re’s room for reform at the United Nations, starting with the Security Council, but the organization is doing more good than not, Ted Turner, the CNN founder and the largest individual donor to the UN, said on Tuesday. “It’s the seventh inning and we’re down by two runs,” he said, citing global warming, nuclear proliferation, growing population and environmental degradation. “We’ve already got a catastrophe on our hands.” Turner was interviewed before an audience on Tuesday by Paul Holmes, Reuters Political and General News Editor, at the Reuters headquarters in New York. See archived coverage of the event here
Turner addressed some of the questions from readers. Steve Bolin asked “Why should we trust an organization like the UN where dictators and despots, and countries that allow the slavery of children have an equal vote?” Turner noted that every country has “different rules and they’re constantly changing… We have a president who admitted secret prisons.”
A question from a ‘Friend of Ted’ drew a sharper response. ‘Friend’ asked whether he felt his donations to the UN Foundation “created one bureaucracy fund another.” Turner called the notion “ridiculous… You have to have management, otherwise you’ll have chaos.”
Turner’s picks and pans
Picks
– Parliament of Man, a book by Paul Kennedy, on the history of the United Nations.
– Al Gore, the 2000 Democratic candidate for president, is “very responsible, a great leader,” Turner told the audience, referring to the former vice president’s campaign to combat global warming. ”We’ve got to have good leadership now; we can’t afford to waste another 8 years.”
– Female politicians. “Men should be barred from public office” for a long spell to bring about a kinder and gentler world, he said.
Pans
– U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 did ‘incalculable damage” to the U.S. Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II each rank as “dumb moves” for Turner, but he said it’s possible the U.S. invasion of Iraq “might be the dumbest; we lost so much. Before Iraq, we were one of the most popular nations on earth and now we’re one of the most feared and distrusted.
– Iran nuclear policy in the West. “It’s a joke to say Iran can’t have nuclear weapons,” he said. “Why don’t we say Israel or India or Russia can’t have them… We’ve got to get rid of all nuclear weapons as quickly as we possibly can.”
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MONEY AND BRAINS DO NOT ALWAYS COME IN THE SAME BOX. THE VILLAGE IDIOT IS NOW ON A GLOBAL SCALE.
- Posted by LARRY DAN CHAUNCEYTHE RUSSIANS ARE NOW SAYING WE ARE ABOUT TO GO INTO ANOTHER ICE AGE. SO NOW “CLIMATE CHANGE” IS THE NEW BUZZ WORD TO BLAME BUSH FOR. SINCE THEY HAVE NO CLUE IF IT’S GETTING WARMER OR COLDER.
EVEN BUSH WOULD NOT CLAIM TO BE THE INVENTOR OF THE INTERNET. JUST WHAT UNIVERSITY DOES GORE HAVE HIS METEROLOGICAL DEGREE FROM ANYWAY?
Only time will tell
- Posted by Ken[…] The bloggers participating in the conversation - on their own blogs as well as live in the IRC chat - were generally disillusioned and skeptical about the U.N.’s ability to solve the world’s problems. Many were concerned that Turner is wasting his money on needless bureaucracy and a dysfunctional organization whose governance structure is an increasingly illegitimate Cold-War era holdover. But Turner was adamant that his money is well spent. […]
- Posted by Global Voices Online » Blog Archive » Ted Turner on the U.N.: Spoke but didn’t listenIraq was not very well thought out idea. It is amazing to me how so many supposedly intelligent people fell for so much bad info and so many more people just didn’t say no. Will we ever get out of Iraq? Who knows? I imagine there will come a day when we can’t afford to go into any more debt to finance the war. Maybe that’s the answer…if they don’t get anymore money they can’t buy anymore bullets and then maybe we’ll all sit down and talk like we should have in the first place.
- Posted by Clyrobj