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June 17, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:53
283 United Nations Part 2: Facts

It's the nations united against the citizens

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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is the 17th of June, 2006.
It's time for the UN, part two.
Unfree, undemocratic, anti-capitalist UN, as the un or the anti seems to be an entirely appropriate acronym.
We actually have one of the intermittent fact-based podcasts which we try to throw in just to confuse everybody who's used to just floating easily and possibly listlessly down the wide and foaming current of my random opinions.
We're going to show up against a couple of rocks of facts.
So I think that's probably worth having a look at.
So I'm going to reference a couple of articles here.
I will put them on the board for those of you who are interested in going further into this topic.
I'm sure it's going to be no shock to people about the United Nations as a super-government.
It has all of the characteristics of a government on steroids.
It is the terminator of government agencies.
And let's have a look at some more information.
There of course have been...
This has been, I'm going to reference a little bit later, an article from the 1980s talking about UN corruption.
It's been going on for quite some time, of course, and there's lots of supposed reforms going on.
There was reforms of the early 1990s designed to deal with whistleblower protection and corruption control, sweeping reforms 1997 and 2002.
There's a World Summit for reform for 2005.
There is, or was, more plans for reform are in the works.
And this, of course, there is now an Office of Ethics.
And now it's expected to introduce in May 2006, or introduced in May 2006, an annual event, UN Ethics Day, which is nice to know that one day a year, the UN is going to focus on ethics.
Now, let's have a look at some of the sort of facts in the back.
Well, one of the big problems with the UN is you can't audit it.
Like, there's no capacity for anyone to look at the full and clear set of accounts.
The statistics vary even within individual agencies and programs.
So the current core budget, this is of April 4, 2006, this is How Corrupt is the United Nations, which is written by a journalist at the Foundation for Defensive Democracies.
Well, the core annual budget is $1.9 billion.
This is US. The core is just a fraction of the actual budget.
Around that core budget is wrapped billions more in funding provided by voluntary contributions from private and corporate donors and blah blah blah, and the US as well, of course.
These amounts get shuffled around in various ways, and UN agencies consistently pay or sort of donate to each other.
For instance, the UN Development Program operates with its own core budget of about $900 million a year, but handles about $3 billion a year, or, depending on who you ask and what you count, $4.5 billion a year.
So there's some variation, I guess you could say.
Now, according to Mark Malloch-Brown, the UN Chief of Staff, who's just been promoted to the post of Deputy Secretary General, the total budget for all operations under direct control of the Secretariat comes to roughly, roughly, in the neighbourhood of sort of, around eight, maybe nine billion a year.
Right? This is... This is someone who should know, right?
And he's saying, it's, you know, give or take, it's in the neighborhood of, you know, if you flew out of a cloud, you'd sort of land near 8 or 9 billion.
But if you add in just a few of the larger agencies, like the UN Development Program, at about 4 billion.
UNICEF, 2 billion or so.
The World Food Program, 2 to 3 billion.
Now, you're already somewhere around 16 or 18 billion.
Again, it sort of depends on who you listen to and what you count.
On U.S. websites devoted to procurement, where the idea is not to minimize the official amount of U.N. spending, but on the contrary, to attract suppliers to the large and thriving U.N. market, The estimate of money spent yearly on goods and services by the entire UN system comes to about $30 billion, or more than 15 times the core budget of 1.9.
See, the reformers are focusing on the 1.9 budget.
As you'd expect, it's only a couple of percent of the actual total budget.
And this is your money, right?
This is money. This is your property taxes.
This is your sales taxes.
This is your income taxes.
I mean, the UN doesn't have a whole lot of businesses that it's funding itself with.
This is all your money.
Now, how many people does it employ?
Well... There's this new ethics office just went into effect.
It's going to offer its services to 29,000 UN employees worldwide.
Isn't that nice? I guess for Ethics Day, which will probably be February the 30th.
So this number is pretty low relative to the total staff of the Secretariat, plus just the specialized agencies, which again, according to this Mark fellow, consists of about 40,000 people.
And this doesn't include local staffs, you know, such as like the 20,000 Palestinians who work for the UN Works and Relief Agency, or the many employees, some long-term, some transient, at hundreds of assorted UN offices, projects, and operations worldwide, or the more than 85,000 peacekeepers sent by member states but carrying out UN orders and eating UN-supplied rations bought by UN purchasing departments and so on.
So, as I mentioned yesterday, the number of UN states, member states, has quadrupled since 1945 from 51, almost quadrupled, from 51 to 191.
The number of personnel has fallen many, many times over from a few thousand in 1945 to somewhere in the six figures.
Now, that's exactly what you'd expect.
It's a bureaucracy, so this is what's going to happen.
That's sort of absolutely inevitable.
Now, here's something interesting as well.
We talked a little bit about the oil for food scandal that was going on, and I gave you a little bit of the procedures that got it going on.
The sheer monetary amounts, it doesn't really help us understand the extent of the damage done by the UN in Iraq.
So this Kofi Annan's office had the mandate of the Security Council plus a $1.4 billion budget to check oil and relief contracts for price fiddles to monitor oil exports in order to prevent smuggling and to audit UN operations.
In the event, or as it turned out, the oil for food program, the bureaucrats spent far more money renovating its offices in New York than checking the actual terms of Saddam's contracts and ignored the smuggling even when, as was widely known and reported, Saddam in 2000 opened a pipeline to Syria.
The rest, sort of the result of what Anand now placidly describes as instances of mismanagement, as if someone forgot to reload the office printer, was that Saddam skimmed and smuggled anywhere from $12 billion, according to the incomplete numbers supplied by Volcker, to $17 billion or more.
So they're supposed to be getting aid to the Iraqi people, Their budget for renovating their offices is higher than the money they spend actually doing their job.
It's, you know, typical. No reason to get upset.
No reason to get angry.
It's absolutely inevitable, right?
It's like throwing yourself off a cliff and then being shocked when the ground doesn't give you a nice tidy hug as you approach.
It's inevitable. So what did they do?
Well, they enriched Saddam Hussein, $12 to $17 billion, and that's probably low.
These things are always hidden and shredded and so on.
Well, it's not just that people get to take money and retire.
You know, this is money going directly into a dictator, a tyrant, and a mass murderer, right?
So, I mean, Saddam, of course, I mean, he built his palaces, he bought luxury cars, and, you know, built a bunch of rape rooms for his sons.
You know, he was a good father. But he also provided patronage to loyal birthists.
He used the money to reward Palestinian suicide bombers and to restock his weapons arsenal, and so on.
When CIA Chief Weapons Inspector Charles Dilfer went to Iraq in 2004 looking for weapons, the money trail took him straight to the UN relief operation, which, as he would report, had become a shill for an arms and illicit money network that reached through Syria to Belarus and Russia.
So this is quite a bit of this kind of stuff.
And that's just the oil for food.
So since the summer of 2004, the UN's been hit with a whole bunch of bribery scandals, centering, as you would naturally expect, and its procurement department handles the secretariat's buying of everything from paperclips to peacekeeper rations.
So in August of last year, a UN staffer named Alexander Yakovlev Pleaded guilty in federal court to taking hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bribes involving possibly hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tainted contracts, many of them still in force.
And then in September, Vladimir Kuznetsov, the head of the UN Budget Oversight Committee, isn't that funny, had to step aside under federal indictment as his co-conspirator, the original guy's co-conspirator, in wire fraud and money laundering.
Shocking! And so with this scandal still spreading, a number of other UN employees are now under investigation in cases involving something like about a billion dollars in UN contracts.
Of course, nothing's ever going to happen.
As soon as the reporters move on to other stuff, there's going to be a big sigh of relief and everyone will get back to fundling stolen taxpayer money to dictators.
Now, of course, this generally only happens to staffers, right?
I mean, the staffers will get indicted and might even get house arrest or something.
Of course, they'll have a nice house, because...
They've been bribed. So they've got a really nice house.
Their house arrest is like you and I being forced to stay at the Hilton.
But the chief guys, what happens is, worst comes to worst, they step aside and they retire on full pension to their manners with all the money they stole.
So there's really not a whole lot of downside to this.
And here, in the research that I've looked into, we have a Canadian who left...
He was originally, or was for a time, the head of Ontario Hydro, which is the big...
Ugly, vicious brute of a hydro system we have up in Canada here.
It's socialized. They tried to de-socialize it a couple of years ago and botched it completely.
Our fabulous conservatives showing their allegiance to the free market.
And so then he slithered off after leaving the sort of public corporation about $30 to $40 billion, we don't know, in debt.
He slithers off to the UN. And so this guy is Maurice Strong.
And he's a UN Undersecretary General.
He accepted a check bankrolled by Saddam in the amount of $988,885.
Now, of course, he has no idea where the money came from.
And, I mean, I can't blame that.
I can't blame him for that at all.
I mean, if somebody wants to give me a check for nearly a million dollars US, I'm just going to assume because I'm pretty, right?
I mean, that's I mean, that makes sense to me.
I mean, why would I even ask where the money comes from?
They just must...
It's a donation.
Yeah, okay, well, that makes sense.
And actually, I should put that in as a category for donating, just in case people are confused.
So, let's have a look at a little bit more about the oil for food stuff, because I did mention it yesterday.
Well... The UN negotiated terms with Saddam, right?
So Saddam had to negotiate terms with the UN, and the Secretariat of the UN would collect 2.2% of his oil revenues to cover its costs in running and monitoring the relief program.
So oil sales from Iraq were about $64 billion, which meant about $1.4 billion for the Secretary General's administrative spending over the seven-year life of the program.
So, if you sort of follow that, what it means is that the UN Secretariat is being directly paid a lot of money by Saddam Hussein to do what?
Well, to supervise Saddam Hussein.
So, no conflict of interest there, and I'm sure that had nothing to do with what happened, right?
I mean, supposed to be Saddam's probation officer actually became his business partner and really not...
Not too surprising about that at all.
Now, there's a whole stuff here about the Ted Turner, right?
This big 1997, I guess because his wife wouldn't sleep with him anymore.
Lefty Jane, he donated a billion dollars to the UN, and you, of course, have noticed how wonderful the world has gotten since that happened.
And what happens now, of course, for the past eight years, in exchange for quite a bit less, I mean, it's supposed to be an impartial public institution,
not that there's any such thing, but he's got quite a lot of access and power in the UN, more than many of the actual governments that it's supposed to be making up its membership.
And he didn't sort of write a check for a billion dollars, it was supposed to be paying a hundred million per year, he then doubled that, and what's happened, of course, is a portion of the gift of the UN goes not to the world's poor, but to a sister organization called is a portion of the gift of the UN goes not to the world's poor, but to a sister organization called the Better World Fund, which describes
So, over the past couple of years, the Better World Fund has devoted more than $110 million to lobbying, So that, of course, I'm sure is not for the UN, but for Ted Turner.
So this is a pretty nice way to end up being able to funnel money to the government to get, I'm sure, policies going his way without having to worry about all those pesky campaign donation laws.
So don't worry about this billion-dollar thing.
And I don't think he ever mentioned that he wanted something in return, like being able to have a big seat in the UN boards.
But that's kind of funny.
Now, here's some fantastic bits of accounting that you can find coming out of the UN. This is just lovely.
So, of course, the UNFIP is one of the United Nations Funds for International Partnerships.
International partnerships, because that's clear, right?
And what's happened is that this is now paid by Turner's Foundation.
And so they've got some public reports that come out really late, right?
Only after they're really pestered, because, you know, it's a government thing, right?
So we have to file our taxes on time, but the government or super-government agencies don't have to.
So here's some of their wonderful bits.
A million dollars for strengthening the UN Secretariat.
Strengthening the UN Secretariat.
1.9 million for UN Dialogue with the Global South.
Just under a million for supporting UN management reform.
Isn't that a project you'd love to sign up for?
$1.9 million for the Secretariat's Department of Public Information, because it's important when you're funded by violence to make sure that you've got good PR. $117,000 for a multi-stakeholder meeting on best practices in partnership.
And that is quite remarkable, of course.
You can never get away with this in the private sector, right?
I mean, this is quite remarkable when you see this kind of stuff happening.
Not at all surprising.
Now, here, Kofi Annan has this thing, right?
This thing launched in the fall of 2005?
2005. It's called the Alliance of Civilizations.
The Alliance of Civilizations.
And if that doesn't sound like something out of Star Trek The Next Generation, I'm not sure what does.
This is, of course, it's actually not civilizations.
It's Spain, Turkey, and 20 unelected eminent persons picked by the Secretary General, most of whom have already spent years on the same UN conference circuits.
So they're instructed to come up with an action plan to, quote, bridge divides.
And what so far has happened, really, is that it's a vehicle for Anand to resurrect as a special advisor.
His former chief of staff, Iqbal Reza, who retired in early 2005 after a Volcker's discovery that he'd shredded three years' worth of UN executive suite documents potentially germane to the oil for food investigation.
So this is the standard quid pro quo.
If you keep the scandal down by shredding all these documents, we will get you a nice juicy paycheck and a lot of money and so on.
Now, there is...
There's no way, almost no way, right?
It's an important thing. There's almost no way to hold the UN accountable for most of what goes on inside the UN. This is true for governments as a whole, but I mean, at least you get elections where you get this, like, fake rule, right?
So there's no national legal jurisdiction applies to the UN network.
No media core has the resources to deal with the entire network.
Despite a Secretary-General who wields more control than anyone else in the system, there's no procedure at the UN for impeaching or firing the Secretary-General.
He's like a dictator for life.
This is the natural result of governments coming up with something that's supposed to promote freedom, is that you want to appoint at the head of that a dictator for life.
Now, there's no way to fire the Secretary General, and there's no accountability, but there is quite a lot of PR machinery for glossing over anything that goes wrong.
So, the Secretary fields a Department of Public Information with an $85 million annual budget and more than 700 employees, about half of whom staff UN public relations offices in more than 100 countries, So, there's a public relations staff which is employed by each of the many agencies,
commissions, and so forth. All of this promotional activity is further supplemented by the World Federation of United Nations Associations, founded in Luxembourg in 1946, and now boasting more than 100 national chapters.
The American chapter, UNA-USA, fields more than 175 community-based chapters and organizations, with nearly 20,000 20,000 members.
So there's quite a lot It's good to have some PR,
right? It's like putting some whipped cream on Stalin's stern visage and saying that you've made him a good man, right?
But there's just no way to control the finances, the flow of information.
It's international. It's hidden.
It's secretive. And there's no external verification of funds.
Naturally... Because it's got all these huge flows of funds across borders, it's got tons of contractors, public-private partnerships, gigantic bureaucracies, no controls, and diplomatic immunity and a culture of impunity, the UN operation is a prime candidate, not only for graft, but as Charles Dufler discovered, for arms deals masked as medicine workers.
And soap, right?
So this is pretty important to understand.
The money laundering capacity of the UN is considerable and is actually quite good at that.
Now, you could say that if you're interested in peace and prosperity, you'd want to maybe prevent dictatorships from getting nuclear bombs.
I don't agree with that, but at least that would be something that you could say is a mandate.
Well, it does pretty much hit spectator, right?
So, North Korea, which came in in 1991, the UN just responded to Kim Jong-il's nuclear weapons program by turning the problem over to the US and making itself irrelevant.
On matters involving Israel and Palestine, which is one of the real obsessions of the UN, of course, the hypocrisy is stunning.
I mean, the UN, sorry, Israel and Palestine are a big mess all around, of course, and it's the natural result of Israel's desire to go into the hotbed of all of its enemies, and it did that, of course, partly because of the crazy addiction to old texts, but also because governments love to be in danger, right?
Because if they're in danger, they get money.
If they had been handed over a canton in Switzerland, they wouldn't be able to get the Israel Defense Fund going, and they wouldn't be able to get all of the donations that they get around the world.
Now, the UN programs which have been set up to help the Palestinians over the past half century, of course, Palestine is a complete mess.
It's helped create a culture of entitlement and violence.
And, of course, if you knew that, I can't remember how many, it's like four or five billion dollars that, oh, the head of Palestine, what's his blobby?
Oh, good heavens, I should be more prepared and know this.
Yasser Arafat. Good heavens, how could I forget that?
Mr. Raghead. That he, of course, ended up with a couple of billion dollars in his bank account.
And the real question, of course, is how?
Because it's not like there's a big thriving economy within Palestine that he can tax.
Well, the answer is that, of course, a lot of it came from the United Nations.
Now, we know, of course, that Soldiers tend to be not, well, we know, I believe, and I've seen lots of evidence this way, soldiers are not exactly the most moral of people to begin with, and you put them in a war situation, things get particularly haywire.
There's a peacekeeping, of course, which since the end of the Cold War has been a real boon for the UN. Now, the expansion of the UN missions has brought everything from widespread allegations of corruption to drug dealing to rape and the sexual exploitation of hungry children, particularly vile.
It's a columnist, Mark Stein, has put it as sex for food.
And in large parts of the undeveloped world, the appearance of blue-helmeted forces has come to signal a warning.
Stay away and definitely lock up your children.
And that is something also that's pretty wretched.
Of course, these blue-helmeted forces, they can't get anything done.
They've got manpower plus a budget that ought to qualify the UN as a fairly formidable military power.
It doesn't do anything in Rwanda and Srebrenica.
It didn't act in Sudan.
It did nothing in Darfur.
It has yet to muster even the integrity to kick Sudan off its Geneva-based Human Rights Commission, which has doubled as a clubhouse for the world's worst regime.
So in the Human Rights Commission, we currently have China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe.
As for disaster relief, the record is similarly ridiculous.
When the tsunami hit Asia in December 2004, the US and countries like Australia rushed to help the victims, so they say.
The UN rushed to To help itself.
And so it demanded exclusive rights to direct the aid effort and the money.
And so the UN officials warned loudly of a house crisis that never materialized, denounced the US as stingy, of course, as completely anti-US, promised a transparent use of funds.
It is transparent in that they will quickly become invisible.
And a year later, the Financial Times reported that, from what little could be gleaned, I mean, this, of course, is far too conservative.
Well... Of course, the UN as a philosophy, it's global socialism.
It's all it really is, right?
They're completely anti-capitalist, of course.
They're completely dedicated to central command and control economies because, of course, they're so good at running their own economy that they can be perfectly believable in their contention that governments they're so good at running their own economy that they can be perfectly believable in their contention that governments should run everything because they have figured it out so well by throwing lots and lots of money at the Palestinian Authority
I mean, they really have figured out exactly how to do it right.
Now, I'm just going to read very briefly from an article that was written in, gosh, 1984. 1984.
This is called The Case Against the United Nations by Ian Geldard, which was originally published in Foreign Policy Perspectives No.
3, an occasional publication of the Libertarian Alliance in England.
The director is Dr. Charles R. Tame, which is not quite the right word, I think, for a libertarian, or the right name, but we'll survive it.
Now, this is sort of what was going on over 20 years ago.
In 1959, a Gallup poll found 87% of Americans convinced that the UN was doing a good job.
In a Roper poll released by the UN Association on September 19th in 1983, the figure was down to 10%.
I wonder where it is now.
This, in 1984, the budget is kind of funny.
The 25 industrial democracies who represent 14% of the voting members pay 75% of the overall budget, whilst the voting majority, the 125 members of the so-called non-aligned movement, pay 11%.
America pays 25%.
The Soviets cover only 10% and are 100 million pounds in arrears, which is quite a sum of money when you remember this is 20 years ago.
Back then, there were half a million people employed in 24 countries.
And, of course, this was a valuable cover in the 80s for Soviet, East European, Cuban, and other kinds of espionage services of the bureaucracy.
The Secretary General, Perez de Quella, estimated in 84 that only one in four of his employees was actually doing any kind of useful work.
They were paid pretty well to 35% more than British civil servants, who were not exactly underpaid at the time.
And there is a curious double standard that's sort of noted in the UN all the way back in 1984.
You get the US, Israel, and South Africa are targeted for real or imaginary crimes.
So, you know, the Republic of China on Taiwan was expelled in 1974.
South Africa was not permitted to take its seat in the General Assembly.
Israel, of course, the UN's favorite whipping boy...
However, you know, there have been 150 resolutions condemning Israel.
Even in 1984, no resolutions were ever drafted or passed concerning the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the imposition of martial law in Poland, or Libya's aggression against Chad, the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Red China's invasion of Tobek, were totally ignored when it came to communist imperialism and third world genocide.
The UN's silence is deafening.
In 1984, the...
The Committee for the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and the Special Unit on Palestinian Rights were funded the sum of 3.5 million pounds in a year.
I can't even imagine what that's going to be in dollars, probably 20-25 million dollars in today's amount.
And, of course, this is the money that By going to the predatory and sadistic leadership, it does the exact opposite of helping the poor, right?
The poor Palestinians, right?
Now, let's have a look at this sort of global socializing thing, right?
I mean, the Third World Marxist movement and the support for the former Soviet Union or the Soviet Union when it was there.
The General Assembly led an attack on the market-oriented economic system In the 70s, when it approved the declaration of the establishment of a new international economic order and a charter of economic rights and duties of states, among other things, the declaration endorsed the right of nations to nationalize foreign business concerns and develop cartels.
Now, in the UN's Economic and Social Council's proposed consumer guidelines, which was drafted by a Norwegian socialist, or just a Norwegian socialist, Contained all of the old anti-capitalist cliches, quote, the emergence of the market economy may be accompanied by several practices prejudicial to consumers.
Shortages may be artificially induced by speculation.
Buying on credit may give rise to usury, and defective weights and measures and adulterated goods may become commonplace.
On the other hand, the study has nothing but praise for collectivism observing that, quote, states often act on behalf of consumers in the purchase of goods and services and obtain high-quality goods at reasonable prices.
And so this is all complete nonsense, of course, that is exactly the kind of stuff that you would expect from this sort of international socialist stuff.
So this is really quite horrible and ridiculous, I think would be the phrase.
So I will get to another podcast in the morning.
I hope that you have enjoyed this little tour through the vile, evil, and destructive bureaucracy that is the United Nations.
I'm sure I'm preaching a little bit to the choir here, but it may be useful stuff for you to have at your fingertips.
Should you ever end up talking with somebody who has some sort of rosy-cheeked view or rosy-eyed view of the United Nations.
So, thank you so much.
I would, of course, take donations far less than a billion dollars, less even than the $988,000 that went to Maurice Strong.
I could go for a tenth or maybe even...
A twelfth of that.
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