By Claudia Rosett on PajamasMedia.com
Yes, it finally happened — over the past month, the United Nations Palestinian relief agency, UNRWA, became the direct target of massive strikes in Gaza. But it wasn’t Israelis who did the striking; it was thousands of Palestinian employees of UNRWA itself.
As the AFP recently reported, “UNRWA’s Gaza schools stage massive walkout.” At more than 240 Gaza schools run by UNRWA, some 7,500 teachers and other staffers walked off the job, taking more than 200,000 students with them. The reason? UNRWA had suspended one of its employees, Suheil al-Hindi, head of the agency’s Arab Workers’ Union, for “alleged political activities,” which the AFP described as “a union activity which was attended by a large number of officials of the Islamist movement Hamas.” Apparently the problem was not consorting with Hamas per se, but — to quote the AFP story further — Hindi’s alleged violation of UNRWA rules that “ban staff involvement in extra-curricular political activities without prior approval of the agency’s management.”
Hamas is, of course, the terrorist organization ruling Gaza, whose not-so-extracurricular activities include receiving weapons and terrorist training from Iran, launching attacks on Israel, calling for the obliteration of the Israeli state, wishing death to America, and, just last month, extorting the release of a parade of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli prisons, in exchange for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Evidently, thousands of UNRWA teachers are outraged by the idea that their union boss should be discouraged from arranging union activities where UNRWA staffers can rub shoulders with a gang of Hamas officials.
Let’s credit UNRWA for penalizing its union chief for entertaining Hamas. But before getting carried away with praise of UNRWA, let’s also note that it is UNRWA, headquartered in Gaza, which hired these thousands of Hamas devotees to staff its schools in the first place, and regularly calls for more money to cover its ever-expanding payroll. In an Oct. 30 appeal to its staff union to stop the strikes, UNRWA made no mention of the depravities of Hamas. Instead, the big concern was money. UNRWA fretted that by going on strike to support Hamas, “the unions are playing dangerously into the hands of those who seek to destroy and defund UNRWA.”
In other words, UNRWA isn’t worried about staffing its classrooms in more than 240 Gaza schools with teachers sympathetic to Hamas — that part is apparently OK, as long as they don’t advertise their sympathies by going on public strike in support of Hamas. But UNRWA is indeed worried right now about losing some of its more than $1 billion annual budget — to which the U.S. is the largest donor, contributing $268 million in 2009. To whatever extent UNRWA is worried enough to be discouraging “extra-curricular activities” in which its staff union consorts with Hamas, we should probably credit Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinin, who has introduced a UN Reform bill that would cut U.S. funding to UN agencies that don’t shape up. It’s a pity that money is a bigger lever at the UN than moral decency, but if that’s the reality, then more pressure on the funding is a very good idea.
by Claudia Rosett @ PajamasMedia.Com
Click here for story on The Rosett report @ pajamasmedia.com
Don’t panic. This is hypothetical. But I’ve been thinking about those recent comments by the U.S. envoy for United Nations management and reform, Joseph Torsella, in his effort to illustrate the profligacy of the UN’s soaring core budget. Torsella just told the UN General Assembly’s budget committee that while the UN may regard $100,000 as a mere rounding error in a core budget now topping $5 billion per year, a big chunk of that money comes from U.S. taxpayers. According to Torsella, $100,000 represents the total federal taxes paid on average by 16 hard-working American families, laboring for a full year.
Torsella also said that for the more than 10,000 UN staffers paid out of the UN’s core budget, total compensation now averages $119,000 per staffer. At the UN, that kind of thing is tax-free.
So, let’s do a bit of arithmetic. U.S. taxes provide the funds for 22% of the UN’s core budget. So, out of a total of more than 10,000 UN staffers now making an average of $119,000 per year, the U.S. supports more than 2,200. Using Torsella’s ratios, for the U.S. to cover the salaries of each of these more than 2,200 staffers requires the total federal taxes paid over a full year by almost 20 average American working families. In round numbers, this means that roughly 44,000 average American working families toil for a full year to provide America’s share of the salaries paid to UN staff, over that same interval, out of the UN’s core budget.
Of course, one reason the UN gets away with its profligate, sky-rocketing budgets, staff numbers, and pay hikes for personnel is that the money from U.S. taxes is not collected from 44,000 specific working families. Instead, the bill is spread as a lesser-ticket item among millions of tax-paying Americans, most of whom are chiefly busy earning a living (and paying taxes), and don’t have time to focus on how the UN spends its share of the swag.
Why not amend that, and make it a lot more personal for a select number of average American taxpayers? Instead of paying the UN out of the general pot of federal tax revenues, the U.S. government could pick 44,000 average American working families, divide them into groups of 20, exempt them from all other federal tax claims, and assign each group its own personal UN bureaucrat to support. These taxpaying families could even be invited to take an interest in the individual UN staffers whose salaries have become their direct responsibility. They could peruse the list of UN benefits, cost-of-living adjustments, and other perquisites. They could cruise the web for news of the latest travels, reports, and other accomplishments of their assigned UN beneficiary/bureaucrat. They could drop by the UN offices in New York, and share a cappuccino, and check out the lifestyle for themselves. Then they could go home and get back to work, earning the money to pay the taxes to support the specific UN staffer with that average take-home pay of $119,000.
I’d wager that would provide a degree of valuable oversight to which the UN, during its entire 66 year history, has never, ever been exposed. It could work wonders in clarifying and focusing the current Washington debate over funding for the UN. (It could also have its highly entertaining moments.)
OK, I know. For a lot of very good reasons, U.S. tax policy does not work that way. Nor is it safe to give the UN any opportunity, however odd, to get its hooks directly into U.S. taxpayers. The UN has been angling for that for years, and in that direction lie horrors even worse than what goes on now. But as a thought experiment, it is interesting to imagine the average American working family taking a direct interest in the work habits and lifestyle of the average UN staffer, so richly supported by funds from the U.S. tax pot. What would they find they are getting for their money?
by Claudia Rosett @ PajamasMedia.Com
Whether you love or hate the United Nations, one thing all Americans ought to be able to agree on is that sloshing billions of American tax dollars into the UN, with little accountability and regardless of UN performance, is a chump’s game. I’d even suggest it is no favor at all to the UN itself — corroding its incentives for decent behavior, and swaddling its staff and offices in plush sinecures that are increasingly catching the attention of financially strapped American taxpayers, who pick up the biggest share of the UN tab.
Yet the chief effort currently on the table to reform the UN — Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s “United Nations Transparency, Accountability and Reform Act of 2011″ — is playing in Washington as an utterly partisan issue. There are so far 98 co-sponsors for this bill, and not a single Democrat among them.
Why’s that? The Hill reports that according to Ros-Lehtinen, the Obama administration is telling Democrats to stay away from her bill. The bill seeks to clean up the UN by revamping some of its financial incentives — basically proposing to condition a substantial share of U.S. money on UN performance. This would include potentially withholding some of the assessed dues with which the UN General Assembly bankrolls its self-approved and ever-expanding budgets, for which the U.S. dutifully pays 22%. The administration’s argument against this approach takes the line that if America stops automatically dispensing money at the UN’s demand, it would reduce U.S. influence and ability to reform the UN.
By that argument, America’s clout at the UN consists chiefly of bribery. And there are a great many signs at the UN that such bribery has long ago been absorbed into the system not as an an exceptionally generous contribution by the host state, for which the other 192 are grateful. Rather, America’s out-sized dues are viewed by the UN’s other member states, and many on its staff, as an entitlement.
Maybe the administration should take a closer look at some of the facts now being unearthed by its own envoy for UN management and reform, Joseph Torsella. I don’t mean to suggest that Torsella is at odds with his boss — if anything, he seems to be trying to walk the impossible line of promoting reform by reconciling the administration’s give-’em-the-money theory with the UN’s gimme!-gimme! realities. But to Torsella’s credit, in his efforts to persuade the UN to behave, he has been digging up a lot of information that suggests there are excellent reasons for withholding money from the UN.
In remarks Thursday to the UN General Assembly’s budget oversight committee (known at the UN as the “Fifth Committee” or ACABQ) Torsella spelled out some of the profligacies of a UN budget which for a decade now “has grown dramatically, relentlessly, and exponentially,” more than doubling to $5.4 billion for 2010-2011, from $2.6 billion for 2001-2002. (He was talking about the “core” budget, which is actually just a fraction of an overall UN system budget that has soared to somewhere north of $25 billion, and to which the U.S. in 2010 contributed almost $7.7 billion.)
Torsella noted that the largest UN cost is for personnel, and the total dollar amount for the UN payroll (that would be the secretariat’s core payroll, not the far larger UN system) has grown over the past decade by 70%. More concretely, he said that the average UN staffer now collects compensation totaling $238,000 biannually. That works out to $119,000 on average per year, for more than 10,000 UN staffers covered by the regular budget.
To illustrate what that actually means, Torsella noted that while $100,000 is a mere rounding error to a UN proposing a $5 billion-plus regular budget, for Americans it represents the average federal taxes collected from 16 hard-working American families over the course of a full year. Credit Torsella again, that’s a vivid way of explaining just what’s going on with those soaring UN budgets. In other words, it takes the aggregate federal taxes of thousands of American families, working year-round, to sustain the tax-free six-figure incomes of all those UN bureaucrats on the sky-rocketing UN payroll — for which the U.S. pays the biggest share.
UN profligacy, coupled with such outrages as last week’s three-ring anti-Semitic circus at the General Assembly, is reaching the point at which American voters may seriously take notice. Washington pols would be wise to view this not as a partisan issue, but as an American issue. If the Obama administration doesn’t like the idea of Democrats signing on to a UN reform bill from the Republican Ros-Lehtinen, then it’s time for some competing proposals for reducing the gusher of U.S. tax dollars into the UN, and conditioning U.S. money on genuine UN reform. What we’re seeing right now from the administration — or at least from its new envoy for UN management and reform — is a long-overdue and much-needed expose of at least a few aspects of UN extravagance and abuse, but no real plan to stop it.
You are respectfully requested to attend the following open briefing of the Full Committee to be held in Room 2172 of the Rayburn House Office Building.
by Claudia Rosett @ PajamasMedia.Com
Foreign policy was a side issue in Tuesday’s election. But with crises in the making, from Venezuela to Iran, and points between and beyond, the wider world will be muscling its way into the spotlight soon enough. Let’s hope the new Congress, whatever its configuration, will take a serious interest in at least trying to resume some oversight of how American tax dollars get spent at that international colosseum known as the United Nations. The issue is not solely the billions of dollars Washington pours annually into the UN — providing roughly one-quarter of a system-wide UN budget that now comes to well over $20 billion. The problem is also that along with the usual waste and fraud, the UN spends some of those American billions on activities hostile to U.S. values and interests.
Just this past week, as I noted in a post last weekend on the UN’s Tiananmen Travesty, the Chinese head of the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Sha Zukang, presented an award to a Chinese former defense minister, Chi Haotian, who was operational commander of the troops who crushed the 1989 Tiananmen democratic uprising. Sha — UN credentials and all — delivered this award on behalf of the World Harmony Foundation, an outfit intriguingly listed by the UN itself in its accredited NGO database as having no availableaddress or home country. Presumably that’s just UN sloppiness, given that the World Harmony Foundation on its own web site lists addresses in both Manhattan and Zhejiang, China.
Now comes word that the UN is now planning a Durban III conference for next September in New York City. Anne Bayefsky has the details at the Weekly Standard. This Durban III would follow the UN’s Durban Review Conference held in 2009 in Geneva (with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as one of the main speakers), which followed the UN’s anti-Semitic Durban Conference of 2001 (which got so bad that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell ordered the U.S. delegation to walk out).
Those are just two of the latest items in a list that includes: Iran on a slew of UN agency governing bodies, including UNICEF and the UN’s flagship development agency, the UNDP; Libya, China and Russia on the UN Human Rights Council; Iran among the countries overseeing the rights of women; UN efforts to gag free speech in the name of “anti-blasphemy”; sexual exploitation by UN peacekeepers of populations they are supposed to protect; brazen violation of UN sanctions by members of the UN’s own Security Council; and the apparently endless list of UN proposals to impose its management style on the entire economy of the world, in the name of controlling the climate, commanding the seas, rolling out central plans for the planet, or whatever.
Basically, there is no incentive for the UN to put a brake on such stuff — barring threats that without better behavior, the funding will dry up. The main gusher of funding for the UN is the U.S. fisc. Don’t count on any serious oversight of the UN from the U.S. executive branch, which — with the State Department in the lead — usually prefers to treat the UN as a handy (though sometimes inconveniently toxic) slush fund. Note that almost two years into his administration, President Barack Obama has yet to get around to filling the slot at the U.S. Mission to the UN for an envoy for UN Management and Reform (since 2008, there has been only an acting ambassador in the post).
Repeatedly, it has fallen to Congress, whence the appropriations originate, to ask what U.S. tax dollars are really paying for at Turtle Bay — and try to do something when it turns out that American money is underwriting the activities of America’s enemies. The current Congress hasn’t really bothered with any of that. The UN is ripe right now for a good old American tea party at Turtle Bay.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT AT PAJAMASMEDIA.COM
Rep. Charles Rangel is having an unpleasant season, convicted on Tuesday by a House panel on 11 counts of ethics violations — including failure to properly disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal financial assets.
Rangel would have done far better to work for the United Nations. For UN senior staff members, as long as they don’t get carried away and attempt an act of genuine transparency, it is virtually impossible to fail to properly disclose their personal financial assets to the public. That’s not because they are all paragons of disclosure. The reason they can hardly fail is that the UN has redefined the procedure of “public disclosure” to mean that UN officials do not need to disclose to the public anything whatsoever. This is the twisted product of the 2006 “reforms,” in which the Oil-for-Food-tainted UN promised greater transparency.
In the U.S. House, as the Rangel case reminds us, the requirements of disclosure involve enough detail so you can check out — with names and addresses attached — such information as, say, how much Rep. Nancy Pelosi says she made in rental income, or in Miscrosoft dividends. If you want to play around with this yourself, just type in the name of your favorite representative in the search space on this web page for the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives.
But at the UN, UN senior officials — unlike Rep. Charlie Rangel and his colleagues — get a choice. Collectively, they are entrusted with handling billions of U.S. tax dollars (the U.S. chips in more than $6 billion per year, bankrolling roughly one-quarter of the UN’s system-wide budget), and they serve in high positions of global, public trust. But when it comes to disclosing their personal finances to the public, UN senior officials may, at their own discretion, opt out entirely and have the UN release zilch. Or — I’m not making this up — they can allow the release of a one-page form on which they check a box to disclose only that they don’t want to disclose anything (for instance, check out the 2009 “public disclosure” form of one of Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s special envoys for climate change, Ricardo Lagos Escobar)
Or, there’s a third way, which at the UN represents going all out on public disclosure. They can allow the UN to release to the public a one-page form on which they declare their personal financial circumstances in terms so vague that the listings include only the broadest generic descriptions, such as “house” — with no dollar amounts attached. For instance, here’s the “public disclosure” form of UN Under-Secretary General Sha Zukang, who hails from China and who recently made waves by presenting an award to the retired Chinese defense minister who had operational command of the crushing of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. Sha lists just two items: “Private House, joint with spouse, China,” and “Chinese Bonds, joint with spouse: Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.”
Though, in fairness to Sha Zukang, his public disclosure form provides more information than many. At least he lists a house and gives the name of the bank in which he holds his bonds — even if there’s no clue whether these assets are worth $10 or $10 million. There are other officials who apparently have no assets, no liabilities, no house, no rental income, no nothin’ — or at least nothing they consider relevant to the process of public disclosure. For instance, the secretary-general’s high representative for the Iranian-grandfathered, globe girdling initiative known as the Alliance of Civilizations, Jorge Sampaio, a former president of Portugal, on his UN public disclosure form, discloses exactly one thing: “I am not engaged in any outside activities at the present time.”
But don’t take my word for just how obfuscatory UN “public disclosure” can get. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, on his official UN web site, has an entire section labeled “Public Disclosure,” where, if you scroll down, you can search for yourself — here are the forms for 2009. I have more on the origins and oddities of this UN version of transparency in my Forbes.com column this week on “The Deepening Mysteries of UN Financial Disclosure,”noting that in the process of UN disclosure, the Russian official who has been running the grand UN complex in Geneva since 2002 has gone from disclosing “Bank Savings accounts” as his sole assets, to listing, simply, “Nil.”
No one’s saying that any of these UN officials, individually, are doing anything wrong. Apparently, they are complying with the UN system in ways that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is proud to post on his official UN site under the category of “Ethical Standards.” I’m just saying, Charlie Rangel never had it this good.
However unsavory, it might seem nothing special for an official from China to hand out a “World Harmony Award” to a former Chinese defense minister, General Chi Haotian — despite Chi’s record as operational commander of the Chinese military forces which on June 4, 1989 used gunfire and armored personnel carriers to crush China’s Tiananmen Square democratic uprising. For the Chinese regime, which continues to brutalize democratic dissidents and gloss over the horrors of 1989, handing out such a perverse award would qualify as business as usual.
Except the Chinese official who presented this “Harmony” award to Chi is, at least in theory, not working for the People’s Republic of China. Sha Zukang is a high-ranking official at the United Nations, where he serves as Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs. That’s a senior post in which Sha is presumed to act and speak not for China, but for the UN — as he goes about duties which include spending plenty of American tax dollars contributed via Washington to the UN budget. Sha’s responsiblities include overseeing follow-ups to major UN conferences and summits, and a whole range of UN activities advertised as promoting development and — no, I’m not kidding — good governance.
Apparently Sha’s UN job was no bar to his presenting an award to China’s Chi Haotian. China’s state-owned and run international broadcasting service, China Radio International, brings us the scoop — complete with a photo of Chi, clutching the award trophy (“a crystal peace dove, symbolizing the U.N.’s core spirit of ‘harmony and peace’ “), next to a smiling Sha Zukang.
Sha presented the award on behalf of an outfit called the World Harmony Foundation, or WHF, which has a web site listing a head office in midtown Manhattan, near the UN’s headquarters; and one additional “representative office” in Zhejiang, China. The WHF, according to its web site, is dedicated to promoting the ideals and principles of the UN charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The WHF also boasts of having received accreditation and consultative status to the UN Environment Program’s Governing Council in 2005. The WHF web site includes a section on “Harmony Bells for Peace,” with the information that the WHF designed the UN Harmony Bell — their web page on harmony bells includes a photo of former Secretary-General Kofi Annan ringing the bell in 2005.
All this World Harmony/UN/China business reminded me so much of the style of Annan’s former close adviser, climate “godfather” of the Kyoto Treaty, Maurice Strong (resident in China since 2005, when he left the UN at the height of the Oil-for-Food scandal) that I took a sideways glance for a connection, googling “World Harmony Foundation” together with “Maurice Strong.” Up popped this account, from another foundation, the Global Restoration and Eco-Development Foundation (or GERDF), which at least at some point in recent years had the exact same Manhattan address as the World Harmony Foundation lists today. TheGERDF web site describes Maurice Strong contributing a motto for that Harmony Bell of which the World Harmony Foundation is so proud: “Together we ring the Harmony Bell.”
Yes, and together Under-Secretary-General Sha Zukang of the UN, and the World Harmony Foundation (with its UN connections), with their professed dedication to the UN charter, have just helped Chi Haotian, of Tiananmen infamy, celebrate … what was it? Chi’s contribution to world harmony? (For that matter, what, exactly, is this outfit called the World Harmony Foundation? The WHF web site has a section on “Our Sponsors,” which includes zero information — apart from a note that the page is being “updated”).
If the government of the People’s Republic of China wishes to confer awards in-house on its former military commanders, there may be little the democracies of the world can do. But when a high-ranking UN official, trailing UN credentials, steps in to present such an award, surely it’s time for the host and chief funder of the UN — the U.S. — to protest.
There is a bigger web here than bears exploring in a weekend blog post. But just to follow one more thread: Back in 1996, former President Bill Clinton, in his efforts to cozy up to Beijing, made the abysmal decision not just to entertain a visit by Chi Haotian to the U.S., but to welcome him with full military honors — including a 19-gun salute, a tour of several military bases and a nuclear laboratory, and a personal meeting (congressional protest at the time linked here). For China’s democratic dissidents, such fawning appeasement of the Beijing regime could only have been a wretchedly discouraging message. Today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has the ability to redress her husband’s folly. At the very least, she might raise the question of why — if the UN has even a trace of integrity — Sha Zukang, after presenting this “World Harmony” award, still has his job.
by Claudia Rosett @ PajamasMedia.com
“Indispensable, if imperfect,” is how President Obama’s envoy to the United Nations, Susan Rice, has described the UN. If you accept the “indispensable” part of that phrase (and after years of watching the UN in action, I don’t), that still leaves the question of just how “imperfect” the UN has become. Since the advent of Obama’s presidency, the U.S. has been ever more willing to tolerate the imperfections. Oversight by the U.S. Mission appears to have pretty much dried up, U.S. security interests get no real traction at the UN Security Council, U.S. tax dollars keep gushing in, and America keeps trying to place at the center of its foreign policy an institution where the majority would rather spend time and U.S. tax dollars on projects such as outlawing free speech and enlisting quack science to control the world economy in the name of fine-tuning the weather to the second decimal point.
Could it be that one of the imperfections aggravating this process is the performance of Ambassador Rice herself?
So argues Richard Grenell, a former spokesman of the U.S. Mission to the UN, who served under four ambassadors during the Bush administration. Grenell makes a compelling case — which caught my eye thanks to a post on NRO’sCorner by Brett Schaefer of the Heritage Foundation. Schaefer highlights some of Grenell’s arguments, and concludes that “it appears that not even Ambassador Rice takes the U.N. seriously enough to try to make it work.” In Grenell’s article itself, worth reading in full — “Where Has Susan Rice, Our UN Ambassador, Been This Past Year?” – we get quite a tour of the lapses, failings and sheer irresponsibility of current U.S. administration dealings with the UN. He notes there is no more effort to control the UN’s sky-rocketing budget (which dips into U.S. wallets for roughly one-quarter of its funding), and no evident follow-up to matters symbolized by such items as $200,000 spent by a UN agency on renovating a guest house. He also points out that the old red-white-and-blue colors of the web site for the U.S. Mission to the UN have been transformed under Rice to UN blue, with a big UN logo (and a little American flag).
But the main thrust of Grenell’s piece is that Rice herself, despite all her talk about the importance of the UN, has been largely awol from Turtle Bay. She commutes between her penthouse in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and Washington, D.C. — where Grenell says she has the largest office and staff of any U.S. ambassador in UN history. She has been missing at many Security Council meetings on important issues, including some on Iran, as well as the recent vote to add more UN peacekeepers in Haiti. But she finds time to go “regularly” to White House social functions, including holiday parties and the White House Halloween Party, for which she dressed up in a Walt Disney“Goofy” costume.
I’m sure the Goofy costume was all in good fun, and Grenell says Rice is the life of the party. But his article might just leave you wondering if Americans would be better off with Goofy himself representing America at the UN.
If you don't like your tax bill now, watch out for the plans of the United Nations. The U.N. has been cooking up proposals to tax you every time you fly, drink, bank, use the Internet or earn a buck.
For an institution that has yet to master the art of policing its own accounts, that's awfully ambitious. But an urge to dig ever deeper into your wallet, dear tax-payer, has become a staple on the drawing boards of U.N. plan-o-crats.
The U.N. already collects billions in both dues and voluntary contributions from the governments of the developed world--first and foremost from the U.S., which typically foots the bill for roughly one-quarter of most major U.N. activities. The actual U.N. budget is a slippery number. The book-keeping is opaque, often tardy or incomplete and spread across many parts of the U.N. archipelago, with no single U.N. office fully accountable for the entire system. In 2006 then-Secretary General Kofi Annan said the U.N. system-wide budget was about $20 billion; by now, with ever-expanding U.N. operations, funding appeals and hazily defined "partnerships," it is certainly larger. But for U.N. spenders this torrent of other people's money is not enough.
Since its founding in 1945, as essentially a diplomatic talking shop headquartered in the U.S., the U.N. has ballooned into a sort of post-colonial global empire, involving scores of thousands of staff, peacekeepers, agencies and proliferating agendas worldwide. With that has come a voracious hunger for money, in which U.N. planners keep casting an acquisitive eye at global commerce, looking for ways to tap in and open the spigots straight into the U.N.'s coffers.
Some years back, the U.N. welcomed the new millennium with a proposal that wealthy nations start turning over 0.7% of their gross national product for aid to the developing world. At the same time the U.N. ramped up its "climate change" campaign for de facto taxes and controls on carbon emissions (based on the U.N.'s politicized "science"), with visions of the command-and-control transfer of billions--or ultimately trillions--around the globe. In such schemes, the U.N. envisions itself manning the main switch.
The U.N. has also been debating a raft of ideas for more targeted global taxes. Just this month comes a dispatch by George Russell, executive editor of Fox News, that the World Health Organization has been honing a "suite of proposals" for asking member states to levy tolls that would be paid directly to the U.N. The WHO notions range from taxes on Internet use, to financial transactions to alcohol, tobacco and weapons.
These campaigns have yet to pan out into the full bonanzas the U.N. hopes for. But for the U.N., there is little cost to trying again and again, gaining traction here and there. All it usually takes is the ability of ambitious U.N. bureaucrats to put together a conference. The planning group for the conference becomes a secretariat. That secretariat becomes the seed of the next U.N. mandate, department or initiative, with the next suite of tax proposals on the table.
So who is keeping an eye on these increasingly acquisitive ambitions of the U.N.? And who is minding the books for its ever-expanding budgets?
The sorry answer is that while U.N. ambitions and spending have soared, U.N. reform efforts have largely fizzled. Oversight has been receding to dismal levels. In a Jan. 12 story headlined "U.N. cuts back on investigating fraud," John Heilprin of the Associated Press outlined just how bad the situation now is. In the wake of Oil-for-Food plus a slew of other scandals, a special task force was set up at the UN in 2006 to probe corruption. That task force uncovered, Heilprin reports, at least 20 major schemes "affecting more than $1 billion in U.N. contracts and international aid." The U.N. response was to dissolve the task force at the beginning of 2009. Since then, reports Heilprin, "Not a single significant fraud or corruption case has been completed, compared with an average of 150 cases a year investigated by the task force." Several reports from late 2008 "still await a final decision from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon more than a year later."
The U.N. has an office of internal oversight, set up at U.S. behest as part of a push for U.N. reform in the mid-1990s. But this office has itself been bedeviled by favoritism, erratic coverage of U.N. activities, under-staffing, under-funding and cover-ups. The U.N. also has a so-called external Board of Auditors, which devotes itself chiefly to inside baseball--cranking out lengthy but largely toothless reports. This board is run by rotating trios of U.N. member states; the current trio consists of France, South Africa and China.
Among the U.N.'s 192 member states, the only member with any record of serious effort to clean up the U.N. is the U.S. (with the U.K. running a distant second). Right now, despite President Barack Obama's professed interest in the U.N., the U.S. is largely missing in action on U.N. oversight. In recent years, for instance, the U.S. Mission to the U.N. began doing its bit for U.N. transparency by posting U.N. internal audits on the U.S. Mission Web site. That ended, quietly, with the beginning of the Obama administration and the arrival of Ambassador Susan Rice. Since late 2008, no more U.N. audits have been posted (I hope that mentioning this does not result in the U.S. Mission scrubbing even the old audits still there).
The U.S. Congress has also largely lost interest in how the U.N. handles the money of U.S. taxpayers. A few legislators still try to keep watch, such as Sen. Tom Coburn and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. But the congressional staffers who developed expertise in delving into the U.N. money maze are mostly gone from government. Sen. Norm Coleman, who did sterling work digging into billions in corruption under Oil-for-Food, is now gone from the Senate. That seat is now filled by Sen. Al Franken, who has displayed more interest in riding herd on Sen. Joe Lieberman than on the U.N.
There are few subjects more tedious than audits and oversight of the alphabet soup empire of the U.N. But the current mix of an ever-greedier U.N. with less and less oversight has the makings of scandals ahead that will dwarf Oil-for-Food. With President Barack Obama lauding the U.N. as a forum for global peace and progress, what's Washington going to do about this mess?
Claudia Rosett, a journalist in residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.
