InnerCityPress Exclusive: The return of a Crook at Rio+20 !

As Maurice Strong Returns as Senior Advisor, UN Stonewalls on Annan Team, Doss

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, March 7 -- Why is the UN so resistant to answering simple questions about who it hires and pays? Since February 24, Inner City Press has been asking the two top spokesman of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon about the financing of the mission of envoy to Syria Kofi Annan.

On March 7 Inner City Press asked again, in writing and then at the day's noon briefing about "how Kofi Annan's work as joint envoy is funded, will Lamine Cisse and any other staff, including the deputy envoy, be paid with UN funds, and how and how much."

Even with the question asked five hours in advance, in writing, Deputy Spokesman Eduardo del Buey told Inner City Press at noon that these "administrative details" are "still being worked on."

But Annan is already traveling to Cairo, and then Syria. Is his Foundation's senior staffer Alan Doss, who left the UN amid a nepotism scandal exclusively reported by Inner City Press, now be getting paid by the UN? [Click here for the Doss story.]

Also hours before Wednesday's UN noon briefing, Inner City Press asked del Buey and lead spokesman Martin Nesirky this question:

"Please confirm or deny that Maurice Strong has been given a role for the UN on Rio + 20, that his travel costs in this regard are paid by the UN, if so how much has been spent and, separately, if any age rules apply in this case."

Neither even acknowledged receipt of the question. At the noon briefing, attempting to be diplomatic, Inner City Press asked del Buey if he had an answer on "the individual" asked about in connection with Rio + 20. Del Buey said it was being "looked into." It shouldn't be that difficult.

Maurice Strong's website describes him as "Senior Advisor to the 2012 Rio+20 Summit." He gave a speech in India, and another in New York in October 2011, on the web site of the UN Environment Program where he is described as "a Canadian entrepreneur and a former under-secretary general of the United Nations. Strong had his start as an entrepreneur in the Alberta oil patch and was president of Power Corporation of Canada."

In fact, Strong left the UN -- until this seeming return -- amid scandal: a large check for $988,885 written to himself, the Oil for Food investigation, and the undisclosed hiring of his step-daughter Kristina Mayo, not unlike Alan Doss. A senior UN official whom Inner City Press asked about Strong on Wednesday morning said, increduously, "he's back? He's a crook!"

Be that as it may, the UN should at least be able to answer what Strong's "Senior Advisor to the 2012 Rio+20 Summit" status means, how much the UN pays, and how any of this is appropriate. Watch this site.

Claudia Rosett: Meanwhile, the UN Is Planning Your Future — All of It

@PajamasMedia

The United Nations hasn’t stopped the carnage in Syria, hasn’t stopped Iran’s race for nuclear weapons, and so far hasn’t even managed to produce financial disclosure forms for its top officials that actually disclose anything about their finances. (For instance, here’s the UN “disclosure” form for the head of the UN Environment Program,Achim Steiner.)

But that’s no bar to the UN proposing to plan the future of the planet. While the headlines focus on upheaval in the Middle East, financial crisis in Europe, and election year politics in the U.S., the UN has been planning its grand summit-level Rio+20 Conference, scheduled for June 20-22 in Brazil. This will mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, which helped spade the ground for climate hysteria, the Kyoto treaty, and the quack vilification of the world’s most productive economies. This round, the UN plans to make even more “sustainable” the things the UN-ocracy would like to see sustained — paramount among them, the UN itself.

As is the way of such UN confabs, the Rio+20 Conference already has a “Dedicated Secretariat,” headed by China’s Sha Zukang, the UN Under-Secretary-General who made news in 2010 for his drunken rant during a UN retreat at an Austrian ski resort — in which Sha declared he had never liked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and he didn’t like Americans either. Also in 2010, Sha served as ceremonial presenter of a “World Harmony Award” to the former Chinese military chief who was operational commander during the 1989 crushing of the Tiananmen Square uprising.

Now, Fox News Executive Editor George Russell reports that Ban Ki-Moon, Sha Zukang and another two dozen or more of the UN’s top Rio+20 planners held a closed-door retreat last October, at a Long Island mansion, where they discussed how Rio+20 could help them reshape the world. The proceedings were meant to be secret (apparently, UN top managers prefer that the world not know the details until their world reshaping is already well underway). But Russell got hold of the confidential minutes of the discussions, which are linked in his story, “UN chief, aides, plot ‘green economy’ agenda at upcoming summit.”

The minutes include the usual mind-numbing welter of UN buzz words: “sustainable…implementing… institutional framework… integration, implementation and coherence…” etc. George Russell has done us the favor of slogging through this, and sums it up as as an agenda of “bold ambitions that stretch for years beyond the Rio conclave to consolidate a radical new global green economy, promote a spectrum of sweeping new social policies and build an even more important role for UN institutions ‘to manage the process of globalization better.’”

Could this really go anywhere? Don’t underestimate it. Thanks in substantial part to U.S. tax dollars that subsidize most of its system, the UN has the ability and resources to stage these mega-conferences, whether the U.S. contributes directly or not. These conferences produce secretariats that become permanent fixtures, and spin off other conferences, commissions, programs — which in turn become frameworks and funders of global lobbying efforts in which an organized few can trample the interests of a disorganized many. At what cost to humanity does this “sustain” and continually expand the UN, and its ever-swelling ambitions?

As it is, we have a huddle of UN officials — none of them chosen by any process that a normal democracy would recognize as elections — bankrolled in substantial part by U.S. tax dollars, and protected by UN immunities, meeting in luxurious secrecy on Long Island to plan the reshaping of the world. Not a good sign.