Money can buy anything: - Bill Gates buys its own Assistant Secretary General

For the first time in United Nations history - a private foundation funds an

ASSISTANT SECRETARY-GENERAL

with full UN/Diplomatic Immunity

At UN, Gates Foundation Learns How to Buy Impunity Like Orr's Position

By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive

Click here for this @Innercitypress

UNITED NATIONS, July 2 -- The UN under Ban Ki-moon has taken to inventing new position without any General Assembly approval, bypassing oversight by using "extra budgetary resources." This means that while these appear to be UN jobs, with trapping like immunity and impunity, the holder is not paid by the UN by some outside party.

  When Ban felt compelled to at least partially apply his so-called five year mobility rule to long time American staffer Robert Orr, he shifted him to a so called Public Private Partnerships position. Inner City Press asked, is this position in the UN budget? Has it been approved?

  The answer, Fifth (Budget) Committee sources say, is no. Orr said he'll raise his own funds, from corporations, they say.

  Ban tried to get the position upgraded from Orr's current Assistant Secretary General level to Under Secretary General, but even funded by others, the UN's Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions balked and said no, as exclusively reported by Inner City Press.

  Perhaps less extreme but along the same lines, when Ban Ki-moon on June 7, 2012 announced with fanfare -- on the UN's own UN News Service -- that he "appointed Ms. Amina J. Mohammed of Nigeria as his Special Adviser on Post-2015 Development Planning," it was not disclosed that this position is not in the UN Budget and will be funded from outside.

  Budget committee sources contacted Inner City Press, disgusted to highlight that the "extra budgetary post funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation was filled by a candidate who is affiliated with... wait for it... the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation."

  And the second half of that, but not the first, is in the UN News Service story: Amina J. Mohammed "currently serves on numerous international advisory panels and boards, including the Global Development Program of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation."

  Here you have an entity, the sources say, that while seeming to want to help the UN, is in fact undermining the UN's credibility by stealthly funding a position which is given to a person allied with it. And so it goes at the UN.

Footnote: the other side and engine of the Gates empire, Microsoft, got into the UN its so-called "Ambassador to Africa," who just happens to be the brother of Ban's then Special Adviser on Africa. Extra budgetary, indeed...

U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-moon is Scrambling to Release a New Cost-Saving Agenda, Ahead of Re-Elections

click here to view this on FOX NEWS

AP

Sept. 23: President Obama gives a toast at a lunch hosted by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, right, during the 65th session of the U.N. General Assembly at U.N. headquarters.

By George Russell

Published March 23, 2011

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is suddenly scrambling to roll out a new “agenda for change” at the U.N. this spring -- an agenda that also saves money -- before he must seek re-election as head of the world organization next fall.

The agenda seems aimed to blunt two major criticisms of his first, five-year term of office: that he has done little to improve the performance of the organization, and that he has not reined in its rapidly ballooning costs -- indeed, he has become the U.N.’s spender-in-chief.

Ban’s abrupt change of course may have gotten some prodding from President Obama, who met with Ban at the White House on Feb. 28. At the time, according to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, the two men “discussed their shared agenda to build on the strengths of theUnited Nations while pursuing and implementing very important management reforms as well as budgetary discipline.”

Ban unveiled the idea of his new agenda not long afterward, at an “extraordinary meeting” with his top lieutenants in the U.N. Secretariat on March 15, according to a follow-up letter dated the next day, which has been examined by Fox News.

In the letter, Ban’s deputy, Asha-Rose Migiro, encapsulated the previous day’s session by declaring that “we agreed on the urgent need to find ways to do more with less.” She then repeated Ban’s demand from the session that top managers “submit concrete proposals for modernizing our operations, identifying efficiency gains, and equipping our staff with state-of-the-art skills” by no later than March 28.

Those ideas will then be chewed over by top level U.N. policy and management committees at a joint meeting under Ban’s direction in late April. “The joint committee meeting will produce an agenda for change that we will all work together to implement,” Migiro said.

The focus will be on “delivering more, on becoming a stronger and more effective organization as well as ensuring long-term cost-containment.”

Drastic cost containment is very much in the cards for the U.N., especially after the huge environmental and nuclear catastrophe that has stricken Japan, the organization’s second-biggest donor (after the U.S.) in previous weeks. Japan’s disaster, which will require hundreds of billions of dollars in recovery costs, came atop Europe's fiscal meltdown, which has also strained the resources of major donor countries.

And then there is the U.S. itself, where the White House is on a collision course with the Republican-dominated House of Representatives over runaway spending -- and where generous, unconditional U.S. funding for the U.N. has come under sustained fire from House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Iliana Ros-Lehtinen.

As Fox News revealed last week, Ban has issued a call to the same subordinates for suggestions on how to achieve a “painful” 3 percent cut in the Secretariat’s regular budget for the next two years that would, essentially, leave spending exactly where it left off at the end of 2011.

Click here to read that story from Foxnews.com.

Ban’s new “reform and strengthening” plan tells top managers to focus on five areas: staffing, budgetary “cost containment over time,” improving business processes through high-tech means, “rationalizing structures” and “engaging member states on closer alignment between mandates and support provided for them.”

The last two points are possibly the most drastic, depending on the ideas offered. “Rationalizing structures” appears to be an oblique reference to bureaucratic streamlining, and few doubt that the U.N. could accommodate a lot of that. “Closer alignment” between U.N. mandates and money points to a longstanding fact of U.N. existence: that only a relative handful of countries, led by the U.S., provide the bulk of U.N. finances, while 192 members, most of them contributing a relative pittance, decide how the money should be spent.

Migiro’s letter on behalf of her boss calls for “bold and forward-looking” suggestions, and a “fresh injection of ideas,” and urges top managers to “draw on the creativity and ideas of your staff.” Ban’s much more charismatic predecessor, Kofi Annan, offered up sweeping and extensive reform proposals before the end of his second term, and the result is the organization Ban now runs.

When it comes to technological fixes, the U.N. track record is equally dismal. A high-tech “enterprise resource planning” system known as Umoja was supposed to be ready next year, but the project, originally budgeted for about $286 million, is tens of millions over budget. Umoja this summer was mired in a procurement scandal and is now not expected to be ready before the end of 2013.

Any “bold and forward-looking” ideas that Ban gets will also face a familiar policy grinder. As Migiro’s letter states, they will be compiled, then returned to their originators for comment. Then they will go to a joint meeting of Ban’s policy and management committees in late April, which will, she says, “produce an agenda for change that we will all work together to implement.”

In fact, Ban, who is notoriousness for his secretiveness and closed decision-making style, may also have an alternative process in mind.

Migiro’s letter closes with the observation that alongside the bulky but relatively open suggestion routine, “the Secretary General will form a small change management team composed of specific staff members who have relevant expertise” to “support this process.”

In other words, a small group of insiders may still run the show.

By whatever process he chooses to give birth to it, however, Ban’s instant “agenda for change” will still face the same question: after years of unimpressive, expensive results from the same management, how will it avoid being more of the same?

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News

U.N. seeks to define crimes: - Victims event called secretive

Betsy Pisik
Monday, September 8, 2008

UNITED NATIONS | A daylong symposium focusing on the victims of terrorism Tuesday was supposed to be an apolitical event with an emphasis on healing, improving support services and combating a common scourge.

Instead, diplomats from many Islamic countries are outraged, with their diplomats complaining that the event was organized in secrecy and haste and that it bypassed their governments' concerns and input.

"It would have been better if the symposium on victims of terrorism was organized as a result of transparent and all-inclusive, multilateral intergovernmental consultation," said Farukh Amil, acting ambassador from Pakistan.

Robert Orr, the chairman of the conference and a key adviser to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said that the session had been planned with input from member states.

"The secretary-general felt he could make a contribution" by convening a special program to examine support for the victims and their families, said another member of Mr. Ban's staff, who was not authorized to speak for attribution.

"The emphasis is on what happens after [an attack]. Is there a support system for them? It could be powerful."

Organizers indicate that Ingrid Betancourt, French-Colombian politician who was rescued dramatically in July after six years in the Colombian jungle where she had been held by Marxist guerrillas, will attend the event.

But U.N. officials have been reluctant to release the names or nationalities of other victims on the panel, citing visa and security complications.

One of the sticking points for this and seemingly all other terrorism-related discussions is the inability to define the term "terrorism" or "terrorist."

Most Arab and Islamic nations insist that there be an exemption for guerrillas, whom they call "freedom fighters," and Western governments call "terrorists."

These include fighters in Hezbollah, Hamas and other groups that battle Israel, claiming that they are fighting against Israel's presence in the West Bank, southern Lebanon and Syria.

Israel, the United States and many Western governments say these groups are fighting to destroy the Jewish state and drive Jews from the Levant.

There are 13 U.N. conventions against terrorist acts, but a four-year effort to draft an omnibus counterterrorism accord has run aground on the inability to define terrorism.

Commenting on Tuesday's conference, U.N. spokesman Michele Montas said, "We cannot release a list that is incomplete."

She confirmed that at least one Palestinian had been invited, "but not as a victim." She said that several potential participants were having trouble with visas and other travel documents.

Palestinian representative Riyad Mansour told The Washington Times that his government is sending at least one specialist on terrorism victims, but likely not a survivor of an attack.

"If there are sensitivities, and they don't want to include an Israeli or Palestinian, we can live with that, " Mr. Mansour said. "But no other country in the world has been as afflicted by terrorism as Palestine."

Israeli Ambassador Daniel Carmon could not say last week whether his country would be sending a victim to the panel discussions, but vowed "there is no way Israel would not participate in this very important initiative."

He said his country "an affected, possibly the most affected country by this phenomenon called terrorism" and has a lot of expertise to share with other nations.