Our new would-be rulers note that "democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely."
These people are serious. They do not want a United States of America and its democratic form of government. To them, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people fails their test: "Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today"s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time."26
Fundamental to this worldview is the elevation of the bureaucrat, the planner, and the expert over the free market entrepreneur in search of profit. The expert who never sees, never speaks to, and doesn"t care about the electorate. Hayek notes that this hierarchy has characterized European thinking for centuries. He writes of the
deliberate disparagement of all activities involving economic risk and the moral opprobrium cast on the gains which make risks worth taking but which only few can win. We cannot blame our young men when they prefer the safe, salaried position to the risk of enterprise after they have heard from their earliest youth the former described as the superior, more unselfish and disinterested occupation. The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number is honorable.27
Elsewhere in The Global Revolution, the Club makes explicit its manipulation of environmentalism to achieve its purposes: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like would fill the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed att.i.tudes and behavior that they can be overcome."
The advocates of global governance want to get rid of democratic governments with national elections. Once again, here"s Mr. Strong with his view of what we need: "Our concepts of ballot-box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong governments capable of making difficult decisions."28
Apparently decisions that are made by representative governments are not really decisions. Only decisions made by a global consensus without any accountability are valid.
That"s what we are up against.
Because it is rooted in the radical environmental movement, and because of its socialist origins, one of the key goals of the planned global governance is the worldwide redistribution of wealth, a.s.sets, and technology from rich countries to poor countries. Part of that is about reparation, the demand that we pay for our dual sins of pollution and consumption. Part of it is simply a manifestation of the socialist ideology that social ownership of the a.s.sets and resources of the planet is a necessity for a global economy. So, although we produce 25 percent of the world"s wealth, they want to decide just how much of that they"ll let us keep.
The movement to consolidate national sovereignty into global governance began-in the modern era-in the late 1960s with the founding of the Club of Rome, but it has been a constant and growing obsession of the left ever since.
Inherent in it is a desire to get the power to tax our wealth. However they rationalize their scheme, it still comes down to this: They want our money. They want our a.s.sets. They want the ability to tax us. They want us to give them our technology, developed by our creative entrepreneurs, often with government investments.
On Thursday, July 5, 2012-the day after our celebration of national independence-the UN called for a global tax on billionaires, intended to raise more than $400 billion a year for the world"s poor countries. The proposal would tax 1,226 billionaires to raise the money (425 of whom live in the US). The tax proposal is coupled with four other proposed global taxes-each imposed by the UN:
[A] tax of $25 per tonne on carbon dioxide emissions would raise about $250 billion. It could be collected by national governments, but allocated to international cooperation.
[A] tax of 0.005 percent on all currency transactions in the dollar, yen, euro and pound sterling could raise $40 billion a year.
[T]aking a portion of a proposed European Union tax on financial transactions for international cooperation. The tax is expected to raise more than $70 billion a year.29
It also suggests expanding a levy on air tickets that a number of nations already impose to raise money for drugs for poor states through UNITAID, a UN initiative.
In its extreme, global governance also wants to eventually eliminate national elections, especially in the United States. They see the concept of popular elections as an unnecessary evil, which often leads to elected officials actually responding to the demands of their const.i.tuents. Imagine that! Some would call that the hallmark of democracy. This quote from Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs indicates just how naive and nutty these folks can be: "The prevailing unilateralism of the United States will seem for many people to be an inevitable feature of world politics in which politicians are voted in or out of office by their own populations rather than by a global electorate."30
While this is undoubtedly the view of the global governance crowd, most of them are afraid to say just how far they want to go to destroy our political system.
It"s hard to understand exactly what Professor Sachs is really saying. Is he proposing that politicians in the United States should be elected by a global electorate? That seems too far-fetched for even the global governance zealots. More likely he is suggesting that we elect a worldwide government that is not answerable to us.
Think about it: A global governance would eliminate the troublesome dictates of the US Const.i.tution, as well as unruly citizen partic.i.p.ation and dialogue. It would stymie the ability of duly elected American officials to determine our policies, and would tax us without representation.
The plan essentially calls for a dumbing down of America and a leveling of American influence and ideology.
How will these goals be realized?
By enforcing obscure treaties that bind us to outrageous mandates without the partic.i.p.ation of Congress and without the consent of our people. (We"ll discuss this in detail below.)
By international conferences with implementing agendas-like the Rio environmental conferences-and signed agreements that often include criminal sanctions.
By imposing international taxes without our consent.
The idealized concept of one-world government has been kicking around for a long time. Its genesis is deeply imbedded in socialist principles. Currently disguised in contemporary United Nations globalspeak, it relies on "sustainability" as the unifying theme.
Sustainability purportedly means that planetary growth and development must only advance if it does not impair the sustainability of the planet. But sustainability is really just a buzzword for a ma.s.sive redistribution of wealth from democracies like the United States-where hardworking people are productive and build a.s.sets-to third world countries whose leaders are often corrupt dictators who ignore the dire conditions of their fellow countrymen, who often neither work nor produce.
Recently, there has been a frenetic push by the "international community" to make this unwise and undemocratic policy come true.
Even the Vatican has weighed in, recently calling for a one-world government: "Globalization, despite some of its negative aspects, is unifying peoples more and prompting them to move towards a new "rule of law" on the supranational level, supported by a more intense and fruitful collaboration."31
This view of the need for a "supranational" level of government is, unfortunately, shared by many. These are the people and organizations who want us to surrender our national ident.i.ty, change our lifestyles, provide reparations for what they view as our excesses, and surrender to a new order of international inst.i.tutions that will tell us what to do, when to do it, and how much to pay for it.
How will they be able to transfer our wealth? By imposing mandatory foreign aid to underdeveloped countries and by enacting international taxes aimed at the United States, including carbon taxes, airline taxes, and Internet taxes. And we"ll have no way to stop them.
And that"s not all. They also want to require us to hand over our technology-our valuable intellectual property-to countries who don"t have either the brain power or the financial resources to develop their own.
All of this is called social justice. More like economic injustice.
They want to take major decision making away from the Congress and Executive Branch and replace it, instead, with a one-world governing system.
And the Obama administration is helping them do it by rushing through a series of treaties that will transfer sovereign power and control to global agencies.
Barack Obama believes in it. Think about it: We have a president who goes to the United Nations to ask for permission to bring a military action in Libya, but claims that he isn"t required to seek the approval of the United States Congress under the War Powers Act-even when his own Department of Justice advises him that he is required to do so.
There"s no doubt about it: President Obama embraces the one-world global view. So does his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
Obama showed his hand even before he was president. On July 24, 2008, thenUS senator Barack Obama spoke to the largest crowd of the presidential campaign in Berlin, Germany. More than two hundred thousand people thronged into the park in front of the site where the Berlin Wall, separating East and West Germany, communism and freedom, had once stood. All were anxious to hear the young senator who was stirring the American electorate and who might be an antidote to President George W. Bush, who was detested by Europeans.
The spectators got what they came for. Obama talked the talk, walked the walk. He spoke their language. Playing to the crowd, he told them that he came to Berlin not as a presidential candidate, but as a "citizen of the world." His rhetoric soared as he repeatedly spoke of "global cooperation," "global partnership," "global commitment," and the "burden of global citizenship" ... that continue[s] to bind us together."32
"I speak as a citizen of the world," he told the crowd.33
Those few words, emphasizing Obama"s obvious embrace of globalism and global governance over nationalism, foretold his vision of a new world order. In this new paradigm, America is just one part of a worldwide decision-making process, instead of an independent-and, yes, nationalistic-country with historic political and cultural roots set deep in democracy that are often at odds with some of the rest of the world, including Europe.
This book is a wake-up call to all Americans who value our democratic traditions and culture, who still believe in the fundamental tenets of liberty and freedom that are the cornerstones of our great nation, and who applaud the uniqueness of America.
WHY GLOBAL GOVERNMENT WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED BY AMERICANS
David Brooks of the New York Times cited five reasons why Americans will never accept what he calls the "vaporous global-governance notion."34
We"ll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. It is impossible to set up legitimate global authorities because there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust. So multilateral organizations can never look like legislatures, with open debate, up or down votes, and the losers accepting majority decisions.
Instead, they look like meetings of unelected elites, of technocrats who make decisions in secret and who rely upon intentionally impenetrable language, who settle differences through arcane fudges. Americans, like most peoples, will never surrender even a bit of their national democracy for the sake of multilateral technocracy.
Second, we will never accept global governance because it inevitably devolves into corruption. The panoply of UN scandals flows from a single source: the lack of democratic accountability. These supranational organizations exist in their own insular, self-indulgent aerie.
We will never accept global governance, third, because we love our Const.i.tution and will never grant any other law supremacy over it. Like most peoples (Europeans are the exception), we will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. We think our Const.i.tution is superior to the sloppy authority granted to, say, the International Criminal Court.