Claudia Rosett writes:

The most notorious of the recent UN power grabs was Oil-for-Food, which began as a limited and somewhat ad hoc relief program, but turned into the biggest scam in history for the simple reason that the UN tapped right into the oil wells of Saddam Hussein’s UN-sanctioned Iraq – effectively dipping its cup right into the world oil market. Once that happened, getting relief to the Iraqi people became a sideshow to doing business with Saddam. The idea was that the UN would supervise Saddam, ensuring he sold oil only to buy relief goods for the Iraqi people. For its administrative pains, the UN Secretariat collected 2.2% of the revenue on every barrel of oil sold by Saddam, totaling $1.4 billion over the course of the seven year program. Member states that supported Saddam got lucrative business from him, with the eager but confidential approval of the Secretariat. What followed was oil-for-fraud, oil-for-palaces, oil-for-weapons, kickbacks for Saddam, payoffs to businesses and politicians, and, allegedly, bribes to assorted UN officials surrounding Kofi Annan. None of that was disclosed to the public at the time, and far too little has been disclosed since, by this same UN now proposing itself as the keeper of the Internet information society. We know it today only because President Bush finally put together a coalition outside the UN, and over UN protest, to topple Saddam -- and in so doing, exposed a lot of dirty laundry, not only Saddam’s, but the UN’s.

Oil-for-Food was the kind of fiasco that should have humbled the UN. But with the Oil-for-Food scandal high in the headlines, Annan rolled out another proposal this year that has the potential to be even worse -- unimaginable though that might seem. This one was his plan for global taxation, in which he wants the world’s wealthiest nations to pledge an automatic .7% of their annual gross national income for aid – much of that, presumably to be administered by the UN. Never mind that decades of UN-run aid programs have done more to prop up and bail out tyrants than to help the impoverished people living under them – since UN aid is generally funneled through governments, and it is basically despotic government that keeps people poor. For the UN, the big effect of Annan’s global tax plan would be to provide a steady gusher of billions straight into the coffers of the same UN Secretariat that administered Oil-for-Food. That plan was shot down by the U.S. at Annan’s “reform” summit this past September. But it is only down, not out. That number, the .7%, persists in UN rhetoric. It is the germ of a plan, and the UN has been playing with similar, smaller, and perhaps more feasible plans of similar kind. A tax on airlines. A tax on… well, that brings us back to the internet.

The danger by now is that the UN has two powerfully motivated interest groups, the censors and the taxers, both gunning for control of the net. And the UN has already sprouted a bureaucracy, complete with Prepcoms, to organize the next summit, and the next. The takeover bid failed in Tunis, but with enough time and persistence, it could very well happen.

So, what’s a blogger to do? For people who care about freedom and value the internet for all the right reasons, the best answer I can see is to fight back with the best weapon you’ve got— the truth. It helped air out CBS. Indeed, it is on blogs that much of the best UN coverage can be found already. We need more. If it’s information the UN wants to talk about, let’s start with a lot more information about the UN itself. Find it, post it, The more daylight, the better the chance that the UN will have to either shut itself down, or clean up its act—and back away from the internet.