You have to hand it to the United Nations: Even if top officials are making a mockery of the UN’s own promises of financial disclosure (see post below), when it comes to fighting corruption, the UN-ocrats are ready to go the extra mile… or, in the case of the Vienna-based UN office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), they’ve just gone thousands and thousands of extra miles — all the way to yet another UN conference at the plush Nusa Dua resort on Bali. (See photo above for a sample of the amenities).
If that location sounds familiar, Nusa Dua is the same balmy Bali beach resort and convention center (“Where business is a pleasure”) to which Ban Ki-Moon summoned UN staffers and delegates of member states from far-off climes in coldest December for a giant pow-wow on fine-tuning global weather — an endeavor in which Ban proposes in effect to have the wealth of the world managed by the same UN bureaucrats who won’t disclose their own assets.
Maybe there’s a grand logic to it all. The global central-planning schemes envisioned by the UN in the name of controlling the climate — under which wealth and productivity get re-channeled worldwide via the black box and many toll gates of the UN bureaucracy — have the potential to make Oil-for-Food corruption look like a mere drop in the broad Pacific. Maybe in the interest of synergy, the UN should simply move all its offices, agencies and meetings to Bali, and the corruption fighters and climate controllers, and all the rest of the gang could consolidate the corruption and the corruption fighting, the cash and the cover-ups, all around the same swimming pool. It would save a lot of money on UN air travel, free up valuable real estate in Manhattan, and move UN headquarters a safer distance from the mighty moneypot of Washington. And while such a scenario might not be what the UN founders back in 1945 had in mind, it might just come closer than what we’ve got today.
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