How treaties trump the Constitution (a timely re-post & must read)

Nothing in the U.S. Constitution authorizes the federal government to regulate private property. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution authorizes the federal government to manage wildlife or prescribe land-use regulations within the various states.

By what authority, then, has the federal government constructed the expansive bureaucracy that now forces wolves, panthers and bears on states and communities that don't want them, or levied fines, and jailed people who dare dig a ditch or dump a load of sand on their own private property?

This federal power arises from the treaty clause (Article VI (2)) of the U.S. Constitution.

Alabama attorney Larry Becraft provides an excellent analysis of just how and when this treaty power was discovered. This power has been exploited dramatically in recent years, and is the basis for imposing a global environmental and social agenda on the United States.

Before the Ramsar Treaty, no American was jailed for dumping sand on his own private property. Ocie Mills and his son spent 21 months in a federal prison and a decade in litigation for dumping 19 loads of building sand on his own property after securing a county building permit and approval from the state department of environmental protection.

Before the CITES Treaty, no one would fault a person for shooting a charging bear. John Shuler was fined $7,000 and spent nine years in litigation because he shot a grizzly – charging toward him only 30-feet away from his front porch.

Environmental extremists, inside and outside the government, are using international treaties to expand the power of government far beyond the power granted originally by the Constitution.

The process has been refined to an art. Environmental organizations pour millions of dollars into the campaigns of elected officials. When elected, the officials repay the favor by appointing executives of the environmental organizations to powerful governmental positions. The Clinton/Gore administration appointed at least 27 of these extremists to powerful positions, including Bruce Babbitt from the League of Conservation Voters to head the Department of Interior, and George Frampton from the Wilderness Society to head the Fish and Wildlife Service.

More than 50 major U.S. environmental organizations, and six federal agencies (including the U.S. State Department), are members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, an international non-government organization that has drafted virtually all of the international environmental treaties for half a century. Delegations that represent the U.S. in treaty negotiations are headed by the U.S. State Department. When a treaty is adopted by the U.N. body, the federal agencies and the environmental organizations that helped draft the treaty then lobby Congress and their constituents to demand ratification.

The League of Conservation Voters supported the Clinton/Gore ticket in 1992. They got their reward. Now the LCW is supporting the Kerry/Edwards ticket. They expect, and will undoubtedly get their reward if the two Johns are elected.

When George Bush was elected in 2000, the international community was bitterly disappointed, and had cause to be. Bush immediately withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, which Al Gore personally navigated through the contentious 1997 U.N. conference in Kyoto, Japan.

Bush immediately withdrew the U.S. signature from the International Criminal Court, which the Clinton administration signed just hours before the deadline. Bush also pulled the plug on a decade-long strategy to authorize U.N. global taxation when he forced a rewrite of the document produced by the U.N.'s High Level Panel on Financing Development in Monterrey, Mexico.

The power of U.N. treaties over domestic policy is not limited to environmental regulations. Increasingly, the U.N. is developing treaties to govern the Internet, the oceans, space, domestic taxation, trade and virtually every other area of human activity.

The Bush administration was right in withdrawing from U.N. activity, but it is a meager first step in a process of withdrawal that must be accelerated. Sadly, many internationalist environmental extremists remain embedded in the Bush administration and in Congress. The recent revival of the U.N.'s Law of the Sea Treaty, pushed by John Turner in the State Department, and Sen. Richard Lugar, is evidence that a more thorough cleansing of government is needed.

The elections in November are a referendum on whether to continue to disrupt the U.N. process of dominating domestic public policy, or whether we will return to the Clinton/Gore days of advancing the internationalist/environmental agenda through U.N. treaties. John Kerry has made clear his intention to restore international favor by subjecting the United States to the will of the international community.

Henry Lamb is the executive vice president of the Environmental Conservation Organization and chairman of Sovereignty International.

He took it with him?

I talked with him about it, but he had cancer at the time and was rather distracted. He had one explicitly documented example, but since his death I doubt anyone knows where it is within his records.

Did the Feds kill him to keep their little secret?

Specializing in vicious slurs to back your obviously bogus assertion does you no favor.

Interesting little factoids which have zero to do with US Treasury debt.

The hell they don't.

My ignorant assertion? My assertion is that your assertion is wrong.

Allow me to refresh your memory of what you said: Your assertion was that treaties don't trump the Constitution. They routinely do, providing the unconstitutional authority for the laws that underlie those "interesting little factoids."

Nations are created (as was ours) and surrender by treaty. As far as the "international community" is concerned (you know, our lenders), the "law of nations" trumps any internal document. Hell the genesis of the Constitution itself was to placate those who were going to reschedule the debt left over from the Revolutionary War.

To explain the timing and magnitude of economic change, however, we have to return to the national constitutional situation as it stood in 1787. The convention that met in Philadelphia in that year was emphatically an exercise in nation-building, perhaps the canonical case. Officially the delegates had no authority to undertake such a sweeping project in institutional design, having been appointed by Congress only to recommend possible revisions to the Articles of Confederation. But the assembled group quickly agreed that more drastic alterations were required, in effect a new national beginning. Among the delegates, there was near consensus on the federal government s need for an independent revenue source and clearer authority in matters pertaining to foreign trade, the army and the territories. It is far from clear that this consensus was broadly shared among the politically active population in the member states -- as the bitter struggle over ratification confirmed. Thus these events count as a true turning point, without which subsequent history (economics included) would have been very different.

To understand the basis for the ratification debates, one must appreciate the context of the 1780s. Although economic historians have mainly studied it as an example of inflationary war finance, the Revolutionary War itself had significant effects on economic activity. Indeed, the war may be viewed as the first step in the long turn inward towards the opportunities of the domestic economy, as booming markets for farm produce generated new interest in inland transportation.12 The end of the war disrupted this new internal trade, but without restoring access to British imperial markets. The resulting distress caused considerable political turbulence, leading to demands for the remedy with which the colonial legislatures were long familiar, unbacked paper money as a form of debt relief.

Gosh, where have we heard that before? So you see, the principal reason the Federal Convention was convened in the first place was to get access to markets by assuring the lenders that they would get paid in real money.

In one important respect, however, the history of the US was not fundamentally different from that of European nations, in that financial policies were dictated by the fiscal needs of governments. On this count the Constitution of 1789 left much unsaid, giving the federal government access to tax revenue only implicitly through its control over customs. Of equal importance in defining the US nation-state was the Federalist program enacted during George Washington s first term of office (1789-92), under the leadership of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton s reports on the public credit, on the Bank of the United States, and on manufactures, are classics of US political economy and national definition. With the exception of the report on manufactures, virtually the entire plan was backed by the President and promptly voted into law by Congress. The immediate results included a sweeping assumption of debt by the federal government ( funding at par the long-depreciated war debts of the states); launching of a banking system based on liabilities convertible into a specie base; and a dramatic improvement in the status of US federal government debt in the capital markets of Europe. Source

As I have said, capital markets dictated the formation of our government in the first place. They still determine the context of international law under which it finances operations. Without the supercedure of that law, there would never have been the loans upon which the building of this nation was financed. Treaties constitute the bulk of that law, which entirely explains why multilateral treaties held by the United Nations are so important to the likes of the Rockefellers.

If you think for one minute that lenders don't demand collateral from governments, you are smoking something. Such deals trading soverignty for solvency are not popular with the people. Politicians hide them. It's been that way since the beginning.

Allow me to refresh your memory of what you said:

They hold collateral on the note. As I understand it, this includes the entire mineral estate of the United States and (more recently) water resources. The way control of these is transferred from Americans to foreigners is via environmental regulations empowered by (IMO unconstitutional) treaties held at the UN.

Given that interest rates on bonds don't pay very much, there has to be a way to sweeten the deal given inflationary pressures on the principal, else the lenders aren't very enthusiastic at bond auctions and interest rates would otherwise rise rather sharply. Needless to say, once regulatory power has been consolidated in administrative government, a selective permitting and enforcement process is a very easy way to deliver a politically opaque return.

Carry_Okie fantasy

If you think for one minute that lenders don't demand collateral from governments, you are smoking something.

Secret collateral. That's funny.

Politicians hide them. It's been that way since the beginning.

Is that a black helicopter hovering over your house? Now that you've discovered the secret, you won't last long.

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