Obama: Surrender to world government?

Despite some public relations moves to assuage our doubts, the Obama transition team appears to be formulating an administration that is quite happy to let some international authority dictate your personal lifestyle and how you raise your kids.

It was indeed newsworthy that Barack Obama's designated Climate Czar, Carol Browner, has "socialist ties," according to the Jan. 12 banner headline in the Washington Times. Newsworthy, but hardly shocking.

Browner was EPA Administrator under President Clinton and rammed through (or attempted to legitimize) the most radical Al Gorean edicts from that eight-year perch. Interesting, but again not shocking, that she would have been listed as one of 14 leaders of a panel that is part of Socialist International, an organization that preaches "global governance," ...a longtime aim of socialists (violent and non-violent) for decades.

A spokeswoman for House Republican Leader John Boehner wants to know if Browner agrees with Socialist International's position that America should abdicate its international leadership to international organizations, and that the "international community" should be the arbiter of climate change. (The hate-America crowd loves to remind us that for a nation of only 3 to 6% of the world's population — depending on whose figures you use — we inflict a disproportionate amount of pollution on the world. Not mentioned in this gleeful denunciation is the fact that we make 30 to 40% of the products the world uses.)

Actually, if Socialist International and its affiliate Commission for a Sustainable World Society (in which Browner has been a participant) had their way, the "international community" — an obvious future cog in a world government scheme — would be enforcing dictates to the U.S. as to how it conducts itself with regard to energy and environmental policy.

A White House "czar" does not require Senate confirmation. Thus, there is only one way Browner can be held accountable: Conservatives on the Hill can make their point by attempting to use the congressional appropriations process to deny any money being appropriated for her own paycheck or for any function envisioned by her office. The votes are not there? That does not excuse avoiding the effort. It would draw more public attention to the matter. Obama would like to keep this "under the radar." Republicans are not obligated to accept that without a fight.

This follows an emerging pattern in the plans the Obama Administration has for diminishing U.S. sovereignty and rendering us subservient to a big brother World Government.

This is not the only straw in the wind as to Obama's intent to encourage the iron fist of world government to bear on America and Americans.

For nearly twenty years, a treaty has been bandied about that would bring the "international community" into your life in even more personal ways than whether you should or should not drive an SUV.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is described by Wikipedia as "an international convention setting out the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of your children."

It is hard to read even that soft description as anything but an attempt of a world authority to enter your home and side with your children when the youngsters don't like your rules. This has some frightening overtones, and calls to mind the Hitler and Stalin societies where kids were encouraged to rat on their parents. While there is no hint here of any threat to send supposedly errant parents off to concentration camps or worse (as happened under Nazi and Communist societies), it does set up an adversarial relationship between parent and child, something in which no government — national or international — has any business, absent, of course, any proof of harm.

The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention and opened it for signature on November 20, 1989. As of last month, 193 nations have signed on to it. The United States has refused to join because the document is deemed to be a threat to the sovereignty of the United States and of the American family unit.

In 1995, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright favored our joining, but fortunately the "Gingrich Congress" of that year put the kibosh on it.

However, the new 111th Congress appears to be more amenable. And President-elect Barack Obama has been quoted as saying failure of the U.S. to ratify the treaty is "an embarrassment," and he has promised his administration would review it. Secretary of State-designee Hillary Clinton has long been a strong supporter of the UNCRC, apparently believing this world authority is the "village" it takes to raise a child.

Governments that have ratified the UNCRC are required to report to and appear before the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child from time to time to be questioned on their progress with regard to the implementation of the Convention and the "status of child rights in their country" (as cited by Wikipedia).

Michael Smith, President of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), reports that the international committee that monitors the CRC "has expressed its concern that parents could home-school without the view of the child being considered; that parents could remove their children from sex-education classes without the views of the child being considered; that parents were permitted to use corporal punishment [like spanking]; and that children didn't have access to reproductive health information without their parents' knowledge."

If you want to home-school your child, you should first ask the child whether he/she likes the idea. Strange, that. By contrast, I don't know of anyone who says you should not send your child to a public school without first asking if he likes anything in the curriculum besides recess. If you take offense to the inferior education product or the political indoctrination centers that many schools have become, tough — your values don't count. All you did was bring the child into the world — or adopt him or her into your family. Who are you to have a voice in such matters?

And the new president thinks it is an "embarrassment" that the parochial, backward, Neanderthal U.S. believes parents have rights in deciding how to raise their own kids.

On top of that, he has a "Climate Czar" who participated in a Socialist International whose authorities think it's their right to tell you how to regulate your thermostat.

And in an e-mail to this column, Michael Smith (of HSLDA) emphasizes that the Convention on the Rights of the Child "opens the door for international bureaucrats to dictate family policy to the U.S. because we are [constitutionally bound] to regard the treaty provisions of the CRC as the supreme law of the land."

It isn't just Obama's well-known socialist ideas that pose a threat. "World governance" has the potential to compound that threat.

http://www.antiwar.com/essays/bricker.html

Perhaps its time to introduce a new amendment.

The Bricker Amendment
By Justin Raimondo

The problem of international treaties superseding the U.S. Constitution and undermining the foundations of our Republic is not a new one. The conservative movement of the early 1950’s, which looked on the United Nations with extreme suspicion, was particularly sensitive to this threat — and they hit upon a solution: the Bricker Amendment.

Introduced into the Senate in February, 1952, as Senate Joint Resolution 130, the “Bricker Amendment” to the Constitution read as follows:

* Section 1. A provision of a treaty which conflicts with this Constitution shall not be of any force or effect.
* Section 2. A treaty shall become effective as internal law in the United States only through legislation which would be valid in the absence of treaty.
* Section 3. Congress shall have power to regulate all executive and other agreements with any foreign power or international organization. All such agreements shall be subject to the limitations imposed on treaties by this article.
* Section 4. The congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Mobilizing to support Bricker, conservatives built a grand coalition which included all the major veterans groups, the Kiwanis Clubs, the American Association of Small Business, many women’s groups, as well as the conservative activist organizations of the time, such as the Freedom Clubs and the Committee for Constitutional Government. The conservative press joined in the campaign; writing in Human Events, Frank Chodorov said that

The proposed amendment arises from a rather odd situation. A nation is threatened by invasion, not by a foreign army, but by its own legal entanglements. Not soldiers, but theoreticians and visionaries attack its independence and aim to bring its people under the rule of an agglomeration of foreign governments. This is something new in history. There have been occasions when a weak nation sought security by placing itself under the yoke of a strong one. But, here we have the richest nation in the world, and apparently the strongest, flirting with the liquidation of its independence. Nothing like that has ever happened before.

The breach in our defenses, said Chodorov, is in Article VI of the Constitution, which provides that “... All Treaties ...shall be the supreme Law of the Land... any Thing in the Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding.” At the time of the Founders, the division between foreign and domestic policy was clear enough; there was never any intention, as Jefferson wrote, to enable the President and the Senate to “do by treaty what the whole government is interdicted from doing in any way.”

But as the concept of limited government was eroded — and under pressure from the endless stream of pacts, covenants, and executive agreements issuing forth from the United Nations and its American enthusiasts — the chink in our constitutional armor widened. Just as the growth of administrative law had threatened to overthrow the old Republic during the darkest days of the New Deal, so under Truman and Eisenhower the burgeoning body of treaty law threatened to overthrow U.S. sovereignty. Executive agreements had created administrative law of a new type; treaties which sought to regulate domestic economic and social behavior to a degree never achieved by the Brain Trusters. If the New Deal had failed to completely socialize America, to conservatives it often seemed as if the United Nations seemed determined to finish the job. According to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, human beings were endowed with all sorts of “rights,” including the right to a job and the right to “security.” There were, however, certain significant omissions, chief among them the right to own and maintain private property. Another equally glaring omission was the unqualified right to a free press, the regulation of which is left up to member nations. When three Supreme Court justices, including the Chief Justice, cited the UN Charter and the NATO treaty in support of their argument that Truman had the right to seize the steel mills, conservatives went into action — and the fight for the Bricker Amendment began in earnest.

The Eisenhower Administration, and particularly the U.S. State Department, went all out to defeat the Amendment. Leading the opposition was Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. This was the same John Foster Dulles who had said, two years previous, that “The treaty power is an extraordinary power, liable to abuse,” and warned that “Treaties can take powers away from the Congress and give them to the President. They can take powers from the states and give them to the federal government or to some international body and they can cut across the rights given to the people by their Constitutional Bill of Rights.” Hammered with this quote by Clarence Manion, Dean of Law at Notre Dame University, and a leading proponent of the Bricker Amendment, Dulles could only take refuge in the argument that this President would never compromise U.S. sovereignty.

Although the Bricker Amendment started out with fifty-six co- sponsors, it eventually went down to defeat in the U.S. Senate, 42-50, with 4 not voting. (A watered-down version, the “George proposal,” lost by a single vote.) The defection of Senators William Knowland and Alexander Wiley from conservative Republican ranks on this occasion was particularly significant, and marked the beginning not only of Wiley’s chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but also the decline of the movement to put and keep America first.

As Frank E. Holman, president of the American Bar Association, and the sparkplug of the Bricker Amendment movement, wrote:

In the destiny of human affairs a great issue like a righteous cause does not die. It lives on and arises again and again until rightly won. However long the fight for an adequate Constitutional Amendment on treaties and other international agreements, it will and must be won. This will be the history of the Bricker Amendment as it has been the history of all other great issues and causes.

Holman’s comments were published in 1954 as Story of the Bricker Amendment, (The First Phase) — a title which one can only hope is prophetic.

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