While government mandates have us all tied up in knots and going broke, few have examined how international agreements, treaties, contribute to this problem.
So let’s look a bit closer at
treaties. Let’s follow the carbon trail from the United Nations (UN)
conference on climate change held in Copenhagen, Denmark in December of
2009.
40,000 protestors, 30,000 delegates and a hundred world leaders slept in flophouses or 4 Star hotels. They rented 1,200 limousines and 140 private jets. The US delegation consisted of 200 people — not including President Obama’s massive entourage of 500.
In just 14 days, those at this one UN conference spewed 40,000 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere — more than that produced annually by 60 of the world’s smallest economies!
It is estimated that, over the last 20 years, the “climate change” campaign has sucked up $80 billion in US taxpayer dollars. So one must ask, “Did they really ALL have to go?”
To mitigate all the hot air
produced at this one UN meeting, UN treaty and EU law force Denmark’s
citizens to buy 40,000 tons worth of UN-certified emission reductions
(UNCERs) at a cost of $700,000. Annually, Denmark purchases another
115,000 tons worth of UNCERs for $2 million a year. All of Denmark’s
UNCERs are bought from UN Project #1901.
UN Project #1901
UN Project #1901 is 100 acres
of new brick making businesses in Bangladesh. At current rates, over
the 20-year lifespan of these brickfields, Denmark will transfer $40
million in mitigation fees to UN Project #1901.
But Bangladesh carbon
marketers have announced that this price will double, bringing the total
of this “developed to developing country” transfer to $80 million over 20 years.
It only cost $9 million to
build UN Project #1901, with an $11 million World Bank credit line
issued to a private finance company. So before making a single brick,
the investors in UN Project #1901 have secured tens of millions in
profits, all risk free.
UN Project #1901 is just one
of thousands of such projects triggered by UN treaty and paid for by
overburdened taxpayers in developed countries, with the US paying the
largest share, fully 22% of the bill.
You can track the activity
for a handful of UN environmental treaties via the UN Global Environment
Facility (UNGEF) which has a database at www.gefonline.org.
Searching by the keyword “brick”, you’ll see that UN Project #1901 is
one of three such projects in Bangladesh, India and China; projects
totaling $52 million, all paid for by income taxed, then transferred,
from developed countries, such as Denmark and the US, to developing
countries, with the UN and the World Bank acting as facilitators.
Each UN meeting requires carbon mitigation
and more cash goes to more UN projects. Every protester equals more
carbon equals more mitigation equals more cash. Never mind selling
T-shirts to conventioneers anymore. There’s definitely more money in
selling UN-certified emission reductions.
Meet the UN
Beyond this, we support
various UN agency budgets. And we support the World Bank which, since
2008, has transferred $100 billion from 40 “rich” countries for
financing and grants to 144 developing countries. At the World Bank,
Communist China has just leapfrogged past Germany, France and the UK to
become the third largest shareholder, just behind the US and Japan. And
India’s not far behind.
Since the World Bank
established the UN Global Environment Facility (UNGEF) in 1991, $16
billion in taxpayer funds, $850 million a year, has flowed from 32
developed countries to projects mandated by just 6 of the 16 UN
environmental treaties. 65% of these funds are for biodiversity and
climate change treaty-mandated projects such as UN Project #1901, the
brickfields in Bangladesh.
Beyond UN Project #1901 in
Bangladesh, there are 822 UNGEF climate change projects slated for
developing countries. Total value: $21 billion. The UNGEF is granting
$2.8 billion for these projects with the balance coming from
“cofinancing” arrangements, primarily grants and lines of credit for
more taxpayer dollars arranged by the World Bank to private finance
companies.
But look closer. If one sorts
the 822 UNGEF climate change projects by “enabling activity”, we find
280 such projects. What is “enabling activity”? It’s paperwork,
paperwork valued at $200 million – with UNGEF grants supplying almost
90%, while the UNGEF retains a 10% agency fee on every document.
Another UN treaty, the treaty
on biodiversity, has generated 971 taxpayer-financed projects valued at
$10 billion. Out of these, 304 involve $120 million worth of “enabling
activities” — “action plans”, “national reports”, “assessments” –
paperwork. For such paperwork, the UNGEF keeps its 10% agency fees while
paying 80% of the cost with “cofinancing”, picking up the balance.
That’s a great return on investment no matter how one looks at it. And
when you recognize that most of this “cofinancing”, comes from the World
Bank, which we taxpayers also fund, you start to see why the EU – and
we in the US! – are going broke.
Paperwork heaven
Every UN treaty triggers
Secretariat costs, thousands of projects around the world, national
legislation and litigation, and lots and lots of paperwork.
A similar document, China’s
Initial National Communication to the UN Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC), is a 102-page document costing $3.84 million. That’s
almost $38,000 a page! China contributed only $240,000 to this total and
we taxpayers in developed countries paid the balance. China’s
Second National Communication carries a $6 million price tag with China
contributing $650,000 and taxpayers paying the balance. The UNGEF
retains its standard 10% agency fees on every document.
Combine this sort of UNGEF
website “transparency” with the hordes of UN workers paid to supervise,
monitor, certify and promote these projects. And, in a glaring conflict
of interest, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) also runs the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC) where all the science
supporting “human induced” climate change is processed, regurgitated
and disseminated to the world.
Add in thousands of Non
Governmental Organizations (NGOs) receiving UN grants to further hype
the scheme as “saving the Earth” and you can see where this is all
heading.
It’s all barely
“transparent”. It’s all without oversight. There is no accountability.
There is no way to vote those pushing such bad policy out of office.
Shielded by the UN, they’re thousands of miles and a world away from the
reach of your vote. But it’s all as close as your wallet.
So how big is it? The UN International Civil Service Commission now handles personnel for 40 UN agencies, agencies where corruption is an ongoing issue.
Oh, and by the way, the UN pension fund is also broke and needs a bailout!
How many treaties?
The biodiversity and climate change treaties are just two of hundreds of UN treaties.
Its predecessor, the League
of Nations, entered into 33 treaties from 1920 to 1944. Soviet operative
and State Department official Alger Hiss helped form the UN and served
as Secretary General at its 1945 founding meeting in San Francisco.
Harry Dexter White, the man behind the World Bank, was a Communist
operative controlled by the Soviet Union. Canadian
Maurice Strong served as Secretary General of the UN Earth Summit and
greatly expanded the scope of UN eco-treaties in the 1980s. Strong is
now involved in carbon trading and lives in China. It has been suggested that Strong is also a Communist operative. From 1947 to 2006 the UN increased its treaty tally to 333.
Out of these 333 UN treaties,
30 focus on the International Court of Justice, human rights and
freedom of information. Another 54 UN treaties address hostages,
terrorism, missing persons, transnational organized crime, narcotics,
pornography, prostitution, slavery and human trafficking.
Countering this, and
frustrating law enforcement, 6 UN treaties work to disarm nation states
and 13 render diplomats immune from prosecution.
4 UN treaties focus on
health, including the World Health Organization. Another 7 focus on
Educational and Cultural Matters; the establishment of the University of
Peace in Costa Rica and a genetic engineering and biotech center in
Spain. 143 UN treaties focus on trade and development; transport and
statistics; the World Trade Organization and commodities such as coffee,
sugar and tropical timber. Another 9 UN treaties regulate access to the
oceans for fishing and mining under the Law of the Sea; 2 treaties
focus on outer space and 16 address environmental issues.
UN treaties commit us in the
developed world to “technology transfers” and “debt for nature swaps”
with developing countries. UN treaties pick up where our borders end at
our exclusive economic zone 200 miles off our coast; cover the
atmosphere above us and outer space beyond. You are, literally,
surrounded.
The UN Law of the Sea treaty
created the UN Seabed Authority, which issues half-a-million-dollar
permits, while collecting royalties and transferring technology to
developing countries. Sensibly, the US is not a party to the Law of the
Sea treaty so it forgoes this onerous permitting process. But the US
does not follow this policy with other treaties and US funds are used to
support projects triggered by treaties we have — and have not —
ratified.
The UN tracks 158,000 treaties worldwide and our Department of State lists 300 pages of bilateral treaties and over 170 pages of multilateral treaties:
treaties on extradition, taxation, defense and disarmament, and joint “peacekeeping.”
While it takes 2/3 of our
Senate to ratify most treaties and give them the force of federal law,
the UN has 192 member countries. The EU has 27 votes and a group of
developing countries in the Southern Hemisphere, the Group of 77,
has aligned with China. Together they control the votes needed to
activate treaties globally, rendering our single US vote irrelevant.
With little on the table and nothing to lose, the developing countries
are heavily invested in treaty development.
With our strong national
protection of patents and intellectual property rights, the US is an
incubator for new business and technology. But another UN agency, the
World Intellectual Property Organization, is working hard to undermine
this. Patents and intellectual property rights are being eviscerated via
treaty-mandated technology transfers.
If you think treaties don’t impact you, think again. Article VI, paragraph 2 of the Constitution renders treaties the supreme law of the land, on the same footing with federal law.
Consider the American Power Act, a carbon cap and trade bill currently under consideration in Congress.
Think about the Supreme Court ruling that triggered an EPA finding that
CO2 – yes, that gas you exhale – is a pollutant. These actions are
direct results of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC).
And remember the spotted owl fiasco? All those jobs lost and sawmills closed for a bird the Fish & Wildlife Service later stated was never under any threat!
And how about the desert tortoise,
which shut down California mining, cattle ranching and recreation? We
taxpayers have gone through $93 million on the tortoise, and animal that
spends 95% of its life underground.
Remember how much time and
how many millions San Diego spent on its Multi-Species Conservation
Program (MSCP)? And think about the shut down of water over the Delta smelt. This
one sub stock of fish has cost us a cool billion dollars in science and
litigation, never mind the orchards, crops and jobs lost in
California’s San Joaquin Valley.
All these issues were triggered by the Federal Endangered Species Act, which in turn, was spawned by UN treaty, its Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
Back to Copenhagen
So, let’s go back to Denmark
and look more closely at the UN-certified emission reductions (UNCERs)
that Denmark bought as mitigation of atmospheric pollution as mandated
by the UN climate change treaty.
An $11 million World Bank credit line built $9 million work of brickfields in Bangladsh, UN Project #1901. covering 100 acres and employing 1,800 people. The World Bank issued the credit line to the Industrial and Infrastructure Development Finance Company — which is 80% privately owned. Who owns it is
not so transparent. But, over 20 years, UN Project #1901 will provide
as much as $80 million worth of UNCERs to sell to Denmark, generating
tens of millions in profit to the owners of the Industrial and
Infrastructure Development Finance Company.
We taxpayers provided all the
capital to build the brickfields AND all the revenue via the UN
treaty-mandated mitigation program. But THEY, the private investors, get
all the profit, all risk free — in Banfladesh, where the average per capta income is $1,500 a year.
But look closer. It is
estimated there are currently 4,000 small privately owned kilns making
bricks in Bangladesh while generating 3 to 6 tons of CO2 annually. To
secure the credit line, these figures were inflated to 6,000 kilns
producing 9 tons of CO2 a year. So, even before ground was broken on UN
Project #1901, it had “saved”, on paper, as much as 6 tons of CO2 a
year!
What is not noted, however,
in any report, is that, based on basic economic principles, to save
energy and labor while increasing the bottom line, over a 20-year
period, the thousands of small, privately owned kilns would be upgraded with more efficient kilns — and fuel usage, and therefore emissions, would decline.
But UN Project #1901 makes no
mention of training or resettlement costs for what could easily be
10,000 small kiln workers and their families displaced by these large,
subsidized, centralized brickfields. There is no mention of the costs,
financial and environmental, of transporting bricks from the large
brickfields back to the areas where demand is located – where the small
kilns, individually owned and operated, are today. And there is no plan
for decommissioning these monstrous Soviet-era style brickfields at the
end of their 20-year lifespan.
So, in addition to making a
profit from making bricks – IF these large brickfields ever actually
make any bricks – UN Project #1901’s investment consortium will clear
tens of millions of dollars while replacing an entire private industry,
an industry that would have slowly and organically modernized over time,
just in response to the normal pressures of the free market system.
Whatever happened to “small is beautiful”?
Bad policy or grand theft?
UN Project #1901 was NOT
built in response to free market principles. It was built in response to
a nonsensical global political policy. The UN climate change treaty
created this top down “mitigation” policy.
While bad policy may be grand
theft, you have no right to sue UN charlatans. This is simply bad
global “governance”. But if the UN gets its dream of taxes on international travel and trade,
it will officially be a global government, a government without any
accountability whatsoever. A corrupt politician’s dream world.
In President Obama’s speech to the climate change meeting in Copenhagen last year, he pushed for: “Mitigation. Transparency. And financing.”
“Mitigation”: Tax dollars
will be transferred to projects no one wants with UN technocrats
charging fees certifying companies providing nonsensical mitigation for
trumped up issues hyped by propaganda campaigns.
“Transparency”: Online
databases will bury agency fees and outrageous paperwork costs —
$38,000 a page! – for tons of UN treaty-mandated reports that no one
will ever read.
“And financing”: The UN and World Bank will transfer your taxes to opportunists around the globe.
It’s all very white collar and three-piece suits. It’s a living.
Public/private partnerships and NGOs
When Secretary of State
Hilary Clinton committed $100 billion of tax dollars every year for
climate change “financing” she did not mention that husband Bill’s
Clinton Foundation runs a Climate Initiative program where thousands of
“non-profit” corporations stand by, ready to make a nice profit.
Bill Clinton has long been a
promoter of “public-private partnerships” and, at the launch of its
Global Partnership Initiative in 2009, Hilary Clinton’s State Department
reported it is “…opening its doors to a new generation of
public-private partnerships”, that its Global Partnership Initiative
“demonstrates how the Obama Administration is putting partnerships with
the private sector, civil society and multilateral organizations at the
heart of what Secretary Clinton refers to as ‘smart power.’”
“The new foreign policy
approach,” State tells us, “is to ‘partner’ with non-governmental
entities to achieve foreign affairs goals.”
Our US GDP is $14 trillion,
25% of global GDP. And California is the world’s 8th largest economy at
$1.85 trillion. Meanwhile, this “civil society” of nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) now boasts an annual GDP of $1 trillion, making
NGOs the 13th largest economy on the planet, literally a borderless NGO
nation. And much of the NGO nation’s wealth is generated by tax dollars
doled out by the UN, the World Bank and willing governmental agencies
such as our Department of State.
For many corporations in the NGO nation, the profit is not in any real service or product. The profit is in the process.
Secretary of State Hilary
Clinton says, “We will lead by inducing greater cooperation among a
greater number of actors and reducing competition, tilting the balance
away from a multi-polar world and toward a multi-partner world.”
In this multi-partner world, sensible economic principles of risk and competition are exchanged for risk-free taxpayer subsidized “partnerships”
such as UN Project #1901 in Bangladesh. Via the UN, the World Bank and
our own US agencies, taxpayers are subsidizing the 13th largest economy
on the planet, an NGO nation that transcends borders and does the
bidding of the UN, further perpetuating the system.
All this socialism is simply
not sustainable. All this “green” for all these “green” jobs comes at
the expense of blue and purple and orange jobs. Our government
institutions are building an elaborate Potemkin village with money taxed
out of the pockets of waitresses and truck drivers, farmers, fishermen
and office workers.
“Mitigation. Transparency. And financing.”
Fraud.
It’s grand theft on the grandest of global scales.
As the line from The
Godfather goes, “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a
hundred men with guns.” It’s obvious that, if you throw in a few Ph.D.s
and a treaty or two, it’s possible to raid the treasuries of the
developed world without ever firing a shot.
So, about that 2009 UN climate change meeting in Copenhagen, let’s ask that question again: “Did they really ALL have to go?”
In Bangladesh, China and
India, at the World Bank and the UN — and in the Clinton household —
the answer is, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
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WHAT CAN I DO?
Since old Soviet-style unsustainable economic policies
unsustainable economic policies put everyone on the fast track to the
poor house and the US is built on individual, not collective, property
rights and respect for the bottom line, we urge our elected reps to:
1)Reduce US funding to all the various UN agencies, as the UN is quickly becoming a global empire.
2)Restrict government largesse (aid/grants/financing) to developing countries to a reasonable percentage of the value of individual charitable donations. Review and rest every five years.
3)Restrict US funding to UN projects to US-ratified treaty projects only.
4)Restrict US agencies from incorporating unratified UN treaty goals into their policies.
5)Increase the share of
development funds to the poorest countries on the planet, not countries
that have figured out how to rig the system for their benefit.
6)Restrict funds to
collectivist countries unsupportive of property rights, basic economic
principles, such as profit and loss and private enterprise.
7)To streamline agencies and reduce costs, sunset older treaties, especially once national legislation renders them obsolete.
FOR A PDF/PRINT-READY COPY, CLICK HERE!
FOR MORE INFO:
The KEY database for following the money is www.gefonline.org
“HardFacts: An Energy Primer” by the Institute for Energy Research 2012
See “UNCOP OUT: Did they ALL have to go?” by Teresa Platt
“Hidden Influences Are Shaping Costly Climate Change Restrictions and Penalties” by Teresa Platt
Some great resources from Down Under.
Carl Schramm has written on Expeditionary Economics and exporting the American Dream of entrepreneurship, messy capitalism, locally owned and operated.
Henry Lamb’s Sovereignty International has several excellent pieces on this subject. We especially recommend this and this.
This document includes definitions of global governance.
A primer on the Federal government’s power of the treaty.
It’s important to note that,
with a 25% federal Value Added Tax (VAT) in Denmark on everything, the
government of Denmark gets 25% of every carbon transaction. IF it can
collect. There is so much fraud in the system, even the government of Denmark is complaining it’s being ripped off.
The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights
does not state that rights come from God, with a limited government
designed to protect such. Instead, it states, “Everyone is entitled to
all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration” and “All
human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are
endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in
a spirit of brotherhood.”
Maurice Strong, a Canadian who greatly expanded the scope of UN eco-treaties in the 1980s, served
as Secretary General of the UN Earth Summit and as President and Rector
of the UN University of Peace in Costa Rica. The University of Peace
promotes the Earth Charter Initiative, generally affiliated with Mikhail
Gorbachev and his Green Cross (founded after the fall of the Soviet
Union). Strong currently lives in China and is involved in carbon
trading. The Earth Charter is promoted in the US primarily by the Humane
Society of the United States, co-founded in the 1950s by Fred Myers who
was labeled a Communist by another HSUS co-founder.
An interesting, if somewhat dated, video on globalism and the “New World Order”.
Warning of the risks associated with scientists/advocates.
The 2010-2011 general, administrative working capital fund for the UN is $2.35 billion, with the US contributing 22%
Ronald Reagan’s administration on technology transfers and the collectivist underpinnings of the UN Law of the Sea.
UK investment requirement for a low-carb economy: 1 trillion pounds. (The UK has 61 million “subject,” as opposed to the USA’s 300 million citizens.