At the annual opening of the United Nations, they’re just getting warmed up right now for another year of inserting themselves ever deeper into the lives of people everywhere, underwritten mainly by the taxpayers of America, Europe and Japan. You can count on a fresh torrent of programs so opaque and multitudinous that even UN officials themselvs can’t keep track, punctuated by scandals for which the UN, with its diplomatic immunities, has learned the perfect answer: Call an investigation, handpick investigators with old-boy ties to the UN, refuse to answer questions due to the ongoing and inevitably delayed investigative process, eventually issue a report accompanied by a press conference that declares exoneration, wait for everyone to get tired of it all, and move on.

But while we wait for such further dramas to unfold, it is already possible to glimpse in broad terms the world the UN plans for us all… or, as Ahmadinejad put it in his speech Tuesday from the UN stage, the “brilliant, desirable and beautiful future.” We have heard something about it already from — variously — Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, General Assembly President and once and future Sandinista Miguel d’Escoto Brockman, Iranian propagandist-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and President Bush.

In this beautiful UN future, as Ban Ki-Moon exhorts, we will all work in global “partnership,” putting the the world collective ahead of the interests of individual nation states. But it won’t stop there. As General Assembly President d’Escoto further explains,  there will be an end to selfishness, a quick and effective redistribution of wealth around the planet — presumably unhindered by the glitches that tripped up communism in the last century, since this time the redistribution will be engineered not by nation states, but by the bureaucracy of the UN.

Ahmadinejad has further elaborated how all this will be powered by countries, such as his own, powered by peaceful nuclear projects. Helping out in the happy process of unselfish, collective partnership will be the the UN’s flagship agency, the UN Development Program, or UNDP. Never mind that the UNDP is so busy spending and transferring billions worth of nontransparent funds around the globe every year that UNDP administrators have no time to waste on such frivolities as disclosing, even to those who fund them, the findings of their own in-house audits — many of which, according to some of the UN’s own public records, have a tendency to be late or incomplete. The important thing is that the UNDP how houses the grand UN project known as the UN Millennium Development goals. These have replaced the old Soviet five-year plans as the cutting edge of central planning for impoverished nations — except unlike the five-year plans, the Millennium goals roll on for decades.

And lest anyone think the U.S. has no more voice in this process, President Bush has called upon the UN eminences to be “focused and resolute and effective.” Plus, now that he has called, again, for the UN to reform, no doubt they will.

See you in the beautiful future.