Do you remember the "Green Climate Fund", launched last December in Durban as some kind of substitute for the failure to agree on any other concrete matters?
The fund is supposed to distribute up to $100 billion a year by 2020 to poor countries fighting (non-existent, human caused) global warming. These enormous sums would - surprise, surprise - be taken out of "rich" countries´ taxpayers´ pockets.
Apparently the western leaders, who committed their countries to this unheard of transfer of billions (most of which would go to corrupted and authoritarian third word governments) did not fully understand what they were doing. Maybe they thought that this was something similar to the usual "commitments" to save the world in 2050 or 2100.
Unfortunately, the "Green Climate Fund" is supposed to get going soon, and the third world dictators are already eagerly demanding to receive "their" share of the promised windfall.
In the typical UN fashion, a vast bureacracy, with hundreds of highly paid international officials is already in the planning. The most pressing issue is now, which country will get to host the huge new "Green Climate Fund" headquarters. Germany, Mexico, Namibia, Poland, South Korea and Switzerland have volunteered to host the bureacrats.
But there is one problem that may delay the project: The people planning the GCF want to make sure that the new organization - and above all, its highly paid international bureaucrats - gets the same immunity as UN organizations have, although the fund is not officially an UN institution:
According to the U.N.’s convention on privileges and immunities as applied in 1947 to U.N. “specialized agencies,” their property and assets “shall enjoy immunity from every form of legal process,” except when waived. And even then, waivers can never apply “to any measure of execution,” meaning whatever was done with them.
U.N. premises as well as property and assets, are immune from “search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation and any other form of interference, whether by executive, administrative judicial or legislative action.” All archives and documents, including even those “held” by the agencies, are considered “inviolable.”
Such agencies can move money, gold or any kinds of funds outside of any national regulation; are exempt from taxes, customs duties and import or export restrictions.
The same bulletproof status goes for their officials.
In the case of something like the GCF, this is “an issue of extending privileges and immunities to property rights,” in the opinion of Allan Meltzer, a distinguished professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University. “And these privileged people will not necessarily protect the property rights of others,” he adds.
A consultant at various times to the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and Congress, Melzer also chaired a Clinton-era congressionally-mandated advisory commission on International financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Says he: “Rather than extending immunities, we should be emphasizing the rule of law. If we want to do environmental things, we should do them above board, not in secret.”
--
“Immunities amount to a veil of secrecy,” says Bea Edwards, executive director of the Government Accountability Project, a Washington-based whistleblower protection organization.
“They are an immunity from external audit or oversight. They build in a structural conflict of interest at any immune institution for any international oversight mechanism.”
Read the entire article here
Most likely the "Green Climate Fund" will never receive anything close to the anticipated amount of money, but one thing is certain: Even if the final cash flow will be only 5 or 10% of the annual $100 billion promised, somewhere in one of the six candidate countries a huge headqarters, housing hundreds of highly paid global warming bureacrats, will be erected as a monument to global (warming) stupidity.
No comments:
Post a Comment