So, there you are, just trying to live your life and find ways to hang onto whatever you’ve earned, before ObamaCare, inflation, and confiscatory tax hikes really kick in. But at least you don’t have to worry about intrusions into your daily doings and your wallet by such alien and lumbering behemoths as the United Nations … right?
Think again. In just over a week, the UN headquarters in New York will open the 65th session of the UN General Assembly, a body rife with groups devoted to finding ever more ways to help Washington regulate your life and spend your tax dollars — from carbon controls to free-speech gags to a relentlessly resurfacing series of proposals for direct UN taxes on everything from bank transactions to the Internet to air travel. On Sept. 23rd, the General Debate will begin, expected to tie up Manhattan traffic with the usual parade of eminences, including such celebrity tyrants as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who will be making his sixth consecutive appearance at the General Assembly annual opening).
Amid all this, there’s one item that looked — briefly — like a glimmer of good news. After a year in which Libya’s man, Ali Treki, has presided over the General Assembly, the new GA president, taking over this month, comes from Switzerland — Joseph Deiss. Sounds like an improvement, right?
Brace yourself. Deiss has already been busy consulting with UN member states about what he calls “issues of global concern,” and in a letter sent Aug. 13 to all permanent representatives and observers, he distills the results of his labors into a proposed theme for this month’s General Assembly debate:
“Reaffirming the central role of the United Nations in global governance.”
That’s quite an ambition for an organization that habitually puts the likes of Iran, Sudan, and Libya on its major committees and governing boards, while featuring an array of the world’s top tyrants on its main stage. I can see, however, why the Swiss might favor the idea. Some of the UN’s more flagrant adventures in governance, such as the Iraq Oil-for-Food program, funneled a remarkable amount of business through the Swiss corporate registries and banking system. But for most ordinary folks, not only in America, but from Asia to Africa to Latin America, “governance” UN-style — in all its murky, unaccountable immunity and impunity — is about the last thing anyone needs.
Surely the U.S. government will protect its citizens from the power-hungry, money-loving UN? Don’t bet on it. The Obama administration, via Hillary Clinton’s State Department, just last month sent in an American self-critique to the UN’s morally addled, despot-infested Human Rights Council, inviting UN member states to weigh in on such domestic matters as Arizona’s new immigration law, and presenting as American domestic “human rights” achievements a great welter of federal spending and regulatory programs, including ObamaCare. More on this in my recent column on the phenomenon that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has correctly labeled “Internationalism Run Amok.“
Is there any upside to this? Cold comfort, I guess, but if you like reading about UN scandals, there are the makings here of an endless supply of ever more financially extravagant and morally bankrupt fiascoes. Though I’d guess that most Americans, if they’d take a moment to think about it, could easily come up with cheaper and more decent forms of entertainment.
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