Here Come the Black Helicopters!: UN Global Governance and the Loss of Freedom (13 page)

PART NINE

AGENDA 21: TELLING US HOW TO LIVE

The single most intrusive—and most ambitious—of the global initiatives that are under way as part of the effort to battle climate change is Agenda 21.

This set of principles, adopted at the First Rio Conference in 1992, spells out how each of us must live in the new world order. We need to leave rural areas, low-density suburbs, and leafy small towns and aggregate in big cities and crowded urban areas. Good-bye, Los Angeles. Hello, midtown Manhattan. Why? So we don’t need to drive. We contribute to greenhouse gas emissions when we get behind the wheel. Bikes will become the order of the future.

Like Stalin’s collectivization in the 1920s and ’30s and the British Enclosure Acts in the nineteenth century, the goal is to force a vast population movement, in this case so we don’t emit greenhouse gases.

Agenda 21 began as a long series of recommendations adopted at the First Rio Conference in 1992. Initially, they were really just suggestions to local zoning and planning boards on how to develop more “sustainable” communities. But the movement is gathering to make it the norm for land use decisions at the local level. More and more zoning boards are molding their plans to its contours. Cities are approving or vetoing land use plans based on Agenda 21. It is beginning really to structure how we live.

In
Screwed!
, we set out how Agenda 21 is influencing local communities around the nation.

Its requirements are all in the name of stopping climate change, but, in fact, through voluntary action and citizen education, we are reducing greenhouse gas emissions on our own. Without being herded into high density living arrangements.

• We are driving less. Per capita vehicle mileage is down by 7 percent in the past five years and is continuing to drop.
  
• One in ten coal-fired energy plants has converted to lower-emission natural gas in the past five years and the trend is accelerating.
  
• Automobile energy efficiency is continuing to climb steeply.
  
• Oil use for home heating is down by two-thirds in the past decade.
  
• Overall, we have reduced our use of oil by 5 percent since 2000 even as our population has grown by 30 million people.
  

Total US greenhouse gas emissions are down by 10 percent since 2006 and are on schedule to drop by another 10–20 percent by 2020.

We don’t need to change the fundamentals of our lives. Greater energy conservation and higher vehicle mileage are the answers. Not a radical change in how we live.

Sorry, environmentalists. We are doing it the American way.

PART TEN

GLOBAL GOVERNANCE: WHO WOULD OUR BEDFELLOWS BE?

The oft-stated goal of global governance—one-world government—begs the question of whether such rule would be democratic and freedom loving or autocratic and arbitrary. Would the world government be fundamentally honest, albeit with a few bad apples, or would it be dominated by kleptocracies—governments whose rulers are only intent on stealing and plundering their way to mega-wealth? Would it be respectful of human rights or ride roughshod over them as happens in many parts of the world?

The fact is that the nations we would be entrusting with our sovereignty are not worthy of the trust. Were this a better world, filled with better nations and rulers, it would be different. But the world is crammed with tiny nations—barely as large as any of our states—who could easily gang up on us and become the tail that wags the dog. And far too many of the nations of the world—more, much more, than would be needed to outvote us—are autocratic, not free, corrupt, and regular violators of human rights.

It is one thing for those of us on the East Coast of the United States to trust our destiny to the voters of the West Coast or the South or the Midwest. It is quite another to give that power to Russia, China, or a collection of tiny, lightly populated, third world autocracies, riddled with corruption and dedicated to the enrichment of their leaders. These are not the kind of bedfellows we want in our government. They are not worthy of entrusting our sovereignty to them.

So let’s examine those who would come to rule us in any global governance scheme.

RULE OF THE LILLIPUTIANS: HOW TINY NATIONS OUTVOTE US

The fundamental concept underscoring global governance is the principle of one nation, one vote. All UN conferences and decision-making bodies—with the sole exception of the Security Council—operate on this principle. With 193 countries in the United Nations, a coalition of very small nations exercises a disproportionate power.

Is the principle of one nation, one vote an appropriate basis for global governance?

It takes 97 nations to constitute a majority of the 193 UN members. But it is possible that a majority of tiny nations could coalesce and outvote the rest. The 97 least-populated UN members have a combined census of only 241 million inhabitants—about one-quarter less than the population of the United States (310 million). These nations, representing only 241 million people, comprise less than 4 percent of the world’s 7 billion people, but together they can determine the direction of its decisions.

Many of these countries are really tiny, their nationhood a result of being an island or remote from population centers. Forty countries—enough to outvote the members of NATO—have populations of less than one million people and thirteen have fewer than one hundred thousand people. The most populated of the 97 smaller countries—which, again, can constitute a majority of voting members of the UN—is Bulgaria, with a population of just over 7 million. That’s smaller than the population of the five boroughs of New York City!

What kind of global government can be predicated on a system in which Monaco (33,000), San Marino (33,000), Palau (20,000), Tuvalu (20,000), and Nauru (10,000) can outvote China (1.3 billion), India (1.2 billion), and the United States (310 million)?

Permitting these minuscule countries to cast one vote each summons the memory of the old pocket boroughs that were represented by one member each in the British House of Commons for centuries. Wealthy landowners would get their own estate and the surrounding town—largely populated by their servants—declared a constituency and become entitled to their own personal member of Parliament. Apportionment of seats being what it was, these tiny districts would often outvote the big cities of the UK.

The US Supreme Court realized the injustice of apportioning power based on any measurement other than population when it struck down legislative districts at the state and local level where seats were not allocated based on the number of inhabitants. It was common practice in the state senates of forty-nine states (Nebraska is unicameral) to allocate seats by county, mirroring the composition of the US Senate, where each state gets two members. This distorted legislative apportionment permitted rural counties to outvote the big cities and perpetuate the power of the rural squires who dominated politics in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and many eastern states.

The system came to be derided as “one cow, one vote” and met its doom at the hands of the Supreme Court in the reapportionment cases of 1964. The justices ruled that both houses of the state legislatures must be apportioned based only on population. They distinguished state senates from the US Senate because the Constitution explicitly mandates two members from each state for the latter. This provision, of course, stems from the fact that the early United States was a federation of thirteen sovereign states that had won their independence from Great Britain.

It is not merely that it is unfair for St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific to have votes equal to that of the United States. It is that these tiny islands can have no conception of what things are like in larger countries. How can they cast intelligent votes based on their own life experiences living in nation-states that are really no larger than small towns?

And then there is the potential for corruption. Like the pocket boroughs of old Britain, these tiny countries frequently tend to be one-man, quasi-feudal estates. Their UN delegates vote the interests of the one person who controls the island—or the one company. And, in many cases, that vote can be easily bought by offers of foreign aid, investment, or access to the markets of larger nations.

The potential for corruption and injustice implicit in allowing the tail of 241 million people to wag the dog of 7 billion people in the world is too great to let the system continue.

Here’s a list of the 97 smallest nations in the UN who constitute a majority of the world body. These tiny nations can outvote the rest of the world and its 7 billion people.
¹

At its inception, the Charter for the United Nations carefully vested most of the organization’s power in a Security Council dominated by its five permanent members: the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China, each of whom was given a veto power over the actions of the global body. This formulation stemmed from the fact that the UN was originally formed as an association of the Allied powers, who had emerged victorious from the Second World War. The vital role played by each nation was recognized in giving it the veto power.

The power of the Security Council overshadowed the rest of the UN organization during the Cold War since neither Russia nor the United States and our allies was willing to trust its fate to a roll of the dice in the General Assembly, where each nation has a single vote.

When North Korea, with Chinese help, invaded South Korea in 1949, the Soviet veto would have precluded intervention by the Security Council. The United States and our allies passed the “uniting for peace” resolution in the General Assembly, which became the basis for the UN’s intervention in Korea to repel communist aggression. Never again would Russia permit the General Assembly to play such a role.

As the decolonialization movement spread throughout Asia and Africa, membership in the United Nations expanded rapidly.

The original UN General Assembly had 51 members when the organization opened its doors in 1945. By 1959 it had grown to 82 members. The next year, 1960, it spurted in size to 99 as former colonies began to join in large numbers. By 1970 it stood at 127. By 1980 it was 154 and by 1990 the membership of the General Assembly was 159.

Then a second spurt in growth happened as the Soviet Russian and Yugoslav confederations broke apart. Membership soared to 189 in 2000. It now stands at 193.

With each new third world addition to the body, the voting power of the West—and Russia—was diluted and the power of the nations of Asia and Africa grew. A sharp anti-American bias became evident as the General Assembly increased in size.

For example, in 2007, on average, only 18 percent of the members of the General Assembly voted with the United States on any given vote (not counting unanimous votes). In 2008, the percentage was up to 26 percent. Then, under Obama, it rose to 42 percent as the administration moved closer to the opinions of the third world countries. (Some would say that it began to share their anti-American bias.) All told, the United States voted no in the General Assembly more often than any other UN member, even in the 2010 session.
²

Yet it is this very body—the 193 members of the United Nations—and this very voting system—one nation, one vote—that we are about to vest with enormous power. If the globalists and their Obama administration allies have their way, these 193 nations will decide where we can drill for oil offshore, which sea-lanes shall be open for our navigation, how the global Internet is administered, how much we should pay to third world countries to adjust to climate change, what limits to place on our carbon emissions, and dozens of other topics now consigned to our national, state, and local jurisdictions.

In entering into governance by this worldwide body of 193 equal nations, we are dealing into a card game with a stacked deck. We cannot hope to win. We can’t even expect fairness.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War’s bipolarity, the power of the Security Council within the UN declined. Now its role is primarily limited to UN military intervention and economic sanctions to keep the peace and, supposedly, to fight aggression. But more and more power has flowed to the General Assembly, and the concept of one nation, one vote has become enshrined as the core principle of global governance.

The diminishing power of the major UN nations is evident in the increasing domination of the Group of 77, a coalition of the poorer nations determined to use the UN as a vehicle to channel money from developed nations to their own needs. Although these countries donate only 12 percent of the UN’s operating budget, their combined power has become dominant in the General Assembly.