Fairly Symmetrical

How you can tell when a government has jumped the shark: they start issuing "five year plans", each of which have "similar goals" — thus indicating no real progress from one to the next.

With 15,484 meetings held and 5,879 reports issued — each in six languages — during the latest two-year budget cycle, UN officials say their workload has become so heavy that it has left them little time to carry out their required tasks, let alone reflect on what their organization is doing and how well it is performing.

Of course, the report says nothing about addressing the inherent contradictions and blindnesses present in many of their programs. On the contrary:

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[Annan] said his reform package is intended to ensure that the greatest emphasis is placed on the economic and social ills — such as extreme poverty, AIDS and educational shortcomings — that weigh most heavily on needy nations.

Other issues, which have acquired new urgency in recent years, also demanded additional attention and resources, he said. Those include fighting terrorism, taming globalization and attempting to prevent conflicts before they become international crises.

Now, I know I'm just one of those damned American middle-class capitalist pigs, but it strikes me as somewhat counterproductive to aim at "preventing conflicts" on a worldwide scale while at the same time "taming globalization". After all, all globalization really is, is the tendency for nations to become more interconnected with the rest of the world — which also serves as a powerful incentive to avoid conflicts which ruin travel, trade, and all the other benefits of globalization. Toss in the fact that countries which become wealthier, better educated, and healthier invariably do so by embracing globalization, not rejecting it, and you have to wonder what exactly the UN — an organization which could not exist in the absence of globalization — has against it.

The United Nations' many human-rights bodies also will be better co-ordinated to eliminate duplication and provide maximum support for programs at the country level, the report said.

No word on whether they'll start concentrating on real human rights abuses, rather than completely falsified reports of massacres by American and Israeli armed forces. Of course, with members like Cuba, China, Zimbabwe, and Syria, I'm not exactly holding my breath.

President Bush recently issued a blatant challenge to the UN when he asked the General Assembly if it would continue to allow Iraq to flaunt resolution after resolution, or if it would prove itself as a real body of power. I'd like to see him issue a similar challenge in respect to the whole world; will the UN continue to make irrelevant statements of feel-good nothingness while stuffing its collective face at a summit on starvation and sustainable development, will it allow summits on racism to be dominated by small, vocal, morally bankrupt minorities, or will it start making hard decisions about feeding people (such as joining with the WTO to force Europe to drop its protectionist bans on GM food, helping work to nurture free trade and free minds in all nations of the world, and refusing to tolerate dictators and totalitarian regimes interfering with food distribution for their own political goals)?