The goal of the world body’s Commission for Social Development, which is meeting February 1 through 10 at the UN building in New York City, is to create what the global bureaucrats call a “social protection floor” (SPF), which they hope will become a major UN focus following its Millennium Development Goals project in 2015.
The focus of the Commission, as it was discussed at a special pre-commission Civil Society Forum on January 31, is to bring “universal access to basic social protection and social services.”
The Global Social Crisis: Report on the World Social Situation 2011 explains the thoroughly socialist reasoning: “Universal access to basic social protection and social services is necessary to break the cycle of poverty and reduce inequality and social exclusion. A basic social protection floor is affordable; its benefits need to be weighed against the potentially high human, social and economic costs of not investing in social protection.”
Declared Milos Koterec, president of the UN’s Economic and Social Council, which created the report: “No one should live below a certain income level. Everyone should be able to access at least basic health services, primary education, housing, water, sanitation, and other essential services.”
Writing in the Deseret News, Susan Roylance of the conservative Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, explained that the services fixated on by Koterec “were presented at the forum as basic human rights equal to the rights of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” and the money to fund such a “social protection floor” should come from a world tax, UN officials insist.
“We will need a modest but long-term way to finance this transformation,” declared Jens Wandel, deputy director of the UN Development Program. “One idea which we could consider is a minimal financial transaction tax (of .005 percent). This will create $40 billion in revenue.”
Jorge Valero, permanent chairman of the Commission for Social Development, insisted that “it is absolutely essential to establish controls on capital movements and financial speculation.” Valero explained that such controls would come through “progressive policies of taxation” requiring “those who earn more to pay more taxes.”
Roylance quoted one of the presenters at the forum, Sister Fatima Rodrigo, as insisting that “there is plenty of money — we just need to stop spending it on militaries and wars.” Added Winifred Doherty, chairman of the NGO Committee on Social Developoment and one of the forum’s organizers, “Military spending is the problem. There is no scarcity of resources. Where do we put our resources? Destroying people and the planet.”
According to Roylance, the push for a “social protection floor” — and the global tax to fund it — “is becoming solidly entrenched in the United Nations’ agencies and programs. Some U.N. leaders are calling for the SPF to become the new focus for the U.N., when the Millennium Development Goals are finished — after 2015.”
The Millennium Development Goals are eight lofty socialist objectives to which the nearly 200 UN member nations gave lip service in the year 2000 with the adoption of the United Nations Millennium Declaration: 1) eradicate poverty and hunger; 2) achieve “universal primary education”; 3) promote “gender equality”; 4) reduce child mortality rates; 5) “improve maternal health” (including universal access to contraception and abortion); 6) address pandemics such as AIDS and malaria; 7) address environmental “issues”; 8) “Develop a global partnership for development.”
Predictably, the particularly open-ended goal number eight addresses the issue of finances, under which the global tax would fall in an “open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system.”
