• Placing the authority for regulating the production and distribution of arms in the UN (gun control by another name)
• Granting mandatory jurisdiction in the International Court of Justice for all members. (The US had not accepted this.)
• Ceding jurisdiction over the global commons, such as oceans, space, and the environment, to the Trusteeship Council
Do those sound like the activities of a body that is not trying to institute a global government? The power to tax (in this case without representation) as well as to legislate, regulate, and enforce looks strikingly like the powers usually granted to a government. In the United States, we convey those powers to our national government with the understanding that they will be exercised within the framework of our Constitution by public officials elected by and accountable to our citizens.
Global governance will simply create a government body (or bodies), with no democratic underpinnings, run by bureaucrats with no accountability to anyone. That’s what they want.
Geographic countries will no longer be important. They see the notion of governing based on sovereign territory or land as old-fashioned, even quaint. As the commission said:
Acknowledging responsibility to something higher than country does not come easily. The impulse to possess turf is a powerful one for all species; yet it is one that people must overcome. In the global neighborhood, a sense of otherness cannot be allowed to nourish instincts of insularity, intolerance, greed, bigotry, and, above all, a desire for dominance. But barricades in the mind can be even more negative than frontiers on the ground. Globalization has made those frontiers increasingly irrelevant.5
Apparently, we need to learn just how irrelevant our national boundaries and national government really are, because they seem to envision that we will have to be taught to “acknowledge responsibility” to something beyond our existing government and political institutions.
And as for infringing on national sovereignty, Maurice Strong, an avid socialist except when capitalism benefits him personally,6 was one of the members of the Commission on Global Governance. Here’s what he had this to say about that:
Sovereignty has been the cornerstone of the interstate system. In an increasingly interdependent world, however, the notions of territoriality, independence, and non-intervention have lost some of their meaning. In certain areas, sovereignty must be exercised collectively, particularly in relation to the global commons.
The principles of sovereignty and non-intervention must be adapted in ways that recognize the need to balance the rights of states with the rights of people, and the interests of nations with the interests of the global neighborhood. It is time also to think about self-determination in the emerging context of a world of separate states.7
Does that sound like a statement in support of maintaining independent national governments? Hardly. Not if you know how to read. Consider this: “In certain areas sovereignty needs to be exercised collectively.” That seems to be the ultimate oxymoron. Collective sovereignty? It can’t exist. (Except in United Nations–speak.) A sovereign nation exerts its own power. It is the opposite of a collective government. And that is why they want to stop the United States from functioning as a free nation.
We need to keep these folks out of our business and out of our national neighborhood. We must stop them. Because we have no intention of subjecting ourselves to their socialist nanny state. They are still pushing for the very same proposals they made in 1995—and even more.
This is not a proposal by a bunch of fringe liberals. This is a well-organized international movement, to change the world, to minimize the importance of our country, and to regulate our personal behavior, which has been growing over the past twenty years.
And, unfortunately, the Obama administration is among its allies.
The Europeans have long supported the concept of giving up sovereignty. That’s what the European Union is all about. And they’ve also been supportive of global governance. On November 20, 2000, in a speech at The Hague, then French president Jacques Chirac gave a seminal speech celebrating the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol as the first step toward global governance.
For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance…. From the very earliest age, we should make environmental awareness a major theme of education and a major theme of political debate, until respect for the environment comes to be as fundamental as safeguarding our rights and freedoms. By acting together, by building this unprecedented instrument, the first component of authentic global governance, we are working for dialogue and peace.8
In a speech at Oxford, England, in 2009, former vice president and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore told his audience that he brought good news from America—that the passage of cap-and-trade legislation and the awareness of it “will drive the change, and one of the ways it will drive the change is through global government and global agreements.”9
There are other buzzwords for global governance. Bill Clinton calls it “interdependence.” Through his William J. Clinton Foundation, he supports global governance under the rubric of interdependence and spends more than $100 million each year to promote this euphemism for global governance.
Some well-known liberal supporters believe that the fight is over, that some form of global governance is inevitable.
Strobe Talbott, former Clinton administration undersecretary of state and head of the Brookings Institution, insists that “individual states will increasingly see it in their interest to form an international system that is far more cohesive, far more empowered by its members, and therefore far more effective than the one we have today.”10
America to Strobe: Some of us actually believe that our current system of democratic government with its guaranteed freedoms and liberty is far more effective than anything you and the United Nations can dream up. Maybe it’s time for you to go back to your ivory tower and read our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
And noted economist Professor Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a staunch believer in the need for cooperative global action, has predicted that “[t]he very idea of competing nation-states that scramble for markets, power and resources will become passé.”11
Passé? Competing nation-states will become passé? Some people seriously doubt that, Professor.
So what exactly is global governance?
Global governance is nothing less than a massive and audacious power grab by the United Nations, an attempt to redefine the world order. But, unfortunately, it’s not just our power that they’re after—they want to take our wealth, our assets, and our technology, too! And they intend to take them and redistribute them to the poorer, less successful countries of the world.
They think that we owe it to them.
And that’s not all. They want to control our land-use planning and our consumption of food and energy. That’s because we’re the cause of all of the planet’s environmental problems.
They have big plans for how they are going to change our ways. Here’s what Maurice Strong, the socialist architect and primary advocate of this new global governance doctrine, and who is considered to be the “godfather”12 of the modern environmental movement, told the opening session of the Rio “Earth Summit” in 1992 about his view of what we have to change:
[Industrialized countries have] developed and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced our present dilemma. It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work—place air conditioning, and suburban housing—are not sustainable. A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.13