By
Sheila Bapat
Congratulations, America. You're no longer a deadbeat.
Thanks to 99 members of the United States Senate, we as a country are no longer indebted to the rest of the world. The United States paid off the $582 million it has owed to the United Nations for 10 years. The Senate passed the vote to pay back the dues on Wednesday, 99-0.
It's such an anomaly that we can be the most powerful country in the world and be in debt at the same time.
The Senate finally decided enough is enough and agreed to pass the bill. The House is expected to do the same. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan thanked the U.S. Senate for paying its dues. He said, "The Senate has kept faith with the United Nations on reform. We eagerly await the money once the process is completed..."
Those statements are always so polite. You know Annan is ready to nail that one-hundredth schmuck who didn't show up to vote.
Imagine if you owed your buddy a million bucks - for 10 years.
Imagine owing all of your buddies around the world that much money.
But your argument for not paying them back is, hey, I'm a pimp. You guys all depend on me for cool stuff - you know, rides to parties, fake IDs and lots of beer.
So because of all of this, you convince your friends not only to let you pay them back in 10 years, but to pay back less than you actually owe.
Damn.
Well that's what the United States pulled with its good buddy, the United Nations. Thanks to Sen. Jesse Helms, D-N.C., (aka, frighteningly conservative old man from North Carolina), the United States actually paid back less than it owes. According to The New York Times, the United States owed $926 million in arrears. Some U.N. officials believe the United States owes up to $500 million more than it has paid.
Helms, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was instrumental in reducing this amount by nearly $3.5 million.
What is the argument for paying less than we owe? Apparently, Americans pay entirely too much in taxes for peacekeeping missions in parts of the world that don't even impact them. True, Joe Schmoe who works at McDonald's may not care about peacekeeping missions in East Timor.
But it's still the responsibility of the leader of the international community to pick up the tab in these situations. Some may believe it is unfair for the United States to have to pick up so much of the slack in the United Nations. But there's a territory that comes with the title.
Furthermore, the United States is probably the most important figure in the United Nations, and is clearly the member with the most clout. This country has an enormous amount of pull in deciding which peacekeeping missions take place, not only because of our seat on the Security Council, but because we are the ones with all of the money.
OK, so we convinced our friends to let us pay after 10 years and to let us pay less than we owe. But we didn't stop there.
We (Helms in particular) coerced other nations, including Israel and South Korea, to pick up part of our tab. And we got all snippy with those Middle Eastern and East Asian countries that wouldn't help us out.
Say what?
Something is seriously wrong here. Since when is the United States hard up?
Part of the problem is having Helms as head of this committee. His nose is harder than anybody's on the Senate, and his stinginess the most palpable. When a foreign-policy realist like Helms is in a position to help us lower our debt, our buddies in the international community are inevitably going to get the shaft.
Our dues are paid. But to the rest of our worldwide buddies, we're still deadbeats.
