Do those sound like the activities of a body that is not trying to inst.i.tute a global government? The power to tax (in this case without representation) as well as to legislate, regulate, and enforce looks strikingly like the powers usually granted to a government. In the United States, we convey those powers to our national government with the understanding that they will be exercised within the framework of our Const.i.tution by public officials elected by and accountable to our citizens.
Global governance will simply create a government body (or bodies), with no democratic underpinnings, run by bureaucrats with no accountability to anyone. That"s what they want.
Geographic countries will no longer be important. They see the notion of governing based on sovereign territory or land as old-fashioned, even quaint. As the commission said:
Acknowledging responsibility to something higher than country does not come easily. The impulse to possess turf is a powerful one for all species; yet it is one that people must overcome. In the global neighborhood, a sense of otherness cannot be allowed to nourish instincts of insularity, intolerance, greed, bigotry, and, above all, a desire for dominance. But barricades in the mind can be even more negative than frontiers on the ground. Globalization has made those frontiers increasingly irrelevant.5
Apparently, we need to learn just how irrelevant our national boundaries and national government really are, because they seem to envision that we will have to be taught to "acknowledge responsibility" to something beyond our existing government and political inst.i.tutions.
And as for infringing on national sovereignty, Maurice Strong, an avid socialist except when capitalism benefits him personally,6 was one of the members of the Commission on Global Governance. Here"s what he had this to say about that:
Sovereignty has been the cornerstone of the interstate system. In an increasingly interdependent world, however, the notions of territoriality, independence, and non-intervention have lost some of their meaning. In certain areas, sovereignty must be exercised collectively, particularly in relation to the global commons.
The principles of sovereignty and non-intervention must be adapted in ways that recognize the need to balance the rights of states with the rights of people, and the interests of nations with the interests of the global neighborhood. It is time also to think about self-determination in the emerging context of a world of separate states.7
Does that sound like a statement in support of maintaining independent national governments? Hardly. Not if you know how to read. Consider this: "In certain areas sovereignty needs to be exercised collectively." That seems to be the ultimate oxymoron. Collective sovereignty? It can"t exist. (Except in United Nationsspeak.) A sovereign nation exerts its own power. It is the opposite of a collective government. And that is why they want to stop the United States from functioning as a free nation.
We need to keep these folks out of our business and out of our national neighborhood. We must stop them. Because we have no intention of subjecting ourselves to their socialist nanny state. They are still pushing for the very same proposals they made in 1995-and even more.
This is not a proposal by a bunch of fringe liberals. This is a well-organized international movement, to change the world, to minimize the importance of our country, and to regulate our personal behavior, which has been growing over the past twenty years.
And, unfortunately, the Obama administration is among its allies.
The Europeans have long supported the concept of giving up sovereignty. That"s what the European Union is all about. And they"ve also been supportive of global governance. On November 20, 2000, in a speech at The Hague, then French president Jacques Chirac gave a seminal speech celebrating the United Nations" Kyoto Protocol as the first step toward global governance.
For the first time, humanity is inst.i.tuting a genuine instrument of global governance... . From the very earliest age, we should make environmental awareness a major theme of education and a major theme of political debate, until respect for the environment comes to be as fundamental as safeguarding our rights and freedoms. By acting together, by building this unprecedented instrument, the first component of authentic global governance, we are working for dialogue and peace.8
In a speech at Oxford, England, in 2009, former vice president and n.o.bel Prize winner Al Gore told his audience that he brought good news from America-that the pa.s.sage of cap-and-trade legislation and the awareness of it "will drive the change, and one of the ways it will drive the change is through global government and global agreements."9
There are other buzzwords for global governance. Bill Clinton calls it "interdependence." Through his William J. Clinton Foundation, he supports global governance under the rubric of interdependence and spends more than $100 million each year to promote this euphemism for global governance.
Some well-known liberal supporters believe that the fight is over, that some form of global governance is inevitable.
Strobe Talbott, former Clinton administration undersecretary of state and head of the Brookings Inst.i.tution, insists that "individual states will increasingly see it in their interest to form an international system that is far more cohesive, far more empowered by its members, and therefore far more effective than the one we have today."10
America to Strobe: Some of us actually believe that our current system of democratic government with its guaranteed freedoms and liberty is far more effective than anything you and the United Nations can dream up. Maybe it"s time for you to go back to your ivory tower and read our Declaration of Independence and the Const.i.tution.
And noted economist Professor Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Inst.i.tute at Columbia University and a staunch believer in the need for cooperative global action, has predicted that "[t]he very idea of competing nation-states that scramble for markets, power and resources will become pa.s.se."11
Pa.s.se? Competing nation-states will become pa.s.se? Some people seriously doubt that, Professor.
So what exactly is global governance?
Global governance is nothing less than a ma.s.sive and audacious power grab by the United Nations, an attempt to redefine the world order. But, unfortunately, it"s not just our power that they"re after-they want to take our wealth, our a.s.sets, and our technology, too! And they intend to take them and redistribute them to the poorer, less successful countries of the world.
They think that we owe it to them.
And that"s not all. They want to control our land-use planning and our consumption of food and energy. That"s because we"re the cause of all of the planet"s environmental problems.
They have big plans for how they are going to change our ways. Here"s what Maurice Strong, the socialist architect and primary advocate of this new global governance doctrine, and who is considered to be the "G.o.dfather"12 of the modern environmental movement, told the opening session of the Rio "Earth Summit" in 1992 about his view of what we have to change:
[Industrialized countries have] developed and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced our present dilemma. It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle cla.s.s involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air conditioning, and suburban housing-are not sustainable. A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.13
For the past forty years, Strong, a former undersecretary-general of the UN, has been at the epicenter of just about every conference, commission, meeting, and agenda that has proposed and advocated population control, global governance, and radical environmentalism. He was a member of the Club of Rome, he represented Canada on the Commission for Global Growth, and he was the secretary-general of both the Stockholm and Rio environmental conferences, and was the first director of the United Nations Environmental Programme. Strong was the leading force behind the Kyoto Protocol, and, along with Mikhail Gorbochev, he co-auth.o.r.ed The Earth Charter, a controversial doc.u.ment that was criticized as the blueprint for one-world socialism. (The charter expanded the rights of man and included the rights of others on the planet, such as rivers and mountains.) His distinguished career at the UN ended in a most undistinguished way in 1997. According to the Wall Street Journal:
Evidence procured by federal investigators and the U.N.-authorized inquiry of Paul Volcker showed that Mr. Strong in 1997, while working for Mr. Annan, had endorsed a check for $988,885, made out to "Mr. M. Strong," issued by a Jordanian bank. This check was hand-delivered to Mr. Strong by a South Korean businessman, Tongsun Park, who in 2006 was convicted in New York federal court of conspiring to bribe U.N. officials to rig Oil-for-Food in favor of Saddam.
Mr. Strong was never accused of any wrongdoing. Asked by investigators about the check, he initially denied he"d ever handled it. When they showed it to him with his own signature on the back, he acknowledged that he must have endorsed it, but said the money was meant to cover an investment Mr. Park wished to make in a Strong family company, Cordex, run by one of his sons. (Cordex soon afterward went bankrupt.) Mr. Volcker, in his final report, said that the U.N. might want to "address the need for a more rigorous disclosure process for conflicts of interest."14
Strong left the UN and spends most of his time in China, where he advises the Chinese government, teaches at Chinese universities, and advises Chinese businesses. In 1995, at the time the allegations against Strong were made, he was a United Nations Special Envoy to South Korea. According to the New York Times, Strong "stepped aside from his post ... because of past a.s.sociations with Mr. Park." His contract wasn"t renewed.15
He lives in Beijing. Strong is a favorite of the Chinese. He was instrumental in drafting and negotiating the Kyoto Protocol, which excluded China (and India) from the carbon-reduction requirements. Recently, the Chinese paid for him to attend the Rio+20 Conference.
Maurice Strong is one of the pilots on the imaginary black helicopters. If he had his way, they"d be landing at this moment.
And, by the way, in the above quote Strong was talking about us-Americans-and he obviously doesn"t approve of how we live. So Strong and his cohorts want us to move out of rural areas, clear out of the suburbs, stop driving cars, and stop using appliances! They want to control how we live, what we eat, how we use our property.
In short, they want to emasculate our ability to self-govern and, instead, impose an international rule of law that is designed to operate against our national interests, violate our democratic ideals and history, and make us subservient to the radical socialist policies of the United Nations and its agencies.
An international law that will find no subject, no issue, no practice too unimportant to focus on. These are not just big-picture folks; they are small-picture folks, too. They want to regulate and control our every action. So, in addition to their major political agenda, they also want to zero in on personal behavior. Think of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg"s ban on the use of salt in restaurants and his proposal to prohibit the sale of large-size sodas. That"s the kind of thing they want to regulate on a global basis.
And, unfortunately, these lofty goals for a one-world governance are not just idealistic daydreams. To the contrary, they are part of a carefully designed blueprint for changing the world order and changing the way we think, live, work, and make policy decisions.
Because they can"t tolerate the United States as a free and democratic country. We won"t conform to their crazy agenda.
They can"t tolerate individual freedom. It"s too unruly.
That"s why their goal is to obliterate the United States of America as we know it-to turn our democracy on its head, and impose a government-or governance-that regulates our every private and personal action.
There"s no question about it: They don"t want the United States to be an independent, influential, successful-and, yes, powerful-nation that makes its own decisions. Instead, they want us to be part of a "global governance" where we are just one of the many other countries in the world-and just one of the many votes. A global governance that is anti-American.
Here"s more from Maurice Strong, about the long-term fate of national sovereignty:
The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. What is needed is recognition of the reality that in so many fields, and this is particularly true of environmental issues, it is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. The global community must be a.s.sured of environmental security.16
Not feasible? It is "not feasible" for countries to exercise their sovereign power to regulate their own country-when it comes to the environment or the many other "fields" that Strong and his comrades identify?
Really?
What is not feasible about the ability of the United States of America to legislate, regulate, and enforce its own environmental laws? (We"re taking some liberties here-and a.s.suming that the "however powerful" was a direct reference to the United States.)
Of course, it"s feasible.
The only thing that"s not feasible about it is that the United States would adapt the radical confiscatory and punitive policies that Strong and his sidekicks recommend.
The only thing that"s not feasible is that we would ignore our const.i.tutional protections for private property and individual liberty.
That"s what"s not feasible.