 | - Joseph A. Klein |
The annual UNDP report follows the customary left-wing approach to most problems: Bash industry. Redistribute wealth through more taxes. And throw in a dig at Western free market capitalism for good measure.
In its latest version, the report downplays the importance of economic growth, as reflected in rising national incomes, to the achievement of better living standards. It links much of the world’s ills to “environmental hazards” and “deep inequalities within and among nations.”
To support their conclusions, the authors of the report created out of whole cloth what they call an “Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index,” which is supposed to somehow adjust the UNDP’s more traditional development index measuring economic prosperity, education levels and life expectancy to take account of “internal inequalities in health, education and income.”
The United States, which had ranked #4 (out of 187 countries measured) in the UNDP’s more traditional human development index, dropped to #23 in the “Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index,” behind such economic heavyweights as Slovenia and Iceland.
The UNDP report’s adjusted inequality index is fallacious on at least two counts. It relies on disparatedata sources that vary widely in quality and completeness from country to country. Moreover, it is at best a static snapshot in time that ignores the dynamics of economic
Nevertheless, in order to reduce the static “inequalities” imperfectly measured by the UNDP report’s authors and to promote “social justice within and amongst nations,” the report takes a top-down, wealth redistributionist approach that relies, in part, on global taxes. The report recommends consideration of an international currency trading tax or even broader financial transaction levies “to fund the fight against climate change and extreme poverty.” The report estimates that an international currency tax alone could raise at least $40 billion a year, while a broader tax on all financial transactions could raise a whopping $650 billion a year globally. This grand wealth redistribution scheme “would allow those who benefit most from globalization to help those who benefit least,” the report argues - a variation of Karl Marx’s anthem “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
The idea for a currency tax was first proposed nearly forty years ago by James Tobin, a Nobel-laureate economist at Yale University, as a way to discourage excessive, short-term speculation in the currency markets. It received little traction until a left-wing transnational group known as The Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC) was founded in Paris, France in 1998 and hijacked the idea as a way to advance its anti-capitalist agenda. Ironically, Tobin himself accused ATTAC of misusing his name and said that he did not share ATTAC’s goals. But it was too late.
Progressive, anti-free trade groups like the AFL-CIO latched on to the tax as a redistributionist mechanism, while United Nations bureaucrats saw it as an independent revenue source to fund expanded UN activities. The UNDP has been pushing some sort of global financial tax for at least twenty years.
More recently, looking for ways to spread the pain they are feeling during the current European financial crisis, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have rallied around the idea of a financial transaction tax. They hoped to make the tax a major topic of discussion at the G20 summit of advanced economies in Cannes on November 3-4, but those plans were derailed by the mess in Greece.
Progressives in the United States are also pushing hard for a global financial transaction tax. One prominent example is Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Columbia University economist who is a Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and works with the UNDP on the United Nations’ massive global wealth redistribution program known as the Millennium Development Goals. Sachs is urging President Obama to accept and impose a financial transaction tax (FTT). Sachs links the tax to the sentiments behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, which he resoundingly supports:
“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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