{"id":372482,"date":"2018-08-07T20:12:57","date_gmt":"2018-08-07T19:12:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/present-perverse-priorities-will-undermine-the-un-even-further\/"},"modified":"2018-08-07T20:12:57","modified_gmt":"2018-08-07T19:12:57","slug":"present-perverse-priorities-will-undermine-the-un-even-further","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/present-perverse-priorities-will-undermine-the-un-even-further\/","title":{"rendered":"Present Perverse Priorities Will Undermine the UN Even Further!"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>The news came a few days ago: <em>\u201cUN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned member states that the organization is facing \u201ctroubling funding issues as a result of delayed dues payments that will force reductions in non-staff costs.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>But who really cares? Any Trump tweet or football result is more important to our media and politicians. The members of the UN still give the world\u2019s military about 340 times more than the UN for its core budget.<\/p>\n<p>You often hear people raising doubts about the\u00a0 \u201cthe United Nations\u201d and most people then think of the skyscraper in New York as \u201cthe UN\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>But there is no \u201cUN\u201d independent of what the 193 member states decide to make of it. That was already pointed out by its first Secretary-General, Norwegian Trygve Lie, in the late 1940s: The UN will never be stronger or better than the member states want it to be.<\/p>\n<p>That is the essential \u2013 and in some sense also existential \u2013 truth about the world\u2019s potentially most important and visionary organisation.<\/p>\n<p>A second truth is that the UN is not, at least not predominantly, the power house in New York (which, in passing, ought to be moved out of the US given the decade-long contempt for the UN Charter shown by that member). The real UN is the family of UN agencies that do good around the world every day and without which the world would be a much worse place.<\/p>\n<p>A third truth is that a few predominantly Western states \u2013 the U.S. in particular \u2013 have done their utmost at&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/2018\/08\/present-perverse-priorities-will-undermine-the-un-even-further\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The news came a few days ago: \u201cUN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned member states that the organization is facing \u201ctroubling funding issues as a result of delayed dues payments that will force reductions in non-staff costs.\u201d But who really cares? Any Trump tweet or football result is more important to our media and politicians. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2525,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-372482","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}