Monday, July 9, 2018

An encapsulation of the UN's overall worthlessness

US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has a piece at NRO today on the idiotic UN report on poverty in our country.

The report demonstrates the collective cluelessness that arises when an international body is formed that gives equal weight to scum regimes and sane, grown-up countries trying to live by humane values and achieve the various forms of advancement that make their societies livable.

ast month, the United Nations released a report about poverty in America. A single researcher spent two weeks in our country, visiting four states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. His report was harshly critical, condemning America for “punish[ing] those who are not in employment,” among other farcical notions.
Everyone knows there is poverty in America. Thousands of public officials at the federal, state, and local levels of government attempt to address poverty, as they should. Thousands more nonprofit, charitable, and religious organizations honorably dedicate themselves to fighting poverty in our country.
Think about how this self-congratulatory assemblage of tyrants and grandstanders has chosen to spend its time, money and human energy:

 It is patently ridiculous for the U.N. to spend its scarce resources — more of which come from the United States than from any other country — studying poverty in the wealthiest country in the world, a country where the vast majority is not in poverty, and where public and private-sector social safety nets are firmly in place to help those who are.
Instead, the U.N. might have studied poverty in the Congo, where 60 percent of the entire population lacks the basics of food and electricity. Or Burundi, where the typical annual income is $280. Or Venezuela, where narco-state dictators have driven a once prosperous country into the ground with an inflation rate over 25,000 percent, and where diseases that were once thought eliminated are now reappearing. 

When there are many dozens of countries where poverty consumes most of the population, and where corrupt governments deliberately make the problem much worse, why would the U.N. study poverty in America? The answer is politics.
Take a closer look at what the U.N. report says we should do about poverty. It reads like a socialist political manifesto of higher taxes, government-run health care, and “decriminaliz[ing] being poor” (never mind that nowhere in America is it a crime to be poor). 

The report also distorts and misrepresents the facts about poverty in America in ways that a biased political opponent might. For example, it states that 18.5 million Americans live in “extreme poverty” and 5.3 million live in “Third World conditions of absolute poverty.” In fact, these numbers fail to incorporate the vast majority of welfare assistance provided to low-income households, such as food stamps, Medicaid, and refundable tax credits. The report also exaggerates poverty by excluding pension and Social Security assets from its calculations. The truth is that America’s median household income has hit record highs. Wages have risen faster under President Trump for low- and middle- income earners than for high earners. And for the first time on record America now has more job openings than unemployed workers.
The best way for the US to proceed on any policy matter, from North Korea to African poverty to Iran-Arab tensions, is to ignore the UN. Leave it completely out of the proceedings. As an entity with  a mission distinct from that of any of the countries comprising it - well, that's not exactly correct; its mission hews pretty closely to those of, say, Venezuela, Iran and Russia -  it has not and cannot have any idea what a nation-state like the United States is all about. Its input is of absolutely no value.
 

14 comments:

  1. What do you suggest for a replacement as an international forum to approach both war and statecraft? Or don't we need international coalitions any longer?

    ReplyDelete
  2. You might as well say "Why spend money studying poverty when there are potholes on 25th St." Whataboutism run rampant.

    Meanwhile, "Knee Pads" Haley appears to have joined the Trump War on Babies, given our UN delegation's threat to slap trade and other sanctions on Ecuador (another brown-skinned country) for proposing a resolution (non-binding) urging member nations to promote breast-feeding over infant formula -- yet another anti-science, pro-corporate profit position.

    These people...

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have a feeling that her private views on trade differ from those of her boss.

    Yay corporate profits!

    Mr. Dings, I propose no replacement at all. Attempts at forming "international-community"-type bodies in this fallen world are always folly. Let sovereign nations form alliances and enter into treaties as fits their own interests. Period.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I get it, moving from a post WWII semblance of order to a pre WWIII disemblance of disorder. Whatever Nettie wants I presume.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Well, the West, broadly speaking, is the grownup at the table, and Israel is most definitely a Western nation, and Netanyahu understands this and the threats arrayed against Israel and the West in general, so you're not too far from where it's at.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Look, the arrangements of sovereign nations seeing to their own interests is for all intents and purposes how it's worked out anyway. The UN Security Council issues a lot of condemnations, and sometimes the UN contributes "peacekeeping forces" in various locations, but noe of it ever moves the needle.

    ReplyDelete
  7. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  8. This is embarrassing. I relied on a single and, as it turns out, incorrect source on the UN connection. The US "put corporations before people, especially kids" policy that gets your nipples so hard was presented at a conference sponsored by WHO. Sorry for any confusion.

    ReplyDelete
  9. "Bottom line: Trump (and his idealogical buddy bloggie) simply doesn’t buy into, or understand, basic concepts such as collective security, burden-sharing, forward defense and the balance of power. He just doesn’t get it. This myopic, isolationist view, consistent with his “America First” outlook, reflects Trump’s hostility to multilateralism in general. He scorns the UN, and has cut its US funding and boycotted its human rights council in Geneva. He repudiates World Trade Organization rules, adopting unilateral, protectionist tariffs that spark trade wars and threaten European jobs."

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/08/donald-trump-uk-visit-contempt-for-european-allies?CMP=fb_gu

    ReplyDelete
  10. That's a blatant falsehood and you know it. I am no ideological buddy of Trump and I agree that he is making a mess of our key alliances.

    ReplyDelete
  11. But that's mixing apples and oranges. Tending to key alliances is a whole other matter from acquiescing to the things that the UN does.

    ReplyDelete
  12. In fact, the more I think about it, the idea that I am "ideological buddies" with Donald Trump, given what I've written about him here over the last three years, is extremely laughable.

    ReplyDelete
  13. You seem to dig most of what he does that affects us all on this planet. What would you call that? The world thinks you're both conservatives.

    ReplyDelete
  14. As I've said over and over and o0ver here at LITD, that is the most unfortunate aspect of his election - that the world would get the mistaken notion that he represented conservatism.

    That said, yes, I am pleased with a number of developments he's had a hand in, most notably judicial appointments and moving environmental policy away from the utter fiction that the global climate is in sone kind of trouble. But to willfully ignore all the posts about him here, which are uniformly negative, diminishes the seriousness of your position.

    ReplyDelete