Herd Watching

I’m by no means a global conspiracy guy or a Ron Paul supporter. I do think the UN is one of the most corrupt and inept organizations that has ever existed, but that’s just a simple reality. So it takes more than shrill panic on the conspiracy blogs to raise my eyebrows.

However the fact that Obama supports something as ill considered as S.2433 (the desperately named “Global Poverty Act of 2007″) tell me a lot about the guy, and none of it good. The bill is at best a pointless political machination to pretend he did something, and at worst it is a sign that this guy really is naive enough to think the UN is the answer to anything.

“To require the President to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.” - S.2433

Sounds OK right? Now here is where the freakoids will start screaming about the UN coming to take your guns and wire up your fillings in the next 24 hours. That isn’t my point here. My point is that this bill (as many do) binds a US administration to support and further a UN action that has radical problems.

While S.2433 is careful to limit it’s literal scope to a subset of the goals included in the UN “Millennium Development Goals” you can’t rally pick and choose when you support something like this. The MDG’s are part of the United Nations Millennium Declaration.  The UNMD starts off as the normal kind of useless feel good UN crap we expect, but then the interesting stuff slips in.

• The UNMD advocates member states to recognize the authority of the international criminal court - a bad idea.
• The UNMD pushes member states to adopt the deeply flawed Kyoto Protocol
• There is a desperate plea in there to give the UN more power and resources, with the illusion that investing more heavily in this thing will make it effective

This think can be spun into all sorts of panic… none of it needed. It is just silly, and doesn’t make me love the guy - but I don’t think it’s a secret attempt to deconstruct the US.

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