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.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member