Beware of the Lame Duck Session
The current Congress hasn’t finished its mischief. It still has the opportunity to do bad things in the upcoming Lame Duck session, a period when members of Congress who are already defeated will have the opportunity to vote without concern for voter approval.
The globalists have been plotting to use the volatility of this Lame Duck session to achieve some of their internationalist goals that they couldn’t get passed during the last four years. In particular, they would like to lock us into treaties that slice out various parts of our national sovereignty, a concept that they have been trying to promote as obsolete.
The globalists could make a surprise treaty push for ratification of the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (UNATT). This treaty is coming under the radar since gun-control advocates know it could never pass the U.S. Senate after debate in broad daylight.
The gun-control advocates assume that private ownership of guns is inherently dangerous. They hope they can achieve their goal of prohibiting private ownership by the covert strategy of a treaty with vague language, and so far have been successful in avoiding media attention. Supposedly UNATT is merely designed to regulate government-to-government arms transfers and direct sales by manufacturers to governments. Its danger to our Second Amendment is its innocuous treaty language that can impact on the use and ownership of guns by individuals.
Another plan to ratify an anti-sovereignty treaty and subject us to unwelcome global regulations is the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This mischievous document was signed for the U.S. by UN Ambassador Susan Rice (now famous for giving big TV time to Obama’s lies about the Benghazi disaster). We don’t need a treaty that sets up UN busybodies to assure benefits and protections for persons with disabilities. We already treat individuals, able or disabled, rich or poor, better than any other nation.
The feminists are using this treaty as an opportunity to promote their abortion agenda. Article 25 requires signatory states to “provide persons with disabilities . . . free or affordable health care . . . including in the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based health programmes.”
The globalists desperately want us to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which was a bad idea when Ronald Reagan rejected it in 1981, and which has soured rather than ripened in its years of languishing in the Senate. This treaty cedes sovereign control over practically all the riches at the bottom of the world’s oceans to an International Seabed Authority.
The treaty’s one-nation-one-vote setup assures control by Third World countries, while Uncle Sap is expected to finance the technology and investment to bring the sea’s minerals to the surface. This treaty sets up a system of dispute resolution by the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) based in Hamburg, Germany, whose judgments about “maritime disputes” can be enforced against Americans.
U.S. access to the high seas, as well as freedom of the seas for all countries, is best protected by a superior U.S. Navy, not by regulations made by UN paper-pushers financed by a global tax. Instead of paying tribute to a UN tribunal, we should build more U.S. ships so America can fulfill its mission to keep the seas open for commerce and national defense.
Still lurking in the drawers of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is the U.N. Treaty on the Rights of the Child, a broadside attack on parents’ rights to raise their own children. This impudent Treaty purports to give children their own right (against their parents) to express their views freely in all matters, to receive information of all kinds through “media of the child’s choice,” to attend a church of the child’s choice (not his parents’), to be protected from interference with his correspondence, to have access to information from national and international sources in the media, to use his own language, and to have the right to “rest and leisure.”
Try Bipartisanship About China
After ratification, treaties become part of the “supreme law” of the United States on a par with federal statutes, which gives supremacist judges the power to invent their own interpretations. The whole concept of putting the United States in the noose of global organizations, in which the U.S. has only the same one vote as Cuba, is offensive to Americans, and all these UN treaties should be scrapped forthwith.
We heard a lot of loose talk during the presidential campaign about getting tough with Communist China. Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney criticized China’s violations of free-trade rules that the United States obeys. This is the perfect issue to showcase the bipartisanship to which both men said they are committed.
The whole idea of free trade with China is a colossal racket. We play by the rules, and China cheats us coming and going. China steals our patents and manufacturing secrets, and violates the rules of the World Trade Organization to which they agreed when we helped them to join in 2001.
The statistics are awesome: the U.S. has closed 57,000 factories, lost 2.8 million manufacturing jobs, and piled up a trade deficit with China of $3 trillion. Our famed manufacturing base that was a major reason why we won World War II is gone.
Chinese Communist officials must be laughing all the way to the bank at U.S. self-deception about free trade. What the Chinese mean by free trade is that the United States is bound by rules, but China gets our manufacturing technology free, sells us shoddy and sometimes poisonous merchandise, and uses its profits to build a military to overtake ours.
A new book and DVD by Peter Navarro and Greg Autry titled Death by China is making the rounds of home and public showings. Called “a lucid wake up call,” Death by China makes a powerful case against allowing China to continue its war against America while our leaders pretend it’s just good business. Workers join the unemployment lines, our country’s manufacturing base disappears, CEOs rake in their bonuses for cutting costs through outsourcing, and a big Communist country builds up its powerful military. Communist China’s strategy is to spy and steal in order to become the number one superpower in the 21st century.
The Chinese engage in massive intellectual property theft in order to get every kind of technology: aerospace, biotech, information, and energy. The Chinese force U.S. corporations to give China their technology and manufacturing secrets as the price of being able to locate a plant in China. The Chinese subsidize their exports in order to sell their products cheaply in the United States, and the Chinese impose high tariffs on imports in order to protect their home market.
U.S. Trade Ambassador Ron Kirk, speaking on Fox News, demanded that we be nice to Communist China lest we start a “trade war.” But as Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation said, “The trade war has already been going on for five or ten years. . . . and we’re losing.” For years, U.S. free traders have been promising that we will soon be exporting our products to China. But what we are really exporting to China is U.S. jobs.
Spying and Stealing by China. Stealing industrial secrets is a major part of China’s trade relationship with America. China has a large pool of potential spies among Chinese immigrants to the United States and the unprecedented number of Chinese graduate students attending U.S. universities.
Here is an example of how China’s spying and cheating works. DuPont had built a $17 billion-a-year industry selling a product called “Titanium white,” which makes dozens of commonplace items white, from toothpaste to plastics to paint. China tried to buy the process from DuPont, but DuPont wouldn’t sell its 70-year-old business.
So the Communist Chinese just stole it, using a Chinese immigrant, Tze Chao, who worked for DuPont as an engineer. After his arrest, he explained that the Chinese, “in asking me to provide DuPont trade secrets to them, overtly appealed to my Chinese ethnicity and asked me to work for the good of the PRC.” That’s how many immigrants retain their loyalty to their native country.
A Chinese immigrant scientist named Kexue Huang, who held positions at both Dow AgroSciences and Cargill, stole their trade secrets and sent them to China to promote China’s strategic science goals. He was caught and pled guilty. Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said, “These crimes present a danger to the U.S. economy and jeopardize our nation’s leadership in innovation.”
The free traders in the United States have been telling us for years that trade would lure China away from Communism, to embrace private enterprise, and become a good fellow in the global community. That isn’t happening; although China has allowed a few powerful bosses to get very rich, the Communist Party has retained all the reins of power. China just issued a requirement that new lawyers must swear an oath of loyalty to the Communist Party. They must swear these words: “to uphold the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the Socialist system.”
Selling Us Counterfeit Chips. Our U.S. weapons system is endangered by Chinese cheating. The Senate Armed Services Committee reported that one million suspected “bogus parts” have been found in U.S. military aircraft, including the Air Force’s largest cargo plane, special operations helicopters, and a Navy surveillance plane.
This report describes a “flood of counterfeit parts” from China, which threaten our national security and the safety of our troops. Obama’s Defense Department issued a weak statement that it is “working very hard to try to sort this issue out,” and that it would strengthen efforts to prevent Chinese counterfeit parts from ending up in the U.S. military’s supply chain. I don’t find that statement very encouraging.
Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative, said that even the smallest counterfeit parts can cause a lot of trouble. A computer that can operate a Tomahawk missile could have a design that involves hundreds of people at many locations. The chips are so complex that no single engineer or even team of engineers can understand how all their parts actually work.
The Senate Armed Services Committee reported that a faulty chip in a sensor on a Navy helicopter in the Pacific Fleet prevented the pilot from firing its missiles. The manufacturer was completely unaware of the problem since it didn’t make the chips, but bought them from China.
Some counterfeit chips are designed to contain a “kill switch” that can shut down the military equipment. Some chips appear to be working perfectly, but really are sending information to someone else. It’s dangerous to buy our military equipment from Communist China; it should be manufactured in the U.S.A.
Chips are not the only Chinese counterfeits. Thousands of U.S. motorists found their cars were installed with dangerous Chinese counterfeit airbags. Now these counterfeit airbags have to be replaced at the owner’s own expense. A government test found that some Chinese airbags don’t inflate, and some shoot flames and shards of metal shrapnel instead of inflating.
China Piggybacks on U.S. technology. China limits U.S. access to its markets while stealing our designs, patents, know-how, technology, and the intellectual property that drives innovation. China has built up its economy by piggybacking onto Western technology. China manipulates its currency to the disadvantage of American exporters, excludes American products from government purchases, subsidizes Chinese companies to give them a commercial advantage, and invents regulations and standards designed to keep out foreign competition.
Here is an excerpt from a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal (9-23-12) from a businessman, Randy Rossi, a retired president of a global manufacturing company that did business with China. “I can tell you that China cheats like crazy and its cheating gives it a massive unfair advantage against U.S. manufacturing companies that follow the rules . . . China manipulates its currency, steals massive amounts of U.S. technology, disregards civilized rules designed to protect consumers and employees from personal injury and totally disregards global environmental standards. This cheating gives China a 40%-50% advantage over U.S. companies that follow the rules . . . I don’t get defending the Chinese as they massively cheat against U.S. companies. Pretending that they don’t is naivete beyond comprehension.”
Remember the scandal of the Chinese drywall sold in many southern states, especially Florida, to be installed in private houses during the housing boom. China sold hundreds of millions of square feet of Chinese drywall, and the homeowners didn’t realize how they were cheated until months later after they moved into their new house, and the drywall emitted an insufferable sulfurous smell that made people sick, caused headaches, respiratory ailments, and skin and eye irritations. The drywall also caused televisions and microwaves to fail, and covered silver and copper items with black soot.
The new homeowners had to move out, going to the expense of finding lodging in another house or hotel. Hundreds of lawsuits were filed in state and federal courts, but chances of getting justice from Communist Chinese manufacturers is almost impossible. After four years of litigation, they have never received a cent.
Ready for Chinese Vaccines? As more and more U.S. public schools are making vaccinations a requirement, Communist China is preparing to take over the vaccine market. China’s Food and Drug administration brags that China has more than 30 vaccine-producing companies with an annual production capacity of nearly one billion doses.
Are U.S. parents willing to inject their kids with Chinese vaccines? Chinese cough syrup killed 93 people in Central America in 2007. At least 81 U.S. deaths in 2008 were caused by Chinese-made Heparin, a blood thinner widely used in surgery.
An expert on Chinese health at the Council of Foreign Relations, Yanzhong Huang, pointed out the difference between Chinese and U.S. medicine safety. Unlike China, U.S. vaccines are kept safe by supporting institutions such as “the market economy, democracy, media monitoring, civil society, and a business ethics code,” plus inspections and regulations, severe punishments for violators, and, of course, lawsuits by trial lawyers.
This year’s scandal involved a big outbreak of meningitis and dozens of deaths. We don’t yet know where the contamination came from, but about 80 percent of the active ingredients in U.S. prescriptions are imported from China or India.
U.S. globalists for decades have closed their eyes to the fact that China is a Communist dictatorship. All during the ’70s and ’80s, and even the ’90s, the globalists predicted that as China pursued a market economy, China would evolve into capitalism, economic freedom, and then political freedom. Dream on; it didn’t happen. The Communist Party still runs the country. So-called reforms don’t include changing the Communist Party government. The Internet didn’t produce freedom but instead became a device to monitor and control the people.
A new Pentagon report states that China is pursuing Marxist global ambitions, and that China’s tremendous military investments are destabilizing. China is developing a nationwide missile defense system. Our Pentagon’s annual report to Congress warns that China’s growing military power will make China the “defining feature of the strategic landscape of the early 21st century.”
When will Americans wake up to how Communist China is cheating us in our so-called “free trade” with them?
Treaty Mischief on Disabilities
The United Nations in collusion with Obama’s globalists have cooked up another scheme to slice off a piece of U.S. sovereignty and put us under global government. The plan is to stampede the Senate into ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This particular piece of globalist mischief had been unnoticed since President Obama ordered UN Ambassador Susan Rice to sign this treaty on July 30, 2009. Now he is trying to ram it through to ratification.
The notion that the UN can provide more benefits or protections for persons with disabilities than the U.S. is bizarre. The United States always treats individuals, able or disabled, rich or poor, innocent or guilty, better than any other nation. We certainly don’t need a committee of foreigners who call themselves “experts” to dictate our laws or customs.
We already have protections and benefits for persons with disabilities enshrined in U.S. laws, regulations, and enforcement mechanisms. Prominent among these laws are the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Fair Housing Act, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Other laws that benefit persons with disabilities are the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Air Carrier Access Act of 1986, the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act of 1984, the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, and the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968. These federal laws are enforced by numerous federal agencies, particularly the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
The UN General Assembly adopted the CRPD on December 13, 2006 and it became part of what globalists euphemistically call international law on May 3, 2008, after 20 nations ratified it. The treaty now has 117 nations that have ratified it.
Under the CRPD, we would be required to make regular reports to a “committee of experts” to prove we are obeying the treaty. The “experts” would have the authority to review our reports and make “such suggestions and general recommendations on the report as it may consider appropriate.” These demands are often outside the treaty’s scope of subject matter. They override national sovereignty in pursuit of social engineering, feminist ideology, or merely busybody interference in a country’s internal affairs.
CRPD’s Article 7 gives the government the power to override every decision of the parent of a disabled child by using the caveat “the best interest of the child.” This phrase has already been abused by family courts to substitute judges’ decisions for parents’ decisions, and transferring the use of that phrase to the government or to a UN committee is the wrong way to go.
The feminists saw to it that this treaty on disabilities includes language in Article 25 that requires signatory states to “provide persons with disabilities . . . free or affordable health care . . . including in the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based health programmes.” Wow!
When the UN approved the CRPD, the United States made a statement that the phrase “reproductive health” does not include abortion. But that’s just whistling in the wind because international law does not recognize the validity of one nation’s reservations to a treaty ratified by many other nations. Furthermore, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is on record as stating that the definition of “reproductive health” includes abortion. In testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on April 22, 2009, she said: “Family planning is an important part of women’s health, and reproductive health includes access to abortion.”
After ratification, treaties become part of the “supreme law” of the United States on a par with federal statutes. It’s easy to predict that some pro-abortion supremacist judges will rule that the CRPD, if part of the supreme law of our land, includes abortion. Several Supreme Court justices, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have urged us to use foreign law in interpreting U.S. domestic law.
Americans may differ about the legality and the scope of abortion rights, but it’s unlikely that any of us want those decisions to be made by a UN “committee of experts.”
Another problem with this treaty on disabilities is its failure to give workable definitions. When the treaty states that “disability is an evolving concept,” that means open sesame for litigation against the U.S.
This treaty is a broadside attack on parents’ rights to raise their children, and it’s a particular threat to homeschooling families because of the known bureaucratic bias against homeschooling and against spanking. It is clear that both the United States and persons with disabilities are much better off relying on U.S. law than on any UN treaty.
UN Treaty Ratification Vote Tuesday, Dec. 4th — Keep Calls Coming!
