-government advocates, anti-Semites – have an argument for supporting the HRC which sounds ever so diplomatic, clever and subtle, as if they were cunningly manipulating the loathsome tyrannies that dominate the  organization, when in fact they are trying to deceive its honest and indignant critics.

Supporters of continued U.S. support of and participation on the HRC say that it’s essential that Washington have leverage on the panel, renowned for including countries that have their own records of human-rights violations [to put it very mildly – JB].

But staunchly the admirable Ros-Lehtinen is sticking to her resolution:

On Tuesday, Ros-Lehtinen will host a panel of U.N. critics and advocates … The 10 a.m. briefing before the full committee is titled, “The United Nations: Urgent Problems that Need Congressional Action.”

Fans of the UN and the shills for the HRC will appear before it to put their cunning (but transparent) argument:

One of those scheduled to testify, Peter Yeo, represents the United Nations Foundation/Better World Campaign, which at the start of President Obama’s term urged the commander in chief to “mount a campaign” to secure a place on the HRC, which the Bush administration had boycotted.

“Support of our UN commitments is more than an obligation, it is a smart investment in America’s strategic, economic and political interests,” Yeo told The Hill. “Continued American engagement and diplomacy at the UN will only advance our goals for democracy, human rights and world prosperity.”

Weasel words!

But there will be others who are fully aware of the evil the UN does, and some who have nobly exposed it.

U.N. critics set to appear include Claudia Rosett, who unveiled the oil-for-food scandal in 2004 and 2005 in The Wall Street Journal; Brett Schaefer, who regularly takes on the U.N. at the conservative Heritage Foundation; and Hillel Neuer, executive director of Geneva-based UN Watch, which monitors the controversial HRC.

Neuer [said] of Obama’s initiative to place a U.S. representative on the council with the intention of reforming from within that it was “naive for anyone to have thought it would change significantly.”

Or at all, since changing it is not Obama’s real intention – unless into a seat of world government.

Neuer probably knows this. He certainly knows how iniquitous the UN and the HRC really are. He has pointed out that 35 of the 45 resolutions produced by the HRC over the last five years have been “one-sided measures against Israel.” And he has lamented (The Hill reports) that “the U.S. and allied nations haven’t pulled together to trigger emergency sessions on crises such as the crackdown on democracy demonstrators in Iran or abuses against Tibetans or Uighurs by China.”

Another Republican who wants to “take on the UN” through control of the purse-strings, is Rep. Cliff Stearns:

The first bill in this Congress taking on the U.N., introduced on the first day the House was in session, came from Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) [who] introduced a measure to ensure that no federal funds may be used for the “design, renovation, construction, or rental of any headquarters for the United Nations in any location in the United States” unless Obama “transmits to Congress a certification that the United Nations has adopted internationally recognized best practices in contracting and procurement.”

“During the Bush administration, it was learned from internal U.N. auditors that 43 percent of $1.4 billion in procurement contracts investigated involved fraud,” Stearns said in a statement to The Hill.

“In addition, U.N. peacekeeping operations are plagued with numerous cases of abuse and sexual exploitation,” he added. “The U.N. is in desperate need of reform from top to bottom, and my bill is designed to have the world body take the simple step of adopting internationally recognized best practices in contracting and procurement, which includes taking the bid representing the best value.”

But the UN is not reformable. The UN (like its predecessor the League of Nations) was a bad idea to start with. After the Second World War the victors sat down together on the UN Security Council where the West and the Soviets, and later Communist China, glared at each other for the the duration of the Cold War – and still do; while in the General Assembly an overwhelming majority of despotisms vented their envy and spite against the West and especially Israel – and still do; and the bureaucrats who ran it, or at least some of them, corruptly enriched themselves at the expense of helplessly subjugated peoples (as in the oil-for-food scandal when they conspired with Saddam Hussein to line their own pockets and rob the oppressed Iraqis) – and still do.

The US sustains it. The US could destroy it at a stroke. Just not giving it the billions it does ($6.347 billion was the amount of American tax-payers’ money handed over to the UN in 2009) would crash the whole institution.

The Republicans are not apparently planning to be so radical as to bring down the edifice. Or not immediately anyway. We might hope that it is in their minds as an eventual aim. At present they’re ready only to chip away at its corners: 

The U.N. is also included in a broad-reaching budget-slashing bill by Ways and Means Committee member Kevin Brady (R-Texas).

The Cut Unsustainable and Top-Heavy Spending Act of 2011, introduced Jan. 7, calls for a 10 percent reduction in voluntary contributions to the United Nations — monies the U.S. is not required to give by law — for fiscal year 2011. …

“America can fulfill its generous financial obligations to the U.N., but will set priorities within the voluntary funding areas,” he said. “A financially and economically sound United States is in the U.N.’s best interest.”

A politically wise United States would see that abolishing the UN would be in the world’s best interest.  A movement to achieve its abolition would be a real “Better World Campaign”.

The Republicans need to throw away the chisel and lay the explosive, because the UN must be destroyed.