Canadian Corruption
Now Playing: "Spy in the Cab" by Bauhaus
Professor Reynolds says you should read this ---and so you should.

[Canadian Prime Minister] Paul Martin hardly needs another scandal, but the news that Maurice Strong has stepped down from his UN post as special envoy to Korea in the wake of allegations related to the Iraqi oil-for-food debacle is potentially damaging on several fronts.

This week, Mr. Strong, a long-time mentor and associate of Mr. Martin, admitted ongoing links to Tongsun Park, a Korean lobbyist charged in connection with oil-for-food. Mr. Park previously enjoyed 15 minutes of infamy in the 1970s as the conduit for bribes to U.S. Congressional officials, an affair dubbed "Koreagate." This time, according to Paul Volcker's independent inquiry, Mr. Park transferred funds from Iraq to high-ranking UN officials.

Mr. Park has apparently admitted that he invested US$1-million in a Canadian company associated with the son of a UN official. Mr. Strong himself immediately came forward and declared that he was the official, and that the company was Cordex Petroleums. Intriguingly, other investors in the company included CSL Group Inc., the holding company controlled by Paul Martin (which was at that time being managed in trust). Cordex's directors included Bill Hopper, the ousted former head of Petro-Canada, the state oil company of which Mr. Strong was the founding chairman and CEO.

What I don't get are the remarks Martin made last November in Santiago, Chile about expanding the current G8 to the G20 ---thereby effectively supplanting the United Nations Security Council. But is that what's going on? Says this guy:

Although initial press reports in Canada interpreted this as a veiled retrenchment from Canada's historically strong support for the United Nations, it is better viewed as an enlargement of the G-8 grouping by co-opting such major economic players as Australia, China, India, Indonesia, South Africa, South Korea, Mexico and Brazil. For Australia, this is potentially more useful and important than trying to gatecrash the East Asian groupings.

That's honest enough, although what Ramesh Thakur says next is perhaps too honest:

The central challenge of global governance is a double disconnect. First, between the distribution of hard and soft power in the real world, on the one hand, and the distribution of decision-making authority in the existing intergovernmental institutions on the other. Second, between the numbers and types of actors playing ever-expanding roles in civil, political and economic affairs within and among nations, and the concentration of decision-making authority in intergovernmental institutions.

See, the real impediment to the UN becoming a true global government is the hardheadedness of those who still haven't gotten over the infantile disease of nationalism. Id est, Americans.

But never mind that; what's really cooking is that a lot of the very same leaders who objected to the War for Iraq are being exposed as morally questionable crooks whose objections were not rooted in principle, but interest. Namely, self-interest.

We don't need the fucking UN. We don't need friends who want to institute one world government at our expense. If you think we're such a force for evil in the world, go find out how bad it is. Go.

And drop us a post card when you can.