American Policy Center » 2003 » January
- What Is The Republican Agenda?
- Property Rights Loss Invites Anarchy
- The Conservative Crisis
- DeWeese Warns "Sustainable Development" Threatens US Sovereignty
- Sustaining Socialism
- Global Forum on the Reinvention of Government
- One Third of 107th Congress Failed to Protect US Sovereignty
- Drugging Our Children to Death
By Tom DeWeese
The Republicans regained control of the Senate and now hold all top positions in the federal government. The chest pounding has begun by Republican leadership and conservative pundits alike, as the death of liberalism is announced and the dawn of a new Conservative era is hailed.
We’re promised lower taxes, more conservative judges, stronger defense, less abortion and… what? What is the Republican agenda? Should it not be to stand against anything that would increase the size, power or scope of the federal government? Are not those conservative, i.e. Republican principles?
Republicans have promised for years that they would begin to roll back the awesome power of government, but complain that they have never had the chance to accomplish it because the Democrats controlled one or both Houses of Congress. Today they don’t. There is no one in sight to block the way.
So, it’s time to gas up the steamroller and begin the destruction of 50 years of Democrat-created socialism. Any day now we should expect new Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott to outline plans to end the federal role in education, especially by abolishing the Department of Education. We can anticipate action on the reform, if not repeal, of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to end the tyranny against landowners. Soon we surely will see a plan to role back federal intrusion in our private lives. True patriots are anxiously awaiting the details on how quickly federal data banks and surveillance cameras will be dismantled. And the announcement I personally can’t wait to hear is that the United States is finally withdrawing from the mistake on the East River – the United Nations. Now that’s an agenda about which most of the citizens who put the Republicans in control could truly cheer. Our nation restored.
But wait, not one of those things seems to be on the Republican agenda. So let’s see, what are they up to? Where will they lead us?
The Republicans have just successfully controlled the lame duck session by marshalling through the Homeland Security bill to create a massive new bureaucracy which will be under the control of one cabinet secretary.
The Homeland Security Secretary will have the power to use the nation’s law enforcement agencies to build a centralized grand database to monitor our entire lives, including purchases, travel, bank accounts, jobs, video rental, medical records, personal web surfing, and our e-mails. This new Republican creation will have the power to come into our homes without a search warrant, without even telling us they’ve been there. They can look through our computers, remove records and leave without a trace. Our driver’s licenses will now be transformed into national identification cards, without which we can’t obtain any government services, open a bank account, get on a plane or buy a gun. And the new Homeland Security Secretary is looking into the possibility of suspending the Posse Comitatis Act, which has protected the nation for a hundred years by keeping civilian law enforcement under separate control from the military. Now we may expect armed soldiers to kick in our doors to perform the searches.
Remember, it’s all in the name of fighting terrorism. Perhaps Americans should start asking Republicans for a definition of terrorism. My definition includes massive government power.
Also in the lame duck session, Republicans in the House of Representatives, led by outgoing Representative Jim Hansen, waited until the wee hours of the morning, after their colleagues had gone home, to pass its version of S.990, the dreaded “Son of CARA” land grab bill. There was no recorded vote, no debate and no hearings on a bill that authorizes over a billion dollars to left wing environmental and animal rights groups. As soon as the House passed it, the Senate, led by “conservative” outgoing Senator Bob Smith moved with lightening speed to pass it as well. The good news is their scheme was foiled by alert property rights activists. The bill died in this Congress, but it will surely raise its ugly head again in the 108th, with Republicans fully in charge.
On the United Nations front, President Bush and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan just completed a White House love-fest, prompting The Washington Post to report that relations between the United States and the UN have never been stronger.
What part of these actions fit the Republican agenda of limited government? What gene are Republicans missing? What brain cell needs to be connected to enable them to see that the principles they advocate on the campaign stump are supposed to be represented in the laws they enact?
The very next day, following the election, new Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was on national television advocating the Republicans desire for “bipartisan” cooperation with the Democrats. After more than a year of tyranny from Tom Daschle and his cohorts in the Democrat party, Lott has apparently learned nothing. Polite society dictates that I say only that Senate Majority Leader Lott seems to lack the leadership skills to smoothly guide the conservative agenda through the Senate.
“Bipartisanship” is a liberal trap. There can never be peace and harmony in the Congress as long as it is so evenly divided between a philosophy that advocates severely limiting the power of government and one that advocates severely increasing it.
Americans are desperately looking to this new Congress to take the ever-growing power of government off their backs. Tax cuts are a fine start, but they are only a small part of the problem. We are losing our liberties, our privacy and our private property. The prospects don’t look good that this Congress will even have a clue as to how to fix that situation. Certainly not with their current focus.
The Republicans have this one chance. Either they must get some new leadership dedicated to their root philosophy of limited government and drive that agenda, or they will stand for nothing, destined to lose time and again to a dedicated liberal cadre that never compromises.
It’s time to dig in and fight, but it’s hard to do that when you’re using your fists to pound your chest in overblown self-congratulations.
January 27, 2003
By Tom DeWeese
While Americans focus on the prospect of war with Iraq, one to liberate the citizens of that nation from a terrible dictator, other Americans are organizing to protect essential Constitutional rights that are being eroded and destroyed.
There is outrage over the manipulation of election laws to thwart the will of the voters. There is the effort to defeat a bill in Congress that would impose a National Identity Card on everyone. Others are raising their voices in protest against a Sustainable Development agenda being driven by the United Nations and the worldwide environmental movement. It is an agenda designed to attack property rights.
For nearly 227 years America has prospered because this nation has operated under a rule of law that was designed to protect the individual’s right to pursue his own life in the way he chooses. To work, to play, to invest, to own property and to use it in the way that best suits his or her needs. Yet, today, we are witnessing corrupt courts that toss aside election laws, that take over whole school systems and then demand taxes be imposed to implement their rulings, a function of legislatures and local communities.
The Founding Fathers, particularly James Madison, took those ideas of limited government to heart and put them in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. It limits government taking of private property, saying no American shall “be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” This is a guarantee to Americans that they are safe and free to pursue their own lives without interference from government. It says it is the government’s job to protect those liberties. Without that guarantee there can be no society. Chaos and tyranny would replace order and prosperity.
Guaranteed by those protections, Americans began to work their land. With their free minds they invented new approaches, and created new jobs, and found new ways to prosper. As a result, our standard of living improved. Science improved health care. Life expectancy increased. And wealth followed. Americans have created an incredible society out of a barren wilderness.
Liberty became our birthright and visions of freedom became our legacy to much of the world’s people still yearning to be free. Today, as we are under attack by terrorists, the nation rallies around our belief in freedom. Flags fly from our homes and car antennas. Bumper stickers declare “God Bless America.” Banners shout “Let Freedom Ring.”
The question must be asked; do we still have those freedoms or is our pride in America now based mostly on propaganda and memories from another era? The answer is that today, an army of bureaucrats care nothing about those rights and the politicians, the ones who seek our votes every few years, don’t care either. They keep passing laws to give the bureaucrats the power to run roughshod over our rights.
Their only true concern is that you are verbally appeased until Election Day while they wink at the radical environmentalists who slip money in their pockets. Step by step, American liberty is disappearing. Americans are being ruled, regulated, restricted, licensed, registered, directed, checked, inspected, measured, numbered, counted, rated, stamped, censured, authorized, admonished, refused, prevented, drilled, indoctrinated, monopolized, extorted, robbed, hoaxed, fined, harassed, disarmed, dishonored, fleeced, exploited, assessed, and taxed to the point of suffocation and desperation.
We lost the wisdom of the need for individuals to have the right to own and control private property. The fact is no other rights can exist without property rights. How can you have free speech if you aren’t allowed to control your own property? Step by step, property rights are being eliminated in America and that means we are eliminating freedom.
Too many people in America have accepted the idea that they have the right to tell other people what to do with their private lives and their private property. And they believe there is nothing wrong with using the power of government to enforce those ideas. They have become the Sustainable Development lynch mob.
Ask yourself these questions. Do you support zoning laws? Do you support land-development plans and restrictions? Do you support restrictions on where businesses can be placed? Do you support how waterways are used? Do you support historic preservation? Do you support restrictions on building designs to create uniformity? Do you support community growth management? Are you an active member of a homeowners association?
In every case, you are licensing the government to infringe on someone else’s property rights. And what happens if a bigger mob doesn’t like what you are doing with your land? Once the precedent has been established the monster is out of the bag. There is no turning back.
If and when Sustainable Development is implemented and imposed, every one of these things are to be controlled by decisions made for you by government bureaucrats, members of private, non-government organizations in partnership with private businesses and elected representatives, working together in specially organized councils with names like sustainability councils, stakeholder councils.
John Adams said, “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”
We keep electing politicians who offer the best argument on how to use government power. We select our leaders today based on which ones have the best plan for collecting taxes; the best plan for restricting land use; the best plan for providing government-restricted medical care and drug prescription and soon, if some get their way, the best plan to even control what we eat.
We seem to have one property right left. The right to keep paying taxes and the mortgage payments as we live by the permission of the government. We have been losing our freedoms because we have lost the knowledge of why this nation was founded.
January 27, 2003
By Tom DeWeese
There is a crisis in the Conservative movement. It is a blind spot that threatens everything the movement stands for. It is Sustainable Development, the theme of the United Nations conference in Johannesburg. However, the conservatives who have always been there to fight off such utopian, socialist nightmares now seem to slumber blissfully in their ignorance at the very moment when vigilance is most urgently needed.
Sustainable Development is the greatest threat ever perpetrated against the American ideal of liberty. Under Sustainable Development there can be no free enterprise, no individual liberty or private property.
As I attend traditional conservative meetings around the country where the defense of property rights should be paramount Sustainable Development is rarely mentioned. Speaker after speaker addresses the audience about issues like abortion, taxes, and national defense. They declare their dedication to the fight for limited government. I’ve even heard some of these speakers gleefully declare that we are in a “conservative era.”
If they believe this then they are seriously deluded. There can be no hope of living in a nation of limited government with Sustainable Development as official government policy. The two are diametrically opposed. Today, the Bush Administration is continuing to help entrench Sustainable Development policies that were started under the Clinton Administration.
Conservatives as a movement appear to be ignoring this threat. Indeed, many Conservative foundations and major donors are actually providing funds to proponents of Sustainable Development such as the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club. By sharp contrast, proponents of property rights who are on the front lines to stop this massive expansion of government control receive few dollars of support from those who should be their champions.
Conservative donors are woefully ignorant of Sustainable Development. They think they are giving their money to help the environment or to preserve historic places. Instead they are only helping to murder the very freedoms they profess to uphold. Conservatives would never concede their liberty to Swastikas or Hammer and Sickles, but tuck it in a Green blanket called “environmental protection” and they will toss those liberties on the fire like an old-fashioned book burning.
Conservatives must heed the warning now! Sustainable Development is anti-science, anti-knowledge, anti-human and anti-reason. It is the creed of the mindless savage who seeks brute force over liberty.
If conservatives don’t learn of its evil now, if we don’t heed the warning and rip Sustainable Development out of every level of government by its well-entrenched roots, then American life, indeed human existence as we know it, will enter a new dark ages of pain and misery unlike any ever experienced by the community of man.
The Conservative philosophy advocates limited government intrusion into the lives of individual citizens. The root of that philosophy goes back to the ideals of the Founding Fathers and particularly John Locke who said, “man creates value and therefore property out of his own labor.” He said that no government could take the fruits of one’s labor without a compelling public need and without just compensation and then only through the rule of law.
James Madison used that theory to write the Fifth Amendment. John Adams said, “the moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and there is not the force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”
Under the guarantee that government’s only real job is to protect the rights of individual Americans to engage in commerce and to protect their property and person from thieves and murderers, Americans set about creating the most prosperous and free nation on earth.
Today, these American ideals are under severe challenge from the international community under the banner of Sustainable Development. Time and again, news reports indicate that sustainable development is an environmental issue. It is not. Sustainable Development is the driving force of what Al Gore called a “wrenching transformation” that society must endure to repair what he perceives as the damage of the 20th century’s Industrial Revolution. It is the same Industrial Revolution that gave us modern transportation, medicine, indoor plumbing, healthy drinking water, central heating, air conditioning, and electric light.
Sustainable Development is not about environmental clean up of rivers, air and litter. It is an all-encompassing socialist scheme to combine social welfare programs with government control of private business, socialized medicine, national zoning controls of private property and restructuring of school curriculum which serves to indoctrinate children into politically correct group think.
Sustainable Development advocates seek oppressive taxes to control and punish behavior of which they don’t approve and there is much these advocates disapprove, including air conditioning, fast foods, suburban housing and automobiles.
Every aspect of our lives is affected by Sustainable Development policies. It is top-down control from an all-powerful central government; specifically the United Nations which seeks to assert such control. That is the true significance of the World Conference on Sustainable Development.
The question is whether conservatives will rally to American principles of freedom against the onslaught of Sustainable Development’s socialist tyranny?
January 21, 2003
Addresses CPAC, Jan 22 at Crystal Gateway Marriott, Arlington, VA
Washington, DC – As debate rages over the President’s State of the Union speech, Tom DeWeese, the president of the American Policy Center, will tell an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that “sustainable development” policies, many of which are being pursued by the Bush administration, will determine how their private property is used, what businesses may operate in their community, how food is grown, and how their children will be educated.
The conference is being held on Thursday, Jan 22, at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, Virginia.
“An international agenda has been set in motion, beginning with the United Nation’s treaties and agreements,” says DeWeese. “That agenda is now working its way down through federal to state to local government policy.”
As just one example, the Bush administration has begun issuing grants to help spread a United Nations-sponsored school program that aims to become “a universal curriculum” for teaching global citizenship, peace studies, and equality of world cultures. The US Education Department has issued its first $1.2 million grant to implement the program.
“Sustainable Development is anti-property rights. Anti-free enterprise. It is anti-individual liberty. It is anti-national sovereignty and national borders. It is anti-Western culture,” says DeWeese who noted that the UN’s Agenda 21, “a treaty signed by George Bush at the Earth Summit in 1992 when he was in President”, set Sustainable Development in motion.”
In his address, “Globalism’s Dark Side: The Dangers of the United Nations”, DeWeese warns against the “erasing of national borders and national sovereignty.”
“Globalism calls for a wrenching transformation of our society, away from representative government and independent nations to the establishment of a global village with global citizens. The entire plan is outlined in detail in the UN’s Agenda 21.”
“Imagine,” says DeWeese, “an America in which a specific ‘ruling principle’ is created to decide proper societal conduct for every citizen? That principle would be used to consider everything you eat, what you wear, the kind of home you live in, the way you get to work, the way you dispose of waste, the number of children you may have, even your education and employment decision. That ruling principle is Sustainable Development.”
Most Americans, notes DeWeese, are largely unaware of this development, nor that “There has never been a single vote in Congress to create Sustainable Development. It’s all done through cleverly rearranged wording of existing programs and budgets, using UN treaties as guidelines. It’s all under the radar.”
The American Policy Center is a grassroots, activist think tank headquartered in Warrenton, Virginia. Mr. DeWeese is the publisher/editor of a monthly newsletter, The DeWeese Report. The Center maintains an Internet site at www.americanpolicy.org.
Contact: Tom DeWeese @ (540) 341-8911
A copy of his speech is available on request from Alan Caruba, APC Director of Communications, at acaruba@aol.com or by calling him at (973) 763-6392.
January 14, 2003
By Tom DeWeese
Readers of The DeWeese Report, my monthly newsletter, know the United States is changing from a nation that values individual liberty, free enterprise, and private property rights to one of top-down government command and control. It is Socialism hiding behind the name of Sustainable Development.
Here are just a few developments from across the nation that demonstrate how the plan is being implemented. “Sustainable Development” is the official policy of the Federal government and is being fully implemented by the Bush Administration and the Republican majority in Congress. Sustainable Development has now been embraced by a majority of local Republican office holders and candidates who call it a “Conservative Principle.”
Central California to ban fireplaces
For years environmentalists have been successful in blocking the construction of new power plants in California, contributing to last year’s power shortages and this year’s skyrocketing energy prices. So what’s a family to do when trying to keep warm this winter? Many burn wood in their fireplaces to supplement the furnace. Using the tired excuse of protecting the environment, the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District recently released a plan calling for the banning of traditional, wood-burning fireplaces. They claim that regulations from the Federal Clean Air Act, as implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency, are forcing the local board to take the action to meet draconian clean air standards.
Under the proposed rule, most wood-burning fireplaces and stoves would be banned in new homes. Masonry fireplaces would have to be permanently disabled, converted to natural gas or upgraded to expensive soot-containing models before homes could be sold. In addition, on winter days, many Central Californians would be prohibited from lighting up their existing wood-burning stoves. More than 500,000 homes are affected.
Meeting the new requirements may cost property owners from $1,500 to $3,000, not including the thousands it can cost for installation of gas stoves, and converting traditional brick fireplaces to natural gas. The pollution-controlling inserts can cost between $2,200 and $3,400. Regulations will require those to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning.
Mankind has been heating homes with fireplaces for thousands of years. In California homeowners who use their fireplaces are feeling the brunt of yet another environmental mandate. Here’s the kicker: there’s no science to back up any of it.
Environmentally correct fishing
Under a policy in which anything can be banned with a simple sound bite, the ridiculous becomes the norm, and when government dictates every aspect of our lives, those who know how to play the game can get rich on other people’s misery.
Consider the new assault on Boston’s seafood restaurants. An environmental group made up of chefs calling itself the “Chefs Collaborative” are promoting a new line of “caught with care” Atlantic codfish. The chef’s are pushing “line-caught” cod as an alternative to farmed fish. It’s an extension of the organic food scam in which “natural” is deemed better even though there is no science to support such claims.
Here’s the bottom line; with the special “caught with care” labeling, the fish cost the restaurants 20 to 30 percent more and diners can expect to pay up to 50 percent more. So with the sound bite of a more environmentally-friendly method to sucker the American public, Sustainable Development works to line the pockets of those who go along.
UN Water
There was an old joke making the rounds during the heyday of the Soviet Union. Question: What would happen if the Soviet Union was to take over the Sahara Desert? Answer: Nothing at first, but in a few years there would be a severe shortage of sand.
Fast forward to today: The United Nations Committee on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights has declared access to water a human right and establishes water as a social and cultural good, not merely an economic commodity.
The Committee is chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a Socialist and one of the originators of the concept of Sustainable Development. The final version of the General Comment left out any mention of private ownership of water (that’s because there won’t be any). There is also no mention of the fact that most water shortages (and its severe pollution) are caused by bad governments using dictatorial policies that mismanage and destroy natural resources.
The primary purpose of the declaration is to enhance UN control over the world’s water supply in what it calls the “Global Commons.” Watch for future edicts that require developed countries to severely curtail their water use so, theoretically, there will be more available for “poor” countries. Watch also, as water around the world begins to dry up under those policies. It’s called Sustainable Development.
Unless and until the vast matrix of environmental lies that underwrite Sustainable Development are exposed and this government policy is abandoned, no one’s home or business is safe. The sovereignty of individual nations to determine the best policies for its citizens will continue to be eroded in favor of a global government operated from the United Nations headquarters.
by Henry Lamb
On January 14, Al Gore convened the Global Forum on the Reinvention of Government, at the U.S. State Department. Representatives from 40 nations were present. The first speaker was the president of the Ford Foundation. Next, Secretary of State Albright introduced Al Gore by reciting the “leadership” Gore has exhibited in his reinvention of American government, boasting that the government has become more efficient, “user-friendly,” and with fewer bureaucrats. After a few half-hearted hints at humility, Gore began his all-too-familiar tirade about the horrors of the status quo, and the urgency to transform government into his vision of “global governance.”
Gore’s vision of global governance is not Al Gore’s; he is simply the leading salesman in the United States for a vision that has evolved over decades in the international community. The vision is articulated in Agenda 21, in Our Global Neighborhood, the report of the Commission on Global Governance, and throughout recent UN literature. He is the front man for global governance in America. He is the one person in the federal government who is passionately pushing for the transformation of American government into an administration agency for the United Nations.
The longer Mr. Gore spoke, the clearer it became that he has lost, or abandoned, the most basic principle of the American brand of self governance: namely, that government is empowered by the consent of the governed. The idea that government exists to implement the will of the governed, as expressed through their elected representatives, was nowhere to be found in his remarks. Instead, another vision of government was illuminated. His vision described a government with responsibility and power to care for its citizens, in whatever way the government decides that citizens need to be cared for.
The new system of governance is described as more democratic, more transparent, more efficient, more compassionate, more peaceful. Its objective is to ensure social and economic justice for all while also ensuring that the world’s natural resources are preserved for future generations. These objectives are to be achieved by governments that employ motivated professionals, dedicated to these high-sounding ideals. All governments everywhere are to be transformed into efficient administrative units of global governance in order to ensure the benefits to all mankind.
So what’s wrong with this utopian vision of the 21st century? This vision begins with the notion that government possesses the power to do whatever it believes to be best for the people; it should begin with the notion that all power resides with the people, who grant limited power to government through elected officials. The people, not professional government bureaucrats, should determine what is best for them, through the policies their elected officials adopt. Gore’s vision and practice, recognizes as valid, the views of only those people who agree with his vision. All the rest of the people are “right-wing conspirators” or worse. Dissenters are discredited as the first line of defense. The American brand of self-governance welcomes dissent because our Founders realized that dissent is nothing more than the competition of ideas. Public policy refined through public debate and disagreement of dissenters, often loses the sharp edges that are painful to those who must comply with the policy.
Gore is building a streamlined bureaucracy of professionals who, on the one hand, help shape global policy, and on the other hand, implement that policy with the full force and power of the federal government.
Where is Congress, while this transformation is taking place? Some members are actively pushing the transformation agenda forward, particularly those Congressmen known as the “Progressive Caucus.” A handful of Congressmen are actively trying to prevent the transformation, particularly those described by the White House spin machine as vindictive, partisan, right-wing zealots. Most Congressmen, by far, are not aware that there is an agenda to transform America into an administrative unit for global governance. Moreover, they do not want to hear about it. Far too many Congressmen immediately associate any criticism of the UN with right-wing, black-helicopter wackos. While this majority in the middle seeks solutions from ever deeper holes in the sand, Al Gore is completing the transformation of America, and is now reaching across the globe to accelerate the transformation of the planet.
Henry Lamb is one of the foremost experts on United Nations environmental programs including Agenda 21. He is the Executive Vice President of the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO). For more information about the entire UN’s international environmental agenda visit ECO’s web site at www.freedom.org or contact ECO at P.O. Box 191, Hollow Rock, TN 38342
Massachusetts called “State of Shame”
January 6, 2003
Washington, DC – One third of the members of the 107th Congress failed to support four key pieces of legislation designed to protect members of the US military and opposing funding of United Nations programs that undermine the sovereignty of the United States.
“This is a frightening scenario,” said Tom DeWeese, president of the American Policy Center, a grassroots, activist think tank, “and one can only hope that the last election’s shift of political power will afford Americans protection against the efforts of the UN to erode and undermine our national sovereignty.”
Of the 435 members of the 107th Congress, 130 voted against the American Servicemembers Protection Act (HR 1794), and amendments to strike funding for UNESCO (Amdt 33 to HR 1646), the UN International Criminal Court (Amdt 480 to HR 4546), and for (Amdt 191 to HR 2500) UN peacekeeping operations. Using these votes as the standard to judge pro-and-anti sovereignty views, the Center has issued its annual evaluation of how Congress dealt with the issue.
“Most dramatically,” noted DeWeese, “not one member of the House delegation from the State of Massachusetts supported any sovereignty measure. This is a shameful record as their Congressmen uniformly rejected any effort to protect American service personnel against prosecution by the UN’s International Criminal Court or the other measures that would deny funding to UN agencies and programs that run counter to the interests of the United States.”
Politically, with the exception of four Republicans, all of those with a zero percent voting record were Democrats. Only one Democrat, Gene Taylor of Mississippi, was among the 39 members with 100% voting records supporting the four pieces of sovereignty legislation.
“In America, our sovereignty comes directly from our Constitution and the powers granted to our government by the people,” said DeWeese. “Therefore, our nation’s sovereignty requires the utmost protection against efforts to diminish the laws by which we are governed. The creation of the UN International Criminal Court strikes directly at our system of justice and our exclusive right to administer it.
“Likewise, the funding of UN agencies such as the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that engage in international educational programs designed to undermine national sovereignty, peacekeeping operations largely undertaken by the US, and the International Criminal Court that puts our citizens at risk of politically motivated prosecution needs to be discontinued,” said DeWeese.
The United States withdrew from UNESCO in protest of the widespread waste, corruption, and mismanagement it demonstrated.
Both the American Servicemembers Protection Act and the prohibition of funding for the UN International Criminal Court passed on May 10, 2001. Legislation opposing funding for UNESCO and UN peacekeeping operations was defeated on May 10 and July 18, respectively.
“Few, if any, issues that come before Congress have more importance than our national sovereignty,” said DeWeese. “This is an issue of control. A nation can voluntarily surrender its control, but it is loss of sovereignty just the same. The votes of one third of the members of the 107th Congress represent a frightening trend.”
Contact Tom DeWeese @ (540) 341-8911
January 2, 2003
By Tom DeWeese
The new year calls to us to save the many children in our nation’s schools who will be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and prescribed mind-altering drugs. This evil grows exponentially and, with it, the tragedies whose stories are rising to the surface of public notice.
This pseudo-psychological racket is big business. Sales of pharmaceuticals to treat DHD snowballed to $758 million in the year 2000, and show no signs of slowing down. However, more and more parents are growing skeptical of the diagnoses and subsequent coercive drugging of their children. Spurred by tragedy, some are fighting back.
Lawrence Smith of Michigan and Vicky Dunkle of Pennsylvania both tragically lost their children to psychiatric drugs prescribed to treat their ADHD. Mr. Smith’s 14-year-old son, Matthew died of a heart attack he had while skateboarding. The coroner determined his death was caused by the long-term use of a stimulant that had been forcibly prescribed to him through his school. Early last year, Mrs. Dunkle’s daughter, Shaina, died in her mother’s arms after convulsing in her doctor’s office. She was just 10 years old.
Lawrence and Vicky, bonded by common tragedy, are fighting back. They are determined to expose the fraud surrounding ADHD and the forced drugging of normal children. The problems started for both parents when they were approached by school social workers and psychologists. They were told that their children were “too active,” “easily distracted,” and that they “talked out of turn.” Lawrence and Vicky shrugged off these diagnoses as simplynormal traits of energetic youngsters.
Then came the iron fist of government.
Smith was told: “…if we didn’t consider drugging our son after the school had diagnosed him with ADHD that we could be charged for neglecting his educational and emotional needs. If we hadn’t been pressured by the school system, Matthew would still be alive today.” Mrs. Dunkle agrees. “If I had followed my heart instead of the advice of ‘professionals’ that thought they knew my daughter better than I did, my precious Shaina would be alive now.”
What is going on here? Since when did government schools get in the business of forcing mind-altering drugs on children against their parent’s will?
In 1965, the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), changed education forever as the seeds for today’s massive restructuring-away from academics and toward behavior modification-began. It was psychology’s crowning moment. The ESEA allocated massive federal funds and opened school doors to a flood of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and the psychiatric programs and testing needed to validate them. The number of educational psychologists in the U.S. increased from 455 in 1969 to 16,146 by 1992. As of 1994, child psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors and special educators in and around U.S. public schools nearly outnumber teachers.
In 1991, eligibility rules for federal education grants were changed to provide schools with $400 in annual grant money for each child diagnosed with ADHD. That same year the Department of Education formally recognized ADHD as a handicap and directed all state education officers to establish procedures to screen and identify ADHD children and provide them with special education and psychological services. As a result, the number of ADHD cases soared again.
Today more than 7,000,000 children have been labeled and registered as permanent patients of the school system. Ten to twelve percent of all boys between the ages of 6 and 14 in the United States have been diagnosed as having ADHD. One in every 30 Americans between the ages of 5 and 19 years old has a prescription to Ritalin. Psychologists have never had it so good. The federal trough has been very good for their industry.
With more than half of those 7,000,000 children also prescribed Ritalin, the stock-market value of its manufacturer, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, has also soared. Now that company and others are working to introduce a host of new drugs into the classroom, including Prozac and Luvox, which has just been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for pediatric use.
The industry is looking to even greater growth as the pill brigade is targeting pre-school toddlers. The use of psychotropic drugs, like anti-depressants and stimulants, in two to four year olds more than doubled between 1991 and 1995. The federal trough has been very good to the pharmaceutical industry as well.
As this sickening practice goes unchecked and unquestioned more children are being drugged into a mind-numbing stupor, deteriorating under the long-term effects of their prescriptions. In the worst cases, children are dying.
