Of course I know that to have gotten that amount, there was some calculations made that is not actually circumscribed within the bill.
But...one has to understand the impact, and whomever had done that initial analysis and it is actually out there, has given a pretty good assessment of what it will cost.
Since the amount is not written into the bill, no one can actually find fault with the bill when it is surreptitiously approved. Only when the actual dollars have to start will it be assessed and found out too late, the phalarope.
Sorry...but:
Jeffrey Sachs, who ran the U.N.'s "Millennium Project," which monitors compliance with and progress toward these goals, says that the U.N. plan to force the U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of GNP in increased foreign aid spending would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends. "We are short by $65 billion each year, which may seem like a vast sum, but it represents just 0.5% of our GNP," says Sachs.
Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.'s Financing for Development conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is expected to meet the Millennium Development Goals, this amounts to $845 billion.
Ten cents more per year to the UN is way too much.
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Also, this Africa is a lost cause, Sachs's critics are happy to tell you. It's a hopeless proposition. Corrupt. Over the past 50 years, more than $500 billion in foreign aid to Africa has gone down the drain; why would anyone in his right mind pour good money after bad?might help:
From Page 3:
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Excerpt: Also...Cliff Kinkaid has this to say as excerpted:
The link is at the end of the excerpt and also here:
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"....The bill requires the president to devise a "comprehensive strategy" to meet U.N. demands for nations to meet the so-called Millennium Development Goals. It says this strategy must include "specific and measurable goals, efforts to be undertaken, benchmarks, and timetables..."
It is true that these specific details are not explicitly defined in the bill.
That is part of the legislative deception.
In order to understand what the president must do, the executive branch would have to take into account the nature of the Millennium Goals and U.N. documents associated with them.
You can be sure that the U.S. Department of State has a complete understanding of what all of this means, even if some of the politicians on Capitol Hill do not.
As someone who has been covering U.N. conferences for many years, it made complete sense to me.
And that is why I wrote my initial column about it.
The bill does not attach a dollar figure--and does not need to--because that is contained in the 2002 so-called "Monterrey Consensus," which grew out of the 2000 Millennium Declaration, which is cited in the bill.
Understanding this critical fact is a simple matter of reading the appropriate U.N. documents.
The sponsors could count on the major media not to do so.
Here's where the issue gets fairly complicated.
Congressional hearings could have made all of this clear if they would have been held.
But they were not.
And that is shameful on the part of Congress.
The Millennium Declaration, which was issued in 2000, specifically called for a "Financing for Development" conference, which was held in 2002 in Monterrey, Mexico, and produced the "Monterrey Consensus."
I was in Monterrey at the time covering this event.
The whole purpose of this event was to force countries to spend more money on foreign aid.
The "Monterrey Consensus" document coming out of the conference committed nations to spending 0.7 percent of Gross National Product (GNP) on official development assistance (ODA), otherwise known as foreign aid.
It says, specifically, that "We recognize that a substantial increase in ODA and other resources will be required if developing countries are to achieve the internationally agreed development goals and objectives, including those contained in the Millennium Declaration."
It then goes on to call for "concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 percent" of GNP as ODA.
It also proposes "innovative sources of finance" to pay for the increased foreign aid.
That is a reference to global taxes, as I have documented on numerous occasions.
All of this is necessary to understand the basis for and the nature of the Global Poverty Act. But there's more.
Jeffrey Sachs, who ran the U.N.'s "Millennium Project," which monitors compliance with and progress toward these goals, says that the U.N. plan to force the U.S. to pay 0.7 percent of GNP in increased foreign aid spending would add $65 billion a year to what the U.S. already spends.
"We are short by $65 billion each year, which may seem like a vast sum, but it represents just 0.5% of our GNP," says Sachs.
Over a 13-year period, from 2002, when the U.N.'s Financing for Development conference was held, to the target year of 2015, when the U.S. is expected to meet the Millennium Development Goals, this amounts to $845 billion.
And the only way to raise that kind of money, Sachs wrote, is through a global tax, preferably on carbon-emitting fossil fuels.
This is entirely consistent with and even mandated by the Millennium Declaration, which proposes "innovative sources of finance" to pay for it.
A global tax is inevitable, even predictable, in order to pay for the bill.
Nobody seriously expects that even a liberal Congress would voluntarily vote that kind of money for U.N. causes.
Perhaps it would even balk at accepting a global tax.
But failure to pay would lead to the predictable charges that the U.S. was in default on its international obligations that were set by Congress.
And that would increase the pressure to come up with some means to generate the funds.
A President Obama might then demand that the Congress "pay its dues" to the international community.
Many people don't realize that an international tax on airline travel is already in effect in several countries, in order to generate funds to fight AIDS.
Why not a global tax to combat poverty?
That is inevitably where the Global Poverty Act leads the country, and the State Department, the U.N. and the foreign aid lobby know it.
Only our politicians pretend not to understand the ramifications of what they are doing.
Their constituents and the voters should not be fooled.
In a fallback position, proponents of the Global Poverty Act argue that the bill only commits the U.S. to support one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGS)--that of reducing global poverty.
And they contend that the commitment to spending 0.7 percent of Gross National Product on official development assistance is not related to fulfilling this Millennium Goal of reducing poverty.
But the bill actually refers to the document containing all of the goals, which range from cutting global poverty in half to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education.
It says, "At the United Nations World Summit in September 2005, the United States joined more than 180 other governments in reiterating their commitment to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by 2015."
Notice the reference to the U.S. "joining" in this commitment.
The bill also defines the Millennium Development Goals as "the goals set out in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, General Assembly Resolution 55/2 (2000)."
What's more, the foreign aid lobby, InterAction, in its publication, "The United States and the MDGS," contends that the U.S. "has not fully joined the world community in making the reduction of global poverty a priority of its official development assistance (ODA)."
This is an obvious reference to what Sachs was talking about.
Foreign aid spending is directly and obviously related to poverty reduction.
You can count on InterAction, which supports the Global Poverty Act, to lobby for more foreign aid spending, citing the Obama/Smith bill as justification.
This is how the Washington game of spending more of your money works.
This is a budget buster that siphons your hard-earned tax dollars to the U.N. and the rest of the world.
In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, that Millennium Declaration commits nations to banning "small arms and light weapons" and ratifying a series of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Passage of the Global Poverty Act would not, of course, result in those treaties being ratified.
But it does increase the domestic and international pressure to do so.
And that is another inherent danger of the Global Poverty Act.
The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as "the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development."
Does anybody seriously believe that? Does Rep. Adam Smith? Does Senator Barack Obama? Does Senator McCain?
But that is the mentality that went into creating and passing the Global Poverty Act. It is now on the verge of passage by the full Senate.
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Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.
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