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.”34
As Herman Van Rompuy, the first Lisbon Treaty–era president of Europe, put it: “2009 is the first year of global governance.”35
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.”36
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.”37
Besides her internationalism, Sotomayor had something else in common with the president who appointed her: a predilection for racial grievance mongering and manipulation. While studying law at Princeton, Sotomayor’s writings demonstrated a preoccupation with racial politics: she was the author of Race in the American Classroom and Undying Injustice: American “Exceptionalism” and Permanent Bigotry. She saw the distinctive features of America, the things that made this nation powerful and free, as liabilities rather than virtues. Instead of Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill,” America in the reign of the post-American president and his post-American advisers and colleagues would become less and less exceptional, less and less distinctive, less and less different from the rest of the world.
And in so doing, it would cease to be the refuge to which those yearning to breathe free would turn. For the tired, the poor, the huddled masses would soon come to know that there was no freedom, no prosperity, no legal protection for them in the United States of America. Not anymore.
Sonia Sotomayor also showed a distaste for the Second Amendment similar to that of the president, who derided those who “cling” to their guns. In Deadly Obsession: American Gun Culture, she argued that the very idea that private citizens could own guns in the United States was based on a misunderstanding. There was, she claimed, actually no right to bear arms that was guaranteed to citizens by the Second Amendment. Rather, she said, this right pertained to militias only.38
Not surprisingly, Sotomayor was not the only Obama appointment that struck at the very principle of American sovereignty.
TRANSNATIONALISM, SHARIA, AND AMERICAN LAW
Obama seemed determined to turn over the Land of the Free to global forces with interests decidedly different from the best interests of Americans. And that included Islamic supremacists—whose attachment to Sharia was apparently just fine by Harold Koh, the internationalist lawyer whom Obama tabbed in April 2009 to become the legal adviser for the State Department.
Obama should have abandoned the climate warming hoax as soon as “the miracle” happened. But this would never happen. Global warming is a tool to “level the playing field,” to weaken America, and to burden her with crippling taxes while enriching her enemies and competitors.
Superficially, Koh had impressive enough credentials. He served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in 1981 and 1982, and then worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council (OLC) from 1983 to 1985. He became a professor at Yale Law School in 1985 and dean in 2004, and from 1998 to 2001 he was assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor. He has written many books, including Transnational Legal Problems (with Harry Steiner and Detlev Vagts) and Transnational Litigation in United States Courts, as well as numerous articles and monographs, including one entitled International Law as Part of Our Law, which was published in The American Journal of International Law.
The titles reveal a substantial focus of Harold Koh’s legal scholarship—one that raised concerns among Obama’s critics that he was appointing an internationalist, someone who would not necessarily have America’s best interests at heart, to a key position at State. Koh’s own words confirm this: “As American lawyers, scholars, and activists,” he wrote in 2003, “we should make better use of transnational legal process to press our own government to avoid the most negative and damaging features of American exceptionalism.” These “negative and damaging features” include “U.S. insistence upon double standards,” including having the effrontery to think that “a different rule” should “apply to itself than applies to the rest of the world.”
Koh zeroes in on the freedom of speech, warning that “our exceptional free speech tradition can cause problems abroad, as, for example, may occur when hate speech is disseminated over the Internet.” What can be done to solve these “problems”? The Supreme Court “can moderate these conflicts by applying more consistently the transnationalist approach to judicial interpretation.”39
In a world that generally values the freedom of speech, as well as the freedom of conscience and the legal equality of all people, far less than does the United States of America, the implications of this are clear: erasing the distinctions between American law and international law would mean an erosion of the rights and freedoms of Americans, and a concomitant deterioration of American society.
Referring to the implications of Koh’s appointment, Glenn Beck thundered: “Once we sign our rights over to international law, the Constitution is officially dead.” However, Obama’s defenders were dismissive: Pamela S. Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School, said that concern over Koh’s internationalism was “all just an attempt to whip up hysteria.” White House spokesman Reid Cherlin said it was all an invention of the right-wing attack machine out to discredit Obama by misrepresenting one of his key appointees: “You have political opponents of the president who are motivated by their opposition to his agenda who are mischaracterizing or fabricating statements by Dean Koh.”40
In reality, however, none of the genuine concerns about Harold Koh’s internationalism and slight attachment (at best) to American sovereignty were fabricated. Koh really was a committed transnationalist who believed that American law should be subject to foreign authorities and informed by foreign precedents—a fact that should make every American demand that Barack Obama fire him. But, of course, Obama will never do that: there is no indication that the post-American president’s views on transnationalism differ in any serious way from Koh’s.
Legal expert M. Edward Whelan III explains that transnationalism “challenges the traditional American understanding that (in the summary, which I slightly adapt, of Duke law professor Curtis A. Bradley) ‘international and domestic law are distinct, [the United Sta
tes] determines for itself [through its political branches] when and to what extent international law is incorporated into its legal system, and the status of international law in the domestic system is determined by domestic law.’ Transnationalists aim in particular to use American courts to import international law to override the policies adopted through the processes of representative government.”
Whelan is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the former general counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, former principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice, and like Koh a former law clerk for a Supreme Court justice (in Whelan’s case, Antonin Scalia). “Harold Koh’s transnationalist legal views,” he declared before Koh’s nomination as State Department legal adviser was approved, “threaten fundamental American principles of representative government and… Koh would be particularly well positioned as State Department legal adviser to implement his views and to inflict severe and lasting damage.… Among other things, he would be advising on the legal positions that the United States should be taking in federal courts on issues arguably implicating international law and before international bodies; he would be counseling State Department officials on international negotiations, treaty interpretation, and treaty implementation; and he would be a major player in interagency disputes on all these matters.”
“What transnationalism, at bottom, is all about,” Whelan explains, “is depriving American citizens of their powers of representative government by selectively imposing on them the favored policies of Europe’s leftist elites.” In contrast, “proponents of a nationalist jurisprudence view ‘foreign legal precedents’ as ‘an impermissible imposition on the exercise of American sovereignty.’”
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