Three miscellaneous items worth noting before they get too far out of the news

- The so-called scandal in the UN's "oil-for-food" program in Iraq is coming up largely empty. According to IPS News (Italy) earlier this month,

[a] series of 58 internal audits of the multi-billion-dollar oil-for-food programme in Iraq has revealed overbilling and management lapses by its U.N. supervisors, but no large-scale fraud.

The United Nations, which provided food and relief supplies to 27 million sanctions-hit Iraqis during 1996-2003, was charged with overseeing some 65 billion dollars in oil revenues to finance goods and services.

But preliminary U.N. audit reports made public by the Independent Inquiry Committee, created by the U.N. Security Council last year, show management failings resulting in losses amounting to about two million dollars - mostly due to overbilling.

Jim Paul, executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, was quoted as saying "When you have a 65-billion-dollar programme and manage to find two million dollars missing, you don't have a big story."

Possibly more importantly, the same article reveals that the stories that Saddam Hussein was able to skim off billions and billions of dollars in illegal profits are also the result of hype. After noting claims by right-wingers that such illegal profits amounted to 10 to 20 billion dollars, the article added that

in an newspaper interview Saturday, the head of the Independent Inquiry Committee, Paul Volcker, a former head of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, said those figures were "grossly exaggerated". He said his own investigations show only about 1.7 billion dollars in illegal profits.

So - ho-hum - it's just another case of wrong-wing hacks building cases out of air. Meanwhile, Paul points out that the real scandal, the billions vanished from the Development Fund for Iraq run by the Coalition Provisional Authority, is all but ignored.

- Venezuela remains on the US hit list, it seems. At her confirmation hearings, Soon-to-be Secretary of State Cantbe Right went after President Hugo Chavez, claiming he was undertaking "autocratic moves to stifle opposition" and calling him "a destabilizing influence in the region."

"We have to view the government of Venezuela as a negative force in the region," Rice said. "We can work with others to expose that and to say to President Chavez this kind of behavior is really not acceptable in this hemisphere."

Let's see, you tried to undermine his government, immediately endorsed a coup you helped provoke, openly supported and helped finance his opposition, and despite having been rejected by the clear majority of the people of Venezuela every time, you now make thinly-veiled threats. Somehow, I don't think you're in a position to lecture him about "unacceptable behavior."

- Only about 30% of international aid actually reaches the poor according to a UN report issued mid-month, says the Toronto Globe & Mail. But, the report insisted,

if rich countries live up to promises made at a UN summit in 2000 and if poor nations reordered their priorities half a billion people could be lifted out of poverty

in 10 years. That's a noble and reachable goal, although with around 1 billion people living on no more than $1 a day and another 1.8 billion people living on no more than $2 a day, it's a beginning, not an end.

Some of the proposals made are good, especially those that might be called quick hit actions, such as

free mass distribution of anti-malaria bed-nets and anti-malaria medicines for children, eliminating fees for primary school and essential health services, providing antiretroviral drugs to 3 million AIDS patients by the end of 2005, and providing free fertilizer for small farmers with poor soil by the end of 2006.

(It's amazing how often the simple things rather than the grandiose, capital-intensive Big Project things make the most difference: Mosquito netting could have a huge impact in Africa, where 150,000 children die each month from malaria.)

Some of the recommendations deserve serious consideration but will need refinement, such as those that aid be focused on nations showing "good governance" while avoiding those known as serious human rights abusers. (I actually first proposed the latter idea 25 years ago, but I added the rider "unless it can be shown the aid directly benefits the people in need.") The reason for the necessity of refinement can be seen in the phrase "good governance." If that means the recipient nations need to be capable of making good use of the aid they get rather than having it evaporate in corruption or plain gross inefficiency, fine - provided that donor nations are prepared to help the less efficient become more so.

But the expression positively invites all kinds of self-serving distortions by more powerful nations to either pressure recipient nations to behave as the more powerful want them to or to punish them for not falling in line. Consider, for one example, the US treatment of Nicaragua in the 1980s. Under the Sandinista government, major strides were made in health, education, and helping rural farmers obtain markets for their produce. But the US successfully blocked Nicaragua's attempts to obtain capital from sources such as the World Bank based on its opposition to the "macroeconomic policies" of the Central American nation. That is, Nicaragua was not capitalist enough for us, so it was economically isolated. Had the US been working under the new proposals at the time, I suspect it would have just as easily have said "poor governance" as "poor macroeconomics."

That's particularly important because one proposal is flat out bad: Increased international support should only go to those nations which are, among other things, "trying to open up their economies" - and failure to do so could and no doubt would be labeled "poor governance" by some (guess who) as part of some power politics play or anther.

The thing is, in other contexts, "opening up the economy" has meant privatization of public services, reduced regulation of, and taxes on, businesses, and taking steps to integrate the nation into a globalized, corporate-dominated, world economy. That course has not served poor nations well so far except for when they can be used as weapons against the standard of living of workers in donor countries - and there's no reason to expect that will change in the future. There is no reason to demand any nation submit itself to the untender mercies of transnational corporations as the price for aid to its poor and good reasons not to make such a demand. Any proposal pointing in the direction of such a requirement should not be part of any program to aid the world's poor.