American Policy Center » 2004 » March
- UN Poisoning US Education with Our Tax Dollars
- The Supreme Court Has Abandoned the Constitution
- A Free Iraq Can’t Succeed Without Private Property Protections
- Highlands Conservation Act: Stealing Private Property with Public Dollars
- We Must Stop the U.N.'s Law of the Sea Treaty!
- Call the White House and demand that President Bush revoke his support for this insane treaty. Recall that this is the same treaty that President Reagan tossed aside as contrary to U.S. interests and the same treaty subsequently that President Clinton signed. We should honor the efforts of Reagan, and all those who value a sovereign Constitutional form of government, and throw the shreds of this treaty back to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee! Switchboard: (202) 456-1414 or (202) 456-1111
- Call your representatives and tell them to put pressure on the Senate to abolish all chances for U.S. participation in this treaty! If we can’t get senators to listen directly, perhaps indirect pressure through the other side of Congress will get their attention. House switchboard: (202) 225-3121
- Call both of your senators and tell them to vote ‘no’ on ratification of the Law of the Seas Treaty. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is trying to push this ratification by unanimous consent, which stifles debate, hides individual votes, and eases the path of compliance for senators who may be facing doubts with this treaty. But they need to be informed of the true nature of this treaty, in the event Frist schedules it for vote in the coming days! Senate switchboard: (202) 224-3121
- The Sierra Club’s Immigration Wars
March 19, 2004
By Tom DeWeese
The Bush administration’s schizophrenic relationship with the United Nations continues unabated. It is dazzling to watch one part of the administration rebuke the UN for failing to respond to the threats of dictatorships to American security while another zealously takes up a UN program designed to create a generation of Americans educated to believe in a system of global government.
It is astonishing that the Bush administration has begun issuing grants to help spread a United Nations propaganda program that describes itself as a “universal curriculum” for teaching global citizenship, peace studies and equality of world cultures. The US Department of Education has issued its first $1.2 million grant to implement the UN’s International Baccalaureate (IB) program to middle schools that are to become feeder schools for the IB’ s high school diploma program in low-income school districts.
The IB program had been adopted by about 1,450 schools in 115 countries, including 502 schools in the United States. The Bush administration grants will expand the IB program initially in Arizona, Massachusetts, and New York.
Children caught between the comparable “New Civics” curriculum now being implemented and the IB program will have no concept of the US ideals of limited government controlled by “We the People.” They will be fully indoctrinated into accepting the idea of a one-world government that only recognizes the power of the state to “grant” our rights. Gone is Thomas Jefferson’s idea of unalienable rights. They were “self evident” to Jefferson and those who sacrificed their lives for American independence, but the new curriculum views them as antiquated curiosities.
Yet, this is what Education Secretary Rod Paige calls “world-class education.” Most everyone else would call the IB program “socialism.” Worse, such indoctrination is taking place in public school classrooms, paid for by taxpayer dollars, and forced on unsuspecting children. What makes this more infuriating is that it’s being funded and implemented by a Republican administration!
This same administration and its educational programs have recently been called to task in a report, the “American Diploma Project.” The result of cooperation between three major think tanks, the report concludes that, “The diploma has lost its value because what it takes to earn one is disconnected from what it takes for graduates to compete successfully beyond high school—either in the classroom or the workplace.”
Coupled with the BI program, not only will American students be taught that allegiance to America, our governmental and economic systems, should be replaced by global citizenship, but the diplomas they are earning are just a “broken promise” of the education they should have received!
The educational system in America is in total meltdown. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., author of “The Schools We Need: And Why We Don’t Have Them” has written that “Successful reading requires more than an ability to decode or ‘sound out’ words. It also requires adequate background knowledge or ‘cultural literacy. ’ Without background knowledge of history, literature, art, music, science and math, students will read, but without comprehension.”
With the UN-sponsored International Baccalaureate (BI), instituted at the middle school level, American students will be taught a curriculum that stresses code words such as human rights and social justice, but which in practice the UN has never successfully been able to implement or enforce. Many of the members of the UN are some of the world’s worst dictatorships, guilty of the worst abuses of human rights and social justice.
Moreover, American children will be taught about the environmental scheme called “sustainable development” that, in reality, means blocking development for almost any reason because it requires using the Earth’s natural resources. They will be indoctrinated to accept the UN’s views on immigration, population, health, and other environmental concerns.
Mostly what they will learn about are that the values that have sustained the United States of America and which make it a magnet for freedom-hungry people around the world. Instead, the curriculum teaches about the failed system of socialism. George Walker, IB’s director-general, based in Geneva, Switzerland, says the program is committed to changing children’s values so they think globally, rather than in “parochial national terms from their own country’s viewpoint…”
Henry Lamb, one of the nation’s experts on the United Nations, warns that the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) “has been trying to impose an international curriculum to prepare students for world government” since its inception. During the Reagan administration, the US dropped its membership in UNESCO, citing how corrupt it had become. Typically, the Bush administration just put us back in!
As a result, the current administration tacitly supports the view of a 1949 UNESCO textbook, “Toward World Understanding”, that says, “As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only rather precarious results. As we have pointed out, it is frequently the family that infects the child with extreme nationalism.”
Think back to the countless American homes, offices and other structures that flew the flag after 9-11 as a symbol of their allegiance to the United States. To the UN, this is “extreme nationalism” that “poisons” the minds of our children.
One critic of the program warned, “administrators do not tell you that the current IB program for ages 3 through grade 12 promotes socialism, disarmament, radical environmentalism and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty.”
Do you want your children growing up without learning the basic facts of our Constitutional form of government? Without learning the facts of our history, replete with the battles fought to retain individual freedoms, States rights, and the rule of law? A review of science, and even math texts, reveals that sustainable development, environmental protection, and social justice dominate material children are force-fed in the name of education.
Either each new generation of Americans must be taught the truth about our heritage, our governmental system of checks and balances, of guaranteed rights that come from the governed, and why our economic systems has made us the most powerful engine of progress on Earth, or they will fall prey to the UN globalists that want to control their future.
The International Baccalaureate program should be ripped from the classrooms of America, defunded, and thrown upon the same ash heap of history where the former Soviet Union and other despotisms can be found.
March 18, 2004
By Cheryl K. Chumley, associate editor APC News Wire
The good news is that some in Congress are awakening to the very arrogant and destructive tendencies of a few of our Supreme Court justices to discard constitutional law in favor of foreign precedent and rule as basis for their decisions.
The bad news is the action congressional members have taken is in vain.
Gathering steam is a House Resolution from Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.), the “Reaffirmation of American Independence Resolution,” that seeks to sway Supreme Court justices from a disturbing trend to look overseas for guidance with domestic legal affairs. With roughly 60 co-sponsors, all Republican so far, the measure is due for introduction into the Judicial Committee for hearings before the end of March.
Specifically, this resolution condemns Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s stated belief that the Supreme Court “will rely increasingly … on international and foreign courts in examining domestic issues.” It also criticizes Justice Steven Breyer for expressing a similar viewpoint and six of the nine justices for relying on Jamaican, Indian, Zimbabwean and European Union courts to decide American constitutional cases.
A comparable resolution introduced earlier by Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) “urging all justices to base their opinions solely on the merits under the Constitution of the United States” now sits with the House subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property. H. Res. 468 specifically criticizes Justice Anthony Kennedy and associate justices John Paul Stevens, Steven Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg for deciding cases based on foreign laws from the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations and on more informal global opinions.
Perhaps most frightening to those who believe in American sovereignty and the judicial system as espoused by our founders and as solidified in the Constitution is Associate Justice Ginsburg’s assertion to an American Constitution Society crowd, as tracked by H. Res. 468.
Judges, she said, “are becoming more open to comparative and international law perspectives.”
Is that Twilight Zone music I hear in the background? These judges are supposed to be our bastions of Constitutional defense, the last line of protection for an ‘of, by and for’ system of governance that is different from all others because it recognizes the inherent rights of the individual, as granted by God rather than as bestowed by a self-serving dictator or tyrannical power-monger.
If those of waning principle on the Supreme Court simply don’t recall the oath-of-office was to the Constitution and not the United Nations, perhaps these resolutions might indeed prove the gentle reminder that’s needed to return our justices’ focus to the domestic arena.
But that’s unlikely. The resolutions have no force of law and the justices are unlikely to back down because they are proponents of the policy that all things global must take precedence over all things Constitutional. Admitting this leads to the realization that effective efforts to reverse this judicial tyranny must focus at the root of the problem. That root, of course, is the United Nations.
What organization but the United Nations promotes the good of the global concern over the importance of the individual and state, and does so by such well-funded means? It’s the U.N. policy on sustainable development, as outlined in its Agenda 21 statement, that pushes for nations to abide such radical and economically damaging guidelines as are currently shaping our American way of life: new civics lessons in public schools that ignore the Bill of Rights and other Founding Father principles, environmental mandates that place half our nation’s lands under government control, Smart Growth strategies that result in over-priced, over-crowded working and living conditions.
These are but a few of the United Nations’ own documented goals that have been enacted and advanced in our country, reflecting a cultural and political acceptance of socialist-style concerns for the greater good of the global entity over the individual or sovereign nation. So if we as a nation, as reflected by our consistent re-election of politicians who support the United Nations, do nothing to halt the trend of quashing our Constitutional freedoms and promoting global governance, how can we expect our justices to act differently?
We can’t, unless we demand Congress risk more than a signature on a non-binding resolution that is all too easy to ignore or dismiss. We must instead compel Congress to attack at the base of the problem, the seepage of United Nation’s beliefs into our once proud and individual culture. It’s only when we as a nation have returned to our Constitutional roots that the voice of the court will begin to reflect that reform – and hopefully never again will we be subjected to the foolhardy, devastating gibberish of a U.S. Supreme Court justice embracing Zimbabwean law as our own.
March 12, 2004
By Cheryl K. Chumley, associate editor, APC Wire
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.”
So how does Iraq, based in part on months of influence from America’s best and brightest, choose to advance this fundamental human right of property ownership in its interim Constitution, the Law of the Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period? By this less-than-stellar introduction to its much touted private property protection clause, Article 16, Sections A, B and C: “Public property is sacrosanct and its protection is the duty of every citizen.”
This is what we’re patting ourselves on the back for helping develop – that first and foremost, citizens’ duty is to protect public land? This is why we’re to join Secretary of State Colin Powell in celebrating the March 8 signing of this document “as a day reflecting a bright future for the Iraqi people?” If this is what we’re celebrating, we as a nation need a stiff dose of internal analysis because praising such indicates we have forgotten that without private property protections, no other civil rights can exist.
Without private property protections, freedoms to choose religion and place of worship, speak without fear, live where desired, maintain personal privacy and operate a business in a profitable manner are all jeopardized. That’s because all these activities take place on land, and once government owns land, it has control of what can and cannot occur on the property.
Let’s just say, for example, our government owned all the land – as could become reality in this nation, given the goal of United Nations’ sustainable development policy and collaborating Wildlands Project advocates who seek, with great success lately, to place at least 50% of America’s property off limits to human use. Then say the government, maybe caving to pressures of an organization like the American Civil Liberties Union, decided that a certain religion and style of worship ran contrary to its and the nation’s best interests and ordered churches that offer such services to relocate from publicly held lands. For the sake of example, let’s just say this church maintained that homosexuality was a sin.
To continue the scenario, say government finds that denouncing homosexuality is not conducive to its “equality for all, at whatever cost” principles, and so declares that all worshipers who engage in promoting this principle of these now-prohibited churches are barred from even meeting informally to discuss spiritual matters on publicly held lands. Government’s argument is that allowing condemnation of homosexuality on its lands constitutes support of the belief, and therefore violates the equal protection rights of homosexuals and the First Amendment “establishment of religion” clause.
As a worshiper of this religion, where would you go?
You could fight this government decree, of course, charging that your Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion choice was denied. But since government did not pass any laws outlawing this religion per se, but only prohibited the worship of it on its public lands, your arguments would likely be considered moot. Your sole recourse, if you chose to continue this line of religious study, would be to retreat to the privacy of your own home.
Sound unbelievable? This could never happen here, in this nation of freedom, free market and emphasis on the individual, right? As far as government’s control of the land, it’s already occurring.
For proof, look to the western portion of the United States and the estimated 75% of Utah property that already rests in the control of state and federal government entities. Or at the 95% of Alaska land that is deemed off-limits to private ownership. Look at the recent successes of radical environmental organizations like the Sierra Club and Audubon Society who work to advance U.N. goals of sustainable development – meaning, controlled “Smart Growth” and Wildlands Project agendas that unequivocally state that humans are destructive to nature and need to be corralled into small, government-managed areas so that the salamander and bear can roam freely.
This is but a few examples of how we as a nation are relinquishing our private property rights and continuing the betrayal of Founding Fathers who knew the importance of land rights and stated so inarguably in the Fifth Amendment: that “no person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.”
Else, as Adams said, tyranny will commence. But we as a nation are forgetting this warning, and are allowing our God-given rights to be transferred to government hands, controlled and doled as a favor or reward for political correctness. We are forgetting to such a degree that we not only seek to undo the hard-earned protections of our nation’s founders, but also spread this watered-down interpretation of basic human right to other countries, congratulating ourselves in the process.
On the one hand, Sections B and C of Iraq’s interim Constitution do guarantee that “the right to private property shall be protected,” that “no one may be prevented from disposing of his property except within the limits of the law,” and that owners will retain control of their lands except in cases of “eminent domain, in circumstances and in the manner set forth in law, and on condition that he is paid just and timely compensation.”
On the other hand, though, perhaps it’s as Patrick Basham, senior fellow for the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute, suggests: “The headline rhetoric looks good, but the devil’s in the details.”
How, for example, can this private property safeguard be taken seriously with so many references and promises of laws-to-come that will ultimately clarify the manner in which property can be disposed and grabbed? It’s these references, along with the curious inclusion of unnecessary gender-specific pronouns, that should strike ominously at the hearts of private property protectionists who truly understand that land ownership stems not from government whim but from a God-given, inborn right of all humans.
It’s the Iraqi document’s lack of mention of free market principles – the cousin of private land rights protections – that should also come as a warning of our nation’s changing belief system, from republic to socialist, as we not only dismiss the decimation of our own capitalistic roots but also applaud the spread of a fated “equality for all” economic system elsewhere.
Look at what we’re congratulating ourselves for supporting and achieving with Article 25, which gives the Iraqi government “exclusive competence” to “formulate a general policy on wages.” Article 14 advances this tenet of socialism further, by recognizing the right of the individual to “to security, education, health care and social security.”
The Iraqi government, Article 14 continues, “shall strive to provide prosperity and employment opportunities to the people.”
Wage controls, a welfare system, government controlled education. A government that professes its duty to deliver this quality of life and equality of prosperity to all its citizens. Sounds a bit like doom for the private property hopefuls living in Iraq, who dreamed of the wealth that could be generated with property and business ownership but who will soon find their newly elected government officials – struggling to realize the promises of this welfare system – turning to regulation as the answer.
To honor the commitments promised in this interim Constitution, desperate politicians will have little recourse but to enact eminent domain provisions in the futile belief that controlling land and therefore business will somehow provide the money for the guaranteed benefits. Reversion to dictatorship – tyranny, as Adams put it – seems imminent.
That we as a nation, as reflected in Secretary Powell’s statements, would offer unabashed support of such a system of governance is telling, a comment of how far we ourselves have strayed from Founding Father principle and its absolute of private property protection.
Perhaps we should not be surprised then if history remembers March 8, 2004 not as Powell depicted, the beginning of Iraq’s “bright future,” but rather as a day of infamy, marking the start of a failed Bush administration nation-building policy that was sadly based on our own deviated, hypocritical interpretations of inborn freedom and that resulted in a slow return of oppression of the Iraqi people.
March 9, 2004
By Cheryl K. Chumley
Just when you thought you had a handle on the maneuvers of environmentalists and the politicians who pander to these anti-private property activists, now comes a new stealth measure aimed at taking even more of your land.
Presented as a friendly partnership plan for necessary preservation of clean drinking water reservoirs, wildlife habitat, and endangered species, the Highlands Conservation Act (H.R. 1964) is actually a carefully crafted, multi-layered, insidious hoax that spits on the Constitution and in the faces of freedom-seeking Americans nationwide.
If left unchecked, this $100 million-plus bill or its companion Senate version, S. 999 that’s even worse, it will become the steppingstone for greater power to the Greens.
The way it works is this: Governors in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey identify which lands in the two million acre Highlands region should be taken from private control and placed under government jurisdiction. The Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture Departments pass along these targeted land grab suggestions to members of Congress. They in turn give their stamp of approval on funding the so-called necessary conservation actions with 50% matching federal dollars, up to $10 million annually from 2005-2014 with general Treasury or Land and Water Conservation Fund disbursements.
This is the new and supposed friendly partnership aspect of the bill; that the federal land bureaucracies assume the more humble role of financial provider while leaving the “non-federal” entities (also known as non-governmental organizations or NGOs; all with political agendas) in charge of identifying which properties to purchase and manage. Comparatively meeker to past land management measures as this federal involvement may sound, deeper analysis reveals several hidden agendas at play.
Do you think, for instance, that the governors of these four States, when faced with the tempting opportunity to receive millions of taxpayer dollars, will show restraint when it comes to identifying land parcels for preservation? The nature of the political beast says no: The history of these four states’ involvement with H.R. 1964 proves otherwise, too.
Connecticut and Pennsylvania, while listed in the bill as Highlands states, were never formally included in the USDA Forest Service’s official land assessment studies conducted in 1992 and 2002.
That these two states were added to H.R. 1964 stems primarily from the findings of their own open space and green plans which, happily for all involved, coincided with the Forest Service’s 2002 formal findings that “long-term sustainability” of the Highlands depends upon the ability of land management efforts to “span local and even state political boundaries.” Research indicates a wide range of environmental groups, from the Sierra Club to the Highlands Coalition, had a heavy hand in helping Connecticut and Pennsylvania politicians develop these land use plans that were added to the Forest Service studies cited in this bill as evidence of the region’s “national significance.”
So, what if politicians in Maryland and Vermont decide they want a piece of the federal money pie, too? The Highlands region is already mapped as a connecting corridor of land, Wildlands Project style, that extends from eastern Pennsylvania through New Jersey and New York to northwestern Connecticut, adjacent to 15 parcels of federally protected property. It wouldn’t take much effort on the part of environmentalists to convince Congress of the “nationally significant” need to extend the lines of land acquisition a bit further to offer Vermont and Maryland similar partnership perks as awarded the four states in H.R. 1964.
The friendly Forest Service certainly won’t oppose extension of “non-federal” or NGO control of Highlands property. While the bill maintains this agency will only assume an advisory role to “local government, individual landowners, and private organizations in identifying” lands for conservation, and grants an extra $1 million each year to cover the costs of these duties, the Forest Service’s own 2002 study offers a different understanding of its authority.
The Forest Service ought to “continue (its) leadership role in land management in the Highlands and in implementing these strategies” by “modifying or creating authority and processes necessary for governance and decision making,” the agency’s “New York-New Jersey Highlands Regional Study: 2002 Update” states.
That sounds a bit like a plan for ultimate Forest Service control of the Highlands area. And with H.R. 1964 granting the agency the right to “undertake other studies and research as appropriate,” it also sounds a bit like the doors opening to land acquisitions and government management in other states, regardless of the bill’s so-called guarantee of private property protections and non-federal authority.
“So-called” is the key phrase here: The private property protection section of the bill says appropriations “shall be used to purchase lands or interests in lands only from willing sellers.” Sounds non-threatening enough, right? But unfortunately, the entire notion of the willing seller is a joke.
By and large, property owners do not understand the intense pressure well-funded conservation groups create on local politicians to acquire land or the complex maze of collaborations and partnerships the NGOs form to achieve these ends.
Buying small parcels here, winning over a few landowners there, these radical conservationists slowly increase the amount of acreage off limits for human use. The landowners who hesitate or refuse to sell become surrounded by these public properties and find the restrictions placed on the managed lands now trickle onto their boundaries. They often lose water rights, access road use, and development rights. In effect, these non-willing sellers lose control of their lands.
As a result, their land loses value and they decide to sell. They become the “willing sellers.”
Those living adjacent to the managed property areas, meanwhile, suffer enormous tax hikes and cost-of-living increases. As private property converts to public property, local tax bases shrink. The government must recoup this revenue somewhere; remaining residents pay in the form of higher taxes and new fees.
H.R. 1964 will continue this decimation of local communities because it allows the federal government to be used as a bank for financing the political agendas of private NGOs.
Changing the language in the bill’s private property section will not prevent this destruction of local communities and Constitutional private property protections from occurring. Even if language were tightened to the point of providing security that locals really would control the future of Highlands property, history indicates private property owners and advocates would still emerge from the bill’s passage as the tossed-aside underdogs.
In 1998, a 15,800-acre privately owned tract of land within commuting distance of New York City called Sterling Forest was targeted for preservation after environmentalists learned developers were planning to build 13,000 new homes for an estimated 35,000 potential residents. An organization called the Palisades Interstate Park Commission took the lead in rallying for purchase and public management of these lands, forming coalitions with other local and state environmentalists. These included known Wildlands Project supporters like the Audubon Society to take their arguments to Congress.
What resulted was a partnership between the federal government and state NGOs, where the former gave money so that the latter could purchase and control land.
Sound familiar? The Sterling Forest deal, which ultimately encompassed about 17,000 acres and – coincidentally again – connects Highlands property targeted in H.R. 1964, is also the model for this bill. The déjà vu continues: H.R. 1964 specifies the Palisade Interstate Park Commission as a “non-federal” entity “with authority to own and manage land for conservation purposes.”
Past experience would indicate this is one non-federal group that wouldn’t hesitate to spread its management authority further throughout Highlands region lands, the majority of which is currently privately owned.
To maintain that private ownership, perhaps Senate supporters like Sens. Rick Santorum, Arlen Specter, Ron Wyden and Larry Craig could take an uncharacteristically nonpolitical step and insert logical language in the bill, before Senate Public Lands and Forests subcommittee members approve it unchallenged during a scheduled March 24 hearing.
Perhaps a line could be added to this effect: “County governments shall maintain final authority to veto any land proposal stemming from this bill.” That ought to stop the droolings of cash-strapped state politicians and land-hungry environmental radicals for a while, at least.
The fundamental concept of private property, the keystone of our economy, would be better served if the entire measure were scrapped. That would abolish any chance the politicians and radical Greenies have of realizing its hidden agendas.
Otherwise, we Americans are facing the dire consequences of Wildlands Project goals to lock out 50% of each state’s lands from human use. It is our tax dollars that are assisting current Wildlands Project efforts to take land from Maine to Tennessee from the private sector. And we’re helping to realize the Wildlands Project dream of grabbing an enormous, connected swath of eastern U.S. land and placing it off limits to all forms of human residence and productive use forever.
H.R. 1964 sits squarely on the backs of the American taxpayer, who could be required to fund these Wildlands Project practices for decades because of a bill that does not even bother to stipulate whether Congress will stop its land grab funding past the 2014 deadline.
Cheryl K. Chumley is Associate Editor of the American Policy Center News Wire. The Center, a grassroots, activist think tank is headquartered in Warrenton, Virginia, and maintains an Internet site at www.americanpolicy.org
March 8, 2004
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Any day now this nation could find itself part of an international treaty that abolishes freedom on seven-tenths of the world’s surface.
That’s because the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, a treaty that has remained latent since Bill Clinton’s presidency, has reemerged as a threat to this nation’s sovereignty, thanks in large part to Senate Foreign Relations Chair Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and his fellow committee members. In February, this committee voted unanimously to bring the treaty to the full senate for consideration; Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist, who is responsible for scheduling legislation for votes, has not yet moved on this request.
With no public outcry in opposition, though, the pressures of support from the Bush Administration, U.S. Navy officials, environmentalists and oil industry executives could result in a vote any day for senate ratification. Once two-thirds of senators approve, America will have yet another U.N. shackle placed about her leg.
The treaty gives the United Nations control of the sea. It compromises U.S. national security, siphons U.S. corporate and taxpayer dollars for global interests in the form of new levies, stifles U.S. development and gives away hard-earned U.S. technology to even non-friendly nations. This treaty represents the “largest transfer of sovereignty to a U.N. body ever,” says Brandon Wales, a senior associate with the Center for Security Policy. “This is unprecedented.”
If ratified, the United States will no longer hold the right to board and search all suspect vessels – a prohibition that will greatly endanger our nation’s security and impede our progress with the war against terrorism. The United States will no longer hold jurisdiction to freely explore the ocean’s beds and waters for oil and precious magnesium without first obtaining permission and receiving quota limitations from the International Sea Bed Authority, a U.N. body. The United States will be required to pay a tax on all ocean discoveries to this same U.N. body, and the United States will also have to share its mining and exploration technology with the likes of China and North Korea – nations that in turn can use this technology against our own military defenses!
This treaty must be halted before the United Nations is allowed to stretch its powers over 70% of the Earth’s surface and control of the seas!
WE MUST ACT NOW! WE MUST ACT OFTEN!
* For a more detailed report on the treaty and its dire effects to America’s sovereignty and free market system, please contact us to obtain the upcoming issue of The DeWeese Report.
March 4, 2004
By Tom DeWeese
My recent commentary, “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t Americans understand?”, generated a lot of flack. Several responses called me a bigot. Others called me a Nazi. Most of the negative comments parroted the pro-amnesty party line that says illegal aliens are really just hard working, honest folks looking for a better life, simply taking jobs that Americans just won’t do.
One comment accused me of knowing nothing about the issue since I’ve never had to employ or deal with the issue. This writer was way off the mark because I recently owned a company that employed more than 40 Hispanic immigrants and I learned first hand about their honesty and work ethic.
All of my detractors missed the point. It is illegal to sneak across our borders and there are laws that say so. Let me share two excerpts from just a few of the letters I received from Hispanic-Americans on the issue. These are people who live daily on the front lines with the illegal alien invasion.
“This is one of the best articles on the Issue I have ever read. Thank you for enlightening my eyes to this great reality. I am originally from Brazil and have gone through arduous but fructiferous path in my legalization. By God’s grace I married a beautiful American who has made my process easier, but no less expensive. I have paid over $1,000 and so far I am still 7 months from receiving my green card and 3 years from becoming a citizen. But Tom, I tell you it is all worth it! To become a citizen of this great nation I would do anything within legal boundaries.”
“To allow millions of ‘illegal immigrants’ to enter this country is to spit on my face and tell me that all I have gone through in these last 4 years is a worthless waste of time. I will continue to proclaim the sovereignty of this great nation in which, by God’s grace, I intend to be a part of.”
The Bush Administration has proposed its “guest worker” amnesty program in order to court the Hispanic vote. The effort will backfire because illegals will never come to the Republican Party. It is the legal Hispanic immigrants like those who wrote to me who would naturally vote for President Bush but they too will turn away, outraged by the Republican disregard for their plight.
Laws make a nation by securing property and our way of life. Ignoring those laws for the price of a few votes creates an outlaw state. Those that have come here legally understand that fact, why doesn’t President Bush?
Immigration issues are generating an internal war within the famed Sierra Club. With the election of its Board of Directors coming in April, the Sierra Club is fighting a two-front war from within as activists from its right wing and left wing seek to take control. It’s developing into a war for the very soul of the nation’s largest environmental activist group.
From the right, activists seek to change the organization’s direction on immigration policy. Currently, the Sierra Club supports open borders to allow the flood of illegals into the United States. The group’s rational is that aliens from poor countries would do less damage to the environment here because the US can better cope with pollution. Therefore, says official Sierra Club policy, let them come. Never mind the cost to taxpayers.
Meanwhile, the Green “Sustainable Development” policy is enforcing “Smart Growth”; regulations on American cities, stopping development, controlling water use, and forcing Americans out of their cars in the name of a population explosion that exists only because of an open border policy! Now, some members of the Sierra Club have reasoned that support for such an immigration policy should end in order to protect the US environment.
Those members opposing the current Sierra Club leadership have now been labeled “extremists” that advocate the “greening of hate.” Thus, according to current Sierra Club leaders, you are a hate monger and a racist if you support national sovereignty or protected borders designed to keep out law-breakers!
From the Sierra Club’s left—if such a thing is possible—comes another takeover effort by a real extremist named Paul Watson. He was a co-founder of Greenpeace who was later kicked out for endorsing increasingly violent tactics. Watson founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an eco-terror group that sails the seas armed with AK-47’s in search of fishing boats to ram and sink. He has openly claimed credit for sinking ten fishing ships.
Only a few years ago, reportedly Watson attempted to obtain a submarine that could lurk undetected under the water ready to sink unsuspecting whalers and fishing ships. Watson claims to have invented tree spiking as a tactic to stop the cutting of trees in the nation’s forests. Says Watson “there’s nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win.”
Watson has declared his intention to take over the Sierra Club and transform it into an animal rights organization that takes a strong stance against hunting and fishing. It’s interesting to note that the Sierra Club leadership has not reacted with nearly the alarm to the possible takeover by a known terror advocate like Watson as they have against those who simply want to keep illegal aliens out of our nation. That fact alone says a lot about the true soul of the Sierra Club, no matter who’s in charge.
Does it matter who runs the Sierra Club? You bet is does! The organization has worked for years to impose strict rules on developing private and public lands in the name of protecting endangered species. Science and reason have had little to do with the outcome. With the power to file lawsuits and intimidate government bodies at every level, the Sierra Club dictates have now largely become government policies. Now they are reaping the fruits of their labor.
Just days after President Bush announced his “guest-worker” program, the number of illegals crossing the border increased dramatically. Apprehension of illegals in the San Diego area alone has since risen threefold. Of course, the Bush Administration argues that there is no connection between the two events.
Meanwhile, in the name of protecting national security, the Department of Homeland Security has initiated efforts to fortify heavy traffic sections of the Mexican border to try to slow the illegals from getting through. Fencing along nine miles of a key section of the border has been completed. The remaining five miles, including filling a half-mile of “Smugglers Gulch” to construct a road, remain in limbo. The new road would be used for border patrols, and maintenance, lights, sensors and cameras. The Border Patrol has already reported the finished section has made a major reduction in illegals getting through the area.
However, those efforts have been stopped by the California Coastal Commission, which says the new defenses would endanger the habitat of several rare birds. The Commission’s biological assessment said the project would “harass” one pair of least Bell’s vireos and a pair of Southwestern flycatchers. Three gnatcatchers would also be “harassed” along with several maritime chaparral on nearly fifty acres of land. Therefore, the government’s efforts to finalize the project to secure a major area of our borders is denied.
There’s no report yet on the impact from the flying feet of thousands of illegal immigrants as they race over the gnatcatchers nest. But then, such a report wouldn’t be politically correct, would it? The Sierra Club must be proud of the impact its policies are having on the quality of life for all Americans.
