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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zoltan! who wrote (14967)	5/5/1998 9:59:00 AM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

Is Ted Turners Billion $ "Gift" to the UN really a leveraged buy out? WSJ: . . . A case in point is CNN founder Ted Turner's $1 billion gift to the U.N., announced last fall. Many who remain committed to the original purposes of the U.N.--promoting peace, freedom and humanitarian aid--were overcome with joy when Mr. Turner announced his donation "to help the poorest of the poor." Paid out in annual installments of $100 million for 10 years, the Turner gift would rank behind the annual contributions of only the U.S., Japan and Germany. It seemed too good to be true. It was. It now appears that the U.N. will not have control over the funds. Rather, its agencies must submit proposals for approval by a foundation headed by a man Mr. Turner chose because "he thinks as I do." The individual who will have the chief say in allocating the Turner millions is Timothy Wirth, a Democrat who has served as a senator from Colorado and as Mr. Clinton's undersecretary of state for global affairs. Mr. Wirth's main claim to fame is that he led an unsuccessful attempt at the U.N.'s 1994 Cairo population conference to make abortion part of "reproductive rights" and therefore an integral part of family planning. Mr. Wirth's lengthy paper trail, forging links between population, the environment and immigration, epitomizes the world view of those who see the poor as a threat to their own consumption, a menace to the ecosystem and a portent of social unrest. As its details have unfolded, Mr. Turner's massive donation looks less like a gift and more like an offer to acquire the services of U.N. agencies with privileged access to target populations. In view of Mr. Turner's challenge to his fellow philanthropists to follow his lead, this will be a time of testing for the U.N. Are its prestige and organizational resources literally for sale? Given the power of private groups bent on channeling humanitarian and development aid into "reproductive services," the funding restrictions in the dues bill before the president would likely have little practical impact on aggressive population controllers. But the restrictions would send an important message from an affluent nation to the poorest and most vulnerable citizens of the world: that American taxpayers do not endorse a program to reduce the size of the world's poor population by any means possible. The congressional bill, which has bipartisan support, reinforces both the great purposes for which the U.N. was founded in the aftermath of World War II and the largely sensible population-stabilization efforts to which the U.N. has long been committed--family planning, education of women and development aid. All these measures respect the freedom of people to decide for themselves how many children to have and when. To reject the bill's restrictions would send a very different message to peoples and nations without political clout. Oxford economist and social philosopher Amartya Sen described it best when he noted a "dangerous tendency" on the part of affluent nations to search for solutions to overpopulation that "treat the people involved not as reasonable beings, allies faced with a common problem, but as impulsive and uncontrolled sources of great social harm, in need of strong discipline." Woman Flatly Opposed Adding injury to insult, the president is apparently ready to sacrifice the payment of U.N. dues rather than endorse the U.N.'s own policy established 14 years ago in Mexico City. What principle is important enough to justify his veto? It is the one principle from which Mr. Clinton has never wavered: unrestricted abortion, up to and including birth itself. That principle, let it be said, has nothing to do with women's rights. The majority of women are flatly opposed to it--more so than men. As with his veto of the ban on partial-birth abortions, the president is preparing to demonstrate his loyalty once again to the only constituency he has never disappointed--a loose-knit coalition of abortion extremists whose "solution" to poverty is to get rid of poor people. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ms. Glendon is a professor of law at Harvard University.

To: Zoltan! who wrote (14967)	5/6/1998 8:27:00 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

Duncan, the reason that Clinton and his associates are being so obstructive of anything to do with the Starr investigation may have to do with a strategy that his attorneys are building for him to prevent testifying at all. This theory, which I have seen discussed on several of the talking heads programs, is one real possibility of how he may handle this, citing his belief that the entire thing is a witchhunt by the far right. What do you think would happen if he simply refused to testify?