The General Assembly has been in New York for nearly a week. Hotels are full and charging higher prices. It is hard to get a reservation at the extravagant restaurants. The streets on the east side of Manhattan are packed with caravan after caravan of limousines, almost each of which is escorted by the police, as in a funeral cortège, and many with the secret service attached, as well. Some 80 heads of state have come to the big city, which amounts to about half of the U.N. delegations. This is bonus time for the third world kleptocracies, mostly overweight and over-dressed as if New York were Geneva in the thirties. I saw two of these limousine cavalcades in Manhattan on Tuesday. One a procession of eight limos, maybe nine, on Fifth Avenue in the lower fifties in front of Gucci. Inside were hordes of Malaysians. The other dress parade was five limos on 57th street, between Fifth and Madison, in front of Dior. This motorcade was from Rwanda. Yes, Rwanda. I tried to get some reliable numbers of its GDP. Those that are available you wouldn’t want to trust. So I couldn’t even begin to calculate what percentage of Rwanda’s income was spent at Dior. What I did ascertain is that Rwanda has been certified as a HIPC, that is, a Heavily Indebted Poor Country, almost all of whose debts have been canceled. Hey, what am I bitching about! When tourists come to New York they shop. Don’t Malaysians and Rwandans have the right to do that, too? I believe that the U.N. is kept in New York for just such perks. This is corruption, big time. Why shouldn’t it be located, then, in Lagos or Kigali, for that matter? Either no one would come or the delegates would be forced to keep their eyes on the prize.