Here Come the Black Helicopters!: UN Global Governance and the Loss of Freedom (14 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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 rules 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.