by Dick Morris
In entering into governance by this worldwide body of 193 equal nations, we are dealing into a card game with a stacked deck. We cannot hope to win. We can’t even expect fairness.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War’s bipolarity, the power of the Security Council within the UN declined. Now its role is primarily limited to UN military intervention and economic sanctions to keep the peace and, supposedly, to fight aggression. But more and more power has flowed to the General Assembly, and the concept of one nation, one vote has become enshrined as the core principle of global governance.
The diminishing power of the major UN nations is evident in the increasing domination of the Group of 77, a coalition of the poorer nations determined to use the UN as a vehicle to channel money from developed nations to their own needs. Although these countries donate only 12 percent of the UN’s operating budget, their combined power has become dominant in the General Assembly.
For example, when the US ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush, John Bolton, pushed through a budget cap on UN spending, these seventy-seven nations, who paid about one-eighth of the cost of UN operations, vetoed the proposal. They saw nothing wrong with continued spiraling growth in spending. As long as they weren’t paying the bill.
And when it came to limiting investigations of corruption at the UN and defunding the agencies charged with exposing fraud, it was this same group of nations that leveraged the global body. Their brazen efforts to condone and even institutionalize graft and bribery are chronicled in our most recent book, Screwed!, in the chapter “The United Nations of Corruption.”
Before we dilute our national sovereignty, we are entitled to ask of our fellow nations, with whom we would share power in global governance, are they worthy countries. Are they free? Are they corrupt? Do they respect human rights? The short answer: No, they don’t.
ARE THEY FREE?
Freedom House, an organization founded in 1941, at the start of World War II, has kept meticulous and impartial track of the degree of freedom and democracy in each of the world’s nations. Every year, it publishes a widely respected report categorizing some nations as free, others as partially free, and still others as not free. Each year, nations move from one category to the other as their political institutions change, revolutions occur, and power changes hands by coups or elections.
Freedom House itself has a storied history. It was founded at the behest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the aftermath of his reelection in 1940. Bipartisan, its first cochairs were First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and the Republican candidate for president FDR had just defeated, Wendell Willkie. Its original purpose was to encourage US intervention in World War II despite isolationist pressure to stay out. Since then, its designation of the degree of freedom in the world’s nations has been accepted almost universally (except, of course, by those whose lack of freedom it questions).
In 2011, Freedom House designated 87 of the world’s 195 nations (including two non-UN members) as “free.” Another 60 countries were “partially free.” The other 48 nations were labeled “not free.”3
Immediately, we see the defect of the one-nation, one-vote rule. The 87 free countries make up a minority of the total UN membership (45 percent).
The 45 percent of the nations that are free have great legitimacy. Their delegates come from democratically elected governments, chosen in free elections. When their delegates speak, they do so with the authority of a government that has been chosen by the consent of the governed.
But who do the delegates from the 55 percent of the world’s nations that are only partially free or not free at all represent? Why is it appropriate that they should each have a vote when they stand for nobody but themselves and their own dictatorial or autocratic rulers? Does the delegate from China, for example, speak for his 1.3 billion people or just for the handful that serve on the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo? Does Vladimir Putin represent the majority of the Russian people (who chose him in totally rigged, undemocratic elections where the results were intentionally miscounted)?
To lump the free and not-free countries into one world body and to assign each the same voting power mocks the very concept of democracy. The UN is very punctilious about preserving the idea of majority rule and its implication of democratic decision making in the General Assembly. But what kind of democracy is it when 55 percent of the delegates come from governments that do not represent the people who live there?
Even if we base representation on population, we don’t do much better in terms of freedom. According to Freedom House, 3 billion people, or 43 percent of the world’s population, live in free countries. Two and a half billion—or 35 percent—live in countries that are rated as not free (about half from China with its 1.3 billion people). The rest come from only partly free countries.
Freedom House is rather charitable in its designation “partly free.” It defines the category: “A Partly Free country is one in which there is limited respect for political rights and civil liberties. Partly Free states frequently suffer from an environment of corruption, weak rule of law, ethnic and religious strife, and a political landscape in which a single party enjoys dominance despite a certain degree of pluralism.”4
Freedom House, for example, labels as “partly free” the South American countries under the thumb of Hugo Chavez and his puppets—Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. Despite the fact that no elected president has served out his term without being toppled or assassinated, Pakistan is rated as partly free. Liberia, just recovering from the long dictatorship of Charles Taylor, enjoys the partly-free rating as well. The authoritarian, undemocratic regime in Singapore is also rated partly free.
It is no bargain to live in a partly free country.
So who are we about to surrender our sovereignty to? A world body dominated by small nations, barely the size of one of our states, in which we have only one of 193 votes, where the majority of the countries are not free to choose delegates who represent their own people?
There is nothing inherent in the idea of global governance that is wrong. Indeed, we are all human and we all inhabit the same planet so eventually some form of global government may be appropriate. But today, such a government could only be as strong and just as its component parts. The failure of freedom to spread to more than a minority of the world makes the submersion of our sovereignty into such a worldwide body an act that will lead to the surrender of our freedoms.
The very premise of the United Nations is based on the idea that you take the countries as you find them. Whether they are dictatorships, monarchies, or tyrannies of any description does not matter. As long as they are in de facto control of their populations and landmasses, they are nations entitled to representation and recognition. If the people want to change the government, that’s their business. If they want greater freedom, good luck to them. But, in the meantime, the UN takes all comers and does not have a litmus test for freedom.
The United Nations was set up to be a kind of permanent international conference, akin to the gatherings of the top world leaders that formulated policy for the Allies during World War II. Where Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt met at Yalta to design the postwar world, now their delegates meet at the United Nations to keep it going and to avert a catastrophic world conflict. That’s, of course, why the Security Council—which mimics their wartime conferences—had most of the power in the early days of the United Nations.
But as power shifted to the General Assembly, where each nation cast a vote and none had a veto, the UN’s refusal to distinguish between legitimate, democratic governments and autocratic ones becomes harder to justify. And when they meet not to negotiate, but to govern, they are not entitled to the same level of participation.
A value-free acceptance of all comers makes perfect sense in a negotiation where countries meet to discuss mutual problems or resolve conflicts. In those cases, the dictator who runs one country must sit down with the elected leader who rul
es the other nation on terms of parity and equality. What matters is control, not legitimacy.
If Saudi Arabia is controlled by a king, Russia by a dictator, China by a one-party system, that is none of our business in international negotiations. We have to take them as they are and negotiate to maintain harmony, trade, and peace.
But when the talk switches from horse-trading and negotiation to governance, the idea of including not free governments and according them a vote equal to that cast by free nations is not a wise idea. And to immerse ourselves in a global governing body where a majority of the votes are cast by peoples who are, to some degree or the other, enslaved, makes no sense at all. We must not subject ourselves to the rule of a world body dominated by autocrats.
Nor need we be Gulliver, the 310 million person democracy, being tied down by 97 Lilliputian nations each with populations of 7 million or less, together casting a majority of the votes and bending global policies to their own needs and outlooks.
We are, at least, entitled to a veto—as we have in the Security Council—and should make common government only with fellow democracies committed to human freedom and the consent of the governed.
In a world of nations a majority of whom are not free, there can be no government by consent of the governed and the United States of America should not be part of it.
ARE THEY HONEST?
But our likely new rulers in the third world are not only undemocratic and not free, they are also hopelessly corrupt. A new word had to be created to articulate the degree of corruption: kleptocracy (a government based on stealing and graft). These governments are to be distinguished from those in which scandal occasionally or even frequently rears its head. Every government has a few greedy public servants who help themselves to riches and wealth. But they are usually investigated and often punished. But kleptocracies are different. These are governments whose mission is to steal, whose reason for being is to make money for its leaders.
These states are more like criminal gangs than regular governments. Their ruling elites get to serve as presidents, prime ministers, ambassadors, negotiators, delegates, foreign secretaries, and cabinet secretaries. In each position, they are empowered to steal all they can and to share their loot with one another.
To such nations, membership in the United Nations affords entrée to a realm of vast resources there just for the taking. And take they do.
What proportion of the UN membership are kleptocracies?
Once again, we can turn to a reputable international civic group for the answer. Just as Freedom House compiles rankings of countries based on the degree of freedom their people enjoy, so Transparency International rates them based on their propensity toward corruption.
Transparency International defines corruption:
Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. [The index] focuses on corruption in the public sector, or corruption which involves public officials, civil servants or politicians. The data sources used to compile the index include questions relating to the abuse of public power and focus on: bribery of public officials, kickbacks in public procurement, embezzlement of public funds, and on questions that probe the strength and effectiveness of anti-corruption efforts in the public sector.6
Their methodology is impressive.
They take a survey of more than seventy thousand households in ninety countries to measure “perceptions and experiences of corruption.”7
They interview business executives who export goods and services to learn “the perceived likelihood of their firms [having to] bribe” officials in each nation to whom they sell.8
They issue a Global Corruption Report, which explores corruption in particular sectors or spheres of government operations.9
Finally, they conduct a “series of in-country studies providing an extensive assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the key institutions that enable good governance and integrity in a country (the executive, legislature, judicial, and anti-corruption agencies among others).”10
Based on this extensive research, Transparency International rates every nation on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 meaning that it is highly corrupt and 10 meaning that it has quite high standards of honesty and integrity.
The results are dismal. Corruption is the order of the day in most countries of the world—the very nations that would rule any global government to which we assent!
About three-quarters of the countries of the world—132 of the 182 nations rated—received less than a 5 (on a 1–10 scale), indicating that they were badly corrupted. Ninety-two (half the countries) got a rating of 3 or less, indicating that corruption had penetrated to its very core. Only fifty of the 182 nations got better than a 5 on the corruption scale!
Here are the rankings for each country:11
Are these the nations to whom we are thinking of surrendering our sovereignty, giving them a one-nation, one-vote right to govern us and control our economies, the sea, the Internet, our industries, and many other key aspects of our lives?
But it is not just the member states of the UN that are hopelessly mired in corruption; it is the United Nations itself.
This institutional tolerance of corruption was much in evidence in the 1990s as the UN administered the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. Established under UN auspices to channel revenues from Iraq’s carefully regulated sale of oil to provide food and medicine for its people, starving under the impact of international sanctions, the program became a poster child for corruption. The money mainly went into the pocket of the dictator, Saddam Hussein, and into those of the UN officials charged with administering the program.
The UN corruption demonstrated by the Oil-for-Food program is sickening. But worse—far worse—is the immunity and impunity of those who committed the larceny. They have not been punished or disciplined or even fired. They remain at their desks in the UN headquarters, anxious to see greater globalism enlarge their opportunities for personal enrichment and theft.
The oil-for-food program began in 1990 when the UN imposed economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein. To overturn the sanctions, Saddam worked to loosen the sanctions by pleading that they were starving his people and denying medical care to his children. So the UN decided to allow Saddam to sell limited amounts of oil to feed his people. As a result of his overt efforts to stir up sympathy for his starving people and his covert bribery of top UN officials, Saddam gradually expanded the amount of oil he could sell until the limits were ended entirely.
But the slush fund his oil profits generated found its way into the pockets of a plethora of international politicians often at the highest levels. The program included a 2.2 percent commission on each barrel of oil sold. Over the life of the oil-for-food program, the UN collected $1.9 billion in commissions on the sale of oil.12
The program was overseen by the Security Council of the UN, but subsequent investigations revealed that the leaders and UN delegates of three of the five permanent members—Russia, China, and France—were on the take, pocketing commissions as they rolled in.
France received $4.4 billion in oil contracts.
Russia received $19 billion in oil deals.
Kojo Annan, the son of Kofi Annan (then UN secretary-general), received a $10 million contract.
Alexander Yakovlev of Russia, senior UN procurement officer, pocketed $1 million.
Benon Sevan, administrator of the oil-for-food program, received $150,000 in cash.
France’s former UN ambassador Jean-Bernard Mérimée received $165,725 in oil allocations from Iraq.
Rev. Jean-Marie Benjamin, assistant to the Vatican secretary of state, received oil allocations under the program.
Charles Pasqua, former French interior minister and intimate friend of former French president Jacques Chirac, received oil allocations.
The Communist Party in Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church, and several Russian oil companies all received oil allocations.
In all, 270 separate people received oil vouchers permitt
ing them to buy Iraqi oil at a discount and then sell it at the higher market price, pocketing the difference.
Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, who investigated the program at the behest of the UN, said, “Corruption of the [oil-for-food] program by Saddam and many participants could not have been nearly so pervasive with more disciplined management by the United Nations.”13
Forty countries and 2,250 companies paid bribes to Saddam under oil-for-food to receive favorable treatment.
No UN official has been criminally prosecuted for bribes or any other crime stemming from the oil-for-food program.
This is the record of corruption at the United Nations. Who can doubt that if the Law of the Sea Treaty is ratified, the billions in oil royalties that flow through the UN will not open the door to the same kind of systematic and universal graft that characterized the oil-for-food program?
New opportunities for corruption-without-consequence are emerging from the initiatives for global governance. If the UN is to administer a vast fund to redistribute wealth to the third world, tax oil royalties from offshore drilling, regulate the Internet, and tax financial transactions and the like, the kleptocracies that make up much of the UN membership can only lick their chops in anticipation.
But won’t the UN enforce rules against corruption as it acquires more power? History indicates that it will do nothing at all to clean up its act.
Indeed, the tendency toward corruption—and the blind eye the UN leadership turned to it—that was evident in the 1990s only accelerated with the start of the new millennium.
In 2005, a huge scandal ripped the UN Procurement Department, which was responsible for all purchases made by the organization. Alexander Yakovlev, the head of the department, pled guilty to federal charges of wire fraud, racketeering, and money laundering. Working with his fellow Russian Vladimir Kuznetsov, the head of the UN Budget Oversight Committee, he tipped off bidders for contracts with inside information in return for bribes. Paul Volcker estimated that the Russians made off with $950,000 in bribes and helped contractors win more than $79 million in UN contracts.14