Bush's foreign aid fanaticism: the Bush administration is overseeing huge infusions of money to the massively corrupt UN in the name of morally required foreign aid.

Pop Singer Billy Joel once wrote about a "New York State of Mind." As George Bush entered the Big Apple on September 14 to attend the special United Nations summit of world leaders, he was in a decidedly "Marxist state of mind." He had come to the confab on New York's Turtle Bay to announce his support for what has been heralded as the UN's great "reform" program. But make no mistake about it, the program has nothing to do with reform and everything to do with--as the UN's leaders themselves proclaimed--"strengthening the United Nations."

A large part of that strengthening involves a huge new financial infusion to the world body--much of it to come from the already bankrupt and over-indebted U.S. Treasury. In his speech before the UN General Assembly, Bush publicly pledged full allegiance to the financial redistributionist schemes endorsed by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the legions of corrupt kleptocrats who populate the UN bureaucracy and run so many regimes of the UN's member states.

Radical Commitment

"To spread a vision of hope, the United States is determined to help nations that are struggling with poverty. We are committed to the Millennium Development Goals," Bush told the UN General Assembly. Too few Americans appreciate just how huge and how radical this commitment is.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) are, ostensibly, a set of welfare goals laid out by the UN in 2000 aimed at eliminating poverty and infectious diseases, guaranteeing environmental "sustainability," and the like. To accomplish these goals, the UN is demanding that the wealthy nations dramatically increase their "development assistance" (UN-speak for foreign aid), with much of it to be funneled through the UN and its agencies, of course. "At Monterrey in 2002, we agreed to a new vision for the way we fight poverty, and curb corruption, and provide aid in this new millennium," Bush told the three-day summit celebrating the 60th anniversary of the United Nations. "Developed countries agreed to support those efforts, including increased aid to the nations that undertake the necessary reforms. My own country has sought to implement the Monterrey Consensus by establishing the new Millennium Challenge Account."

The so-called Monterrey Consensus committed the United States to "increasing international financial and technical cooperation for development [and] sustainable debt financing and external debt relief" and to "make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 per cent of GNP (Gross National Product) as ODA (Official Development Assistance) to developing countries." Let's look at what this actually means. The U.S. gross national product for 2004 was $11.788 trillion. Implementation of the Monterrey Consensus means a Republican White House and a Republican Congress sticking the American taxpayers for more than $84 billion per year in foreign aid. Thus, the Monterrey Consensus requires the United States to more than double its official foreign aid budget.

These are not paltry sums! However, far more important than the enormous amounts of principal involved, are the even more important principles at stake. Like most UN figures, the selection of 0.7 percent for ODA is completely arbitrary. It could just as well be 0.4 or 0.8--or 1.8, for that matter. And once the ODA principle is firmly established, the percentage will be completely negotiable, and we can be quite sure that it will go ever upward. What's important is that President Bush has signed the U.S. on in support of the principle that adopting the UN's ODA target is part of "our moral obligation to help others," as he put it. Most of us accept that we do indeed have "a moral obligation to help others," but recognize that it is precisely that, a moral--not a legal--obligation, one that is properly determined by individual conscience, not government coercion, as to the amount we give, the recipients we choose to give to, and the agency we choose to deliver the aid.

A corollary principle implicitly endorsed by President Bush is that an increasing amount of our foreign aid, or ODA, will be channeled through the UN, thus providing the UN's reprobates and tyrants with the enormous and growing revenue stream that they have always coveted.

Foreign Aid Laundry List 

Amazingly, even though his administration has been more supportive of more radical programs for UN empowerment than any previous administration, many of his loyal supporters (and opponents) still cling to the false image--projected both by the Bush spin machine and the media spinmeisters--that George W. Bush is the most anti-UN president ever.

Many on both the left and the right may find it hard to believe, but the left-wing Clinton administration actually presided over a real cut in foreign aid appropriations (from $17.2 billion in 1993 to $16.5 billion in 2001). The "conservative" George Bush, on the other hand, has led the charge to a more than 125 percent increase in foreign aid giveaways in just his first four years as president (from $16.5 billion in 2001 to $37.8 billion in 2005). And Bush had brought with him to the UN a laundry list of new foreign aid spending programs he plans to send to Congress for approval:

Through our bilateral programs and the Global Fund, the United States will continue to lead the world in providing the resources to defeat the plague of HIV-AIDS....

We're also working to fight malaria.... To achieve that goal, we've pledged to increase our funding for malaria treatment and prevention by more than $1.2 billion over the next five years.

... Today I am announcing a new International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza....

The G-8 agreed at Gleneagles to go further. To break the lend-and-forgive cycle permanently, we agreed to cancel 100 percent of the debt for the world's most heavily indebted nations.

The following day, Bush's Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was one of the main speakers at the Clinton Global Initiative, a one-world conference of elite glitterati just a few blocks from the UN, sponsored by former president Bill Clinton and the Rockefeller Foundation. Like her boss, she seems positively giddy in support of any and every UN spending initiative, as long as it comes with a noble-sounding title. She kicked off by praising the new spending program for the Gaza Strip, noting "that [former World Bank President] Jim Wolfensohn is engaged in getting governments to put together a large package, probably as much as $9 billion." But, she observed, this was just a "down payment," to help "create better infrastructure." And it's barely the beginning. For, as she said, "this is going to be a job, not just in Gaza, but as hopefully the peace process moves forward, in the entire area of the Palestinian territories."

In the past, these foreign-aid giveaways were predicated on the idea that the U.S. would gain in the long-term through "building bridges" and reducing strife worldwide, but political realities have shown the folly of this line of reasoning.

Just one year ago, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (who has since replaced Wolfensohn as head of the World Bank) told the House Appropriations Committee (April 2004) that foreign aid was primarily needed for defense: "Regrettably, foreign aid, and security assistance programs in particular, are still viewed by some as charity--unnecessary spending that we can ill afford ... but it has become vitally important in the war on terrorism.... Security assistance spending is in many ways an extension of defense spending." No longer. The "national security" pretense for foreign aid is being de-emphasized in favor of the compassion card. In his UN address, Bush openly boasted of a pseudo-generosity with other people's money: "It's essential we work together, and as we do so, we will fulfill a moral duty to protect our citizens, and heal the sick, and comfort the afflicted." Bush's boast sounds more like a proclamation from Hillary Clinton than a statement by a self-described "conservative" president.

Empowering the United Nations

Much of this new foreign aid proposed by Bush would flow through United Nations channels, such as the "Global Fund" Bush mentioned in his UN speech. That's part of the plan for empowering the UN, gradually transforming it from incipient to full-blown world government. "We believe in the United Nations. We want the UN to be strengthened. We want the UN to be effective around the world," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Nicholas Bums said, reiterating the Bush administration worldview. The summit's agenda would result, Burns said, in a "greatly strengthened United Nations" making it a "more effective institution and allowing the United States to participate in the UN in a very vigorous way." Indeed, the U.S. government signed onto the outrageous 40-page World Summit Outcomes document that emerged from the summit, which calls for, among other things, "cooperating with the International Criminal Court," the UN judicial monstrosity that violates every principle of "the rule of law" the UN sanctimoniously pretends to champion.

Some of the best ways to strengthen the UN, say its authors, are through implementation of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and other fraudulent UN proposals to shackle the planet with socialist controls, in the name of protecting the environment. And, naturally, the Outcomes document calls for providing more and more money to fund the UN's evergrowing "mandates." Some of the new UN programs include a World Solidarity Fund, a Democracy Fund, a Central Emergency Revolving Fund, an International Finance Facility, and a Peacebuilding Fund--to be added to such recently established programs as the Global Fund to fight AIDS, the Global Environment Facility, and the Slum Upgrading Facility. This is undisguised global socialism run amok.

Even U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, portrayed by the left during his confirmation hearings as a typical Bush-appointed rabid United Nations-hater, has campaigned for a strengthened United Nations. Though the left made much hay of Bolton's quip that no one would notice if the top 10 floors of the United Nations headquarters building were destroyed, Bolton said the 40-page outline document approved by the three-day UN summit that empowers the United Nations "represents an important step in a long process of UN reform. We cannot allow the reform effort to be derailed or run out of steam."

President Bush, in pledging to follow the Monterrey Consensus to open up the valves of foreign aid through United Nations auspices, has demolished two myths: that he is anti-United Nations and that he is a conservative of any stripe, compassionate or otherwise.