Chirac wants to raise your taxes, updated x 2
I couldn't make this one up had I tried.

Jacques Chirac, arguably one of the most corrupt politicians of all time, yesterday gave a speech at the UN (that paragon of transparency) proposing to harness globalisation with a new "ethic for globalization". The new ethic takes the form of a proposed $50 billion global tax on financial transactions, greenhouse gas emissions, arms sales, airline tickets and credit card purchases.

Together with Brazilian president Ignacio Lula da Silva, Jacques, trying to convince what the France2 article calls "a hostile or skeptical audience", said (my translation)

"Such instruments (i.e., an international tax) can be designed according to methods guaranteeing the absence of economic distortion, the sovereignty of the States, as well as the transparent management of the funds. . . We shouldn't delay in finding new balances between capital and labor, private interests and the common good, freedom and the law".

Going along with the scheme are Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and President Ricardo Lagos of Chile.

To their credit, the France2 news TV broadcast (which normally repeats Jacques's point of view uncontested) interviewed a gentleman that pointed out that such taxes are undemocratic and uncollectable to the point that in France they have had to resort to taxing real assets, such as real estate, in order to be able to enforce any tax.

Helen at EU Referendum has a few things to say about the UN:

But the Security Council is not a legal body. It is merely a very uneasy political grouping, whose moral stature is doubtful. Two of the permanent members are Russia and China, whose own record in either legal or moral terms, is not worth examining. (Think Chechnya, Tibet, Falun Gong, media control.) Another one, France, is being revealed to have been so anxious to prevent the deposition of President Chirac's friend Saddam Hussein that it forged documents to discredit the American operation.

Other, non-permanent members of the Security Council are often failed states with disgusting human rights records whose governments are dependent on Western hand-outs.

There are several problems with the U.N. The fact that it is a political organization in which individual nations' interests predominate, while pretending to be the bearer of to torch of international legality and morality is one.

Another one is the principle of buggins' turn on which positions are allocated. This leads to quite breathtaking examples, the best known of which is the Human Rights Commission, which is chaired by Libya and of which Sudan is a member, re-elected until 2007.

The fact is that the United Nations was created largely by liberal democratic states to promote liberal democratic ideas. This was immediately sabotaged by the Soviet Union and its many satellites. As time has gone on, the U.N. has become an organization the majority of whose members neither believe nor practice its supposed basic principles. The idea of elevating it into a supreme arbiter of world legitimacy and morality is not only preposterous, it is criminal.

And now those criminals want you to pay more taxes. Guess who's going to profit.

In not totally unrelated news, Twelve French soldiers on peacekeeping duties in Ivory Coast have been arrested in connection with a bank theft there last week.
Update The NY Times must have not found either the Chirac speech or the French soldiers' news "fit to print" since both were missing from today's paper. The Times, however, sounds (unintentionally?) reassuring: U.S. Declines to Back Poverty Declaration, and says the "final declaration didn't focus on a specific proposal".
Update 2 Kathleen finds a bone to pick with Jacques's grocery bills.