U.N. Says Dump The Dollar, Replace It With Something Global

For decades now, the world financial system has relied on the strength of the U.S. dollar to trade a wide variety of commodities. Everything from pork bellies to oil futures rested on the American currency. Now after nearly forty years of economic decline on the world stage, the U.N. is finally giving a hard look at moving towards a world currency that could provide more stability than the dollar.

From RawStory:

"The dollar has proved not to be a stable store of value, which is a requisite for a stable reserve currency," the U.N. World Economic and Social Survey 2010 said.

The report says that developing countries have been hit by the U.S. dollar's loss of value in recent years.

"Motivated in part by needs for self-insurance against volatility in commodity markets and capital flows, many developing countries accumulated vast amounts of such (U.S. dollar) reserves during the 2000s," it said.

Now this development is not being taken lightly. Opposition quickly formed to say that markets will decide whether or not a reserve currency should replace the dollar's dominant position. However leading economic gurus such as Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz are advocating for a new way, as many developing countries have suffered from the current situation.

Whether or not this news will lead to substantive change, it is indicative of a growing consensus that the dollar is not working on a macro level. Gulf states have already begun looking at alternatives and the developing world could very much turn if the I.M.F. were to utilize a reserve unit of currency.

Only time will tell, but the way the U.S. is holding itself economically (both domestically and internationally) a new way may not be too far off.

Blackwater Wanted By U.N. For War Crimes

Although the State Department is reviewing its policies about contractors in the wake of the Blackwater massacre last month, justice seems slow in coming or not at all for those mercenaries that slaughtered 17 civilians and wounded dozens. While the Bush Administration does nothing, Iraqis are going to court and the U.N. is demanding that the perpetrators be tried for war crimes.

From Yahoo News:

The killing of 17 Iraqis in a shooting involving U.S. security firm Blackwater last month has created tensions between Baghdad and Washington and sparked calls for tighter controls on private contractors, who are immune from prosecution in Iraq.

Ivana Vuco, the U.N.'s senior human rights officer in Iraq, told a news conference that private security contractors were still subject to international humanitarian law.

"Investigations as to whether or not crimes against humanity, war crimes, are being committed and obviously the consequences of that is something that we will be paying attention to and advocating for," she told a news conference.

Maybe this is one of the reasons why Bush and his neo-con friends hate the U.N. so much. Accountability and justice for American actions overseas? Bush doesn't even like those things here at home, let alone in Baghdad where he has set his cowboy friends loose on the country. We'll see if the U.N. can muster the strength to actually try these killers in a court of law.

Doublespeaking The Environment

More is less and less is more. Sometimes I feel like we are living 1984 every single day under George Bush. The President and his Administration have become pros at saying one thing while doing the opposite. The latest episode deals with climate change and Bush snubbing his nose at the United Nation's upcoming conference on what to do with our deteriorating planet. Instead of working together with other countries, Bush is having his own conference-of-one to talk about what he isn't going to do.

From The New York Times:

Mr. Bush’s aides say that the parallel meeting does not compete against the United Nations’ process — hijacking it, as his critics charge. They say that Mr. Bush hopes to persuade the nations that produce 90 percent of the world’s emissions to come to a consensus that would allow each, including the United States, to set its own policies rather than having limits imposed by binding international treaty.

“It’s our philosophy that each nation has the sovereign capacity to decide for itself what its own portfolio of policies should be,” said James L. Connaughton, the president’s chief environmental adviser.

Mr. Bush’s approach sets the stage for a new round of diplomatic confrontation. And it raises the prospect that he could once again put the United States in the position of objecting to any binding international agreement intended to slow or reverse the emissions linked to rising temperatures.

Whether Mr. Bush prevails remains to be seen, but the effort is the last chance in his presidency to shape the debate after years of being excoriated for keeping the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement that limits the emissions of greenhouse gases from most industrialized countries.

Actually, this is just a re-enactment of Kyoto. While other countries are beginning to meet the demands set at Kyoto and are looking forward to more stringent goals, we are going backwards. Snubbing Kyoto at the beginning of his Presidency showed the world that we are not committed to ebbing global warming and this diplomatic error is just another testament to where his priorities lie.

At least we have less than sixteen months of this torture to go.

Tempest In A U.N. Teapot

So last week the traditional media saturated itself with a "breaking" story that claimed horrifying and terrible chemical weapons had been found in a filing cabinet in the U.N. where the old Iraqi government had their offices. New York was practically under attack ten years after the fact. In their nutty bum rush to the wires, the "journalists" forgot to do their due diligence (whats that?), because if they did there would have been no story to report and no fear to spread through Manhattan and the rest of the country.

From The New York Times (at least they are clarifying a week later):

When officials said that a potentially deadly chemical from Iraq had been found last month in a Midtown United Nations office, many questions followed. How did the sample get here? How did it get misplaced? And how could it sit in a box, unnoticed, for more than a decade at a world agency in the middle of New York?

But now, heaping embarrassment upon embarrassment, it appears that the chemical was merely a commercial solvent, a law enforcement official said.

Initially, officials said the substance was phosgene, an old-generation nerve-gas component used extensively at the end of World War I, and in Iraqi attacks against Kurds in the 1980s.

“We learned later,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case, “that initial tests indicated it might be some kind of over-the-counter solvent, though we don’t know what kind.”

Of course, the State Department is to blame for feeding them this crappy information....but seriously, these reporters need to do their jobs before falling all over themselves for the first crack at the airwaves and newspaper columns. Come on guys and gals, repeat after me, "I will do my due diligence, I will do my due....."

The Price Of Peace And War

The difference between the two is astounding. The video below shows how funding the U.N. can make a world of difference. Congress needs to make sure that the United Nations can fulfill its role around the globe. Our foreign policy in the last few years has used and abused our military to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Money that could have been allocated for far better purposes.