Swamp Watch: The United Nations
/Swamp Watch: The United Nations
A sprawling international bureaucracy with endless different bodies and agencies
Adapted Transcript
The annual United Nations General Assembly starts in New York this Tuesday, with President Trump scheduled to speak that morning.
As you'd expect, the assembled international bureaucrats, diplomats and plutocrats are hardly his biggest fans. Just before our election day, a top U.N. official said this:
"If Donald Trump is elected... I think it's without any doubt that he would be dangerous from an international point of view."
"Without any doubt", eh? Aren't these permanent bureaucrats supposed to be politically neutral? What a joke! Well, if he's a threat to anything, let's hope the President is a threat to the pompous, self-regarding, bloated, wasteful, and above all corrupt swamp on New York's East River
The United Nations is tonight's Swamp Watch.
The UN is a sprawling international bureaucracy with endless different bodies and agencies. Its executive arm, the Secretariat, has a five and a half billion dollar budget... 22 percent of which is funded by you, the U.S. taxpayer. So, where exactly is your money going?
Well - the U.N.'s a global thing, right? So you'd expect a bit of travel. But hundreds of millions of dollars on travel?
Just one U.N. agency, the World Health Organization, spent 200 million dollars last year on travel alone. They spent less than half that on fighting aids and hepatitis. And even less on malaria, which kills a million people a year, mostly children. But at least when it came to Ebola, no expense was spared...
...for Margaret Chan's accommodations.
She's the former World Health Organization's director, and on a trip to Africa in the fight against Ebola she stayed - at our expense - in the biggest presidential suite at the Palm Camayenne hotel in Conakry, Guinea. It cost over a thousand dollars a night. But, hey, it's got great reviews on TripAdvisor.
Then there's the case of former U.N. General Assembly President John Ashe. He was charged with taking 1.3 million dollars in bribes from Chinese businessmen to use his official U.N. position to advance their business interests. It included a 500 thousand dollar payment for Ashe to push for the construction of a multi-billion dollar U.N. conference center in China. As John Ashe showed, it's a pretty cushy life being a United Nations crony. He had 59 thousand dollars worth of hand tailored suits, two 54-thousand dollar Rolexes, and a 30,000 dollar basketball court in his New York home.
While these bribes and kickbacks - or just good old fashioned taxes paid by American workers - are paying for a luxury lifestyle for elite diplomats, staggering levels of waste and fraud end up stealing money from the poorest people in the world, like those in Somalia. Between 2010 and 2013, the U.N. doled out 260 million dollars through the "Common Humanitarian Fund" for Somalia - money intended to pay for food, water and medicine. But according to confidential U.N. reports obtained by Fox News, much of it was given up-front to three local organizations that produced phony receipts, padded invoices, and doctored project reports.
Later, the U.N.'s internal oversight body estimated that each of these local outfits engaged in fraud. In fact, as much as 79 percent of their project funding was phony.
the un's internal audit found approximately 79 per cent of somalia project funding was fraudulent
And unbelievably, investigators found evidence that some of the money may have gone to the Islamist terror group, al-Shabaab. In an email, a U.N. contractor asked a superior for money transfers, while writing that another colleague is, "pressed by al-Shabaab to do the three payments as quickly as possible."
the un's internal report also found that the money may have gone to the al-shabaab terrorist group.
Don't think this kind of fraud is an isolated example. Just last year, its own report across 28 U.N. organizations found a, "sense of impunity for fraud perpetrators." More than half of the sixteen thousand staffers surveyed said they believe fraudulent behavior goes unpunished.
Remember that when you see all the grandstanding at the U.N. next week and the endless lectures about how terrible America is, they take money from U.S. taxpayers, use it to fund their luxury lifestyles, and then lecture America on, I don't know, morality and human rights. Just look at the U.N Human Rights Council, whose members include such well-known paragons of human rights as:
- Saudi Arabia, where women can't drive. (UPDATE: they subsequently reversed this ban)
- Rwanda, where human rights watch condemns arbitrary detention and torture by the military and police.
- And Venezuela, where - well, you know about Venezuela.
The United Nations Human Rights Council has condemned Israel, a democracy, more than any other nation on earth, including murderous dictatorships like China, Syria, and Iran. And now they're trying to organize a blacklist for any company that does business with Israel. In March, they even passed a resolution on cultural diversity co-sponsored by North Korea.
What a farce!
With conflict, civil wars, refugee crises, and famine around the world, of course there's a need for coordinated humanitarianism
But when that noble mission gets corrupted by elite diplomats and bureaucrats more interested in Rolexes and room service than the world's poor, it's time for us to stop writing them blank checks.
Let's drain the swamp at the United Nations.