Humanvalues Weblog

Ambassador Bolton! We hear you’re a Kick-Ass, Get-Things-Done Guy! Also, we heard that you are very interested in the architecture of the U.N.
This is really great news! Because, here’s what we want you to do:

First, arrange to add 10 more floors to the U.N. to accommodate the additional services that are needed for new Programs to Protect the Peoples of Earth from the Scourge of War! Then please do the following:

Dismantle the obsolete, so-called U.N. Security Council and its veto power, wherein a few powerful nations hold the rest of the world hostage! This body “Secures” only the perpetuation of inequitable and unethical power in the hands of the few. These hands have proven to be untrustworthy. Even the proposed expansion of this U.N. Branch, a move toward more power-sharing, will merely enhance its chauvinistic dominance over the majority of Earth’s People. It is time to put an end to this tyrannical situation. The Security Council was created 60 years ago in a completely different dynamic when fewer Nations were involved. It is a relic of the U.N.’s founding that is no longer relevant. Now there are 191 Nations in place to take full responsibility for solving Earth’s problems and creating Peace. Ambassador Bolton, if you absolutely insist on dismantling something, please start with the U.N. Security Council?
Help to create a new kind of U.N. Peacekeeping: A Standing Regional Intervention Peace Force, under the direction of the U.N. Secretary General, with the authority to exercise a new Responsibility to Protect. Kofi Annan, (who shall be accorded proper respect) has declared that the U.N. has a mandate to assume the responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves, those who are the helpless victims of war and aggression! He has pledged that there must never be another Rwanda! But, what do we have today? Sudan, Congo, Iraq, and what’s next? Iran? Think of this: the U.N. is criticized for non-intervention; this automatically implies that the world EXPECTS it has an obligation to intervene! We, of Civil Society agree! But critics do not understand that Kofi Annan has no Executive Power to do so! This power presently rests with the inconsistent Security Council. The same Council that is arbitrary and capricious, depending on “whose ox is being gored!” The original mandate for the U.N. was to protect the Peoples of Earth from the Scourge of War! Ambassador Bolton, after sixty preliminary years, it’s high time that we start protecting!
Help to create a new U.S. Humanitarian “Police” Force. If the U.S. feels that its role must be to police the world, then let it be for the purpose of protecting victims, not creating them! The natural corollary of such intervention would be the delivery of humanitarian aide to victims. Ambassador Bolton, what do you say? How about recruiting idealistic young people of the U.S. for such a noble role? Many of them have begun to recognize that a strictly military response serves only to exacerbate the problems with which we must deal. Veterans who’ve had a belly-full of lies and killing in behalf of the U.S. military will tell you! Ask one who has held the lifeless mangled body of a buddy or an “enemy combatant” that is only a child. If the U.S. had gone into Baghdad with only food and medicine, rather than despicable “shock and awe” bombing, our presence there would not have become a recruitment for “insurgents” and an influx of “terrorists.” Americans used to think of themselves as the Good Guys who would come to the rescue! Ambassador Bolton, we’re asking for your help in figuring this out. Let’s get it straight once and for all: Who are the Good Guys? Who are the Bad guys? And by what criteria is one expected to judge anymore?
Help to finance Humanitarian Aide by taxing the instruments of war! How can we pay for such an Intervention Peace Force? How will we pay for humanitarian aide? It’s very simple! Brazil’s President, Luiz Inacio da Silva, along with Jacques Chiraq, France’s President, proposed a perfect solution for raising the money needed to implement the humanitarian programs needed by the U.N. The solution is to impose a worldwide TAX ON ARMAMENTS! This tax could be extended to include manufacture of, sale of, purchase of, transfer of, all guns and military equipment and paraphernalia, tanks, military planes, all bombs, landmines, all potential death-making machines, especially all weapons of “mass destruction.” Such a tax would certainly take a big bite out of the profit of the war industry. The mercenary proliferation of the instruments of war are contrary to the best interests of the People of Earth. Who benefits? Corporate war-profiteers! No one else! The United Nations, in the best interest of the Peoples of Earth, must one day begin to deal with the unethical principles and irresponsibility involved in this, the creation of bullets and bombs, the sole purpose of which is to kill human beings. Ambassador Bolton, where do you stand? With the proliferators of death machines? Or with their victims? It can’t be both! An entrenched, traditional military response to crises serves only to exacerbate the problems we must deal with. We can learn responses that are more creative and life-affirming. Ambassador Bolton, if we invest in war, and we prepare for war, we will make war! Help the Nations of Earth to promote and invest in Peaceful pursuits instead!
Support the Millennium Development Goals! Children are starving! Ambassador Bolton, what will you do about starvation? Have you been sent to the U.N. to threaten to withhold the U.S.’s share of support for the Millennium Development Goals? When children are dying by the thousands every day from hunger, malnutrition, preventable disease, no clean water, from the lack of something as cheap as mosquito netting that could prevent malaria deaths, there is no justifiable excuse for the U.S. to turn its back on them! It is unethical and inexcusable to skimp or give niggling amounts to this effort. The relatively un-ambitious goal of just cutting hunger in half by the year 2015 will not be met, according to recent estimates on the lack of progress; we are going backwards, instead of forward! Ambassador Bolton, please support and sign-on to our obligation regarding the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.

In order to reach the Millennium Development Goals by the year 2015, the industrialized Nations must increase their contributions to 0.44% of their Gross National Product starting in 2006. What actually is the amount of the GDP of the U.S. for 2005? Wall Street can help you out with these calculations. Ambassador Bolton, if you are a courageous man of integrity, do not allow yourself to be used as a tool of destruction. You can become a hero to all People of conscience and especially to the hungry of the World. We expect that you will do the conscientious thing: Hold your president’s feet to the fire and tell him to ante-up!
Affirm all treaties on Nuclear Non-Proliferation! Provide ethical world leadership! This is a crucial matter that the U.S. must face. Our foreign policy is extremely hypocritical, to say the least. We will invade a sovereign country simply with the allegation that they have the potential to create various “weapons of mass destruction,” and proceed to threaten those nations that wish to belong to the most powerful “Nuclear Club,” while, we ourselves, refuse to provide ethical leadership in preventing the further proliferation of our own nuclear weapons of mass destruction! The US opened the Pandora’s Box of unethical use of Atomic power; the U.S. has a moral obligation to forbid its further use for weapons by any Nation, and to slam the lid shut! Nuclear weapons must be located, accounted for, and verifiably dismantled. All weapons-grade fissionable material must be rendered harmless, and the by-products, such as depleted uranium, must not be used in weaponry because of its lasting damage to human health and the environment. Furthermore, weapons must not be placed in space. Ambassador Bolton, this Earth needs a Non-Nuclear Club! Start one!
Sign the Document supporting the already up-and-running International Criminal Court! Hundreds of activists and organizations in the U.S., along with representatives of many other nations, worked diligently to help design and perfect this instrument of justice to end age-old impunity to prosecution by perpetrators of genocide and war crimes. It is an insult to the International Community that endorses the Court, for the U.S. to have refused, first of all, to approve the Rome Statute, stating that it would interfere with military obligations of the U.S., and then, to Un-sign the document after President Clinton had given it his approval before leaving office. No U.N. document had ever before been Un-signed by any Nation. Ambassador Bolton, where were you when the U.S. went around bribing and coercing 80-some Nations to sign non-extradition treaties? We required of each a promise to not cooperate with the International Criminal Court if the U.S. were charged with war crimes. This seems to be a morally culpable indication that we were, still are, and even further, plan to continue being, in violation of the tenets of this Court. If the U.S. is ever to regain a shred of respect in the world community, especially when it covets a world leadership position, pretending to promote democracy, it is nothing but hypocrisy, if we do not endorse the International Criminal Court!
Renounce “Free Trade!” Economic aggression is just another kind of war that is being waged against the Peoples of Earth! There is a great deal of confusion over terms. What is the meaning of Free? It sounds great! It brings to mind the right of an individual to freely express a preference for a political system or an economic structure. Not so in the case of Free Trade! Ambassador Bolton, what is being pawned off in the guise of Free Trade, is actually economic colonialism and a form of ruthless capitalism. The corporate world is free to grind up workers and resources in its machinery, and freely, as well as callously and indifferently, spit them out in order to maintain profitability. Sure, the workers are free also! Free to eat out of garbage cans! Free to starve to death and to die of preventable illnesses! Free to be uneducated! Free to have their lands polluted! Free to be exploited as slave labor or worse, be murdered for labor-organizing!
Help to modify the World Trade Organization, and its Regional counterparts. They are engaged in unscrupulous, coercive, anti-democracy, anti-labor, anti-human rights, and anti-environment practices that dominate the most vulnerable Peoples of Earth and their natural resources and assets. For instance: anytime that a local government, concerned with its fishing industry, cannot cancel a previously and mistakenly entered-into-contract with off-shore oil drillers, without incurring a fine from the governing body of the WTO, which is greater than its gross national product, the antithesis of democracy is at work. Or anytime that a host country must abide by a contract to bring out its own police force to quell its own people’s labor dispute against a foreign corporate exploiter, you will see the antithesis of local democracy and of collective bargaining. It is union-busting! If the host country does not quell the strike, it can be charged and fined for the unforgivable crime of “interrupting profit-making!” Ambassador Bolton! These coercive practices must cease! Free trade is the wrong word; it needs to become FAIR trade. Any World Trade regulating body must have only democratically elected officers who can be withdrawn by the People. And those officers must be required to hold corporations to universal standards of human rights, and of internationally accepted labor practices, and environmental protocols. Consideration of the human values involved and of Earth’s shared-in-common goods, such essentials as air, water or forests, must always prevail over the claims of stock shareholders and the myopic “false profit” called the bottom line.
Sign the Kyoto Protocol! Global Warming is disturbing the Earth’s weather patterns, no matter how vigorously corporation-scientists deny that there’s a problem. We industrial Nations and our greenhouse gases are destroying mother Earth in demonstrable and observable ways right in our lifetimes; not in some distant predictable future! Ambassador Bolton, take steps to set standards to diminish the pollutants and destroyers of our environment, not tomorrow, but in order to stop pollution right now! Plan to diminish the use of non-renewable fuels; invest in solar, wind and water technologies. The ice caps are melting; the hole in the protective ozone layer keeps getting bigger. Flooding, tsunamis, earthquakes, droughts, contamination of soil, pollution of air, spoiling of seas, waterways and marine life, are threatening life on Earth as we have come to know it. Ambassador Bolton, acknowledge that we are doing something very wrong! Please consult with the citizens of New Orleans! Will you ask their opinions? Provide leadership; sign the Kyoto Protocol!
While you’re at it, sign the Convention on the Rights of the Child! What an embarrassment! That the U.S., which purports to be a civilized Nation, will not sign a document agreeing with all other Nation’s concerns that children must be accorded basic human rights to water, to food, shelter, medical care, to education, to the right not to be abused, executed, sold, or conscripted into military, sexual or economic exploitation. Tell us, Ambassador Bolton, what part of sign-the-document do you not understand?
Support Civil Society and respect its concerns! This is the new collective name for Non-Governmental Organizations at the U.N., the issue-oriented groups that work to alert the world about, and to influence decisions on, various matters pertaining to every imaginable problem on Earth. Mostly international in scope, their focus is not necessarily bounded by sovereign state’s borders, but deal instead with the issues that transcend arbitrary boundary lines; issues like Peace, poverty, pollution, banning of land mines, refugees, immigration, labor standards, human rights, slavery of children and women, torture and abuse, or epidemics like Aids that can affect all Peoples of Earth. Some of these organizations are much older than the U.N. itself, yet we are shunted to a peripheral role, of little notice or consequence. We require the respect of a Civil Society Home of our own at the U.N. The Trusteeship Council Chamber is now mostly unused; more than a hundred Nations have passed through this Chamber in seeking their independence from colonial Nations. It now can be put to appropriate use, becoming the Civil Society Council Chamber! Ambassador Bolton, please help the NGOs that represent Civil Society obtain the use of this chamber?
Help establish appropriate respect for the U.N. We NGOs are charged with the responsibility of promoting the U.N. to our constituencies. The new World Wide Web presence for U.N. information is excellent, but it is available to only a self-selected portion of the public. NGOs envision the dissemination of information about the efforts and the accomplishments of the U.N. and its day-to-day agenda, by the method that average Americans obtain their news: by Television in the 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week fashion of a U.N. C-Span. It is essential that it be available right here in the U.S., the most powerful Nation on Earth, and whose citizens consume the greatest amount of Earth’s resources, and who cause the greatest amount of pollution and desecration of the ecosystem of our endangered Planet. The Citizens of the U.S. have little knowledge of the United Nations or its value or its potential. They are taught by the corporate media to scoff and fear, in sound-bites that denigrate, urging replacement of its heroic Secretary General, and crying scandal, merely to discredit it. How can the Citizens of the U.S. possibly begin to understand that this amazing organization, envisioned and created 60 years ago, and dedicated to the protection of the Peoples of Earth from the Scourge of War, is their best hope for Peace on Earth? Ambassador Bolton, don’t undermine the United Nations; help us to sustain it and promote it, for all the world to witness. Help us to realize its potential for peaceful deliberations among Nations, and to celebrate its 60th anniversary, respecting the progress that it has made.
Help the U.S. to be a leader in the promotion of Peace by earnest and respectful negotiations, and by renouncing lawlessness on the world stage, thereby easing the perceived need for military might. Millions, perhaps a majority, of U.S. Taxpayers, the very conveyors of “family values,” immersed as they are in the struggles of balancing their own budgets, simply cannot be oblivious to the total insanity of the U.S. war-focused budget. Especially knowing that we are less safe now than ever! Ambassador Bolton, you surely recognize this insult, especially to our veterans! And what about the elderly, the homeless, ill, un-employed parents, under-funded schools and neglected children and hungry families right here at home? There’s something terribly wrong! What is going on here? Where is the money for needed social services? We NGOs will tell you where! Here is a practical lesson in family values, an example of kitchen-table budgeting. When your children are hungry and sick and under-educated, you don’t waste money on so-called “security measures” just because you fear that your neighbors might threaten you. You have finite resources; how will you spend them? You can borrow only as long as your credit lasts. Because you wish to appear strong and powerful and impenetrable, you can make a great show of guns, locks and barred windows, alarms, guards, vicious dogs, security systems, police protection, etc. spending the greater part of your focus and your budgetable income. With the little that is left, how will you sustain the life within your home? You simply cannot “serve up” a gun at the dinner table. Can you imagine such perverse “family values?” Such obsessively paranoid and totally insane bad budgeting is the absolute antithesis of family values! Instead of living in fear of them, you might try befriending your neighbors; invite them to a party; take your kids shopping at the grocery store, take them to the clinic, to the school, to the library. Your children are your future. Teach them to respect others. Give them reasons to enjoy life! Do you understand this kitchen-table budget analogy?
Help to bring respectful resolution to the extremely complicated and seemingly unsolvable dilemmas of self-determination, and of disputed lands. The People themselves must have the right, through a democratic process, to determine their own leadership. And as for disputed lands, the U.S., along with the inconsistent U.N. Security Council, has been in-cahoots with certain political entities that have a “god-given claim” to such lands. We admonish you: listen to the voices of all the occupants in such a dispute, and to protect all! The Native Peoples of the North and South American continent have much to say about such prior claims! If the U.S. champions the right of any Peoples to claim prior ownership of disputed lands, especially those who have long been persecuted, even decimated, over the centuries, we ask you, Ambassador Bolton, to be consistent and to consider also the plight of Native Americans right here at home!

Well, Ambassador Bolton, this is enough for a starter. If you can accomplish all of these assignments right here at the U.N. in New York City by January 2006, and express willingness to take on a second round of assignments, you will have the undying devotion and admiration of the Peace People of the World, but we must warn you: you’ll sure shock the sox off of all the war mongers, the religious nuts, and all of the corporate profiteers in Washington DC!

Good Luck to you! Have courage, Ambassador Bolton, to make changes that benefit the People of Earth!

For additional information on the UN General Assembly 2005 World Summit, September 14 thru 16, 2005 at United Nations Headquarters in New York, please visit the following page on the U.N. Web site.

2005 World Summit (14-16 September 2005)
https://www.un.org/en/conferences/environment/newyork2005