Senator Jesse Helms has been calling for the United Nations to reform itself and reduce its bloated budgets, but the UN reform agenda now being implemented is very different from what Helms has in mind.
The apparatus for UN-style reform consists of the Millennium Forum, a gathering of accredited Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), a UN Millennium Assembly of UN delegates, and a Millennium Summit attended by heads of state from more than 160 nations. These events get under way September 6, and the "reforms" will be presented under six headings.
Using the rubric Peace, Security and Disarmament, the UN "reformers" want to establish a UN standing army under the command of the UN Secretary-General, with the ultimate goal of disarming national armies. The UN reformers want to eradicate national sovereignty as a barrier to UN action and use the shibboleth "security of the people" to rationalize UN action inside sovereign countries (as in Kosovo).
The plan is to transform sovereign countries into administrative units assigned to carry out UN policies. The UN even wants disarmament of personal guns, with the UN controlling the manufacture, sale, distribution and licensing of all firearms.
In the area called Eradication of Poverty, the UN wants debt cancellation for poor countries plus Western-financed social development. This means forcing the United States to turn over our wealth to UN bureaucrats to distribute to Third World dictators.
Under the do-good caption Human Rights, the UN plans to enforce its version of global human rights through a series of UN treaties, each of which has its own international compliance commission. These include the UN treaties on the Rights of the Child, on Discrimination Against Women, on Civil and Political Rights, on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and on the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The heading Sustainable Development is designed to facilitate total UN control of the environment. In addition to bootstrapping power to the globalists under the Biodiversity Treaty and the Kyoto (Global Warming) Protocol, the plan is to use the UN Trusteeship Council to control the "global commons," which is UN terminology for the atmosphere, outer space, non-territorial seas, and the related environment that supports human life.
Globalization to Achieve Equity, Justice and Diversity is a catch- all phrase to achieve any other power-grabbing goal the UN bureaucrats may dream up in the future. They want the authority to equalize rich and poor economies and pretend that redistribution of wealth is equity.
Strengthening and Democratizing the United Nations is doubletalk for wiping out all power and influence that the United States might ever exercise in the United Nations. This goal calls for eliminating the veto and permanent member status in the Security Council and giving the UN the power to tax so that it will no longer depend on governments' appropriating funds to pay their dues.
UN bureaucrats are salivating over the prospect of passing the Tobin Tax, a proposal that has been gaining momentum since the UN conference in Copenhagen in 1995. This is a plan to tax all international financial transactions, which would funnel an extraordinary $1.5 trillion a year to the UN.
These grandiose plans to achieve global governance through the UN originated in a 410-page report called "Our Global Neighborhood" published by the UN-funded Commission on Global Governance in 1995. Ever since, the UN bureaucrats have been working on a "Charter for Global Democracy" to build the framework for a restructured UN.
The Charter has been incorporated into the recommendations being advanced by the NGO Forum, precursor to the People's Assembly, a body of unelected pressure groups with leftwing political agendas that is supposed to be formally attached to the UN during the Millennium Assembly. Pompously calling themselves the "civil society," they claim to be the voice of the people, in contrast to the General Assembly, which consists of the representatives of national governments.
The lobbyists for these dramatic changes in the mission and structure of the UN are those NGOs accredited by the UN, of which there are currently 1,603. Most of the NGOs are also members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which originated many of the global environmental policies set forth in the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on Climate Change, and Agenda 21.
The most prominent NGOs are the radical environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the population-control groups such as Planned Parenthood. The head honcho of this dramatic restructuring of the UN is Executive Coordinator of UN Reform Maurice Strong, who was Secretary General of the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992.
The best first step to bring all these global government pretensions to a screeching stop is to pass the Jesse Helms bill, the American Service Members Protection Act. It would cut off U.S. military aid to any country that ratifies the ICC treaty and authorize the President to undertake any means "necessary and appropriate" to free U.S. soldiers from ICC captivity.
