United Nations Plans for America's Future

At the 55th annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on September 5-9, 2000, called the Millennium Assembly and Summit, far-reaching plans are underway to turn the corner from a world of sovereign, independent nation-states to a world of disparate peoples subordinated to the supreme authority of the United Nations. These plans call for the total restructuring of the mission and powers of the United Nations.

To achieve this goal, the UN is scheduled to consider at least two actions, by consensus rather than by formal vote: adoption of the Earth Charter, a document whose text has evolved through several drafts since the Earth Summit in 1992, and adoption of a Declaration authorizing a new UN commission to implement recommendations to bring about global governance. Global governance means world government by incremental steps, chipping away at national sovereignty one treaty at a time, one world conference at a time, one UN commission at a time.

A portion of the Millennium Assembly is designated as the Millennium Summit, which President Bill Clinton and 160 heads of state are expected to attend, the largest gathering of heads of state in history. Also meeting at the same time at the New York Hilton will be Mikhail Gorbachev and his State of the World Forum, hoping to help induce heads of state to concur in the Millennium Assembly's historic actions. Gorbachev has been promoting world government ever since his 1992 speech at the Churchill Memorial in Fulton, Missouri, where he called for a "global structure," "a democratically organized world community," a "restructured" United Nations with "armed forces" and "substantial funding," and "some mechanism tying the UN to the world economy."

The Earth Charter's advocates talk as though it were the "Magna Carta" of a new regime, but it's not a regime of freedom from arbitrary kings like King John at Runnymede in 1215. It's a charter to submit Americans to global dictators possessing unprecedented powers.

The UN Millennium Assembly and Summit and its actions should be a major issue in the current presidential campaign since Al Gore has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Earth Charter during its years of development. Republican leaders have yet to be heard from.

The Earth Charter demands that we "demilitarize national security systems" (i.e., eliminate our armed services and their weapons). The Charter proclaims that its "Way Forward" requires "a change of mind and heart" as we move toward "global interdependence and universal responsibility."

The Charter demands that we adopt "sustainable development plans and regulations" (i.e., to subordinate human needs to global fads enforced by environment dictators), and that the UN "manage the use of renewable resources such as water, soil, forest products, and marine life . . . [to] protect the health of ecosystems" (i.e., not the health of mere humans).

The Charter demands that we "act with restraint and efficiency when using energy" (i.e., reduce U.S. energy use and lower our standard of living). The Charter requires that we "eradicate poverty," "promote the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations," and "relieve them of onerous international debt" (i.e., redistribute U.S. wealth around the world and cancel the debts owed by recipients of U.S. foreign loans).

The Charter exhorts us to affirm "gender equality" and "eliminate discrimination in ... sexual orientation" (i.e., adopt the feminist and gay agendas). The Charter demands that we "integrate into formal education [i.e., assign a UN nanny to monitor our schools] ... skills needed for a sustainable way of life [i.e., indoctrination in how we must subordinate sovereignty to the UN dogma of sustainability]."

The Charter affirms that "all beings are interdependent" (i.e., personal freedom is irrelevant) and "every form of life has value regardless of its worth to human beings" (i.e., animals, plants and insects, but not unborn babies). The Charter demands that we "ensure universal [i.e., global] access to health care that fosters reproductive health [i.e., abortion and contraception] and responsible reproduction [i.e., UN-dictated population control]."

The Earth Charter won't be a treaty that the U.S. Senate can accept or reject. It will be "soft law," a policy document like the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which has no legal standing but gives globalists such as Bill Clinton and global environmentalists such as Al Gore the perch from which they exhort us to "fulfill our international obligations" (even though Americans never accepted such obligations).

The Declaration and Agenda for Action, subtitled "Strengthening the United Nations for the 21st Century," will also be considered by the Millennium Assembly and Summit. This lengthy document, which fleshes out the global plans in more detail, was developed by the UN-accredited Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) who call themselves the Millennium Forum.

The Declaration demands the disarmament of all conventional and nuclear weapons, the prohibition of "unilateral deployment of nationwide missile defense by any country," and a "standing Peace Force" (i.e., a UN standing army). It calls for a "UN Arms register" of all small arms and light weapons, and "peace education" covering "all levels from pre-school through university."

The Declaration calls for "eliminating" the veto and permanent membership in the Security Council so that the United States will be merely one of 160 nations. This would reduce the influence of the United States in the UN to that of Cuba or Haiti even though we pay the lion's share of the budget.

The Declaration calls for the UN to impose direct taxes such as a "currency transfer tax," a "tax on the rental value of land and natural resources," a "royalty on worldwide fossil energy production -- oil, natural gas, coal," "fees for the commercial use of the oceans, fees for airplane use of the skies, fees for use of the electromagnetic spectrum, fees on foreign exchange transactions (i.e. the Tobin Tax), and a tax on the carbon content of fuels."

The Declaration calls for "a fair distribution of the earth's resources" (from the United States to the rest of the world, of course), and for the "eradication of poverty" by "redistribution [of] wealth and land." It demands that we "cancel the debts of developing countries."

The Declaration demands UN "democratic political control of the global economy so that it may serve our vision" (i.e., control by 160 nations with the U.S. having only one vote). It calls for UN monitoring of U.S. implementation of Agenda 21 and the Copenhagen Declaration.

The Declaration demands that we "integrate" the World Trade Organization under UN control. All the talk we hear from politicians about "free trade" is just pap for the gullible; the goal is managed trade -- managed by UN bureaucrats.

The Declaration calls for implementing UN treaties that the United States has never ratified, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (which refuses to recognize the right to private property).

The Declaration calls for the unratified International Criminal Court (ICC) to exercise "compulsory jurisdiction" over all states, enforced by the UN Security Council. The ICC is so dangerous to the constitutional rights of Americans that even Bill Clinton declined to sign it after his Administration had spent years participating in writing and negotiating it. The ICC has been signed by a hundred countries, and now the ICC and the UN are impudently asserting jurisdiction over the United States even though we did not sign it.

The Declaration would impose "gender-based methodologies" as adopted at the UN Conference in Beijing.

All this and more of the same could be America's future under an Al Gore presidency.

These radical UN Plans, which originated with the UN-funded Commission on Global Governance, are promoted by the NGOs, the hundreds of private Non-Government Organizations that have attached themselves to the United Nations like leeches. The UN now accredits 1,603 NGOs. Accreditation is dependent on the organization declaring that its primary purpose is to "promote the aims, objectives, and purposes of the United Nations."

The NGOs are energetic lobbyists for dramatic changes in the mission and structure of the UN to achieve global governance. Most NGOs are also members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which originated many of the global environmental policies set forth in the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on Climate Change, and Agenda 21. The most prominent NGOs are the radical environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the feminist and population-control groups such as Planned Parenthood.

The leader of the UN's restructuring plans is a Canadian named Maurice Strong, who was Secretary General of the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and has built his power base among the NGOs. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed him Executive Coordinator of UN Reform.

The NGOs work the corridors of the United Nations headquarters in New York like typical corporate lobbyists. Persistent lobbying has made the NGOs very influential at the various UN conferences, including the Children's Summit in New York in 1990, the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the Human Rights Conference in Vienna in 1993, the Population Conference in Cairo in 1994, the Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995, the Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, the Habitat II Conference in Istanbul in 1996, and the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996.

Maurice Strong and the NGOs publicized their extraordinary plans to achieve global governance through the UN in a 410-page report called Our Global Neighborhood, issued in 1995 by the Commission on Global Governance. This document states (p. 359) that the plans to "strengthen" the UN into global government originated with former West German Socialist Chancellor Willy Brandt.

The UN bureaucrats and NGOs have been working ever since on a Charter for Global Democracy to build the framework for a restructured UN, and the plans are now being crystallized in the Earth Charter and the Declaration described above.

The NGOs worked for several years under the name NGO Forum and are now becoming the People's Assembly, as recommended by the Commission on Global Governance. This body of unelected pressure groups with leftwing political agendas is supposed to be formally attached to the UN during the Millennium Assembly. Pompously calling themselves the "civil society," they claim to be the voice of the people, in contrast to the General Assembly, which consists of the representatives of national governments. The NGOs dream of becoming the real power in the UN, bypassing the official representatives of nations.

Clinton Administration representatives at the United Nations are always very supportive of expanded UN powers. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke says that "the United Nations must transform its civilian-run peacekeeping department into a larger and more effective military-style operation ..." (New York Times, 6-14-00)

The UN bureaucrats and NGOs are skillful with semantics, and their goal of world government is waffled with words that have specialized meanings but may appear non-threatening. Their jargon words used in a positive connotation are sustainable (their favorite word), global, interdependent, civil society, environmental, inclusive, diversity, common good, demilitarize, fair distribution, international, and universal responsibility. Among the jargon words always used negatively are production and consumption. Forbidden words include independence, freedom and sovereignty.

Many UN and NGO documents confirm the goals and plans of these tireless promoters of global governance in six areas:

* Using the rubric "Peace, Security and Disarmament," the UN wants to establish a UN standing army under the command of the UN Secretary-General, with the ultimate goal of disarming national armies. The UN reformers want to eradicate national sovereignty as a barrier to UN action and use the shibboleth "security of the people" to rationalize UN action inside sovereign countries (as in Kosovo). The plan is to transform sovereign countries into administrative units assigned to carry out UN policies. The UN even wants disarmament of personal guns, with the UN controlling the manufacture, sale, distribution and licensing of all firearms. * In the area called "Eradication of Poverty," the UN wants debt cancellation for poor countries plus Western-financed social development. This means forcing the United States to turn over our wealth to UN bureaucrats to distribute to Third World dictators. * Under the do-good caption "Human Rights," the UN plans to enforce its version of global human rights through UN treaties, each of which has its own international compliance commission. These include the UN treaties on the Rights of the Child, on Discrimination Against Women, on Civil and Political Rights, on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and on the International Criminal Court (ICC). * The heading "Sustainable Development" is designed to facilitate total UN control of the environment. In addition to bootstrapping power to the globalists under the unratified Biodiversity Treaty and Kyoto (Global Warming) Protocol, the plan is to use the UN Trusteeship Council to control the "global commons," which is UN terminology for the atmosphere, outer space, non-territorial seas, and the related environment that supports human life. * "Globalization to Achieve Equity, Justice and Diversity" is a catch-all phrase to achieve any other power-grabbing goal the UN and NGO bureaucrats may dream up in the future. They want the authority to equalize rich and poor economies and pretend that redistribution of wealth is equity. * "Strengthening and Democratizing the United Nations" is doubletalk for wiping out all power and influence that the United States might ever exercise in the United Nations. This goal calls for eliminating the veto and permanent member status in the Security Council and giving the UN the power to tax so that it will no longer depend on nations' appropriating funds to pay their dues. UN bureaucrats are salivating over the prospect of passing the Tobin Tax, the brainstorm of James Tobin who lobbied for it during the Copenhagen Summit in 1995. This plan to tax all international financial transactions would funnel an extraordinary $1.5 trillion a year to the UN. Other targets of UN taxing plans include international airline tickets, sea-shipped freight, and ocean fishing. * Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms has been calling for the United Nations to reform itself and reduce its bloated budgets. But the UN "reform" agenda, now headed by Maurice Strong, is certainly very different from what Senator Helms has in mind.

What can Americans do to preserve our independence and sovereignty? Here are some first steps that should be taken immediately:

The UN Millennium plans must be made an issue with all presidential and congressional candidates. Urge them to pledge to repudiate global governance goals, all proposed UN treaties, and all acceptance of the authority of UN commissions or committees.

* Demand endorsement of a law requiring that, if the UN tries to impose any direct tax, the United States shall immediately withdraw from the UN and expel it from our country.

* Demand a pledge to oppose or reject all UN proposed treaties, specifically those on the International Criminal Court, Global Warming (Kyoto), Biodiversity, the Rights of the Child, Discrimination Against Women, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Nuclear Test Ban, and any purported extension of the defunct 1972 ABM Treaty.

* Demand endorsement of the American Servicemembers' Protection Act, sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms, to cut off U.S. military aid to any country that ratifies the International Criminal Court treaty, prohibit U.S. forces from participating in UN peacekeeping operations unless expressly immunized from ICC jurisdiction by a UN Security Council resolution, and authorize the President to undertake any means "necessary and appropriate" to free U.S. soldiers from ICC captivity.

Let me submit an extensive quote here in response to your question, Cal. A brief history of how treaties morphed into something else may shed some light on why so many doors to our house are open and why so many strangers are traipsing through our living room, looting our pantry, moving our furniture around and kicking our dog in the process:

Quoting Dr. James L. Hirsen, "The Coming Collision -- Global Law vs U.S. Liberties," (Chapter 11):

(footnote references omitted)

_____________________

Trading Away the Constitution"

"The Constitution requires that treaties must be approved by a two-thirds vote of the Senate in order to be enforceable as American Law. In recent years, this constitutional provision has been repeatedly ignored. The evasion of proper procedural requirements has had enormous consequences on the functioning of our government and serious effects on the discourse with the American people.

The saga of manipulating events and averting the Constitution involves sophisticated public relations campaigns, and oftentimes outright duplicity, revealing the ugly underbelly of politics. If we examine the many cumulative compromises that have been made over time, we could easily find ourselves paraphrasing the popular song, "How'd we ever get this way?"

The Questionable Passage of NAFTA

Abbreviated references such as GATT, NAFTA, and WTO have become familiar to most Americans. The news media provide reports about free trade when there is a debate among politicians, but the details presented are usually scant. The public has not been given the complete and proper picture when it comes to these international agreements.

On 20 November, 1993 the Senate voted on a treaty call the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Senate approved it by a vote of sixty-one to thirty-eight, but a perplexing question lingers to this day. Since NAFTA was passed with less than two-thirds of the Senate present, how could it possibly be valid under the Constitution? After a long and heated discussion of pertinent issues, why was there no mention of this constitutional concern?

Considering the fact that thirty-eight senators voted against NAFTA, and numerous high profile leaders sought the demise of the treaty, it would seem as if any and all arguments would have been used in an attempt to defeat the measure. Evidently, the political and legal elite accepted this new kind of approval procedure as unassailable. What is unfortunate for the American people is that this procedure cannot be reconciled with the provisions of the constitution.

Antics with Legal Semantics

The question of whether a world trade agreement can be passed with less that a two-thirds majority so plagued the community of scholars that, in 1005, a book-length article about NAFTA, written by Burce Ackerman, Professor of Law at Yale, and David Golove, Professor Law at the University of Arizona, appeared in the prestigious Harvard Law Review. The article was entitled "Is NAFTA Constitutional?" After one hundred twnety-four pages of discussion, the two professors came to the conclusion that NAFTA was valid, but it appeared as though they were arguing with the very essence of the Constitution and the real intent of the framers.

When the framers held the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they intentionally excluded the House of Representatives from being involved with treaty making. After debating the matter, they felt that foreign relations needed a discreet quality, such as that of the smaller senatorial body. At that time, the Senate consisted of only twenty-six senators from thirteen colonies. The framers did not feel they had to define the word 'treaty." In their world, it was a generic word that referred to any form of international agreement between nations. For 150 years after the country was established, a binding obligation between nations could never even have been considered enforceable without the required two-thirds vote of the Senate.

In 1945 a constitutional amendment was drafted to modify the approval process required for a treaty to be fully enforceable law if approved by majorities in both Houses rather than by the traditional two-thirds vote of the Senate. However, the movement to promote the establishment of this new amendment became unnecessary, primarily because of a novel manipulation of legal semantics. Through undue expansion of a simple term called "Executive agreement," a new approval procedure was utilized, despite the fact that it did not appear anywhere in the Constitution.

Foundations of Treaty Making

The framers of the Constitution debated the treaty making power vigorously. Both Madison and Hamilton believed that treaty making was a legislative function rather than an executive role. Hamilton noted that the King of England could make treaties by himself, and he certainly did not want the president to be compared with the British sovereign from whom this young country had just broken away. "In this respect, therefore, there is no comparison between the intended power of the President and actual power of the British sovereign. Hamilton's language indicates that he regarded the two-thirds approval requirement of the Senate to be mandatory for every possible international agreement.

One of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, Roger Sherman, made a statement about the treaty power in relation to international agreements. He said that the Senate and president "ought to act jointly in every transaction with respect to the business of negotiation with foreign powers. Hamilton also believed that the treaty clause was one of the "best digested and unexceptionable parts of the plan." He thought that it was utterly unsafe and improper to entrust that power to an elective magistrate of four years duration.

Without a doubt, the writers of the Constitution would have been shocked to find out that trade agreements such as NAFTA, GATT, and WTO would be characterized as anything but treaties. In 1796 there was great debate over the Jay treaty with England. The House demanded access from President George Washington to all official papers connected with the negotiation of this treaty. When Washington refused to give these official papers to the House of Representatives, he state, "The power of making treaties is exclusively vested in the President, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate."

The approval process for treaties is described in the Constitution by the phrase that Washington used, "the Advice and Consent of the Senate." By employing these words, Washington confirmed his belief and support for the constitutional provision that requires a two-thirds vote by the Senate before a treaty is valid. The feud about treaty power continued over time, the description embodied in the Constitution was honored for the next 150 years.

Presidential power encompasses some limited international agreements. For example, the president has the power to negotiate a cease-fire or grant a pardon. However, one can search the Constitution from the beginning to end and not find any mention of the term executive agreement.

Nowhere in the Constitution is independent power granted to the president to make international agreements. [Emphasis mine.]

In cases where there is time for the Senate to act and where an agreement has importance in foreign relations, it is clear that the constitutional requirement of two-thirds approval of the Senate must be followed.

The Treaty Power and the New Deal

The 1930's brought about President Roosevelt's New Deal. Because of the Great Depression, economic policy was paramount. Two agreements involving specific commodities were inaugurated. One was the Silver Agreement of 1933 and the other was the Wheat Agreement of 1933. Both of these agreements had international implications. Yet President Roosevelt did not submit either agreement to the Senate. Instead, he declared these international initiatives to be executive agreements.

He simply placed them into law via a proclamation, believing that a previous act of Congress, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, gave him the power to do so. No opposing argument was mounted, and, after all, these actions were viewed as emergency measures in desperate times.

In 1934 President Roosevelt began to pursue broader international trade initiatives. One such initiative was called the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934. Roosevelt felt that the existing procedure for approving treaties was too slow to meet the economic challenges of his time. He sought his own version of what today we call fast track, an authorization by Congress to enter into a legally binding international trade agreement.

. Congress gave Roosevelt this ability, with overwhelming majorities in both Houses. Any criticism invoking the Constitution was easily suppressed due to the exigent circumstances of post-depression times. Thus, a constitutional aberration was allowed to take place. The president had always had the power, in very limited categories, to bind our nation. These specific instances had to do with military matters and settlement of claims. However, in the era of the New Deal, presidential authority was stretched out of proportion, permitting the president to enter into binding international agreements with a prior authorization of Congress.

It takes some historical recall and empathy to understand the mood of the nation and the collective mindset of the American people during these intensely turbulent times. In 1936 the Senate failed to approve the Treaty of Versailles and the public began to question the need for a two-thirds approval by the Senate. In October, 1943 it was such a major issue that a Gallup poll was taken to gauge public opinion as to whether or not the two-thirds majority of the Senate needed for approving treaties should be retained.

Fifty-four percent of those surveyed thought that a simple majority in both Houses should be the new rule. By May 1944 the percentage of people favoring a change to a a majority vote in both Houses had risen to sixty percent.

Because of the public sentiment, a constitutional amendment was finally proposed and formally approved by th ehouse of Representatives to change the Constitution to eliminate the two-thirds requirement the Senate. By 1945 Congress was not dealing with whether the Senate would lose it's two-thirds approval power, but was pondering how it could be changed. A number of proposed constitutional amendments were being circulated through the House of Representatives. Simultaneously, the United Nations Charter, the founding document of the United Nations, was submitted to the Senate as a treaty.

The Senate approved it, partially believing that they were preserving their treaty making power for the future.

The difficulty of restoring the damaged economies of the affected nations was on the minds of world leaders after the devastation of World War II. As a result of the Breton Wood Conference in 1944, three organizations were established: the International Trade Organization (ITO), the INternational Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank.

Because the Senate refused to ratify the ITO, it emerged in 1947 as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Since these important organizations were established in the conference , and have been influential over the world economy ever since, they were referred to as the Bretton Woods Regime.

This establishment of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund created a whole new international economic order. Rather than confronting these major issues head on, the weak-spirited Senate of 1945 approved both broad, sweeping international agreements. A trickle of executive agreements turned into a waterfall with Roosevelt pushing through one international agreement after another.

The proliferation of treaties led to the campaign to amend the Constitution by Senator Bricker, [as set forth in Chapter 6]. Early versions of the Bricker amendment contained a provision that specified executive agreements could not be made in lieu of treaties. But by this time, legal scholars fully embraced the loophole of the using a two-House approval for treaties, as long as they were labeled executive agreements. [Emphasis mine.]

Professor Louis Henkin of Columbia University explained his view of the bypass of the Constitution when he said:

"Whatever theoretical merits, it is now widely accepted that the Congressional-executive agreement is a complete alternative to a treaty; the President can seek approval of any agreement by joint resolution of both Houses of Congress instead of two-thirds of the Senate only. Like a treaty, such an agreement is the law of the land superseding inconsistent state laws as well as inconsistent provisions in earlier treaties, other international agreements, or acts of Congress."

By making it easier for a treaty to become the supreme law of the land, a greater opportunity to erode state sovereignty and individual liberties exists, thereby empowering government to more readily implement international bureaucracy."

End of quoted section of Chapter 11.
___________________________________

There you have it, folks. The explanation of how the government pulled the plug on our liberties and sovereignty and allowed treaty laws to supersede the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Everything that is happening in our country via UN/NGO intervention today can be attributed to the failure of the American people to stop the Senate in its tracks when it abdicated it's reponsiblity to deal with treaties/international agreements in a manner consistent with the requirements of the Constitution.

Even so, there is still much debate on whether treaty laws really do supersede the Bill of Rights/Constitution as the Supreme Law of the land, but that's another topic.

(Apologies for typos, etc. I spelt this by hand. :P)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.