FORECASTS & TRENDS E-LETTER
by Gary D. Halbert
October 16, 2012
IN THIS ISSUE:
1. United Nations Global Taxes – Will Obama Consent?
2. Latest United Nations Push For Global Taxation
3. The UN is the Last Place We Should Give Money
4. United Nations Wants Control of the Internet
5. Conclusions – We Have A Choice
United Nations Global Taxes – Will Obama Consent?
The UN recently formalized a broad set of global taxes and penalties that it wants to impose on developed nations in the Northern Hemisphere, and especially the US, in order to raise some $400 billion annually to send to lesser developed nations in the Third World. And the kleptocrats at the UN want to implement these huge new taxes by the end of this year while President Obama is sure to be in office.
I will discuss these hideous new UN global taxes in more detail as we go along, but here are the highlights:
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A 1% income tax on billionaires around the world (apprx. 1,600 total, 425 in the US);
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A tax on all financial transactions including stocks, bonds & derivatives;
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A tax on currency transactions in the US dollar, euro, yen & pound sterling;
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A carbon tax of $25 per ton of CO2 emitted by developed countries only;
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A carbon tax on all commercial airline flights from the US to Europe;
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A royalty on all oil & gas extracted from wells over 100 miles offshore; and
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A global tobacco tax with the proceeds going to the World Health Organization.
Oh, and one more little thing: The UN would control and regulate the Internet before long.
At first blush, you might say that this is impossible, even absurd. You might note that the UN has been trying for years to figure out how to impose global taxes, but has thus far not been successful. Yet this time around, the UN has formalized these proposals into a document to be voted on in the General Assembly before it adjourns in late December. The document is entitled: “In Search of New Development Finance”. You can read it for yourself if you wish.
For whatever reasons, senior officials at the UN believe that NOW is the best time to roll out this tax monstrosity, and they apparently think that President Obama will agree to it, especially if he is re-elected for a second term. It is rumored that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may also be onboard, but I could not confirm this.
Since the UN does not have legal authority to tax its member nations, such an agreement would need to be structured as some kind of “treaty” between the UN and those nations that agree to the onerous new taxes. US treaties are signed by the President and ratified by the Senate. The House of Representatives has no say when it comes to treaties.
We Simply Cannot Let This Happen!
Let me be fair and say that I do not know if President Obama would agree to something like this. I hope he would not. But as we know, this president has made it abundantly clear that he views the US very differently than past presidents (with the possible exception of Carter).
One of the highlights of his first couple of years in office was his so-called “apology tour” around the world, suggesting that America’s great successes over the years might not have been entirely fair or above board. If you saw the record-breaking documentary movie 2016: Obama’s America (as I recommended), you know exactly how to put this issue into perspective. FYI, 2016 comes out on DVD today – I still highly recommend you see this documentary.
If anyone reading this is still undecided as to who to vote for in the November 6 presidential election, this UN issue should make it absolutely clear. As noted above, I don’t know if Mr. Obama would agree to this UN deal, but we simply cannot afford to take that chance!
Governor Mitt Romney was not my first choice for the Republican nomination, but I believe him to be an honorable, patriotic man. He has been incredibly successful in business and knows how to create jobs. But most importantly, he would never agree to this UN deal!
You have heard almost nothing in the mainstream media about this UN global tax initiative. Only FOX News has reported it. But there is plenty of information on this on the Internet – which the UN also wants to control as soon as possible. You really should get up to speed on this ASAP!
Let’s get into the details.
Latest United Nations Push For Global Taxation
Here’s how FOX News reported on this issue at the end of the United Nations’ first week of General Assembly deliberations in the last week of September.
QUOTE:
EXCLUSIVE: As the UN opens its General Assembly session,
it is already thinking up new global taxes
A 1 percent tax on billionaires around the world. A tax on all currency trading in the U.S. dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen and the British pound sterling. Another “tiny” tax on all financial transactions, including stock and bond trading, and trading in financial derivatives. New taxes on carbon emissions and on airline tickets. A royalty on all undersea mineral resources extracted more than 100 miles offshore of any nation’s territory.
The United Nations is at it again: finding new and “innovative” ways to create global taxes that would transfer hundreds of billions, and even trillions, of dollars from the rich nations of the world — especially the U.S. — to poorer ones, in line with U.N.-directed economic, social and environmental development.
These latest global tax proposals have received various forms of endorsement at U.N. meetings over the spring and summer, and will be entered into the record during the 67th U.N. General Assembly session, which began this week. The agenda for the entire session, lasting through December, is scheduled to be finalized on Friday.
How to convince developed countries wracked by economic recession and spiraling levels of government debt – especially the U.S. — is another issue, which the world organization may well end up trying to finesse.
As the U.N. itself notes, in a major report on the taxation topic titled, “In Search of New Development Finance” -- the main topic at a high-level international meeting of the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) this summer -- “These proposals are subject to political controversy. For instance, many countries are not willing to support international forms of taxation, as these are said to undermine national sovereignty.”
The U.N. clearly hopes it can find a way to move ahead. “Politically, tapping revenue from global resources and raising taxes internationally to address global problems are much more difficult than taxing for purely domestic purposes,” admits an ECOSOC document produced last April. But, it summarizes, “the time has come to confront the challenge.”
Shortly thereafter, the tax proposals — known in U.N.-speak as “innovative methods of financing”-- got a limited endorsement from a group of government ministers and other heads of national delegations who attended a major ECOSOC meeting in New York City in July.
The global taxation idea was echoed this week by Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and also a U.N. Assistant Secretary General. Sachs was recently named by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to head a new intellectual lobbying group of experts called the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It “will work closely with United Nations agencies, multilateral financing institutions and other international organizations,” according to the Earth Institute website.
On Monday, the controversial economist, a vociferous supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement, called on President Obama to implement a carbon tax that in turn could be used to finance bonds, paying for investments to combat “climate change” -- one of the major focuses of the new solutions network.
Sachs was quoted by Bloomberg News as declaring that, “I’m happy to have the future pay for a lot of this. It doesn’t have to be current financed.”
In the midst of a heated U.S. national election campaign, any official endorsement of those [UN global taxation] views is unlikely.
Nonetheless, the U.N. is taking a longer view. The world organization, and its constellation of funds, agencies and programs, has been pushing “innovative financing” for nearly a decade, since the topic was discussed in depth at an international conference in 2002. The topic was endorsed again at the failed Rio +20 conference last summer, without much detail attached.
But the need for new revenue is becoming more urgent as the world’s rich countries, gripped in recession, no longer hand out foreign aid with the same generosity as before — though the total reached $133 billion annually last year--while the demands for huge additional amounts of money for social and climate issues continues to grow.
Earlier this year, for example, the overseers of a new, U.N.-sponsored Green Climate Fund held their first meeting in Bonn to contemplate the spending of some $30 billion annually — rising to $100 billion by 2020 — to meet climate change needs in developing countries. Where all that money will come from is still not clear.
The U.N.’s latest roster of tax possibilities certainly has what the New Development Finance Report calls “large fundraising potential.” Or, at least some of them do. An around-the-world tax of $25 per ton on carbon dioxide emissions in rich countries, the report says, could raise some $250 billion a year. That new billionaire’s tax would raise anywhere from $40 billion to $50 billion per year, the report estimates, though it adds that the idea “is not yet in any international agenda.”
CLICK HERE FOR A TAX LIST
The U.N. places the same estimated value on the proposed currency tax ($40 billion), and roughly the same thing on its proposed financial tax ($15 billion to $75 billion).
Even more innovative is a notion to, in effect, borrow the lines of credit allocated to rich countries themselves at the International Monetary Fund, and “leverage” them to create new investment funds for the world’s poor. How to do this while preserving those credit lines as a reserve asset that rich countries could draw on when required, the report admits, remains to be seen.
Another “innovative” idea that may have trouble staying afloat is the notion of charging royalties on undersea minerals more than 100 miles offshore, within what are called “exclusive economic zones” — in effect, inside some country’s sovereign economic territory.
The sensitive issue here is that the world’s current “exclusive economic zones” extend 200 miles offshore — meaning that the U.N. is suggesting that it collect royalties on mineral wealth on half the “exclusive” territory, which it refers to in the report as part of the “global commons.”
For most nations, excluding the U.S., those 200 mile zones were established by the U.N.-sponsored Law of the Sea Treaty, known as LOST, which came into force in 1994 after it was signed and ratified by 162 countries. (The U.S. signed but has not ratified LOST; its 200-mile “exclusive economic zone” was established by presidential decree.)
The new, 100-mile royalty proposal in the U.N.’s financing report would require a new agreement to hand over proceeds from half of that territory to the U.N.-sponsored International Seabed Authority.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Approximately 24 hours after this story was published, a spokesman for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations sent the following unsolicited statement to Fox News: “The United States opposes global taxes because we believe that any source of revenue should remain under the control of national authorities. This is an idea that has been kicked around for years. Fortunately, it hasn’t gone anywhere, nor will it.” [Want to bet on that?]
END QUOTE
The UN is the Last Place We Should Give Money
Is there any organization less worthy of our trust to spend our money wisely than the United Nations? No. Beset by almost constant scandal, bereft of any in-house oversight or even audit, the UN is one of the most corrupt of all international organizations.
And where would the money go? To so-called “less developed countries.” The taxes are part of a global plan of redistribution of wealth from the Northern Hemisphere (the U.S., Europe and Japan) to the Southern Hemisphere (Latin America, Africa and South Asia), with the goal of reducing poverty.
But don’t think that this redistribution of wealth will reduce poverty. Foreign aid doesn’t work in most cases. In most Third World countries, the money we give typically goes to whoever controls the presidential palace – ruthless dictators in many cases. Coups, civil wars, revolutions and all sorts of violence often ensue as various factions try to get their hands on the money.
Real reduction in poverty in lesser-developed countries can come only through foreign direct investment and trade, not via massive exports of Northern Hemisphere wealth to countries controlled by corrupt dictators and tyrants.
Even if we were delusional enough to give the UN all of these new global taxes (collectively $400 billion a year), why would we trust the UN to know how to best dole it out where it would help the most people? We wouldn’t! The UN is inherently corrupt.
In the UN, each member has ONE VOTE, regardless of the size or population of the country. Venezuela, a dictatorship under Hugo Chavez with apprx. 29 million people, has the same one vote as the United States with a population of apprx. 310 million people. With this arrangement, almost anything is possible.
United Nations Wants Control of the Internet?
Not surprisingly, the UN is secretly planning to regulate and/or tax the Internet. Proposals to do so are expected to be unveiled and possibly voted on as early as this December. You can find plenty of info on this by typing “United Nations Internet control” in Google. Please do because I don’t have space to go into all of the details today.
The International Telecommunications Regulations Union (ITRU), a part of the United Nations, is pushing to control the Internet. One of our UN ambassadors, Terry Kramer, is the US representative on the ITRU, and he is fighting hard to prevent the UN from implementing new regulations on the Internet.
But Kramer warns that the UN’s Internet fee proposals are “gaining momentum,” especially in regions such as Europe, Africa and the Arab world. I urge you to get up to speed on this. There are a couple of articles on the subject in the links below.
Conclusions – We Have A Choice
No doubt what I have written today about the United Nations is controversial, maybe unthinkable. You might also think it is questionable because FOX News is the only mainstream media outlet to report on the UN’s plans for global taxation. But is that really a surprise? Just go to Google and type in “United Nations global taxation.” As usual, you’ll find plenty of information.
You might assume that no US president would agree to such a treaty, not even a re-elected President Obama. You might also assume that the Senate would never ratify a treaty or series of treaties that would obligate the United States to pay these additional proposed annual taxes to the UN. You might be correct, but if Obama is re-elected and the Democrats retain control of the Senate, you just don’t know.
The point is, we cannot take that chance.
Most Americans now realize that we elected Barack Obama without knowing a lot about him. There is still a great deal we don’t know about him (see 2016: Obama’s America documentary which is being released on video today).
What we do know is that he is an avowed liberal – he’s made no secret about that. Most liberals have great affection for the United Nations. What we do know is that President Obama is all for “spreading the wealth around.” What we also know is that he told Russian President Medvedev that he would “have more flexibility” on reducing nuclear weapons after he is re-elected.
We cannot know if President Obama would agree to the UN global tax proposals discussed above or not. What we do know is that the Republicans formally OPPOSED these UN global taxes in the GOP Party Platform in August of this year. There is an article on this in the links below. There is no such language in the Democrats’ Platform.
Bottom line: We know that a President Romney will not sign any UN treaty that subjects us to these heinous United Nations taxes. He will not agree to hand over control of the Internet to the UN kleptocrats. We can be sure of that. But with President Obama, we just don’t know for sure.
We cannot afford to take that chance three weeks from today. Be sure to vote!
Very best election season regards,
Gary D. Halbert
SPECIAL ARTICLES
Another UN Push For Global Taxation (Cato Institute analysis)
GOP platform opposes U.N. global tax plans
United Nations wants to regulate the Internet
Bloomberg/Businessweek on UN control of Internet
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