United Nations Plans for America’s Future — September 2000

To achieve this goal, the UN is scheduled to consider at least two actions, by consensus rather than by formal vote: adoption of the Earth Charter, a document whose text has evolved through several drafts since the Earth Summit in 1992, and adoption of a Declaration authorizing a new UN commission to implement recommendations to bring about global governance. Global governance means world government by incremental steps, chipping away at national sovereignty one treaty at a time, one world conference at a time, one UN commission at a time.

A portion of the Millennium Assembly is designated as the Millennium Summit, which President Bill Clinton and 160 heads of state are expected to attend, the largest gathering of heads of state in history. Also meeting at the same time at the New York Hilton will be Mikhail Gorbachev and his State of the World Forum, hoping to help induce heads of state to concur in the Millennium Assembly’s historic actions. Gorbachev has been promoting world government ever since his 1992 speech at the Churchill Memorial in Fulton, Missouri, where he called for a “global structure,” “a democratically organized world community,” a “restructured” United Nations with “armed forces” and “substantial funding,” and “some mechanism tying the UN to the world economy.”

The Earth Charter’s advocates talk as though it were the “Magna Carta” of a new regime, but it’s not a regime of freedom from arbitrary kings like King John at Runnymede in 1215. It’s a charter to submit Americans to global dictators possessing unprecedented powers.

The UN Millennium Assembly and Summit and its actions should be a major issue in the current presidential campaign since Al Gore has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Earth Charter during its years of development. Republican leaders have yet to be heard from.

The Earth Charter demands that we “demilitarize national security systems” (i.e., eliminate our armed services and their weapons). The Charter proclaims that its “Way Forward” requires “a change of mind and heart” as we move toward “global interdependence and universal responsibility.”

The Charter demands that we adopt “sustainable development plans and regulations” (i.e., to subordinate human needs to global fads enforced by environment dictators), and that the UN “manage the use of renewable resources such as water, soil, forest products, and marine life . . . [to] protect the health of ecosystems” (i.e., not the health of mere humans).

The Charter demands that we “act with restraint and efficiency when using energy” (i.e., reduce U.S. energy use and lower our standard of living). The Charter requires that we “eradicate poverty,” “promote the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations,” and “relieve them of onerous international debt” (i.e., redistribute U.S. wealth around the world and cancel the debts owed by recipients of U.S. foreign loans).

The Charter exhorts us to affirm “gender equality” and “eliminate discrimination in … sexual orientation” (i.e., adopt the feminist and gay agendas). The Charter demands that we “integrate into formal education [i.e., assign a UN nanny to monitor our schools] … skills needed for a sustainable way of life [i.e., indoctrination in how we must subordinate sovereignty to the UN dogma of sustainability].”

The Charter affirms that “all beings are interdependent” (i.e., personal freedom is irrelevant) and “every form of life has value regardless of its worth to human beings” (i.e., animals, plants and insects, but not unborn babies). The Charter demands that we “ensure universal [i.e., global] access to health care that fosters reproductive health [i.e., abortion and contraception] and responsible reproduction [i.e., UN-dictated population control].”

The Earth Charter won’t be a treaty that the U.S. Senate can accept or reject. It will be “soft law,” a policy document like the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which has no legal standing but gives globalists such as Bill Clinton and global environmentalists such as Al Gore the perch from which they exhort us to “fulfill our international obligations” (even though Americans never accepted such obligations).

The Declaration and Agenda for Action, subtitled “Strengthening the United Nations for the 21st Century,” will also be considered by the Millennium Assembly and Summit. This lengthy document, which fleshes out the global plans in more detail, was developed by the UN-accredited Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) who call themselves the Millennium Forum.

The Declaration demands the disarmament of all conventional and nuclear weapons, the prohibition of “unilateral deployment of nationwide missile defense by any country,” and a “standing Peace Force” (i.e., a UN standing army). It calls for a “UN Arms register” of all small arms and light weapons, and “peace education” covering “all levels from pre-school through university.”

The Declaration calls for “eliminating” the veto and permanent membership in the Security Council so that the United States will be merely one of 160 nations. This would reduce the influence of the United States in the UN to that of Cuba or Haiti even though we pay the lion’s share of the budget.

The Declaration calls for the UN to impose direct taxes such as a “currency transfer tax,” a “tax on the rental value of land and natural resources,” a “royalty on worldwide fossil energy production — oil, natural gas, coal,” “fees for the commercial use of the oceans, fees for airplane use of the skies, fees for use of the electromagnetic spectrum, fees on foreign exchange transactions (i.e. the Tobin Tax), and a tax on the carbon content of fuels.”

The Declaration calls for “a fair distribution of the earth’s resources” (from the United States to the rest of the world, of course), and for the “eradication of poverty” by “redistribution [of] wealth and land.” It demands that we “cancel the debts of developing countries.”

The Declaration demands UN “democratic political control of the global economy so that it may serve our vision” (i.e., control by 160 nations with the U.S. having only one vote). It calls for UN monitoring of U.S. implementation of Agenda 21 and the Copenhagen Declaration.

The Declaration demands that we “integrate” the World Trade Organization under UN control. All the talk we hear from politicians about “free trade” is just pap for the gullible; the goal is managed trade — managed by UN bureaucrats.

The Declaration calls for implementing UN treaties that the United States has never ratified, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (which refuses to recognize the right to private property).

The Declaration calls for the unratified International Criminal Court (ICC) to exercise “compulsory jurisdiction” over all states, enforced by the UN Security Council. The ICC is so dangerous to the constitutional rights of Americans that even Bill Clinton declined to sign it after his Administration had spent years participating in writing and negotiating it. The ICC has been signed by a hundred countries, and now the ICC and the UN are impudently asserting jurisdiction over the United States even though we did not sign it.

The Declaration would impose “gender-based methodologies” as adopted at the UN Conference in Beijing.

All this and more of the same could be America’s future under an Al Gore presidency.

These radical UN Plans, which originated with the UN-funded Commission on Global Governance, are promoted by the NGOs, the hundreds of private Non-Government Organizations that have attached themselves to the United Nations like leeches. The UN now accredits 1,603 NGOs. Accreditation is dependent on the organization declaring that its primary purpose is to “promote the aims, objectives, and purposes of the United Nations.”

The NGOs are energetic lobbyists for dramatic changes in the mission and structure of the UN to achieve global governance. Most NGOs are also members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which originated many of the global environmental policies set forth in the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on Climate Change, and Agenda 21. The most prominent NGOs are the radical environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the feminist and population-control groups such as Planned Parenthood.

The leader of the UN’s restructuring plans is a Canadian named Maurice Strong, who was Secretary General of the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and has built his power base among the NGOs. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed him Executive Coordinator of UN Reform.

The NGOs work the corridors of the United Nations headquarters in New York like typical corporate lobbyists. Persistent lobbying has made the NGOs very influential at the various UN conferences, including the Children’s Summit in New York in 1990, the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the Human Rights Conference in Vienna in 1993, the Population Conference in Cairo in 1994, the Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995, the Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, the Habitat II Conference in Istanbul in 1996, and the World Food Summit in Rome in 1996.

Maurice Strong and the NGOs publicized their extraordinary plans to achieve global governance through the UN in a 410-page report called Our Global Neighborhood, issued in 1995 by the Commission on Global Governance. This document states (p. 359) that the plans to “strengthen” the UN into global government originated with former West German Socialist Chancellor Willy Brandt.

The UN bureaucrats and NGOs have been working ever since on a Charter for Global Democracy to build the framework for a restructured UN, and the plans are now being crystallized in the Earth Charter and the Declaration described above.

The NGOs worked for several years under the name NGO Forum and are now becoming the People’s Assembly, as recommended by the Commission on Global Governance. This body of unelected pressure groups with leftwing political agendas is supposed to be formally attached to the UN during the Millennium Assembly. Pompously calling themselves the “civil society,” they claim to be the voice of the people, in contrast to the General Assembly, which consists of the representatives of national governments. The NGOs dream of becoming the real power in the UN, bypassing the official representatives of nations.

Clinton Administration representatives at the United Nations are always very supportive of expanded UN powers. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke says that “the United Nations must transform its civilian-run peacekeeping department into a larger and more effective military-style operation …” (New York Times, 6-14-00)

The UN bureaucrats and NGOs are skillful with semantics, and their goal of world government is waffled with words that have specialized meanings but may appear non-threatening. Their jargon words used in a positive connotation are sustainable (their favorite word), global, interdependent, civil society, environmental, inclusive, diversity, common good, demilitarize, fair distribution, international, and universal responsibility. Among the jargon words always used negatively are production and consumption. Forbidden words include independence, freedom and sovereignty.

Many UN and NGO documents confirm the goals and plans of these tireless promoters of global governance in six areas:

• • Using the rubric “Peace, Security and Disarmament,” the UN wants to establish a UN standing army under the command of the UN Secretary-General, with the ultimate goal of disarming national armies. The UN reformers want to eradicate national sovereignty as a barrier to UN action and use the shibboleth “security of the people” to rationalize UN action inside sovereign countries (as in Kosovo). The plan is to transform sovereign countries into administrative units assigned to carry out UN policies. The UN even wants disarmament of personal guns, with the UN controlling the manufacture, sale, distribution and licensing of all firearms. 
  • In the area called “Eradication of Poverty,” the UN wants debt cancellation for poor countries plus Western-financed social development. This means forcing the United States to turn over our wealth to UN bureaucrats to distribute to Third World dictators.  
  • Under the do-good caption “Human Rights,” the UN plans to enforce its version of global human rights through UN treaties, each of which has its own international compliance commission. These include the UN treaties on the Rights of the Child, on Discrimination Against Women, on Civil and Political Rights, on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and on the International Criminal Court (ICC). 
  • The heading “Sustainable Development” is designed to facilitate total UN control of the environment. In addition to bootstrapping power to the globalists under the unratified Biodiversity Treaty and Kyoto (Global Warming) Protocol, the plan is to use the UN Trusteeship Council to control the “global commons,” which is UN terminology for the atmosphere, outer space, non-territorial seas, and the related environment that supports human life.  
  • “Globalization to Achieve Equity, Justice and Diversity” is a catch-all phrase to achieve any other power-grabbing goal the UN and NGO bureaucrats may dream up in the future. They want the authority to equalize rich and poor economies and pretend that redistribution of wealth is equity. 
  • “Strengthening and Democratizing the United Nations” is doubletalk for wiping out all power and influence that the United States might ever exercise in the United Nations. This goal calls for eliminating the veto and permanent member status in the Security Council and giving the UN the power to tax so that it will no longer depend on nations’ appropriating funds to pay their dues. UN bureaucrats are salivating over the prospect of passing the Tobin Tax, the brainstorm of James Tobin who lobbied for it during the Copenhagen Summit in 1995. This plan to tax all international financial transactions would funnel an extraordinary $1.5 trillion a year to the UN. Other targets of UN taxing plans include international airline tickets, sea-shipped freight, and ocean fishing. 
• Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms has been calling for the United Nations to reform itself and reduce its bloated budgets. But the UN “reform” agenda, now headed by Maurice Strong, is certainly very different from what Senator Helms has in mind.

What can Americans do to preserve our independence and sovereignty? Here are some first steps that should be taken immediately:

The UN Millennium plans must be made an issue with all presidential and congressional candidates. Urge them to pledge to repudiate global governance goals, all proposed UN treaties, and all acceptance of the authority of UN commissions or committees.

• Demand endorsement of a law requiring that, if the UN tries to impose any direct tax, the United States shall immediately withdraw from the UN and expel it from our country.
• Demand a pledge to oppose or reject all UN proposed treaties, specifically those on the International Criminal Court, Global Warming (Kyoto), Biodiversity, the Rights of the Child, Discrimination Against Women, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Nuclear Test Ban, and any purported extension of the defunct 1972 ABM Treaty.
• Demand endorsement of the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act, sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms, to cut off U.S. military aid to any country that ratifies the International Criminal Court treaty, prohibit U.S. forces from participating in UN peacekeeping operations unless expressly immunized from ICC jurisdiction by a UN Security Council resolution, and authorize the President to undertake any means “necessary and appropriate” to free U.S. soldiers from ICC captivity.

The liberty, independence and sovereignty of America are at stake.

Clinton’s Abuse of the Treaty-Making Power 
Annoyed with the Senate’s refusal to ratify his various United Nations treaties, Bill Clinton is arrogantly trying to bypass the Senate by signing international agreements to implement them anyway. Each one cedes more U.S. sovereignty to some global organization.

Clinton knows that his proposed United Nations Convention (treaty) on the Rights of the Child will never be ratified by the Senate because it would be a codification of Hillary’s plan to put the global “village” in charge of raising children instead of parents. So Clinton made an end-run around that obstacle by going to the UN in New York and signing two protocols to the unratified Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The first of these protocols, a pet project of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), would prohibit military service by minors. This encountered stiff resistance from the Pentagon because every year the U.S. Armed Services enlists about 50,000 high school seniors before their 18th birthday. Clinton worked out a compromise; he agreed not to send them into combat until their 18th birthday.

I guess the negotiators haven’t seen The Patriot in which Mel Gibson gives guns to his 10- and 13-year-old sons when British soldiers threatened their family. In any event, the age at which we allow men to serve our country should be a U.S. decision, not one determined by a Clinton treaty or regulated by a commission of foreign bureaucrats, the kind of paper-pushers who expect Americans to do all the fighting and dying in their wars anyway.

The protocol’s first paragraph makes its real purpose clear. It is “to achieve the purposes of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the implementation of its provisions.”

The protocol is quite lengthy, nine pages of fine print. That gives the global commission lots of excuses to inject itself into U.S. laws and behavior. Article 12, for example, requires that we submit, within two years, a report to the Committee on the Rights of the Child. Since that committee is a creation of Article 44 of the unratified treaty on the Rights of the Child, this is another way that Clinton’s protocol locks us into the unratified treaty.

The second protocol that Clinton signed last week would make it a crime to sell children for sex, to engage minors in prostitution, or to use them for pornography. Again, the real purpose is to validate UN authority, not to protect children. Those acts are already crimes in the United States. The countries that engage in such behavior will not be deterred by some piece of paper that Clinton signed.

Furthermore, the UN committee set up to monitor compliance under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) recently ordered China (which has ratified that treaty) to allow women to sell their bodies as “sex workers.” The UN committee calls prostitution a “reproductive right” over one’s body.

Despite this ruling, HHS Secretary Donna Shalala said on May 31 that the Clinton Administration will continue to push for Senate approval of CEDAW. She added that the Clinton Administration is “quite frustrated on the inability to ratify CEDAW,” for which she blames Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms.

While in Cologne, Germany, on June 20, 1999, Clinton announced that he and then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin had agreed to negotiate amendments to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. This was a follow-up to the “Memorandum of Understanding” on the 1972 ABM Treaty signed by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on September 26, 1997.

This charade is a dishonest attempt to manufacture a new treaty that takes the decision about defending America against a missile attack away from Congress and cedes it to foreign countries, something that the Senate would never approve. Clinton is using the ploy of these new executive agreements to try to resuscitate the now-moribund 1972 ABM Treaty, which is actually null and void because the Soviet Union no longer exists.

Everything about this treaty-bypass ploy is hurtful to the United States. Clinton is pretending that the successors to the former Soviet Union are only four states — Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine — but the remaining 11 countries of the former Soviet Union would be free to develop and deploy ABM systems.

Clinton told the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 1997 that he wants to take America into a “web of institutions and arrangements” that will set “the international ground rules for the 21st century.” Unable to get the advice and consent of the Senate, he is using his last few months to try to bypass the Constitution and do it anyway. Will Congress let him get by such underhanded actions?

Phyllis Schlafly is the author of 16 books, including five books on national defense and foreign policy: The Gravediggers (1964), Strike From Space (1965), and The Betrayers (1968) covering the McNamara years; and Kissinger on the Couch (1975) and Ambush at Vladivostok (1976) covering the Kissinger years. She was a member of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution (1985-1991), by appointment of President Reagan. She is a lawyer, a syndicated columnist, a radio commentator, and the president of Eagle Forum.