WHISTLEBLOWER MAGAZINE

Revealed: U.N.'s plan for world government
WND probe unearths plot for global taxation, gun control, standing army.

The United Nations and the United States are engaged in a major battle over American sovereignty - the last major impediment to global governance -- according to the May edition of WND's acclaimed monthly magazine, Whistleblower.

The U.N.'s plan, dubbed "Our Global Neighborhood," is a 410-page final report of the Commission on Global Governance, and was first published in 1995 by Oxford University Press. That 28-member "independent commission," created by former German Chancellor Willy Brandt, developed the following strategy, as reported in the EcoSocialist Review: "To represent a shot-across-the-bow of George Bush's New World Order, and make clear that now is the time to press for the subordination of national sovereignty to democratic transnationalism."

Then-U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali endorsed the commission, and the U.N. provided significant funding. The plan calls for dramatically strengthening the United Nations, by implementing a laundry list of recommendations, including these:

* Eliminating the veto and permanent member status in the Security Council;
* Authorizing global taxation on currency exchange and use of the "global commons;"
* Creating an International Criminal Court;
* Creating a standing army under the command of the secretary-general;
* Creating a new Economic Security Council;
* Creating a new People's Assembly;
* Regulating multinational corporations;
* Regulating the global commons;
* Controlling the manufacture, sale and distribution of all firearms.

None of the recommendations in the report is new; all have been proposed in a variety of documents for decades. This report, however, is the first time the comprehensive plan for global governance has been published with the approval and funding support of the United Nations, according to Whistleblower.

To justify the sweeping changes proposed by the commission, a new concept of "security" was offered. The U.N.'s mission under its present charter is to provide "security" to its member nations through "collective" action. The new concept expands the mission of the U.N. to be the security of the people and the security of the planet.

Thus, in their speeches to the U.N.'s Millennium Assembly in 2000, both Secretary General Kofi Annan and President Bill Clinton made reference to this new concept, saying national sovereignty can no longer be used as an excuse to prevent the intervention by the U.N. to provide "security" for people inside national boundaries.

To provide security for the planet, the plan calls for authorizing the U.N. Trusteeship Council to have "trusteeship" over the "global commons," which the plan defines to be: "... the atmosphere, outer space, the oceans beyond national jurisdiction, and the related environment and life support systems that contribute to the support of human life."

Private land ownership under attack.

Actually, the U.N. has been working to achieve this goal for more than two decades, reports Whistleblower, but the work has been pursued as a part of the environmental agenda. A first glimpse of the environmental agenda's magnitude came in 1992, when the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development presented for adoption a 300-page policy document called Agenda 21. This document made clear that the only way to protect the environment is to control the activities of the people who use it.

Each of the nations that endorsed Agenda 21 agreed to create a national council to implement its recommendations. Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 12852 on June 29, 1993, which created the President's Council on Sustainable Development. This 28-member council included the heads of the government departments concerned with the environment and commerce, the heads of major environmental groups, and four representatives from business, one of whom was Ken Lay of Enron infamy.

This group worked through the end of 1999 to implement the recommendations of Agenda 21 throughout the United States, primarily by rewriting and refocusing the rules of implementation for existing legislation, and by encouraging state and local governments to implement the recommendations at the local level. With the coordinated assistance of the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy and the National Wildlife Federation -- all of whose executives sat on the President's Council on Sustainable Development -- the message of "sustainable development" and "sustainable communities" spread rapidly across the country.

Among the many goals of the President's Council was to change the way public policy is made in the United States. Its "Belief Statements" include this:
"We need a new collaborative decision process that leads to better decisions, more rapid change, more sensible use of human, natural, and financial resources in meeting our goals."The new collaborative decision process is the same consensus process used by the United Nations. It is a process that uses trained "facilitators" to assure a predetermined outcome.

Every department of government has trained facilitators to transform public-input meetings into "consensus-building" sessions. With the support of various environmental groups, virtually every community in the country began to see "visioning councils" and "stakeholder councils" appear, to develop plans for a "sustainable community" for the 21st century.

These plans are remarkably similar, whether in Santa Cruz, Calif., where they call the process "Local Agenda 21," or in "Yourtown 2020," they all end up with the recommendations set forth in Agenda 21.

When examined from a national perspective, the local plans, arrived at by consensus, are elements of the broader plan to "provide security for the planet" by controlling the activities of the people.

To achieve this objective, private property has to be effectively eliminated. This U.N. policy was first adopted in 1976 at the U.N. Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver, British Columbia. Its final report says:
"Land ... cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice. Public control of land use is therefore indispensable."

Three years later, the U.S. State Department entered into a Memorandum of Agreement with the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization to launch a Man and the Biosphere Program, which designated vast stretches of land as wilderness. The Convention on Biological Diversity began its life in 1981 and evolved until 1992, when it was formally adopted by the U.N. in Rio de Janeiro.

This international law requires the creation of wilderness areas, all connected by corridors of wilderness and surrounded by buffer zones, in which human activity is regulated by the government, while the population is forced to move into "sustainable communities." There are more than 400 of these wilderness areas, called U.N. Biosphere Reserves, throughout the world; 47 are in the United States, with another proposed for the Chicago area and yet another proposed for the Bay of Fundy on the Maine/Canada border.

Remarkable progress has been made toward transforming the United States into this United Nations vision of a "secure planet." Because each plan element operates at the local level, it is difficult to see the ultimate outcome. A picture of the dream is suggested, however, in the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development report authored by Andrew Euston for the U.N. Conference on Human Development meeting in Istanbul in 1996.

The report describes in considerable detail how "sustainable" communities of the future will be bounded by growth limits, surrounded by open space, with housing provided by public/private partnerships that require both economic and ethnic integration, and feature live-over shops and services. Transportation in these communities will feature light rail and bicycle, since automobiles will be unnecessary; people are expected to work within walking distance of their employment. Each complex in the community is a "neighborhood" that provides schools and day care, governed by a "neighborhood council."

Agriculture and light "sustainable" industry will occur in the buffer zones between the communities and the Biosphere Reserves, under the direction of the government, in public/private partnerships with non-government organizations that oversee day-to-day operations.

Policy decisions are to be made by the council closest to the people governed by the policy, providing that the policy is consistent with each of the councils in the hierarchy. The ideal system of governance in this utopian vision would see the government selecting a non-government organization, or NGO, for a particular neighborhood project. The majority of the neighborhood council would consist of board members of the NGO, with a few additional representatives selected by the NGO. The neighborhood council would choose a representative to sit on the community council, which would choose a representative to sit on the watershed council, which would choose a representative to sit on the bioregional council, which would choose a representative to sit on the national council, which would choose a representative to the People's Assembly at the United Nations.

Sound familiar? This system parallels the old Soviet system in Russia, in both design and function. It has been under development in the United States since launched in 1993 by the President's Council on Sustainable Development. Progress so far has been mostly voluntary, "to comply with international obligations." But success will come for the U.N. only when it has the power to enforce its international law. That's the next step.