US Threatens Pullout from UPU and ITU, Which Survived Hitler but Not Trump

WAYNE MADSEN

US Threatens Pullout from UPU and ITU, Which Survived Hitler but Not Trump

The United States is threatening to withdraw from two international organizations that survived World Wars I and II but may not survive the retrogressive neo-conservative foreign policy of Donald Trump. The world’s third-oldest international organization, the Universal Postal Union (UPU), founded in 1874 in Bern, Switzerland, has been informed by Washington of the US withdrawal. The United States became, under the administration of President Ulysses Grant, a founding member of the UPU.

The Trump administration, notably the rabidly-rightwing White House trade adviser, Peter Navarro, is upset over foreign government subsidies for certain postal authorities, most notably that of China, which reduces international parcel mailing costs to manufacturers and consumers. Rather than negotiate revised postal rates, through the auspices of the UPU, which was established to standardize the world’s postal system, Trump plans to leave the organization.

The Trump White House is also threatening US withdrawal from the second-oldest international organization, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), established by the International Telegraph Convention in Paris in 1865. The United States joined the ITU in 1908, during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt. The two presidents – Grant and Roosevelt – who ushered the United States into the UPU and ITU, respectively, were Republicans.

Trump’s beef with the ITU is over the organization’s management of the international radio frequency spectrum and its movement toward managing international data bandwidth. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) members, notably FCC chairman Ajit Pai and member Michael O’Rielly, both of whom are owned and operated by America’s communications giants — including AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast — who want private industry, not government agencies, to set the rules for radio spectrum and bandwidth governance.

The flagrant racism of the Trump administration was on full display when the United States, for the first time in the history of its membership of the Geneva-based ITU, withdrew its candidate for chairman of the Radio Regulations Board (RRB), one of the governing bodies of the ITU. The RRB is key to the oversight and management of the global radio spectrum management, something that Trump and his business cronies want to milk for as much profiteering as possible.

The candidate dropped for RRB chair was board vice-chair Joanne Wilson, nominated by Barack Obama in 2014 to the board’s second-ranking position. Breaking with protocol, Washington not only dropped Wilson as chairman-designate but counteracted the ITU’s consensus that Jean Philemon Kissangou should be elected as the director of the ITU’s Telecommunications Development Bureau (BDT).

The Trump administration has threatened to cut off funding of the ITU, a move tantamount to withdrawal, unless the ITU selects Doreen Bogdan-Martin, a favorite of the scandal-ridden US Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, to be the next BDT director. Ross’s Commerce Department touts Bogdan-Martin as the first woman to head any of the ITU’s elected leadership roles in the organization’s 153-year history. However, the Commerce Department is lying. Ms. Wilson was slated to become the ITU’s first woman to be elected the head of an ITU body, the RRB.

Wilson’s disqualifying factor for the Trump White House is that she is an African-American. Kissangou’s disqualifier for the Trump administration is that he is an African from the Republic of Congo, one of the nations that Trump previously described as a “shithole.” Bogdan-Martin, who is white, had the backing of the George W. Bush administration for various positions at the ITU. The racism that is on display by the Republican Party in elections in Georgia, Florida, Texas, and other states is also fashionable in elections for international organization leadership positions in Geneva…..more here

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