It seems to me, that if you are asking for immunity up-front, you already know that
something has been done that without immunity, would land somebody in the slammer. From Fox News:
Mammoth new green climate fund wants United Nations-style diplomatic immunity, even though it’s not part of the UN
“EXCLUSIVE: The Green Climate Fund, which is supposed to help mobilize as much as $100 billion a year to lower global greenhouse gases, is seeking a broad blanket of U.N.-style immunity that would shield its operations from any kind of legal process, including civil and criminal prosecution, in the countries where it operates. There’s just one problem: it is not part of the United Nations.”
Whether the fund, which was formally created at a U.N. climate conference in Durban, South Africa last December, will get all the money it wants to spend is open to question in an era of economic slowdown and fiscal austerity. Its spending goal comes atop some $30 billion in “fast start-up” money that has been pledged by U.N. member states to such climate change activities.
A 24-nation interim board of trustees for the Green Climate Fund (GCF) is slated to hold its first meeting next month in Switzerland to organize the fund’s secretariat and to get it running by November, as well as find a permanent home for the GCF’s operations. The board expects to spend about $6.7 million between now and June of next year.
But before it is fully operational, the GCF’s creators—194 countries that belong to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and who are also U.N. members—want it to be immune from legal challenges and lawsuits, not to mention outside inspections, much like the United Nations itself cannot be affected by decisions rendered by a sovereign nation’s government or judicial system.
Despite its name, the UNFCCC was informed in 2006 by the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs that it was not considered a U.N. “organ,” and therefore could not claim immunity for its subordinate bodies or personnel under the General Convention that has authorized U.N. immunity since the end of World War II.
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With all that money and total immunity, one can do mostly anything he likes. So it can easily becalled Green Climate Fun.
j ferguson says:
March 24, 2012 at 1:49 pm
Is there no-one else reading this who finds it unlikely that the powers, money, and purview for this group would all be granted? The reference article seems to be full of loose language….
Don’t get me wrong. I hate the idea as much as the rest of you. I’m just skeptical that it has legs.
____________________________
Skepticism that an idea has legs is what has gotten us in to the jam we are in right now. Ten to Twenty years ago if you talked of a “New World Order” or a “World Government” you were labeled a nutcase and in some instances could actually end up in an institution. Now we have Pasca Lamy, Director General of the World Trade organization writing articles about Global Governance, the CIA and other National Security Organizations putting out a report: Global Governance 2025: at a critical juncture and the United Nations has the Commission on Global Governance.
Ideas that would have been met 40 to 60 years ago with complete outrage are not only considered common place, they are now law. The Regulating Class has learn to repeatedly bring the idea up until we accept it. It reminds me of how we train horses by desensitizing them. The principle is exactly the same.
They are also running a parallel track – depending on which “side” predominates.
http://classicalvalues.com/2012/03/look-at-what-is-sustainable/
http://classicalvalues.com/2012/03/wall-street-is-in-the-news/
I wonder if the political right, which tends to be associated with more conservative stances (but also emphasises the importance of the individual) might, on account of all the corruption in large organisations (which the left, by its communal emphasis, tend to prefer), if the right might move to a more progressive stance whereby they reboot modernity.
The right has tended to favour conservative religious stances, but the corruption on the communal side is getting so bad, especially as it “progressively” tries to deal with complex world problems, is causing more harm than good. So, as the progressive left might be undermining democracy, and yet, the very complexity of global problems is so great that no “United Nations” can deal with it, and merely suffocates under its own inefficiency and corruption, so actually, the place to be is on the progressive right, a renewal of modern principles of individual responsibility and intelligence and specialisation.
This may happen anyway as the rest of the world (China, India, Malaysia, etc.) progresses into modernity, but in a globally connected context. USA and Europe modernised, but still in a quite nationalistic perspective. The intellectuals were a bit too interested in self-deconstructing, and don’t quite get the world as a multinational, multi developmental, multi faceted system; it is too complex, and their answers are to go back to organised cooperation, but the world is too big and varied to do that, so the UN collapsed into self serving corruption.
Sorry this is such a wooly comment, but I wonder that things really need to swing back to the individual, just when so many environmentalists are clamouring for things to become more communal.
The more fool you. Some are clearing more in a day or two, part time, tax-free, than others of us earn in a week. The top performer locally I know of was an old dude in handmade road-worker orange vest who tromped up and down the divider at the intersection of the exit road from a major bridge and a major cross-town street. Had a nice stable wink-wink relationship with the cops, confined himself to walking up and down cracking jokes with drivers while they waited on the red light. About $700/day.
Seems to be gone now; retired, senescence, or misadventure.
Gail Combs:
I’m not sure skepticism about the onset of world governance as you put it is the whole problem. That I’m skeptical might be part of the problem, but I’m not driving this bus.
At the same time, it is instructive to watch the operations of the EU Commissars (If i have the proper organization identified). Wouldn’t you agree that their regulatory activities have many of the characteristics we might see in a world government – runaway infliction of political dogma on the unprotected.
We’ve enjoyed government by regulation here in the US for generations. Maybe it would be easier to hide from global governance (/half seriously).
But, no. less politely; I did think the article above was nuts.
Brian H.
Agreed. After Hurricane Andrew here in Miami, I offered a couple of day’s work to a guy with a sign that said “Will werk for Fud.” I would pay $15/hour AND feed him.
“Nothing doing. I’m making over $100/hour doing this and i don’t get my hands dirty.”
@j ferguson says:
March 25, 2012 at 6:03 am
The world (all living organisms) progresses (cultural and biological evolution) thru conflict and competition – for resources, reproductive rights, cultural and biological success, etc.. The goal of all of this ‘compassion and concern’ – ‘the moral high ground’ – voiced by liberals, leftists, etc. is to eliminate conflict and competition – the engines that drive evolution. Thereby halting the very progress they claim to aim for. It’s a deluded version of a fantasy Utopia and a denial of the way the world really works.
If you think the article is so improbable as to dismiss without a second thought, not so fast. Consider Obamacare….”you’ll have to pass it to find out what’s in it.” Who could imagine so flagrant a derelection of duty tossed off as commonplace. It seems the trajectory we’re on now corrupts not just the rationality, clarity and objectivity of the scientific process but infects the very idea of “rule of law.” Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit has a 1/12/12 post on “Stocker’s Earmarks” which excruciatingly details how the team members corrupted the IPCC procedures in that instance, and it’s sneaky and behind the scenes. So much depends on destroying evidence, garbling data, covering tracks. All over the world there are obfuscations being spun, ensnaring webs to bind and deceive. Of course they want immunity. Sunshine doesn’t suit their purposes.
The root problem is we have (allowed) the creation a culture where white collar sociopaths can rip off a never ending parade of suckers with hardly any of them paying any consequences. By for too long turning a blind eye to corruption in all its forms, starting with the kids that think it is ok to cheat on tests in school because everyone else is doing it, to the used car salesman that misrepresents a car and laughs at the sheep he just screwed out of several hundred dollars through creative financing and dealer fees.
With the exception of a handful like Bernie Madoff, most of them get away with it for a life time. This breeds a culture where everyone thinks everyone else is doing the same thing and over time the social pressure to behave ethically gets replaced with a social culture of “get my share”.
It also allows them to slowly over time accumulate the wealth, connections and power to actively manipulate the system on all levels. It is not a conspiracy so much as a lot of vultures each independently picking over the same carcass looking for their pound of flesh.
Until there is leadership from the top both at the governmental level and the corporate level, not to mention family and schools to enforce a value system that has an ethical base, the predators will slowly inch by inch gain power at the expense of the ethical and the naive.
If the judicial and law enforcement systems will not make it sufficiently risky that the white collar sociopath tempers his/her greed due to fear of getting caught, the only remedy is to have things get so out of hand that the “serfs” rise up with their pitch forks and torches and settle the books.
That unfortunately is the lesson of history. The greedy and amoral can win for a while, but sooner or later they attempt a bridge too far and pay dearly for their corruption. Even the Mafia eventually learned that getting too greedy was “bad for business”.
Larry
j ferguson says:
March 25, 2012 at 6:03 am
….We’ve enjoyed government by regulation here in the US for generations….
But that has now changed. This is an example of how it now works.
_________________________________________
Actually one of my major beefs is with regulations (not laws) and more recently world wide harmonization.
First ever hear of the Broken Window Fallacy? Regulations fit into the category of the broken window fallacy. (I will use farming because I know the subject) An ex-dairy farmer illustrated this to me. He conducted me through a rather nice stainless steel milking parlor filled with cobwebs that he was still paying for. Before he could finish paying it off new regulations made it obsolete. Since milk is a monopsony the farmer could not raise his prices to pay for additional investment. This same situation holds true for many other farm products and other small businesses. In hogs and chickens the situation is even worse because the big chicken/pork processors hold the mortgage to the chicken/hog houses and their “ex-employees” in the USDA and FDA rewrite the regulations making those building obsolete on a regular basis so the farmer never has a chance to get out of debt once trapped.
So how do we get bureaucratic regulations instead of laws. Laws are passed by Congress and signed into law by the President as authorized by the Constitution.
So there is not a darn thing in the Constitution about bureaucrats (or foreign bodies likethe UN or WTO) making regulations with the power of law. So how did we end up with the Federal Register established March 14, 1936, and its bypassing of the Constitution? (The 2010 Federal Register was 81,405 pages long BTW)
The Supreme Court decided law could be made by the Executive branch.
So that is how our US Constitution got twisted and a dictatorship by unelected bureaucrats got set up.
Gail Combs:
What you describe is no different than the nonsense processes i was subjected to in seeking environmental permits for greenfield industrial projects in the ’70s. I think that was 40 years ago.
The beauty of the the regulatory process at least as enabled at EPA was that you had to exhaust their internal review process before you could seek relief in the courts. This could take years and could cost millions in fees alone let alone the cost of lost business due to the delay.
The trick to all this is that Congress enables the regulators to devise regulations within some boundaries. Very often, the devil really is in the details. Some small part of a regulation which might appear to achieve a worthy purpose often has di minimus effect and huge cost to a few specific industries.
But Gail, all of this apprehension about global governance is predicated on the assumption that the people we send to the Senate will agree to surrender portions of our sovereignty. I suspect that most of the people who have commented above believe this.
I don’t.
j ferguson says:
March 25, 2012 at 2:00 pm
But Gail, all of this apprehension about global governance is predicated on the assumption that the people we send to the Senate will agree to surrender portions of our sovereignty. I suspect that most of the people who have commented above believe this.
I don’t.
==========
Neither do I, we will never allow The Rule of Law to be replaced with Rule by Bureaucrats.
Yes, I’ve had a few brushes with them. They regard competition as obsolete, distasteful. It is to be replaced by the much nicer and more efficient “co-operation”. How that is to be obtained is unspecified.
It’s more complex than that. Buried in multiple leftist-composed Acts and Treaties are potent constraints on national sovereignty. The One World vision regards it as a dangerous anachronism, to be whittled away to nothing by all means available.
Brian H says:
March 26, 2012 at 10:14 am
“much nicer and more efficient “co-operation”. How that is to be obtained is unspecified.”
Simple. Comply or die.
It’s worth noting and remembering that all of the grand Utopian experiments somehow end up in genocide (aka Democide) …. usually aided by the formerly nice neighbor next door. We have ample proof in the 200+ million deaths over the 20th century: Stalinism, the Cultural Revolution, Bolshevism, Rwanda, Third Reich, Khmer Rouge, Ho Chi MInh, et al.
And soon enough – inspired by the Sustainable Utopia – that nice schoolteacher turned Cadre of Sustainablilty will be chanting “To lose you is no loss, to keep you is no gain. Hail Mother Gaia!”
The original story posted in tips and hints has been updated. A short response from the GCF has been received by Fox news. An update has been posted to the story.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/03/22/mammoth-new-green-climate-fund-wants-un-style-diplomatic-immunity-even-though/
Larry
You know a $1E9 dollars would sponsor a lot of research like the nanotube and cerium CO2 conversion. Can you imagine a world where CO2 can be extracted from the atmosphere and converted back into a burnable fuel? Greenies would be irritated for centuries. Also research into why ice cubes absorb gases and become stinky in the freezer but not in Antarctica.