By Joseph A. Klein, CFP United Nations Columnist ——Bio and Archives--November 7, 2011
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"If President Obama is true to his recent words sympathizing with Occupy Wall Street, he will join Sarkozy and Merkel in supporting the FTT... We keep hoping that Wall Street impunity will finally be ended. Mr. President, this week is your chance to make good on your word. Adopt the FTT at the G20 meeting and bring the fight back to Congress. The American people will support you in the fight to restore democracy for the 99 percent."Not surprisingly, the United Nations Development Programme agency boss, Helen Clark, is fully on board with instituting a global tax on financial transactions. "A Financial Transaction Tax, for example, now supported in principle by several G20 members, has the potential to raise considerable revenue," she told a sympathetic audience at the Second World Congress of the International Trade Union Confederation. "A currency transaction tax has been identified as the most viable of all the sources of innovative financing," Clarke said as she presented the 2011 Human Development Report in Copenhagen. Clark reportedly receives an annual salary of approximately $215,000 plus another $100,000 in perks (for example, full apartment rental paid by UNDP), which puts her very near the top 1% of American incomes. But Clark lectures the rest of us on "social justice" and ensuring a "fair distribution of income, assets, and opportunities." I asked the authors of the UNDP Human Development Report whom they thought should administer the pot of money collected from the global tax and whom they thought should be responsible for deciding how to allocate the money. They declined to respond. The answer, if Helen Clark has anything to say about it, will be her very own UNDP bureaucracy. Clark is all about expanding the reach of the UNDP's power and accumulating more funds under UNDP management. According to a report by Inner City Press, for example, Clark had tried to win control of a Haiti disaster relief trust fund from the World Bank, in order to grab the fee income associated with it. In addition to heading the UNDP agency itself, Clark is the Chair of the United Nations Development Group, a committee consisting of the heads of all UN funds, programs and departments working on development issues. Clark has also advocated more global governance power for the United Nations as a whole and an end to the veto power of the United States and the other permanent members of the Security Council. Clark's UNDP is a case study of what more power vested in the UN bureaucracy would look like, particularly the power to administer many billions of dollars in new revenue raised through a global tax. It regularly withholds information from the UN member states who pay its bills. Its Executive Board, which includes Iran, operates behind closed doors. The UNDP's Chief Financial Officer and Deputy Assistant Administrator, Darshak Shah, is responsible for financial management and strategic resource and budgetary planning of UNDP’s global operations. In that capacity, he already manages at least $16 billion a year, and would be overseeing the flow of many more billions to its operations and network of suppliers worldwide if revenues from a new global tax fall under UNDP's control. The UN development agency has failed to make public Shah's assets and interests. In fact, when I searched the UNDP's official website, it did not even disclose Shah's position as the UNDP Chief Financial Officer. I had to communicate several times back and forth with UNDP bureaucrats to get a simple confirmation of that fact. The UNDP has hidden information about its Chief Financial Officer from the public despite concerns about possible conflicts of interest and Shah's questionable conduct while he served as the UNDP's comptroller during a major scandal engulfing the UNDP in North Korea (DPRK) several years ago. The North Korean government is reported to have used its relationship with the UN agency to execute deceptive financial transactions. The UNDP also is said to have transferred UN funds to a company with ties to an entity involved in North Korean weapons activity. As the largest contributor to the UNDP, the United States had sought back in 2006 to speak with Darshak Shah in order to get details on how the UNDP was operating its aid programs in North Korea. The U.S. requested an immediate audit and investigation of UNDP activities in North Korea as well as copies of previously conducted audits. High level UNDP administrators, including Shah, did not cooperate. According to a cable released by WikiLeaks that was sent by the United States UN Mission to the Secretary of State:
"USUN has dealt extensively with Mr. Shah, as he was the primary point of contact for Mission demarches concerning hard currency transactions in the DPRK, but he has proven unable and unwilling to provide comprehensive and consistent information on expenditures and audits of the UNDP programme in the DPRK."Now this same shady UN development agency would no doubt like to get its hands on billions of dollars of new revenue raised from a global tax that will drain more money from American taxpayers and investors. What's more, the money would be under the management of a chief financial officer whose questionable past conduct as UNDP comptroller should have disqualified him from being promoted to the higher level position of chief financial officer altogether. Anti-capitalist, wealth redistributionist polices coupled with bloated, unaccountable bureaucracies managing billions of our taxpayers' dollars - par for the course at the United Nations.
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Joseph A. Klein is the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom.