CanadaFreePress: UN is Fleecing US and the EU Carbon Tax

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Politicians in America and the current administration are fleecing the American public with their Green Environmentalist Agenda 21 driven by the United Nations and its bureaucrats

- Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh

The EU charges a carbon emissions fee, an “extra terrestrial tax.” This is viewed by non-European governments as an attack on sovereignty. China’s airlines have refused to comply. “Some non-European airlines may have to choose whether to obey the law of their land or that of Europe.” Companies refusing to comply would be fined and denied the right to land in the 27 countries that are members of EU.

The European Court of Justice has already rejected the legal basis of a challenge raised in London by North American airlines. Carriers have until April 30 to calculate their damaging annual emissions and to buy polluting rights for 2012. Delta Airlines has already added a surcharge to passenger tickets. The scalping of the developing world continues. Each flight will cost us an additional $32 of a round-trip long-distance ticket. The financial gains are substantial for the bureaucrats since 655 million people flew to Europe last year.

The United Nations is pushing for a global deal through its International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). It does not matter that global warming has been debunked, the EU and UN coffers must be replenished by hapless developed world citizens and the wealth must be spread to developing nations in the name of “social justice.”

The media did not report on the temperature rise in the U.S. during the time period when no airplanes flew after the 9/11 attack, proving that pollution from airplanes does not increase temperatures, on the contrary, it provides a level of cooling protection. (Lord Monckton)

Never mind that the United Nations no longer lives up to its charter of world peace and is indoctrinating children and the population into the green sustainability hoax. UN wants more than the $516.3 requested from the United States for its regular budget and more than the $2.182 billion requested for the peacekeeping budget.

In 2009, U.S. contribution to the UN octopus was $6.347 billion. US have provided aid to UN since 1945, currently giving 22 percent of UN’s operating budget and 27 percent of its peacekeeping budget. (OMB)

Aaron Cantor, USAF (retired) perfectly encapsulated the peacekeeping mission of the United Nations “Ready, Aim, Flee.”

The Congressional Research Service revealed that we are giving hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign aid to some of the world’s richest countries while borrowing billions from them. More specifically, we gave $1.4 billion to 16 foreign countries that hold at least $10 billion in Treasury securities. China received $27.2 million, India $126.6 million, Brazil $25 million, and Russia $71.5 million.

Palestinians receive $400.4 million in economic aid, $100 million to support the Palestinian Authority police training, $61.5 million in emergency humanitarian aid after Israel’s “assault on Gaza,” an actual retaliation for all the rockets fired randomly from Gaza into Israel.

Fritz Vahrenhold and his geologist colleague, Sebastian Luning, work for the German utility company RWE. They published a book last month, “Die Kalte Sonne” (“The Cold Sun”) in which they claim that important research about climate change was hidden and “cries of an impending catastrophe are misleading.” “The world is not facing a climate catastrophe.” The authors are dismissing the “CO2 lie” – it is not greenhouse gases that cause problems, it is the sun that determines climate change.

The most relied upon source of information on the topic is the climate report produced by the United Nations, more specifically the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC). The report, produced by civil servants and not researchers, is full of misinformation and doubts. Yet countries around the world are basing their policies and fundamental changes of their citizens’ lives on a bogus report produced by bureaucrats.

Many climate researchers question the quality of computer models used to forecast climate change. “Knowledge of the effect of particle from industry, heating, and auto emissions as well as from oceans, volcanoes and from the soil is very low, according to the IPCC report. These particles serve as seeds for clouds, and some estimates suggest that an increase in the cloud cover by just one percent could offset a doubling of the CO2 in the air.”

Making matters worse, a trading scheme is now part of European Union laws. The EU is trading on emissions that would limit the release of “harmful greenhouse gases.” Prices for CO2 certificates have dropped constantly to about half, around $10.60 per metric ton, in spite of the closure of eight German nuclear power plants in 2011 and the increase in demand for coal power. The CO2 trading system is not working and is producing nothing but deceptive hot air because politicians decide the amount of CO2 that industries in the EU may emit way into the future.

Why are CO2 certificates so cheap? Other than the obvious that people understand it is a fleecing scheme, Germany for one spends billions on renewable energy. “With CO2 certificates so cheap, generating power from environmentally harmful fuels becomes even more than a good deal - which explains why brown coal consumption increased by nearly 4 percent in 2011, bucking the general trend.” Emissions trading is not stopping climate change, but actually speeding it up. (Alexander Jung)

Politicians in America and the current administration are fleecing the American public with their Green Environmentalist Agenda 21 driven by the United Nations and its bureaucrats. Do we want to become subservient to the laws of the European Union and United Nations or follow the supreme law of the land, the U.S. Constitution?

Race 4 World Bank Prez: Jeffrey Sachs calls Amb. Susan Rice an "Obama insider" - forgetting he is a UN insider serving as Under-Secretary-General

Jeffrey D. Sachs ‏ @JeffDSachs

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@hlkalin So far this is still an insider's game. It needs to be opened up. Senator Kerry has taken himself off the list.

undpwatch ‏ @undpwatch

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@JeffDSachs @hlkalin if u call @AmbassadorRice an insider - than u should accept u r @UN insider since u serve as #USG, right?#UNreform

Jens Wandel "Greening UNDP": $1 Million dollar electricity bill for DC1 and FF Buildings

Joe Torsella ‏ @USJoe_UN

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3. Big savings were projected from energy efficiency of rehabbed buildings. Now would be a good time to show us that money!

undpwatch ‏ @undpwatch

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@USJoe_UN why not publish @USUN website on #OIOS the energy bill 4 #DC1 & #DC2 buildings? Let public know how much @UN save energy #UNreform

GAP: IDB Whistleblower case leads to shady dealings going public (UNDP's Grynspan involvement detailed)

by Bea Edwards on March 06, 2012 ( The Whistleblogger / 2012 )

Click here for this on GAP page

So ethics guru Bernardo Kliksberg is back in the news. On March 1, FOX News' George Russell published a detailed piece about Kliksberg’s peculiar departure from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in January 2007, just before the Social Capital and Ethics Initiative “coordinated” by him ran completely out of steam. The Norwegian and Canadian Governments funded this effort, and a whistleblower at the IDB disclosed repeated and costly ethical violations by Kliksberg, using the funds of the initiative.

It seems that Kliksberg, the author of More Ethics, More Development, among other treatises, is himself guilty of diverting funds from the IDB’s ethics initiative.

This takes, in the immortal words of Sarah Palin, cojones.

Russell’s piece reports that the IDB then repaid the Norwegian and Canadian Trust Fund for the amount Kliksberg demonstrably diverted: $109,000, equivalent to half of the funds available for the initiative in 2006. After that, the cone of silence descended around the Kliksberg affair, and it remains concealed beneath highly improbable and contradictory official statements. It only came to light because the whistleblower brought suit in the IDB’s internal tribunal. She protested the loss of her job, which the IDB tried to represent as the inevitable consequence of the demise of the Ethics Initiative.

The failure of the IDB to protect the whistleblower in this case sent a terrible message to Bank staff: if your whistleblowing causes an interruption of your project, your job will be the first casualty of your disclosure. That should pretty much shut down everyone with any survival instinct at the IDB, no?

For his part, Kliksberg simply caught the Acela to New York and assumed control of another international trust fund. That would be the fund contributed so generously to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) by Spanish taxpayers through the Government of Spain. Established in April 2007, the Spain-UNDP Trust Fund held $62 million by 2009. (Just a heads up, UNDP people: you need to keep a close eye on those deposits. In our experience dealing with corruption, the diversion of funds tends to be a lifestyle, not an incident).

Despite the rhetorical commitments to transparency and accountability with which the IDB decorates its website, this episode is shrouded in secrecy and stinks of institutional cover-up. Kliksberg contends that Bank management never told him he was under investigation and never informed him he was found guilty as charged. Nor did the IDB inform UNDP, claims UNDP. But not informing Kliksberg that he was under investigation and later censured violates the procedures of the IDB’s internal justice system in ways that even the Bank – which is notoriously cavalier about adhering to its own anti-corruption regulations – would hesitate to try.

Now, I'm not saying this couldn’t have happened. After all, stealing from an ethics trust fund is also a violation of something, and rather than making Kliksberg repay Norway and Canada, the IDB coughed up the money out of its own public coffers. This decision had the effect – whether intentional or not – of removing the fraud from the public record by depriving the governments of a cause of action.

But Kliksberg told Russell that the IDB conducted an extensive investigation, and the only result was a note in his file advising anyone considering a contract for him to first consult with the Human Resources Department. So…

• Question One: How did the IDB conduct a thorough investigation of the Trust Fund deficits without asking Kliksberg himself about his financial practices (and without freezing his access to funds and his e-mail account)?
• Question Two: Did Kliksberg’s stature as an Ethics Expert allow him to escape sanction for ethics violations involving the Trust Fund?
• Question Three: Why would the IDB not inform the Spanish Government about the risk Kliksberg represented to the integrity of its Trust Fund at UNDP if he were hired to manage it?

Nothing about the official steps taken by the IDB makes sense, from an accountability perspective. After Kliksberg took down the Social Capital and Ethics Initiative at the IDB, the Bank took steps to ensure that there was no record of what had happened – no letter outlining Kliksberg’s ethical violations and misconduct in the HR files, and no judicial action against him either in Washington, Norway or Canada. The only record of what happened is the letter to the Norwegian and Canadian Governments committing the IDB to repaying the trust fund.

The Ethics Committee concluded that there was sufficient evidence to establish that the former Technical advisor for the Fund violated certain provision of the Bank’s Code of Ethics. The former Technical Advisor [Kliksberg], a Fund consultant, was found to have used employees hired with Fund resources to perform work in furtherance of his personal endeavors. Based on these conclusions, the Bank did not renew his contract and his employment at the Bank has, therefore, ended.

This letter, of course, was not intended to see the light of day. And if not for a whistleblower claim and an intensive investigation by a journalist, it wouldn’t have. Nevertheless, with reference to accountability at the IDB, the Bank website has this to say:

The Inter-American Development Bank has developed a major overhaul of its anti-corruption framework to ensure that allegations of corruption in Bank financed activities are investigated and sanctioned more quickly, and whistleblowers enjoy stronger protections than before. The IDB is also strengthening the support it provides to countries to battle corruption.

But hey! In this particular case, the whistleblower lost her job and got paid something for her trouble only after more than two years without work. In contrast, the guilty party enjoyed the privilege of confidentiality provided by the Bank to protect his reputation in spite of his own thievery. The simple fact here: the IDB ensured that an unscrupulous consultant enjoyed strong protections, while the whistleblower was abandoned, and a trust fund at the IDB as well as another fund at UNDP were left for him to use at his discretion.

Outstanding. But here’s some consolation: at least someone got protection. Too bad it wasn’t the whistleblower.

Bea Edwards is Executive Director and International Director for the Government Accountability Project, the nation's leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization.