The UN’s Non-Conspiracy for World Government and Global Taxation

by Steven Yates

Suppose, loyal reader, you and I were to work together in secret and hatch a plan that would affect others – perhaps a lot of others – without their knowledge or consent. Would we or would we not be launching a conspiracy? I think we would have to say, Yes.

Now suppose we do the same thing, but instead of keeping it secret we put our agenda on the World Wide Web where anyone with a computer, a modem and an ISP can access it. Never mind that we’ve written it in mindnumbing bureaucratese. Never mind that most of the public is more interested in sports, the Oscars or the latest Survivor series. Never mind that its reporting by the mainstream media is minimal and focused on side issues. The point is, our machinations would be available to any literate person who has the will and the know-how to seek them out.

I doubt we could still call it a conspiracy. What would be the point?

But that is the state of affairs with the UN’s latest confab, the International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD) in Monterrey, Mexico, held from 18 – 22 March, 2002. This meeting continued the agenda set forth in Our Global Neighborhood issued by the Commission on Global Governance in 1995, restated in the Millennium Declaration, and now incorporated into the Monterrey Consensus agreement. Except for the Internet, of course, media reporting was skimpy, even though representatives of 171 nations signed the agreement. The meeting was attended by hundreds of other luminaries, from leaders of non-governmental organizations to CEOs of multinational corporations who attended an International Business Forum on "public / private partnerships."

The Monterrey Consensus is fairly tough slogging. The phrase mindnumbing bureaucratese pays the document a compliment. There are abundant phrases like global partnerships, sustainable development, good governance, appropriate policy and regulatory frameworks, involving all stakeholders and so on and so on, for 16 pages (73 paragraphs) of small print. One suspects that its writers wanted to discourage prying eyes. Most people indeed will lose interest before they get to the second page. Much the same may be said for the UN website itself. It is a disorganized, hard-to-navigate mess; finding specific information on it is challenging even for experienced Web-hounds.

But there is enough in this document to give away the game when translated into plain, words-mean-things English – for those who persevere. For example, in the very first paragraph of the Consensus is the overall goal of the meeting: "… to eradicate poverty, achieve sustained economic growth and promote sustainable development as we advance to a fully inclusive and equitable global economic system." In the next breath (paragraph 2): "We note with concern current estimates of dramatic shortfalls in resources required to achieve the internationally agreed development goals, including those contained in the United Nations Millennium Declaration." Thus the need for "[m]obilizing and increasing the effective use of financial resources and achieving the national and international economic conditions" needed to achieve the goals; this "demands a new partnership between developed and developing nations. We commit ourselves to sound policies, good governance at all levels and the rule of law" (paragraph 4).

Okay, time out. Once translated from bureaucratese, is this or is this not a recipe for global socialism, under the auspices of a global superelite? (Superelite here means: an elite operating freely at an international of a national level, with the additional clout and resources this implies.) Is it or is it not a call for massive redistribution of the wealth from "developed" nations (i.e., the U.S.) to "developing ones" (i.e., much of the rest of the world). What, finally, is the cash value of the last sentence in the above quote? The UN steadfastly denies any commitment to setting up a world government. According to Our Global Neighborhood, "global governance … does not imply world government or world federalism." But then what in blazes does it imply?

Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) has accused the UN of planning to institute a global tax to finance its agenda. One searches the Monterrey Consensus in vain for any direct reference to such a tax. However, the material quoted above continues. Again, even untranslated from bureaucratese, the language is suggestive: "We also commit ourselves to mobilizing domestic resources, attracting international flows, promoting international trade as an engine for development, increasing international financial and technical cooperation for development, sustainable debt financing and external debt relief, and enhancing the coherence and consistency of the international monetary, financial and trading systems" [emphasis mine]. A bit further in the document, this is expanded upon: "In our common pursuit of growth, poverty eradication and sustainable development, a critical challenge is to ensure the necessary internal conditions for mobilizing domestic savings, both public and private…. An enabling domestic environment is vital for mobilizing domestic resources" [all emphases mine]. Language that suggests global taxation and massive redistribution of wealth and resources is supplemented by language suggestive of global welfare-statism, involving both massive amounts of corporate welfare (which have euphemistically been called investments for some time). Finally (this is in paragraph 15): "An effective, efficient, transparent and accountable system for mobilizing public resources and managing their use by governments is essential. We recognize the need to secure fiscal sustainability, along with equitable and efficient tax systems and administration…" [emphasis mine]. This is as close as the Monterrey Consensus gets to a statement of intent to set up a global tax system.

In related documents, the long-term intent is clear. Consider the Report of the High-Level Panel on Financing for Development, Executive Summary. It also notes "the task of mobilizing the financial resources needed," observes that the FfD confab "will be a key event in agreeing a strategy [sic.] for better resource mobilization." Then, once we have waded through several more pages of bureaucratese, we come to the following:

The international community should consider whether the common interest would be furthered by providing stable and contractual resources for these purposes. Politically, taxing for the solution of global problems will be much more difficult than taxing for purely domestic purposes. If only out of self interest, new sources of finance should be considered without prejudice by all parties involved. In particular, a currency transactions tax (otherwise known as the Tobin tax) have [sic.] often been proposed as a new source of finance.

There, lest there be any doubt, is the call for a UN-sponsored global tax – on the UN’s website, not a site put up by a "conspiracy theorist." The document calls for "further rigorous technical study" of the Tobin tax, named for the Yale University professor who came up with the idea. It is true that the Tobin tax would only lay taxes on cross-border currency transactions, and so would not affect those uninvolved in international business. But a door would be opened, and we might never be able to close it again. The UN would have been granted taxing authority to pay for its agenda, and this authority would quickly expand. Also being kicked around, after all, are ideas of taxing carbon emissions, air travel, the Internet and so on. None of these are specifically cross-border. But as UN operations become more expansive and expensive, the need to hire and pay more bureaucrats will grow. This is the way power centers operate, after all. Look at the history of our own tax system.

The Report accordingly concludes with a specific recommendation for the FfD confab:

There, in black and white, is the proposal for the specific outfit that would be empowered to lay and collect the global tax. An International Tax Organization, whether called that or something bureaucratic like the International Resource Mobilization Organization (gasp!), would assume its place alongside the World Bank, the International Monetery Fund, the World Trade Organization and other contemporary behemoths of globalist centralization. Presumably I hardly need point out that territoriality principle is a euphemism for national sovereignty, and by globalization the authors hardly mean global free trade in open markets but trade micromanaged at the highest levels under the auspices of governments, megacorporations involved in "public / private partnerships" and the World Trade Organization.

The Monterrey Consensus, along with other critical UN documents, uses the phrase rule of law. This sounds good, of course. But one can be assured that no one is referring to the concept freedom believers understand – that of law to which kings and governments are no less subject to than ordinary mortals. When the superelites use the phrase rule of law you can guarantee they mean law established by them, imposed through international agreements designed to control economic activity through "investments" and "partnerships" of various sorts. A political structure of enforcement is in the works, involving an expanded UN Security Council, a new Economic Security Council (ESC) (under whose authority the World Trade Organization and the International Labor Organization would operate) and an expanded UN International Law Commission. The superelites already have their International Criminal Court. The ESC is central to the UN’s strategy for micromanaging the global economy. According to Our Global Neighborhood, "[t]he ESC is designed to centralize and consolidate policy making for not only world trade, but also for the international monetary system and world development." Its own documents leave no doubt that UN superelites plan eventually to have their own army, police force, branches of international courts, hundreds of offices charged with micromanaging American communities large and small to ensure "sustainable growth patterns," and so on.

At what point, asks Sovereignty International chairman Henry Lamb in a recent WorldNetDaily article, does all this become world government. The UN agenda has been in the making since 1945, the year of its Charter. Since the early 1990s, the UN effort to dominate the world’s political and economic systems has accelerated. It has drawn on every available cause ranging from radical environmentalism to radical feminism. In the first case, we are all aware of the Rio Summit of 1992, the Kyoto Protocol and the hysterical proclamations about global warming. Regarding the latter, the Monterrey Consensus makes perhaps a dozen references to "gender-sensitive development," "gender equality," "empowering women," "gender budget policies," "mainstream[ing] the gender perspective," and so on. Speaking of what radical feminists in the globalist movement want, a separate "women’s declaration – a rough draft apparently no longer on the UN site – openly proposed "the establishment of a tax upon foreign financial transactions, with a percentage that increases in times of crisis.…"

Most people do not realize how much influence the UN now has, even at the level of local politics and the local school board. Buzzwords such as sustainable communities and reinventing government, not uncommon at the local level, amount to UN-speak – the former traceable to Agenda 21, the UN’s radical environmentalist program launched in 1992 at the Rio Summit. Goals 2000 and the School-To-Work movement are products of UN-think, standing as evidence of UN efforts toward transforming children into "global citizens" through a global curriculum one can guarantee wouldn’t emphasize the Declaration of Independence.

President Bush rejected the global tax. But his actions were very equivocal. He had already promised a 50 percent increase in foreign aid over the next three years (around $5 billion), to be financed by our homeland tax serfdom. With this, he basically conceded the UN’s major premise: the poverty of "developing nations" is "caused" by "American wealth" and that the U.S. government is obliged to do something about it. He also held a meeting with his buddy, Mexican president Vicente Fox, who happens to be one of the leading proponents of a global tax (also of unlimited immigration and, with his predecessor Ernesto Zedillo, eventually dissolving the border so that the American Southwest can rejoin Mexico). So who knows what Bush’s true motives are, or what he will do next go around?

The confab in Mexico concluded without the UN getting its global tax. But no one in his right mind believes the superelites will give up. The FfD confab created a new commission to monitor "progress"; the Consensus ends by calling for a "followup international conference to review the implementation of the Monterrey Consensus." The march toward world government will therefore go on, despite the occasional bump in the road. The UN holds its next World Summit on Sustainable Development in August in Johannesburg, South Africa, and will no doubt renew the same calls – and no doubt, also, we will hear sharp criticisms of the U.S. for refusing to allow the UN to serve as the agent of its redistribute-the-wealth programs.

It is important that we be clear as we can about what we are dealing with. We have seen that despite the bureaucratese, the message comes through the loud and clear; for example: "Upholding the Charter of the United Nations and building upon the values of the Millennium Declaration, we commit ourselves to promoting national and global economic systems based on the principles of justice, equity, democracy, participation, transparency, accountability and inclusion" (paragraph 9 of the Monterrey Consensus). Taken in aggregate, and to answer our earlier question, this is indeed a call for global socialism – massive redistribution of the wealth to be financed through a global tax paid by everyone who works for a living. The UN clearly sees itself as an emerging world government.

This, I repeat and emphasize, is not a conspiracy as conspiracies are usually defined. It may have started that way, but now, there it is, on the UN’s website. Conspiracy or not by some formal definition, this ought to lay to rest once and for all whether or not there really is a superelite bent on dominating the world and transforming the rest of us "commoners" into global serfs tied to trades and specialties where we will never see the big picture. American politicians lack both the principle and the will to resist indefinitely. And so the question remains: will American citizens get informed and organized against the UN agenda, or will they continue to indulge the soma offered by sports, the Oscars and the latest Survivor series? After all, once a "Mobilization of Domestic Financial Resources for Int’l Development" withholding starts showing up on every working American’s paycheck, it will be too late.

March 30, 2002

Steven Yates [send him mail] is a Margaret "Peg" Rowley Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, where he is writing a book entitled The Paradox of Liberty. He has a PhD in philosophy, and is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS Press, 1994), and dozens of articles in both academic and nonacademic periodicals. He has relocated to Auburn, Alabama.

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