Post-American Presidency (5 page)

“It is a blueprint to save the world,” wrote environmental journalist David Adam in
The Guardian
. “And yet it is long, confusing and contradictory.”
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But its internationalist and socialist aspects are unmistakable.

The Framework Convention document includes regulations for climate control; for “mitigation,” which is money that the developed world pays to the underdeveloped world for all the carbon and resources it has consumed, ostensibly to the detriment of the world’s poor nations; and “adaptation”—money developed countries pay to underdeveloped nations to aid in their development. A large portion of the treaty is devoted to scaling back Western development and “consumption” to a level that will supposedly enable the Third World to catch up industrially and technologically with the First—whereupon all will march together into the glorious socialist future.

It is the same socialist vision that the post-American president is pursuing domestically: the rich give to the poor, so that we can all be poor, and all just alike.

Justice! Climate justice, the new and improved Orwellian lexicon for a warming that was more chilly than warm.

The climate agreement stipulated that the nations that signed on to the treaty would meet in a conference, where they would “identify elements, including the economic development stages, response capabilities and shares of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, to be considered as criteria for changes in circumstances of the Parties.” In other words, the conference itself would examine the various factors and decide on their basis whether to change the requirements of any particular nation that was a signer of the treaty.

So in effect, the nations themselves would no longer have the power to determine their own degree of compliance with recommendations to combat global warming; instead, they would cede this right to this new supranational body. And this conference would in turn give way to a new international governing body: an “institutional arrangement and legal framework” would be established after 2012 “for the implementation, monitoring, reporting and verification of the global cooperative action.” This would “include a financial mechanism and a facilitative mechanism drawn up to facilitate the design, adoption and carrying out of public policies”—and to this mechanism, “market rules and related dynamics should be subordinate, in order to assure the full, effective and sustained implementation of the Convention.”

In other words, the free market would be subordinate to the oversight and direction of this new governing body. The new international governing body would regulate markets and trade worldwide, subordinate to the Copenhagen accords.

This new body would, quite explicitly, be a “government”—so it is termed in the document. This government would oversee the enforcement of international socialism, establishing “an international registry for the monitoring, reporting and verification of compliance of emission
reduction commitments, and the transfer of technical and financial resources from developed countries to developing countries.”

The document envisions a government on the model of the current European Union, with nations subordinating themselves to a secretariat, and the citizens of those nations having absolutely no elective voice, nor any other monitoring or governing authority over that secretariat. This secretariat would set global standards on emissions controls, on carbon dioxide levels, on trade rates, and most likely also on currency exchange and value rates. It will, in short, determine who pays, and who receives.

This is, plainly and simply, world government.

Given the complexities of the regulations delineated in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, nothing less than world government would be necessary: only a huge international bureaucracy could monitor, implement, and enforce these regulations.

Ironically, the developing nations, the chief beneficiaries of this global government and attendant transfer of wealth, are hopelessly ill equipped to establish and maintain the giant bureaucracy and enforcement apparatus that the climate agreement would entail. So the treaty would effectively induce the West to create and enforce a huge government apparatus for the transfer of its own wealth to other countries, the emasculation of its economies, and the surrender of its political independence.

Is this the suicide of the West? Perhaps—but Western European and American leaders don’t see it that way. At first glance, the climate change treaty looks as if the West is imposing a horrible burden on itself. And certainly the new global climate change order will be prohibitively expensive, both financially and in terms of loss of sovereignty. But in exchange the West is buying the status quo. As with welfare systems in America and Europe, the new world order will pay the poor to be poor—and when the poor buy into it, they will be
poor forever. By accepting payoffs instead of developing ways to earn money on their own, they exchange subsistence levels for achievement, and the fathers and mothers who buy into it simply ensure that their children will never rise above it, for they will not raise their children with the values necessary to enable them to do so.

After decades of the failed policy of throwing hard-earned American currency at despots, dictators, and bureaucrats of failed nations, what we should have been exporting was political freedom. What we should have been insisting upon was individual rights, entrepreneurship, and self-governance. And only nations that upheld such standards would qualify for the ample bounty of American largesse.

But instead, the end result of all this transfer of wealth and sovereignty will be neither climate justice nor economic equality. The West will retain its technical and technological superiority, although its further growth will be hamstrung by the new climate regulations. The developing countries will remain developing countries, because the riches they will receive via the climate treaty will do nothing to develop their economies. They will get rich by doing nothing, and as they continue to do nothing and the largesse from the West dries up, they will return to their former poverty. The developing nations are on the brink of ensuring their “developing” status for generations to come—simply by “forcing” these concessions from the West and its willing post-American leader.

It is also noteworthy that there is virtually nothing in the document forcing the developing nations to adhere to any standards of reporting or compliance or wisdom in the way the money is spent.

In reality, it is all about assuaging Western guilt and establishing a transnational socialist regime. And for the Islamic world, the climate change treaty is a sweet deal. We buy the oil from them. We burn the oil. We pay them reparations for having consumed the oil. We pay them “adaptations” for not burning their trees. At every step, they gain.

LORD MONCKTON BLOWS THE WHISTLE

Several weeks before Obama was scheduled to leave for Copenhagen, the internationalist aspect of his plans was exposed. On October 14, 2009, Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science adviser for Margaret Thatcher and noted critic of Al Gore’s climate change dogma, spoke at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, about the threat to American sovereignty that was posed by the United Nations Climate Change Treaty, which was set for Obama and others to sign at a conference in Copenhagen.

Monckton told his audience that at that conference, “a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regimes from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.” And he issued a warning: “I have read that treaty. And what it says is this: that a world government is going to be created. The word ‘government’ actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, ‘climate debt’—because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.”

While Monckton’s words were greeted with skepticism, in fact the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change backed him up completely. And Barack Obama, with all his hard-line socialist associations and policies, was hardly one to stand up in opposition to a measure that embodied so many of his core beliefs. Monckton explained the nature of the government envisioned in the climate change treaty—and it sounded like the government of Obama’s dreams. He pointed out that the words “election,” “democracy,” “vote,” and “ballot”
do not appear in the treaty, and declared that this treaty would “impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.”

Monckton declared that this treaty would supersede U.S. law and eclipse American sovereignty: “And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution, and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties—And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.” He apparently based this view on Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which stipulates: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” If “Treaties” are to be the “supreme Law of the Land,” theoretically Obama’s climate treaty could supersede U.S. laws that may contradict it.

Accordingly Monckton concluded with a warning: “In the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your humanity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back. That is how serious it is. I’ve read the treaty. I’ve seen this stuff about [world] government and climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or not.”
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As Herman Van Rompuy, the first Lisbon Treaty–era president of Europe, put it: “2009 is the first year of global governance.”
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Perhaps stung by the publicity that Monckton’s warning received,
an Obama administration official announced ten days later, on October 24, that the post-American president was “leaning toward not going” to Copenhagen. He said that Obama would instead address climate change issues during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But the treaty would remain unsigned.

For the time being.

Climategate, the explosive revelations that the evidence of manmade global warming was largely fabricated, should have changed all that. But genuine science seemed to have little to do with the international environmental-global-industrial complex.

Obama, meanwhile, had made appointments in line with his overall internationalist goals.

INTERNATIONALIST ON THE SUPREME COURT

When Justice David Souter retired from the Supreme Court, Obama chose Sonia Sotomayor, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, as his replacement. Quickly approved, Sotomayor joined the high court on August 6, 2009.

An internationalist had joined the Supreme Court.

In 2007, Sotomayor contributed a foreword to a book entitled
The International Judge
, by Daniel Terris, Cesare P. R. Romano, and Leigh Swigart. In it, Sotomayor emphasized how important it was to consider “how much we have to learn from foreign law and the international community when interpreting our Constitution.…” She added: “We should also question how much we have to learn from international courts and from their male and female judges about the process of judging and the factors outside of the law that influence our decisions.”
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This was Sotomayor’s consistent line of thought. In April 2009, addressing the American Civil Liberties Union of Puerto Rico, Judge
Sotomayor again declared in effect her support for a role for international law in deciding cases stateside: “international law and foreign law,” she said, “will be very important in the discussion of how to think about the unsettled issues in our own legal system.” Opponents of the consideration of international laws and foreign laws to decide cases in the United States were “asking American judges to close their minds to good ideas.” She referred to cases in American courts where foreign precedents were used to “help us understand what the concepts meant to other countries and… whether our understanding of our own constitutional rights fell into the mainstream of human thinking.”

Would the concepts of the freedom of speech and legal equality of women with men fall into “the mainstream of human thinking” today? Not with the rapid advance of Sharia norms in Islamic countries (as well as in the West). Not with the increase of authoritarian governments in countries all over the world. And not with the post-American president paying only the vaguest lip service to the freedom of speech, while working in all sorts of ways to undermine it.

The hazards of Sotomayor’s approach were many.
The
Wall Street Journal
asked a pointed question in an editorial published just as Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings were about to begin: “If one judge may look to the courts of Western Europe for expansion of liberal thoughts on human rights, why may another not look to decidedly less liberal ideas? Iran allows women who appear without a hijab on the streets to be lashed 74 times. China limits families to bearing one child. Even the democracies of Western Europe have laws that differ broadly from ours. Few countries, for instance, share our rules protecting the rights of the accused, or have the U.S.’s constitutionally mandated separation of church and state.”
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