Roll up! The UN circus is in town with its General Assembly Annual Debate! Get your tickets ladies and gentlemen to see our collection of freaks, clowns and weird and wonderful creatures from the four corners of the globe spouting hot air in a piss and wind rendition of "all together now". What policymaking can we expect for the forthcoming years?
So, here we go again with another meeting of 130-odd world leaders getting together in New York for another General Assembly annual general debate which will last all this week and part of next. The hot air focus of this year's magnificent event is about global development, promoting equity, protecting the planet, justice and (violins) prosperity for all (cheers) (end violins).
Permit me to write a paragraph of UN-speak, the language spoken by the UN: We are gathered together here today to create a brighter tomorrow learning from the mistakes of yesterday and building a common garden for all of us to prosper in starting next week, remembering last month's challenges to implement a new direction this year, living a common goal which reaches out to all colours, races and creeds, living together like brothers and sisters around our common lake, the seas. (Raspberry).
This type of discourse is going to last day in, day out all week long. The tangible results will be a lot of promises, a lot of hand-shakes, some very bland chicken lunches and dinners, some bored old sod falling asleep in his soup plate on day three, the high point of the meeting and the subject of mirth-filled e-mails for the coming six months, some token moves on sustainable development (whatever that means), a few wishy-washy sentences on the Millennium Development Goals and er...
Now, if the UN General Assembly, many of its 130-odd world leaders, its 84 heads of state, 41 heads of government, 11 deputy prime ministers and 65 foreign ministers are going to spend our taxpayers' money on hot air, let us address the real issues, without spending a cent.
For a start, President Vladimir Putin has proved himself a Statesman by using every fibre of his existence and every drop of his energy by averting another of Washington's imperialist ventures, for now at least. Perhaps he should be the one speaking and the representatives of the FUKUS Axis (France-UK-US) should sit quietly in the front row listening and taking notes before he passes the word to his fellow leaders of the BRIC bloc.
Secondly, a motion should be tabled depriving President Obama of his Nobel Peace Prize for insulting the Institution by being weak, arming terrorists by proxy, lying to his people and to the world and kowtowing to the lobbies in Washington which pull his strings, a situation he vowed to er... "change", remember? Also because his real plans are allegedly to go to war in Syria and then in Iran. Watch this space. Read his lips as he addresses the meeting and watch his fingers crossed behind his back as he lies through his teeth, him or his queen of lies John "There's no al-Qaeda in Syria" Kerry.
The General Assembly's General Debate is, and will always be, a joke and an insult to the international community until the world leaders come together with tangible plans to address the real issues today at the beginning of the Third Millennium of the Christian Calendar. One of these is the one point seven trillion dollars spent each year on weaponry to kill each other, that is one point seven thousand billion dollars, or in plain numbers, 1,700,000,000,000 USD. If that much money was invested in schemes to eradicate poverty, provide environmentally clean energy, build schools and send kids to them, in safety and create water distribution networks (and let us remember NATO's act of bombing the Libyan water supply and then strafing the civilian factory making the pipes to repair it, "to break their backs"). But no. They speak about these things, then distribute military contracts to their cronies.
Speaking of NATO, why does this organization exist if the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, and why has NATO encroached eastwards when it promised it would not? And why does NATO control the foreign policies of its member states when this area is enshrined in their Constitutions as being a national and not a supra-national prerogative? If NATO is unconstitutional in many cases and is the spider at the centre of the war mongers' web, then we may see that the military complex which fuels today's wars and distributes contracts to the lobbies which feed off its teats, is the root of today's evils.
They will defend the status quo claiming that this complex creates jobs and maintains economies, but suppose someone figured out that spending one point seven thousand billion dollars a year on creating plants to create environmentally friendly energies, fuelling the backbone of the economy which is civil construction and not bullets and providing public services would be a viable alternative?
These are the issues that UN General Assembly should be covering in its General Debate and these are the issues which the grass-roots public should, if they care, bring into the political arena when they select their representatives.
Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
Pravda.Ru