"Privatizing" the UN: International Fascism.

With the UN acting as the occupying power in East Timor, Kosovo, and elsewhere, the world body may consider "the partial privatization of nation-building activities," suggested Jamie Frederic Metzl of the Council on Foreign Relations in an August 13th Christian Science Monitor essay.

For instance, Metzl suggests, "Instead of asking the UN to establish and run a finance ministry for a transitional territory like East Timor ... interested donor states could create a fund from which contracts for specific services could be drawn. Local leaders could offer a contract for establishing a ministry of finance and training local personnel.... Firms with expertise in finance would then submit competing proposals to be considered by a corporate board of diverse local leaders, overseen and assisted by a UN ombudsman. The same model could be used for other basic government functions within a hybrid UN/indigenous/private framework."

"Although many of the firms that could provide these types of services may not now exist," continues Metzl, "the partial privatization of UN civil administration would allow such firms to grow. This process would parallel recent trends in international development and military assistance, in which private firms such as Development Alternatives International and Dyncorps compete for American USAID [Agency for International Development] and Department of Defense contracts to fulfill seemingly public policy functions."

It should be remembered that "public-private partnerships" are the foundation of fascism, a political and economic model in which government controls, but does not own, the means of production. The proposal described by Metzl would create a huge corporate constituency for UN interventions -- but this is to be expected of any proposal that would award huge taxpayer subsidies to corporate interests engaged in the hands-on work of building global socialism.