How Obama will spend your hard earned tax dollars.

With the problems with the US economy and crippling debt to the nation, instead of finding ways to cut our costs, Barack Hussein Obama proposes more wasteful spending. This time it is to the United Nations Development Program.

Barack Obama, who lamented Friday that “we have not managed our federal budget with any kind of discipline,” is nonetheless promising to spend $50 billion on a United Nations anti-poverty program that critics say will drive up American debt.

Yet Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, have pledged tens of billions in new spending on a U.N. program that promises cash to poor countries. The program is one of eight sweeping “Millennium Development Goals” the U.N. adopted in 2000.

“Obama and Biden will embrace the Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty around the world in half by 2015, and they will double our foreign assistance to $50 billion to achieve that goal,” the candidates vow in their campaign platform.

Johns Hopkins professor Steve Hanke said such spending would merely drive up American debt, while doing almost nothing for the world’s poor.

“It goes down a bureaucratic rat-hole, lining the pockets of people who are connected to the power structure,” said Hanke, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “It’s basically a system to redistribute income from middle class people in the United States to rich people in poor countries. It never reaches those people who are living on a dollar a day.”

Hanke said such expenditures are especially unwise in the wake of significant expansions of government and spending during President Bush’s tenure.

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Why should the United States have to be responsible for problems of poverty around the world? According to Senator Obama and the Democratic Leadership, there is a great amount of poverty here in the US. Shouldn't we deal with our own problems first?

Why not ask those nice rich Saudis to foot the bill for this one, or the Iranians, or the Venezuelans, or the nice rich emir of Dubai? They have plenty of money lying around to finance many mosques, terror groups, etc. They should be footing this bill instead of us.

To give more money to the UN Development Program is like flushing it down the toilet. It is a cesspool of corruption and greed.

Nearly 18 months after the United Nations Development Program promised to shed daylight on its internal operations to the countries that pay its bills, is the U.N.'s flagship anti-poverty agency going to live up to the deal?

That is one of the main issues in a tussle currently taking place within UNDP's 37-member executive board, which supervises the organization, and which winds up its semi-annual meeting today in New York.

The battle is led by the U.S. and a number of other Western nations that pay most of the UNDP's bills (the U.S. alone donates roughly $500 million annually to UNDP). Some of the Western states are concerned that UNDP is still trying to keep its $5 billion operations — and any problems it has with them — under as many wraps as possible. For its part, UNDP says it is happy to cooperate if only all the countries that make up its board can agree. The outcome of the battle is still uncertain.

The issue revolves in part around UNDP's disclosure of its internal audits to U.N. members that request them — a policy that became a hot button a year ago, when the U.S. demanded to look at UNDP audits for North Korea. The audits, conducted periodically of all UNDP programs, examine how the organization is spending its money and whether it is following its own rules while doing so. Traditionally, UNDP's top managers have considered them to be "management tools," and insisted they be kept confidential, even from the governing executive board.

But all that began to change in 2007, when U.S. diplomats got to examine a series of UNDP audits of its programs in North Korea. After reading them the U.S. accused UNDP of funneling millions of dollars in hard currency to the Kim regime, hiring North Korean government employees to fill sensitive UNDP jobs in the country, and passing on sensitive "dual use" technology that could be used in North Korea's nuclear program, all in violation of U.N. rules. Moreover, UNDP auditors had passed on many of those concerns to top management; nothing was done.

The essence of the U.S. charges was vindicated, and then some, in a special investigation of UNDP's operations in North Korea, which reported in June of this year. The lengthy document not only buttressed most of the U.S. charges, but also reported that a North Korean government employee who served as UNDP's finance officer also verified the receipt of the checks she wrote, in violation of one of UNDP's most fundamental anti-fraud rules.

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Fraud, mismanagement, greed is just some of the words to describe the UN in general the its Development Program exactly. Yet Senator Obama will just throw them more and more of our taxpayer money.

This is just one more Communist idea from the closet communist. It is bad for the US and the American taxpayer in general.

And just another reason not to vote for Barack Hussein Obama in November!

U.N. Development Program Violated U.N. Law,

Cross posted at Reject the UN

Routinely Passed on Millions to North Korean Regime

Business as usual at the UN. Instead of condemning North Korea and its crazy leader Kim Jong-il, they just pass on millions of dollars. Millions mostly from the United States. American taxpayers paying for the obscene lifestyle of this despot. But that is ok with the UN. It is not their money.

After more than two years of accusations and probes into the operations of the United Nations Development Program in North Korea, a weighty report finally reveals how routinely, and systematically, the agency disregarded U.N. regulations on how it conducted itself in Kim Jong-Il’s brutal dictatorship, passing on millions of dollars to the regime in the process.

The 353-page report, by a three-member “External Independent Investigative Review Panel” appointed by UNDP to investigate itself, was published with much fanfare last week after nine months of political maneuvering and research.

Of course with fanfare. It wouldn't be a UN Report without it. The corrupt officials (none of whom were ever elected by any people of the world) are proud of their achievements. They have to be proud of something.

The report depicts an organization that for years apparently considered itself immune from its own rules of procedure as well as the laws and regulations of countries that were trying to keep weapons of mass destruction out of Kim’s hands.

It also shows that UNDP apparently considered itself above the decisions of the United Nations Security Council itself when that organization tried — as it is still trying — to bar Kim from gaining the means to create more weapons of mass destruction.

That is the same Security Council whose decisions, U.N. officials argue, have the weight of international law when applied to the United States and the rest of the world.

But not to North Korea, Iran, or any other 2 bit dictator. They are above all laws.

“What this report shows is that UNDP has operated lawlessly for far too long,” said Mark Wallace, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who brought many of the original accusations against the U.N. anti-poverty agency to light in January 2007 after examining confidential UNDP internal audits of its North Korean operation.

“U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has indicated that integrity is a high U.N. priority," Wallace said. "It is now up to UNDP to follow that direction.”

Integrity is not a word that one can link with any organization of the UN. Lack of integrity, honesty or any of the human virtues is more of the norm at the UN. The idea that one has to have morals is something that any UN official isn't allowed to have.

But a close reading of the long and dense document, replete with mind-numbing footnotes, shows that Dervis is wrong.

Among other things, the report confirms that UNDP hired North Korean government employees to fill sensitive core staff posts, in violation of its own regulations, and that the Kim regime picked the staffers.

Previously this had been revealed by a report done by the United Nations Board of Auditors in May 2007 in the wake of Wallace’s concern. The 2007 report noted that the same violations had been reported in internal UNDP audits going back to 2001.

The UNDP office in North Korea paid the salaries of these staff directly to the government in hard currency — another forbidden practice. The report dryly notes, in a footnote on page 96, “It was not clear how much of these amounts were paid to the National Staff, if any.”

In an effort that may have been aimed at keeping at least some staffers from starving, UNDP gave them all hard-currency supplements in cash — another violation of its own rules.

The regime employees filled such critical jobs as UNDP finance officer; program officer slots that helped to design and oversee UNDP projects in the country; technology officer, who maintained all of UNDP’s internal and external communications and servers; and even the assistant to the head of the UNDP office, who presumably was in a position to see much, if not all, of the boss’ paperwork.

Millions of Dollars given by the United States. Dollars that could have been better spent here in the US instead of propping up Kim Jong-il's regime. Undermining the efforts of the United States to keep North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons. And yet we are suppose to just smile like imbeciles and forget this too? The trouble is that we will do just that instead of cutting off the funds. Instead of leaving that Tower of Babel, House of Corruption once and for all.