This Month in World Government
The New World Government types have been very busy this month. Let’s take a look at what they’ve been up to.
In our first story, Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the UN, calls for a “global governance structure” for greenhouse gases.
Developed countries must strengthen their mid-term (greenhouse gas) mitigation targets, which are currently nowhere close to the cuts that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says are needed. Developing countries must slow the rise in their emissions and accelerate green growth as part of their strategies to reduce poverty. (Meaning in this middle of this “crisis,” he is actually encouraging developing nations to increase their greenhouse gases output.)
[...]A deal needs to be backed by money and the means to deliver it. Developing countries need funding and technology so they can move more quickly toward green growth. The solutions we discuss cannot be realized without substantial additional financing, including through carbon markets and private investment. (Ah, yes, carbon credits and the carbon market. Implement carbon credits and it somehow helps the third world! …Nevermind the fact, that if we really wanted to support the Third World we could simply stop propping up their brutal dictators.)
A deal must include an equitable global governance structure. All countries must have a voice in how resources are deployed and managed. (But not more than the “global governance structure,” of course.) That is how trust will be built. (Oh, don’t worry, buddy. I trust you.)
How are we going to get all these countries to line up? Well, the first step is financial global governance.
The Group of 20 nations is close to an agreement that would require members to subject their economic policies to a type of “peer review,” according to several senior G-20 officials, in a shift that would xpose the U.S. and China to broad scrutiny of the way they run their economies.
Also, the G-20 heads of state will announce on Friday that the G-20 will become the permanent council for international economic cooperation, eclipsing the Group of Eight, a senior U.S. administration official said.
“It’s a reflection of the world today,” the official said Thursday night. “It’s basically pulling international cooperation into the 21st century.”
The G-8 will continue to meet on matters important to the most-developed economies, such as international security issues. But those meetings will come as world leaders converge for other events, not in major summits.
The initiative was pressed by U.S. President Barack Obama, but it satisfied the demands on Brazil, China, India and other large developing countries, which have bristled at being left out of G-8 conclaves.
How are we going to enforce this new “peer review?” Just leave countries to themselves to adhere to it? Of course not. We’ll need a global body.
A global body with legal (Meaning they will be able to tell you what to do. They will have authority over nations) powers may be needed over time to enforce the world’s new financial rules, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) said on Wednesday.
The FSA’s newly appointed and first director of international affairs, Verena Ross, said the Financial Stability Board (FSB) was key to ensuring all gaps in regulation between securities, insurance and banking sectors were plugged.
Formerly known as the Financial Stability Forum, the FSB was expanded in April to include central bankers and finance ministry and regulatory officials from all Group of 20 (G20) countries.
[...]But the board has no legal teeth and there are “real questions” about whether the world can continue with such informal arrangements in the longer term, Ross said.
There may be a case for exploring the need for a more formal global regulatory framework, such as a body with legal powers of enforcement like the World Trade Organisation, Ross added.
Well, you can’t have a new world financial system without a central bank able to issue currency for the entire world, and what will that be? The IMF, of course.
“A year ago,” said law professor Ross Buckley on Australia’s ABC News last week, “nobody wanted to know the International Monetary Fund. Now it’s the organiser for the international stimulus package which has been sold as a stimulus package for poor countries.”
The IMF may have catapulted to a more exalted status than that. According to Jim Rickards, director of market intelligence for scientific consulting firm Omnis, the unannounced purpose of last week’s G20 Summit in Pittsburgh was that “the IMF is being anointed as the global central bank.” Rickards said in a CNBC interview on September 25 that the plan is for the IMF to issue a global reserve currency that can replace the dollar.
“They’ve issued debt for the first time in history,” said Rickards. “They’re issuing SDRs. The last SDRs came out around 1980 or ‘81, $30 billion. Now they’re issuing $300 billion. When I say issuing, it’s printing money; there’s nothing behind these SDRs.”
George Soros: [...]I believe that basically the system is broken and needs to be reconstituted. We cannot afford to have the kind of chronic and mounting imbalances in international finance. So, you need a new currency system and actually the special drawing rights do give you the makings of a system and I think it’s ill-considered on the part of the United States to resist the wider use of special drawing rights.
[...]Financial Times: What sort of a financial deal should Obama be seeking to strike when he travels to China next month?
GS: I think this would be time because you really need to bring China into the creation of a new world order, a financial world order. They are kind of reluctant members of the IMF. They play along, but they don’t make much of a contribution because it’s not their institution. Their share is not commensurate … their voting rights are not commensurate to their weight, so I think you need a new world order that China has to be part of the process of creating it and they have to buy in. They have to own it the same way as, let’s say, the United States owns the Washington consensus, the current order, and I think this would be a more stable one where you would have co-ordinated policies. I think the makings of it are already there because the G20, in agreeing to peer reviews, effectively is moving in that direction.
Ah, I’m sure it will be nice having Chinese masters. I hope they’re kind to us.
In other world government news, there is also the Treaty of Lisbon, which threatens to give the EU drastic new powers over the individual nation states, including over the nations’ criminal laws. Every member of the EU, except for Czechoslovakia, has ratified it, sometimes against the will of the people, such as in France and Holland.
It looked as if Czechoslovakia’s President Vaclav Klaus would hold out, but under international pressure he passed the decision to Czechoslovakia’s highest court, which is viewed as sympathetic to the intentions of the EU.
Now it looks as if European sovereignity hangs by a thread, but then again now-a-days, what doesn’t?
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