Oil-for-Food (popularly known as UNSCUM) and the Peacekeeper Sexual Harrassment Scandal (doesn’t seem to have an acronym) may ultimately be minor league compared to a greater danger from the United Nations – the international organization’s attempt to take over the Internet. Claudia Rosett wrote a a summary of this problem for Pajamas Media back in November. Needless to say, however, as fine a journalist as Rosett is, her work by itself cannot hold back the ambitions of Kofi & Company. Not long ago, while most of us, including (alas) yours truly, were looking the other way, they slipped another fast one past the General Assembly. Global technology attorney John A. Klein explains:
The United Nations is known for double-speak. In the UN’s vocabulary, for example, the phrase “innovative sources of financing” really means global taxes. But the General Assembly outdid its usual Orwellian prose at the 2005 World Summit in New York, when it officially endorsed what it called “voluntary contributions” to an Internet kitty for developing countries known as the Digital Solidarity Fund. This is false labeling.
Read all of Mr. Klein’s article – it’s a must – but this portion will not surprise readers of this blog:
Kofi Annan is all for end-running the standard UN budget process that requires member nation approval because doing so gives the UN more money for its pet programs with less accountability. He certainly would prefer to deal with the mayor of San Francisco than with George Bush. In fact, he does not like the UN Charter’s model of the United Nations as a world organization of member states. As he expounded at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos in a talk he entitled “A New Mindset for the United Nations”, Kofi Annan said that his objective as Secretary General “has been to persuade both the Member States and my colleagues in the Secretariat that the United Nations needs to engage not only with Governments but with people.”
Uh-oh.
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11 Comments
1. Terrye:And when he says they want to be engaged not only with governments but with people, that means exactly what?
Feb 11, 2006 - 5:02 pm 2. David Thomson:I do not sense any interest regarding this threat by the legacy media. As matter of fact, they probably do not think thereís any real cause for concern. The rest of the world is allegedly frightened by American power. We should therefore gladly relinquish our dominant position as quickly as possible. To be blunt, many members the American leftist media subconsciously feel more loyalty to a non-formal understanding of a world order than to their own country. Am I jumping to an invalid conclusion? I donít think so.
Feb 11, 2006 - 6:52 pm 3. Carl Spackler:David,
I would imagine the legacy media would love tax burdens applied to the Internet. So, if anything they should be mum on this so that us rabble have as much chance as a 1925 Ukrainian dying of obesity.
I feel the lefties are just sick, fecal Eloi. Somebody that knows all that Eros stuff can weave a better analogy, but I think they’re all now old and ugly, their appetites expended in a vomitorium of lives wasted with serial rejection of purpose and meaning. They were supposed to change the world. They were to be unlike any that had gone before them. They were the best and the brightest. But nothing changed. The world just shrugged. Like their destructive icons, they really want to have a Gutterdamerung, and so, call on the available furies. And if we ignorant peasants have to go too, well why not? We never appreaceated them anyways. They got that right
Feb 11, 2006 - 7:55 pm 4. RosOz:We the peoples: civil society, the United Nations and global governance. Report of
the Panel of Eminent Persons on United NationsñCivil Society Relations Iran had a member. Released June 2004.
One of the strategies for control. Taxing electronic communications another. I canít see Australians being all that chuffed about being taxed by the UN. And it would of course be a wealth tax. So off to Iran goes the money so they can improve their technology for catching the free speakers on the web, and incarcerating them.
For those who have forgotten, The report again.
http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N04/376/41/PDF/N0437641.pdf?OpenElement
The, representative democracy giving way to participative. The Separation of powers does not work on a global level. The Need far greater engagement with religious and spiritual groups And unions.
This is not new obviously, but it is coming together with the latest nicely for them. From virtually no monitoring and accountability to absolutely none. And part of the plan requires control of the internet (eminent, make use of communication and information technologies in order to drive the brave new world of international government by civil society ).
Koffiís be nice to bigots is a little clearer as well. Follows nicely from the eminent personís proposal that religious and spiritual groups get a bigger say so, in this brave new world of improved democracy.
I wondered when Bolton bucked at the addition of the Gay and Lesbian group whether he was just being pigheaded or he has started the fight against this movement to obliterate democracy and place us under the control of a mob of corrupt invisible UN persons and there gross mates in the NGOîs and tyrannical states. People to be heard through civil society mechanisms. Oh yeh!
Feb 11, 2006 - 9:37 pm 5. Jim Rockford:I don’t think this money grab will work in the US.
1. Any vendor aced out now has a built in motivation to drop a dime to the opponent of the political system-mover, anon of course, on this corrupt power system.
2. This is a built in populist issue: your tax money going to Kofi’s chalet in Switzerland. So political opponents unlike closed systems in Europe get to run on this issue on TV commercials etc.
3. Governments will pay higher prices for this “transfer” and it gets them no built in advantage. Where’s the patronage? Kofi can’t do anything for them, unlike fixing potholes in front of Mrs. Smith’s house or keeping the streets plowed in a Chicago winter.
So yeah, Kofi might get a few bucks but governments by definition shop on price absent local patronage stuff because their entire incentives are about staying in power.
Feb 11, 2006 - 9:53 pm 6. Barbara Skolaut:I doubt coffee wants to engage with this people.
But come on down, coffee – I’ll make it worth my while.
Feb 11, 2006 - 10:07 pm 7. lindenen:It’s like all the worst nightmares of far right wackos who think the UN is some global oppressor with black helicopters are coming true. I would so travel to New York to march in a “No Taxation Without Representation” or “UN out of US” parade. How can they reform the UN to cut out more of the corruption? How do you clip the wings of an organization plotting things like this?
Feb 12, 2006 - 12:28 am 8. TomTom:Roger:
Feb 12, 2006 - 7:06 am 9. Cynic:The real question is, WHAT CAN WE DO? The lights are going out, not to be relit in our lifetimes, as we succumb to internationalization of Eurocrats and Jihadism, with our Southern flank awash in Chavesistas.
Most of us don’t get it. Of those of us that do, half (the Democratic Left) promote the process. The anti-Left is increasingly ineffective in repelling the assaults.
WE ARE DOOMED.
” How do you clip the wings of an organization plotting things like this?”
By taking a page out of the latest muslim rage tactic, rioting in Turtle Bay and torching the UN?
Feb 12, 2006 - 7:10 am 10. Akatsukami:I am sometimes struck by the similiarities between the UN and the HRE (Holy Roman Empire).
The difference being, of course, that if Ferdinand II had proposed “voluntary” contributions from printers and getting involved with the German peoples, everyone from the electors to the Imperial knights would have re-started the Thirty Years’ War and burned Vienna to ashes.
Feb 12, 2006 - 7:58 am 11. TomTom:Read the 2/12 posting by Joshua Trevino on brusselsjournal.com. Says it much better than I could: The barbarians have won. Note the past tense.
Feb 12, 2006 - 8:33 pm