Think tanks wrap-up

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 (UPI) -- The UPI think tank wrap-up is a daily digest covering opinion pieces, reactions to recent news events and position statements released by various think tanks.

The Independent Institute

(II is an independent public policy research organization whose goal is to transcend the political and partisan interests that influence debate about public policy. II aims to redefine the debate over public issues, and foster new and effective directions for government reform, by adhering to the highest standards of independent scholarly inquiry, without regard to political or social biases.)

OAKLAND, Calif. -- U.S. Should Stay Out of UNESCO

by Wendy McElroy

A statement went almost unnoticed in President Bush's Sept. 12 address to the United Nations General Assembly on Iraq.

The president pledged to rejoin UNESCO -- the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization -- from which the United States had withdrawn in protest in 1984. Rejoining is a mistake.

The United Nations and its alphabet-soup agencies are committed to spreading a politically correct agenda on issues such as gender around the globe. The United Nations is a corrupt, mismanaged and power-hungry organization that has contempt for the United States and for individual rights.

UNESCO is not the benign agency it is sometimes painted as, as President Reagan discovered. In the early '80s, American tax dollars were funding about 25 percent of UNESCO's bloated budget which -- it was discovered -- went largely to fund leftist causes or into the pockets of then Director-General Mahtar M'Bow and his cronies.

The rest of the American tax money went into producing proposals such as UNESCO's "New World Information Order," approved by the U.N. General Assembly in 1974. The policy required journalists around the world to be licensed to practice so that cultural bias in reporting could be prevented through the threat of revocation or non-issuance. Translation: Western journalists and their values would no longer be allowed to "dominate."

In exiting UNESCO with congressional support, Reagan declared the agency "extraneously politicized virtually every subject it deals with. It has exhibited a hostility toward the basic institutions of a free society, especially a free market and a free press."

In re-entering UNESCO, Bush stated that the "organization has been reformed." UNESCO's critics, such as the Heritage Foundation, dispute the effectiveness of reorganization within the notoriously corrupt agency. But, assuming UNESCO has been ably reformed, what is its true mission? What will the United States be funding to the tune of at least $60 million a year?

UNESCO's first Director-General Julian Huxley prepared the official document "UNESCO, Its Purpose and Its Philosophy" in 1946. Speaking of a need to transcend traditional religions and political-economic doctrines (e.g. free trade), Huxley declared, "The task before UNESCO ... is to help the emergence of a single world culture, with its own philosophy and background of ideas, and with its own broad purposes." [Emphasis added] He wrote of the "transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations to a world organization."

UNESCO's current mission statement speaks in vague terms of contributing "to peace and security in the world ... in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms."

The ideology lurking beneath the noble vagueness can be judged by which issues UNESCO addresses and which it skirts.

UNESCO is ambitious in the area of bioethics. This is the crossroads between medical science and morality that includes issues such as abortion, cloning, euthanasia, population control, and gene therapy. According to a 2000 address by Koichiro Matsuura, then director-general of UNESCO, the agency's objective was "the construction of a shared bioethics, that is, of universal principles in bioethics." It has established active sub-agencies like the UNESCO Bioethics Committee and International Regulation of Gene Therapy.

Huxley predicted this focus in his 1946 document. He wrote, "Even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable."

One bioethical issue UNESCO skirts is China's one-child policy, established in 1979. For decades, the policy has forced women who exceed the government-approved number of children to abort, even in late pregnancy.

Among the millions of the policy's victims are the first-born infant girls killed by parents who are desperate for a son to support them in old age. UNESCO itself estimates such deaths at "more than one million."

Why, then, is there no official condemnation of the one-child policy, which is arguably the greatest bioethical atrocity on the globe? UNESCO makes clear and official statements of what should be legal regarding gene therapy. Yet it seems unable to come up with a firm statement on one-child policies. UNESCO's Web site includes articles defending -- as well as critiquing -- China's policy, as though the murder of millions of female infants was a debatable issue. UNESCO seems determined to support the family planning Programs Of The United Nations Which Has Been Complicit In The Slaughter.

The United Nations and UNESCO have no respect for individual rights or for America. One day after the United States was voted off the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, commentator Juan Williams asked Mary Robinson -- then U.N. high commissioner on human rights -- if she worried about America withholding funds. She replied

"I hope the Americans see it as a wake-up call to take a more positive approach." She believed Americans should try to "earn their way back" onto U.N. committees.

A more accurate phrasing is "buy" their way back. The United States should walk away.

(Wendy McElroy is Research Fellow at The Independent Institute and editor of the Institute books, "Freedom, Feminism and the State" and "Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the Twenty-first Century.)

The National Center for Policy Analysis

(The NCPA is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research institute that seeks innovative private sector solutions to public policy problems.)

DALLAS, Tex.-- Off Welfare, Better Off

by Joe Barnett

Welfare rolls nationwide have fallen by more than 50 percent since welfare reform was enacted in 1996. The goal of reform was to move families on welfare -- the vast majority of which are headed by single women -- from dependency to independence through work. How successful has reform been?

-- Both national surveys and state data show that the women most at risk for long-term welfare receipt have left the welfare rolls at rates as fast as or faster than women who are much less at risk.

-- In the states studied in depth, most of those leaving the welfare rolls have found employment, increased their incomes relative to welfare recipients and are gradually moving up the income ladder; a majority of those who have left say they feel they are better off.

During the booming economy of the late 1990s, welfare reform critics claimed that the good economy was primarily responsible for the fall in welfare rolls. They predicted that if the good times ended, welfare rolls would rise. Yet despite the increase in unemployment following the 2001 recession, many states continued to reduce their welfare rolls.

That is because most significant factor in caseload reduction is state policies. The states that have been less successful have had ineffective sanctions, high benefit levels and other counterproductive policies. Without any changes in federal law, the states that have failed to reduce their welfare rolls by as much as the average could adopt more effective policies. The impact would be significant:

-- If the 23 less-than-average states had done as well as the average state, more than 800,000 additional people would have left welfare.

-- Instead of a 59 percent reduction in welfare rolls since 1993, the United States would have 66 percent fewer welfare recipients.

(Joe Barnett is a policy analyst with the National Center for Policy Analysis.)

The Institute for Public Accuracy

(The IPA is a nationwide consortium of policy researchers that seeks to broaden public discourse by gaining media access for experts whose perspectives are often overshadowed by major think tanks and other influential institutions.)

WASHINGTON -- Missions to Baghdad: Value in Dialogue?

Members of Congress Jim McDermott, D-Wash., David Bonior, D-Mich., and Mike Thompson, D-Calif., have been attacked for speaking out against U.S. policy while in Iraq.

-- James Abourezk, former U.S. senator who visited Iraq in mid-September.

"We've arrived at a very scary state in this country where people opposed to the administration are accused of not being patriotic. The real act of patriotism is not to fall into line behind a president who is desperately trying to get us into a war -- but to raise questions to save lives and our national morality."

-- Edward L. Peck, former chief of mission to Iraq and deputy director of the White

House Task Force on Terrorism in the Reagan Administration.

"Having these congressmen over there is a fantastic thing. They should talk. You don't

lose a thing by talking."

-- Joan Campbell, director of the Department of Religion at the Chautauqua Institution,

Campbell is a former Secretary General of the National Council of Churches.

"We must pursue every diplomatic effort to avert war. We should truly work with the United Nations, not simply issue demands."

-- Leah Wells, teacher and peace education coordinator of the Nuclear Age Peace

Foundation, Wells just returned from Iraq.

"There's no dialogue between students in Iraq and the United States. All they have

grown up knowing is sanctions and bombing and my students have grown up hearing that Iraq is simply a country of 25 million Saddam Husseins."

-- Anthony Arnove, editor of the book "Iraq Under Siege."

"Rep. Jim McDermott has been criticized for saying 'I think the president would mislead the American people' about the reasons for going to war. In fact, Bush has already been deceiving the U.S. public as he tries to sell the country on a war against Iraq. Speaking in Phoenix on Sept. 27, Bush said that Saddam Hussein is 'a man who loves to link up with al Qaida.' Bush is untroubled by the lack of any evidence for this claim. Bush has also dissembled about the U.S. withdrawal of United Nations weapons inspectors in 1998. Bush said in January 2002, 'This is a regime that agreed to international inspections, then kicked out the inspectors.' In reality, the inspectors were pulled out by the U.N. at the behest of the U.S. in anticipation of the planned U.S. bombing of Iraq in December 1998. And, as the Washington Times reported Sept. 27, a report Bush cited as saying that Iraq was only six months away from developing a nuclear weapon in 1998 doesn't exist, according to the alleged source of this information, the International Atomic Energy Agency."