While meaningless United Nations hand-wringing over the North Korean nuclear weapons program garners the headlines, the world body is moving ahead with a global conference to lay the groundwork for world government financed by global taxes. The communist head of the U.N. General Assembly is leading the effort, but he is getting crucial support from “progressive” economists who advise the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party.

The United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on Development, previously scheduled for June 1-3, will now take place on June 24-26.

U.N. General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto is the U.N. point man on these “global governance” issues. We noted his role at the United Nations in a column last October. Now, even the New York Times is paying attention to what this crackpot has been up to.

D’Escoto, the Times said, believes the way out of the global financial crisis “should be lined with all manner of new global institutions, authorities and advisory boards,” including the Global Stimulus Fund, the Global Public Goods Authority, the Global Tax Authority, the Global Financial Products Safety Commission, the Global Financial Regulatory Authority, the Global Competition Authority, the Global Council of Financial and Economic Advisers, the Global Economic Coordination Council, and the World Monetary Board.

D’Escoto is the former foreign minister of Communist Sandinista Nicaragua and Catholic Priest of the Maryknoll Order who advocates Marxist-oriented liberation theology and won the Lenin Peace Prize from the old Soviet Union. D’Escoto also claims a Master’s of Science from Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

The Times interviewed Paul Oquist, D’Escoto’s senior adviser for the conference, who sat beneath portraits of Fidel Castro of Cuba, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, among others.

The problem is that the Times, in its story, “At U.N., a Sandinista’s Plan for Recovery,” didn’t mention until the 13^th paragraph that the official U.N. list of “experts” behind the plan include an American economist, Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning professor from Columbia University who supported and contributed to Obama’s presidential campaign and advises Congressional Democrats on economic policy.

Stiglitz, an advocate of nationalizing U.S. banks, is also a member of the Socialist International Commission on Global Financial Issues and his name appears on a separate list of 15 “special advisers” to D’Escoto obtained from the U.N. by Inner City Press. Another name on the list-Noam Chomsky-is on the board of the Communist Party spin-off, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. 

Working With A Castroite

Aides to D’Escoto “point out repeatedly that the president got many of his ideas from a distinguished panel of experts led by an American economist and Nobel laureate, Joseph E. Stiglitz,” the Times noted.

Stiglitz, a former Clinton official and financial contributor to the Democratic Party and its candidates, wrote the book, Making Globalization Work, in which he argues for a variety of global tax schemes that would cost American taxpayers billions of dollars. Last October he met behind closed doors with congressional Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to devise the economic “stimulus” plan of more federal spending and debt.

Incredibly, Stiglitz was quoted in a U.N. press release last October as saying that the United Nations, which is notorious for corruption, had to intervene in the financial crisis because it was “the one institution that was inclusive and had political legitimacy…”

Another one of the “experts” the Times neglected to mention was Robert Johnson, former managing director at Soros Fund Management and board member of the Institute for America’s Future, a sponsor of next week’s June 1-3 “progressive” conference in Washington, D.C. that will honor pro-Castro Rep. Barbara Lee and socialist labor leader John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO.

 The Hand of Soros

The Soros-funded Open Society Institute gave the Institute for America’s Future $500,000 in 2008 in the area of “Idea Generation and Policy Change.”

Johnson also serves on the board of the Democracy Alliance, a wealthy liberal group that includes Soros and is committed to “fostering collaboration among progressive leaders and institutions…” 

Johnson’s involvement in the United Nations Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis demonstrates how this “collaboration” is occurring at the global level and involves representatives of socialist and communist governments at the U.N.

Other “experts” on the D’Escoto panel come from Russia and China, with one of his “special representatives,” Oswaldo Martinez, identified as only being from Communist Cuba with no biography attached. Another D’Escoto “special representative,” socialist and Jesuit Priest Francois Houtart, is the author of “Socialism for the 21^st Century.”

Toward this end, the “Report of the Commission of Experts of the President of the UN General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System” raises the possibility of global taxes to finance one of President Obama’s legislative goals when he was a senator-committing 0.7 percent of Gross National Income as “official development assistance” or foreign aid. This was the essence of Obama’s Global Poverty Act, which never came up for a full Senate vote because of increasing public awareness that it would commit the U.S. to spending $845 billion in additional foreign aid. 

Global Tax Agenda

 Under the heading of “Innovative Sources of Financing” (page 109), the U.N. document declares that “For some time, the difficulty in meeting the UN official assistance target of 0.7 per cent of GNI of industrial countries as official development assistance, as well as the need for adequate funding for the provision of global and regional public goods (peace building, fighting global health pandemics, combating climate change and sustaining the global environment more generally) has generated proposals on how to guarantee stable sources of financing for these objectives.”

These proposals, the document says, include initiatives involving “taxation for global objectives.” It adds, “Two suggestions deserve special attention: a carbon tax and a levy on financial transactions.” The global carbon tax, the document says, could generate $130 billion a year, while estimates of the revenues from a currency transaction tax range from $15 to $35 billion. Other global taxation options are also examined.

However, as D’Escoto and his “experts” move ahead with the U.N.’s global economic conference, some of Obama’s representatives at the U.S. Mission to the U.N. seem to have grown sensitive to the communist’s frequent outbursts of loony leftism and anti-American rhetoric. Such remarks could bring unwarranted attention to what D’Escoto and the “progressive” American economists are trying to implement in the international economic realm.

For example, The Washington Post recently reported on American criticism of D’Escoto’s statements about Iran having no nuclear weapons program, exaggerating civilian deaths in Iraq, and calling for the release of Cuban Communist agents imprisoned in the U.S. D’Escoto “has repeatedly abused his position to pursue his personal agenda, and in doing so he diminishes the office and harms the General Assembly,” one U.S. official was quoted as saying.

The Times story about the upcoming global economic conference said that D’Escoto’s critics, who are “legion,” say that some of his proposals-”like levying an international tax on all financial transactions or replacing the dollar as the international reserve currency”-”are well beyond the role of the United Nations.” But none of these critics was identified as being in the Obama Administration or at the U.S. Mission to the U.N. Some of the critics seemed to be ambassadors from foreign countries who were peeved that they didn’t get more direct input into formulating the conference document.

However, other than being too outspoken about the elaborate plans for new global institutions and world government that are being drawn up, it would appear that D’Escoto’s goals and those of the Obama Administration correspond nicely. Perhaps that is because they share some of the same economic “experts” and Marxist philosophy.

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