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Insult to Injury: Why We Must Oppose the WHO Global Tax Proposals | ||||||||
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James Corbett The Corbett Report 20 January, 2010
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Fresh on the heels of a Dutch investigation into the conflicts of interest of their chief influenza advisor and the bombshell announcement that the Council of Europe will be probing their role in creating and sustaining panic over the recent H1N1 outbreak in order to sell vaccines for Big Pharma, the World Health Organization is now considering "innovative" proposals for raising additional revenues, including levying a global tax on internet activity. The startling revelation comes in a report submitted by an Expert Working Group ahead of the biannual meeting of the WHO's Executive Board. Tasked with finding a financial mechanism for funding the WHO's mandate of transfering health technologies to the developing world, the team of bureaucrats and medical researchers have spent the past 14 months developing a variety of suggestions, including: -A digital tax: "Internet traffic is huge and likely to increase rapidly; this tax could yield tens of billions of US dollars from a broad base of users." -A financial transaction tax: "Brazil's financial transaction tax"[...]set at 0.38% levied on paying bills online and major withdrawals, it was raising an estimate [sic] US$ 20 billion per year and funding some 87% of the Government's key social protection programme, Bolsa Familia, before it was voted down." -An arms trade tax: "a 10% tax on the arms trade market, which might net about US$ 5 billion per annum." The funds raised from such schemes—ranging into the tens of billions of dollars depending on which plans are enacted—would be ostensibly used to aid in the transfer of medical technologies to the developing world so that local research, development and production of medicines can be ramped up. It is argued that this is needed to fill the gap left by pharmaceutical companies who have no motivation to produce medicines for areas of the world that can't afford to pay for them. Additionally, local research and development would allow for the incorporation of local ingredients and traditional medicines in different parts of the globe. Although these aims are laudable on the surface, such platitudes obscure the underlying reality that the WHO's plans would amount to nothing more than the latest attempt by the UN to set the precedent for a global tax to fund their stated goal of establishing global governmental structures. On top of that, the WHO itself has recently been exposed as little more than a vehicle for Big Pharma-connected fraudsters to line their own pockets. Add to that the fact that the WHO and other UN-affiliated agencies have been caught sterilizing women without their knowledge or consent in country after country and it quickly becomes apparent that these are no ordinary taxation proposals by misguided do-gooders. On the contrary, these measures if enacted could signal the birth of a UN-administered global eugenics body. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
Global Tax and Global Government Although it has received almost no attention in the establishment media (with the notable exception of George Russell's Fox News article which broke the story and leaked the report), the fact that the WHO is seiously considering a global tax to fund its global aspirations is an incredible admission for the global health arm of the United Nations to make. Coming as it does on the heels of call after call for global taxation by the UN and the subsequent attempt to introduce such measures at the UN-led climate change conference in Copenhagen last month, this new proposal can be seen as only the latest move toward establishing a funding mechanism for a UN-led global governmental institution. At this point, the UN does not have the authority to unilaterally levy direct taxes on its members, but such schemes can be 'voluntarily' implemented by the coordinated action of individual member states. In fact, this technique has already been used to fund UNITAID, a WHO program set up in 2006 to combat AIDS, malaria and TB. As the WHO's report explains in glowing terms, the program has already raised $1 billion dollars from an airline tax that has been voluntarily levied in 13 countries. For some time now, anyone who buys a plane ticket in Brazil, Britain, France or any of 10 other countries has unknowingly supported a UN-administered global health program. Regardless of what one thinks of the humanitarian intentions that are supposedly behind such schemes (more on that later), the danger of ceding national sovereignty over health issues to an unaccountable, non-democratic UN-led organization should be self-evident. As Lord Monckton pointed out in the run-up to the climate change conference in Copenhagen, the draft text of the UNFCCC proposal included talk of setting up a system of global governance to administer the proposed carbon trading scheme, but notably omitted any mention of a vote, ballot, election or any other pretence of democracy in the proposed governmental institution. With bodies like the WTO, WHO, IMF and World Bank already wielding incredible authority over the lives of people around the world, giving these bodies greater and greater power to expand their global agendas without transparency, democracy or accountability is a formula for global tyranny. Defenders of the UN will no doubt argue that the humanitarian intentions of the WHO programs and the reputation of the WHO itself should assuage any fears that these taxes would be misappropriated or misplaced. The facts, however, do not support this reasoning on either count. Swine Flu Panic Exposes WHO Conflicts of Interest Just as the WHO is gearing up to lobby for a global tax in support of its activities, the global health body is being rocked by an investigation into how its top officials and advisors deliberately exaggerated the H1N1 threat in order to sell vaccines for the pharmaceutical industry. The Council of Europe has launched an official inquiry into the scandal, with the President of the Council's Health Committee, Wolfgang Wodarg, saying he is "certain" that corruption "does exist" in the organization. Describing the vaccine manufacturers like Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and Baxter Vaccines who made billions of dollars off of the contracts that ensued from the WHO's declaration of an "emergency pandemic" last June, Wodarg noted that "These large firms have 'their people' in the cogs and then they pull strings so that the right policy decisions are taken." He cites Klaus Stohr, a top executive at Novartis who was formerly a WHO official in charge of pandemic preparedness plans, as an example of the conflicts of interest and tangled relations between the WHO and Big Pharma.
In a painstakingly researched article from December 2009, F. William Engdahl identified Albert Osterhaus, the so-called "Dr. Flu" who was the WHO's chief influenza advisor, as another key individual in the scam. Ostershaus is chairman of the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza, an advisory group financed by Novartis, Hoffman-La Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, Baxter Vaccines, Sanofi Pasteur and other companies that were estimated to have made as much as 8 billion Euros in profit from the WHO's declaration of pandemic emergency. Osterhaus was also a member of the WHO's scientific advisory group, SAGE, which advocated that a pandemic emergency be declared despite this bout of H1N1 being potentially the mildest influenza outbreak in recorded history. The Council of Europe investigation follows a Dutch parliamentary investigation of Osterhaus that resulted in new legislation requiring scientific advisors to disclose their financial ties to companies. It also follows calls by Russian parliamentarians for "an international commission of inquiry" into the scandal. As Wodarg noted, international institutions like the WHO "are now discredited, because millions of people have been vaccinated with products with inherent possible health risks. This was not necessary. It has also led to a considerable mismanagement of public money." To give the WHO a global tax revenue stream while it is being investigated for one of the largest public health frauds in history would be absurd. But to do so in the belief that the WHO's programs are benevolent and humanitarian would be worse than absurd. It would be potentially genocidal. UN 'Humanitarian Aid' and the Eugenics Agenda At almost the precise moment when the WHO global taxation ambition was exposed, reports began to emerge that a 'humanitarian' program administered by another UN organization, UNICEF, had failed. Remarkably, a review of the program—which was intended to provide basic supplies and humanitarian aid to African children—found that children who were receiving the UN aid actually died at higher rates than children who received no aid at all. Although the UNICEF program may seem like an isolated example of the failure of a humanitarian project, the UN as a whole is replete with examples of supposedly benevolent programs causing disorder, unrest, and even death. UN peacekeepers have become renowned the world over for their corruption, with child abuse, rape, human trafficking and torture becoming (even by the UN's own admissions) a systemic problem. UN administered programs to provide women in Botswana with infant formula have led to widespread infant death and UN run tests of anti-AIDS gels actually increased the likelihood of participants contracting AIDS. An examination of various WHO vaccination programs uncovers an even bleaker reality. The WHO has been actively engaged in seeking effective contraceptive vaccines for decades. In 1988 they published the results of a Phase I trial of a birth control vaccine in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. This vaccine worked by causing the immune system of those injected to develop antibodies against human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), a hormone produced in a woman's body that is necessary for the maintenance of a pregnancy. In effect, women who are vaccinated in this way have their immune systems primed to perform a spontaneous abortion. In 1996, the Philippine Medical Association concluded that tetanus vaccines administered as a part of a WHO vaccination program in that country contained hCG. Women who had taken the vaccine and suffered miscarriage shortly thereafter were found to have had the hCG anti-bodies. That the hCG could have accidentally ended up in the tetanus vaccines is almost unthinkable, especially since tetanus toxoids in particular have been known as ideal carriers for the hormone since at least 1980. In 2004, independent testing of a polio vaccine being administered by UNICEF found sterilizing agents had been added to those vaccines as well. In Thailand, the tetanus vaccine is routinely administered to women during pregnancy, often resulting in spontaneous abortions. The widespread prevalance of similar problems in completely unrelated batches of vaccine produced in different laboratories in different parts of the globe in different years suggest that this pattern is not explicable as mere accident or negligence, but malicious forethought. The fact that many of the key United Nations agencies from the Population Division (Frank Notestein) to UNESCO (Julian Huxley) were set up and directed by card carrying members (and presidents) of eugenics societies should give an indication as to the true purpose and intentions of the UN "Humanitarian Aid" programs. Conclusion The recent WHO proposal, although shocking, is unlikely to become a reality in the near future, especially given the pending investigations into the organization's role in the H1N1 pandemic scam. What is more worrying is that these very "innovative" financing ideas—from internet taxes to financial transaction taxes, airline taxes, carbon taxes and others—that supposedly took the expert working group 14 months to compile have in fact been making their rounds at the UN for at least a decade. Whether or not they are implemented immediately or by a slow process of transformation, it seems the agenda of implementing global taxes for the funding of nascent global governmental bodies is not likely to abate until the UN is abolished or their demands are met. In order to counteract these proposals, they must first be exposed for what they are: attempts to sneak non-accountable, non-democratic global governance structures in the back door by establishing indirect taxation mechanisms for funding them. In order to expose the agenda and what is really at stake, everyone must do their part in spreading the information about the UN and its programs to de-legitimize the process long before such taxes can be enacted by sovereign governments. Related works from The Corbett Report: New World Next Week 2010/01/14 (video) |
