The United States funds 22% of the United Nations $1.6 billion annual budget, pays 27% of an additional $3.6 billion in peacekeeping operation costs, and provides billions more for U.N. agencies and related agencies each year. Add to this the contributions by American private citizens (American individuals, estates, foundations, and corporations gave an estimated $240.72 billion to charitable causes in 2003) and you have consistent criticism levelled at the United States for being "stingy" by ambassadors of the U.N.
Most U.N. ambassadors are a bunch of ne'er-do-wells who owe $ millions in unpaid parking tickets, reside in multi million dollar Manhattan residences, set their gift limits at $10,000 (changed to $250 in 2005), are exempt from tax, and are entitled to "diplomatic discounts" on luxury items. This is a privileged class of 45,000 U.N. agency employees; so also is the the U.N. Press Corps - journalists unlikely to write anything derogatory about the hand that feeds them.
As of 2005, there were 89 democracies in the U.N., leaving 101 tyrannies, dictatorships, and oligarchies in majority who delight in voting against all proposals initiated by the United States.
The U.N. is a gigantic spendthrift organisation which does "deals" with impunity and offers little oversight in its dealings e.g. UNICEF claims 88% of its donations go to children, when it's actually 54%. The American Red Cross delivers 91% to give you a comparison.
Up to 1/3 of the U.N.'s tsunami donations were plowed into U.N. bureaucracy. The U.N. refuses to provide an accounting.
Millions of Swiss francs have been embezzled from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), according to an internal audit quoted by the Swiss press. Maria Veiga, the official who probed the scandal from 2003 to 2005 before being fired by the WMO, told Le Matin newspaper at least part of the missing 4.3 million Swiss francs (2.65 million euros) went to buy countries' votes for the post of secretary general.
The United Nations Development Programme office in Pyongyang, North Korea, sits in a Soviet-style compound. Like clockwork, a North Korean official wearing a standard-issue dark windbreaker and slacks would come to the door each business day. He would take a manila envelope stuffed with cash (a healthy portion of the U.N.'s disbursements for aid projects in the country) and leave without ever providing receipts.
According to sources at the U.N., this went on for years, resulting in the transfer of up to $150 million in hard foreign currency to the Kim Jong Il government at a time when the United States was trying to keep North Korea from receiving hard currency as part of its sanctions against the Kim regime.
"At the end, we were being used completely as an ATM machine for the regime," said one U.N. official with extensive knowledge of the program. "We were completely a cash cow, the only cash cow in town. The money was going to the regime whenever they wanted it."
The Hudson Institute estimated from 1979-2005, roughly $520 billion (Nigeria earns $300 billion from oil revenue, by the way) of U.N. money was poured into Africa where poverty and disease have only worsened along with continuing genocide - U.N. peace keeping forces only enter troubled areas AFTER a political settlement and a truce have been achieved.
Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney recently called the United Nations a failure and said he would support a new coalition of the free nations of the world.