On May 30, 2013,the United Nations High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda released a report entitled “A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development.” Its authors claimed that the report sets out a "universal" and "transformative" agenda to eradicate extreme poverty from the face of the earth by 2030, and deliver on the promise of sustainable development.
The panel was established by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and co-chaired by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron.
The report in actuality is a socialist manifesto dressed up in the garb of nice business-sounding terms such as "investment" and mobilizing "private capital." Scratch the surface of the report and one sees the emphasis on shop-worn themes such as over-consumption by the "rich," "equity," "sustainability," "solidarity," the establishment of "social protection floors" funded by a new "global fund for social protection," establishing "a global knowledge commons," the targeting of "inequality within and between countries," and "the right to development and responsibilities shared in accordance with capabilities."
The authors of the report might as well have gone all the way and quoted directly from Karl Marx: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Fundamental transformation of the world economy, an echo of President Barack Obama's call for a fundamental transformation of America, is the report's central mantra. It bears the unmistakable imprint of one of its primary participants in putting the report together, John Podesta, the only U.S. representative on the panel. Podesta, the Chair of the Center for American Progress, is closely linked with President Obama and his left-wing, redistributionist policies.
The report pushes for developed countries "to re-imagine their growth models" as part of "making structural changes in the world economy." (emphasis in the original)
Regarding over-consumption, for example, the report states: "We also agreed on the need to manage the world’s consumption and production patterns in more sustainable and equitable ways."
The report incorporates climate change as a core issue to resolve in meeting the overall objectives of poverty eradication and transformation of the global economy. It calls for "climate finance" to be "public, obligatory, predictable, grant-based, and free from conditionalities." In other words, think of the global carbon tax, which was not mentioned explicitly in the report but has been recommended by UN agencies for years.
The report introduces the concept of a "universal legal identity," a possible precursor to replacing national citizenship with global citizenship and eliminating any barriers to free, borderless migration. Indeed, the reports insists that the "universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of migrants must be respected."
National sovereignty over tax rates, the report suggests, should give way to "universal domestic resource targets: corporate tax take, tax/GDP ratio." The report also recommends "innovative, democratic financing mechanisms," which is UN-speak meaning global taxes. National military related resources must be re-allocated to "development purposes." The report specifically calls for ensuring "financial allocations for women’s rights (gender budgeting)."
In short, “A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development” is a grab bag of left-wing ideas to fundamentally transform the world economy away from free market capitalism, in much the same way as President Obama has sought to fundamentally transform the United States economy to mirror the European cradle-to-grave social welfare model.
