Mark Steyn predicts an unhappy New Year.

Everything he warns about is real, but he writes about it so engagingly that he waltzes with our minds rather than rubs our noses in the messy facts.

Ring out the new, ring in the old. No, hang on, that should be the other way around, shouldn’t it?

Not as far as 2011 was concerned. The year began with a tea-powered Republican caucus taking control of the House of Representatives and pledging to rein in spendaholic government. It ended with President Obama making a pro forma request for a mere $1.2 trillion increase in the debt ceiling. This will raise government debt to $16.4 trillion — a new world record! If only until he demands the next debt-ceiling increase in three months’ time.

At the end of 2011 … tens of millions of Americans remain unaware that this nation is broke — broker than any nation has ever been.

A few days before Christmas, we sailed across the psychological Rubicon and joined the club of nations whose government debt now exceeds their total GDP. It barely raised a murmur — and those who took the trouble to address the issue noted complacently that our 100% debt-to-GDP ratio is a mere two-thirds of Greece’s.

That’s true, but at a certain point per capita comparisons are less relevant than the sheer hard dollar sums: Greece owes a few rinky-dink billions; America owes more money than anyone has ever owed anybody ever.

Public debt has increased by 67% over the last three years, and too many Americans refuse even to see it as a problem. For most of us, “$16.4 trillion” has no real meaning, any more than “$17.9 trillion” or “$28.3 trillion” or “$147.8 bazillion.” It doesn’t even have much meaning for the guys spending the dough.

Look into the eyes of Barack Obama or Harry Reid or Barney Frank …

Please no!

… and you realize that, even as they’re borrowing all this money, they have no serious intention of paying any of it back. That’s to say, there is no politically plausible scenario under which the $16.4 trillion is reduced to $13.7 trillion, and then $7.9 trillion, and eventually 173 dollars and 48 cents.

At the deepest levels within our governing structures, we are committed to living beyond our means on a scale no civilization has ever done. Our most enlightened citizens think it’s rather vulgar and boorish to obsess about debt. The urbane, educated, Western progressive would rather “save the planet,” a cause which offers the grandiose narcissism that, say, reforming Medicare lacks.

So, for example, a pipeline delivering Canadian energy from Alberta to Texas is blocked by the president on no grounds whatsoever except that the very thought of it is an aesthetic affront to the moneyed Sierra Club types who infest his fundraisers.

The offending energy, of course, does not simply get mothballed in the Canadian attic: The Dominion’s prime minister has already pointed out that Canada will sell it to the Chinese, whose politburo lacks our exquisitely refined revulsion at economic dynamism, and indeed seems increasingly amused by it. Pace the ecopalyptics, the planet will be just fine: Would it kill you to try saving your country, or state, or municipality?

The “ecopalyptics”: a coinage that should go into general circulation.

Last January, the BBC’s Brian Milligan inaugurated the New Year by driving an electric Mini from London to Edinburgh, taking advantage of the many government-subsidized charge posts en route. It took him four days, which works out to an average speed of 6 mph — or longer than it would have taken on a stagecoach in the mid-19th century. This was hailed as a great triumph by the environmentalists. I mean, c’mon, what’s the hurry?

What indeed? In September, the 10th anniversary of a murderous strike at the heart of America’s most glittering city was commemorated at a building site: The Empire State Building was finished in 18 months during the Depression, but in the 21st century the global superpower cannot put up two replacement skyscrapers within a decade.

The 9/11 memorial museum was supposed to open on the 11th anniversary, this coming September. On Thursday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced there is “no chance of it being open on time.” No big deal. What’s one more endlessly delayed, inefficient, over-bureaucratized construction project in a sclerotic republic?

Barely had the 9/11 observances ended than America’s gilded if somewhat long-in-the-tooth youth took to the streets of Lower Manhattan to launch “Occupy Wall Street.” The young certainly should be mad about something. After all, it’s their future that got looted to bribe the present.

As things stand, they’ll end their days in an impoverished, violent, disease-ridden swamp of dysfunction that would be all but unrecognizable to Americans of the mid-20th century — and, if that’s not reason to take to the streets, what is?

Alas, our somnolent youth are also laboring under the misapprehension that advanced Western societies still have somebody to stick it to. The total combined wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans is $1.5 trillion. So, if you confiscated the lot, it would barely cover one Obama debt-ceiling increase.

Nevertheless, America’s student princes’ main demand was that someone else should pick up the six-figure tab for their leisurely half-decade varsity of social justice studies. Lest sticking it to the Man by demanding the Man write them a large check sound insufficiently idealistic, they also wanted a trillion dollars for “ecological restoration.”

Hey, why not? What difference is another lousy trill gonna make?

Underneath the patchouli and pneumatic drumming, the starry-eyed young share the same cobwebbed parochial assumptions of permanence as their grandparents: We’re gayer, greener and groovier, but other than that it’s still 1950 and we’ve got more money than anybody else on the planet, so why get hung up about a few trillion here and a few trillion there?

In a mere half-century, the richest nation on earth became the brokest nation in history, but the attitudes and assumptions of half the population and 90% of the ruling class remain unchanged. …

At this stage in a critical election cycle, we ought to be arguing about how many government departments to close, how many government programs to end, how many millions of government regulations to do away with. Instead, one party remains committed to encrusting even more barnacles to America’s rusting hulk, while the other is far too wary of harshing the electorate’s mellow.

“Harshing the mellow”. Only Mark Steyn could write that.

The sooner we recognize the 20th century entitlement state is over, the sooner we can ring in something new. The longer we delay ringing out the old, the worse it will be. Happy New Year?

Individuals find their happiness – if they find it – in their private lives. “Public affairs  vex no man,” said the great Dr. Samuel Johnson.

The trouble is, a wrecked economy affects private lives by reducing the chances for happiness.

But may we all still pursue it. The Declaration of Independence says it’s our right to do so. And if we can get rid of the collectivist-minded Obama and his henchmen and henchwomen, maybe we’ll catch it eventually in a bright new year.

Here are a couple of picks from an article  in Canada Free Press, by Dr. Karl L.E. Kaiser, on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change recently held in Durban, South Africa. We’re glad to say it fizzled out with no result to please the delegates other than an agreement to meet and try again to scare the world into enriching the UN.

First, here are some figures to startle and amuse. The first column of figures may be overlooked; not only because they’re uncertain, but the heading is nonsense – not every country, certainly not every little island, has a “federal government”. The second and third columns taken together have the flavor.

Table 1. Official pre-registrants at the Durban conference (COP17).

*) Data from unfccc.int; some registrants’ government affiliations are uncertain.

Clearly there are groups which were represented at extraordinarily high levels on a per capita basis. Without fail, they are the ones who feel that much (or any) of the “green” dollars to be funded (by other countries on this table) are owed to them. To underline the need and claim, the myths about “drowning in a rising sea” are perpetuated. Unfortunately, for them, the facts are somewhat different. Rather than becoming de-populated as we are told, and just prior to the last ocean wave sloshing over the remaining few square miles of land, their populations are doing the opposite. They are expanding in size and “happily living thereafter”. All of the ocean island nations claiming to be inundated by rising seas have had growing populations in recent years, without exception. If you really want to see what is happening, just look, for example, at a Google Earth picture of the Maldives’ main island Male at the coordinates 4° 10’ N, 73° 30’ E. You’ll see luxury yachts at the moorings, hotels, buildings, and residences from shore to shore.

Next, here is news, funny or sad depending on your point of view. (Sad anyway about the birds.)

One of the great green developments touted were thousands of wind mills, sorry, wind turbines, installed in California. Under various state governments, generous tax-subsidized handouts were given to manufacturers and buyers of such. But now, some 14,000 of such turbines are cluttering the landscape of the western US, without producing any power whatsoever. Their gear boxes are broken and they just keep on flailing without generating anything. (But they still keep shredding any bird getting into their path). As the tax subsidies have disappeared, it is not even profitable to repair them any longer, even with the existing (and generous) “feed-in” tariffs. Of course, the groups which were early in the game and have all left the game since, were the real winners. Who cares about any electricity actually being produced?

Dr. Kaiser concludes that “the green bubble has burst”.

We hope he’s right.

Now we have the UN pitching plans — again — for taxes on world commerce that would pluck scores of billions directly from the private sector every year, and send this lucre through the skimmers of the UN system, to be reallocated as the UN might prefer.

In a PJ Media article, Claudia Rosett – by far the most illuminating and reliable authority on the UN and its iniquities – writes:

Never mind where you might stand on the question of global warming, global cooling, climate change or plain old weather. If there’s one constant to this entire climate debate, it is that in the name of “climate,” the United Nations wishes to regulate and tax the economy of the planet — stripping resources from the most productive economies to hand them out as assorted UN bureaucrats deem fit. 

This is an agenda for global central planning — which, at the extreme, is what the Soviet Union envisioned as the radiant future of mankind, at least until the USSR itself collapsed as a basket case of monstrously misallocated resources, pervaded by the nightmare repression required to enforce such a system. Nonetheless, at the UN this agenda keeps coming up, year after year, at one climate conference after another.

The proclamations of emergency have varied, but always, in the middle of it, there is the UN, proposing to serve as planner and traffic cop for global commerce — a role that entails the UN aiming to redirect resources and collecting a cut to cover the administrative enterprises of its own neo-colonial empire of agencies, organizations, intergovernmental outfits, programs and special envoys. Somehow that already includes a need for climate conferees to travel great distances at other people’s expense …

Right now, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, they’re at it again, conferring for a fortnight. There, they are trying to design a “Green Climate Fund,” hoping to impose some form of global taxes that would bring in some $100 billion per year, to be redistributed to countries the UN decides are most at risk from change in climate. Reports have been emerging that the UN is eyeing a “carbon” tax on shipping, or international financial transactions, or cross-border aviation. Of course, this would raise the cost of commerce for everyone, so there is a further proposal, reports AFP, to use some of the money to compensate developing countries, at the expense of the most productive countries, for the higher costs. Such an arrangement would presumably require yet more intervention from the UN, since someone would have to decide which countries should be compensated, and to what extent — presumably a changing scene, as economic shifts occur — and of course there would be a need for more international bureaucrats to administer such a scheme. It’s also a good bet that more UN bureaucrats would also devote some of their time to coming up with yet more global tax schemes. The possibilities are staggering.

As a recipe for corruption of monumental scope, this is brilliant.It would open money spigots on a scale the UN to date has only dreamt of. …

The UN is a collective, encased in immunity, prone to horrific waste and abuse, and likewise prone to endless promises of reform and transparency which never quite work out — because there is no mechanism to hold the UN to account, or require that its officials comply with their promises. Even the U.S., which contributes 22% of the UN’s core budget, pours billions into the UN system, and periodically tries to clean the place up, has scant luck. In the 193-member General Assembly, the U.S. casts only one vote. The General Assembly budget process is one in which the U.S. provides the biggest share of the money, and a majority of other states out-vote the U.S. in deciding how it will be spent.

The UN must not be allowed to tax us. The UN must not be allowed to become the world’s Kremlin. The UN must be destroyed.

This is the essence of what the 2012 election is all about. Either we’re going to have a Constitutional republic run by the people we elect to run it, or we’ll continue to be subjected to the whims of an international cartel which privatizes profits and socializes losses, even as they threaten the autonomy of every democracy in the world in the process.

We quote from an article by Arnold Ahlert. He writes at Canada Free Press:

Americans, whether they know or not, are in for the fight of their lives. It’s been one week since the biggest story of the last three years was published by Bloomberg News, and maybe the only thing more fascinating than the story itself is the level of indifference it’s gotten from our so-called mainstream media. Remember the $700 billion in TARP funds used to bail out the banks? Chump change. Or more to the point, collateral for the $7.77 trillion made available by the Federal Reserve to bail out financial institutions all over the world.

That’s right, all over the world. Back in August, the facade was partially pierced when the number on the bailout went from $700 billion up to $1.2 trillion. That’s when it was revealed that almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers were European firms, including Royal Bank of Scotland, Zurich-based UBS, Belgium-based Dexia SA and France’s Societe Generale SA.

Now we discover that even the $1.2 trillion was a crock. Or rather Bloomberg News discovered it, after filing a Freedom of Information Act petition that took more than two years to wend its way through the courts. Bloomberg got the information after the Supreme Court rejected an appeal last March by the Clearing House Association LLC, a group comprised of the nation’s largest commercial banks. They, along with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, tried to prevent the details from becoming public. If it were up to them, Americans still wouldn’t know a thing.

Its a scheme in which the Feds made available an amount of money equal to half of America’s Gross National Product for an entire year. Furthermore, on a single day, December 5, 2008, the banks were in such dire straits they needed a combined $1.2 trillion to remain solvent. How duplicitous were the bankers themselves? A little more than a week before this level of borrowing occurred, former Bank of America CEO Kenneth D. Lewis, informed shareholders that B of A was “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world,” despite owing the Federal Reserve $86 billion at the time. In a March 26 letter to shareholders, JP Morgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon claimed his firm used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility (TAF) “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system”—even though his bank’s total borrowings were nearly twice its cash holdings. …

Last week it was also announced that several central banks are making “cheaper” dollars available to bailout the socialist basket cases in the EU. Cheap money for Europe means higher prices for Americans, as once again Bernanke and Company are debasing the currency and holding Americans hostage to the ransom demands of bankers, who once again are telling us systemic failure awaits if we refuse to kowtow to their demands.

So let me tell you what’s at stake here. It’s something that transcends Democrat and Republican, left and right, conservative and liberal. The real dividing line is between those who stillbelieve in … national sovereignty, and the New World Order supra-nationalists, for whom countries are little more than an annoying impediment getting in the way of their one world government schemes.

Even now Europeans are being told that the only way out from under the current crisis is to grant the European Commission the power to approve national budgets—before each country’s parliament gets to vote on them. If that sounds like the “making you an offer you can’t refuse” schtick from the Godfather, that’s because it is. No more Greeks or Italians deciding what’s best for Greece or Italy, flawed as those decisions might be. It’s take it or leave it from … bureaucrats in Brussels … whose unbridled arrogance gave the world an EU that was doomed to failure from the start. …

And where is Congress, who ought to be making it crystal clear that the United States Federal Reserve has no business bailing out an EU that steadfastly refuses to put its own house in order?

Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy want to start the EU all over again with a new treaty that binds the individual nations more tightly together – in other words to make Europe, with all its different languages, cultures, histories, interests, strengths and weaknesses, into a single state.

The EU is failing precisely because the attempt to bind the nations into a “United States of Europe” has proved impossible. Merkel and Sarkozy are prescribing a more intense dose of the killing disease as a cure for it.

If a tighter union were agreed to by the member states of the present EU, what it would mean in practice is the Germanization of all Europe. Germany as the strongest economic power would dominate the continent. It would be the realization of a long-standing German ambition. Germany would achieve through the power of economic success what it twice failed to achieve in the last century with military might. It would be a dictatorial domination. How else could Greeks and Italians be brought to work like Germans? And Europe – aka Greater Germany – will not, cannot, be a welfare state; the dream of socialism, which became ever more of a nightmare, is over.  

The EU was established  in the first place to satisfy the need of Germany to dissolve its guilt  – for the Second World War and the Holocaust – in the big pond of Europe; and the (paradoxically) nationalistic desire  of France to put on more muscle  – a vaster population, a zone of freely moving capital and labor – so it could rival the United States as a power in the world.  Yet France will not mind being dominated by Germany. It collaborated all too willingly with the Third Reich. (The French “resistance” is largely a myth, such resistance as there was being small, bitterly divided, and mainly Communist.)

The best hope for Europe would be a dissolution of the EU. Britain should withdraw from it as soon as possible. The EU idea was never popular in Britain, and if a referendum on continued membership were held now, the votes against it would almost certainly be in the majority – which is precisely why the Conservative government, which promised to hold such a referendum if it came to power, now won’t take the risk. Almost all the politicians of Europe love the (non-democratic) EU because it provides them with a bigger stage to strut on.

Our view, cold and hard, is that it would be a good thing if the Euro collapsed and the European Union broke into its constituent national pieces. The United States should be doing everything it can to disentangle itself from the banks of Europe, and refrain from helping any continuation of its ruinous welfare socialism. And Americans must save themselves from the fate Europe brought upon itself by voting to strengthen national sovereignty and  keep their Republic.

As we provoked indignant comments from an environmentalist enemy with our post yesterday (though he/she only addresses marginal points), we return to the attack today with more on the UN’s climate conference being held now in Durban, South Africa, and the lethal threat named “Agenda 21”  (see our posts Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011; The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011).

Phyllis Schlafly goes right to the heart of the matter – the UN making a power-grab on the pretext of protecting the planet from human depredation – with this article at Townhall:

The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, opening on Nov. 28, called COP-17, is one of a series of U.N. meetings working toward a specific goal … to move the United States into a global government by environmental regulations and a vast network of taxes. These newly imposed taxes will give the U.N. a tremendous stream of money in addition to U.S. dues and congressional appropriations.

The plan for taxes was launched at the 1992 U.N. meeting in Rio de Janeiro, known as the Earth Summit, where Conference Secretary-General Maurice Strong produced a 300-page document with 40 proposals called Agenda 21.

The tax-seeking route then proceeded through U.N. meetings in Cancun in 2010, in Durban this November and will be finalized next year at what is called Rio+20 (i.e., Rio de Janeiro after 20 years).

Agenda 21 is a comprehensive master plan to reshape and control the U.S. while locking us into the clutches of the U.N. under the innocuous phrase “sustainable development.” Along with 178 countries, President George H.W. Bush accepted Agenda 21 as “soft law.” It was adopted by a new tactic called collaborative consensus building, instead of by treaty.

Bush popularized the term “new world order,” but left it for others to define. Mikhail Gorbachev said the threat of an environmental crisis will be the international key to unlocking the new world order, and former President Bill Clinton issued an executive order in 1993 creating the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.

Advocates of Agenda 21 talk about the three E’s of sustainable development: economy, equity and environment.

Equity means replacing our American constitutional system with central planning and social justice, which is a code word for redistribution of wealth, abolition of private property rights and giving favored corporations tax breaks, grants, and use of eminent domain.

Economy means shifting from a private enterprise system to government, private-corporation partnerships. That would be a giant step toward total government and U.N. control of our economy, with the ability to redistribute our goods and services to foreign countries.

Environment means giving animals and plants more rights or equal rights with humans. It also promotes worship of nature and mother Earth.

Yes, a multitude of genuine anti-human fanatics are only too happy to be used by the UN as it pursues its political aim of a centrally controlled world economy, which is to say a global socialist tyranny.

To talk about Agenda 21, you will have to get used to a new vocabulary: green jobs, green building codes, going green, regional planning, smart growth, biodiversity, sustainable farming, growth management, resilient cities, sustainable communities, redistribution, urban growth boundaries, redevelopment districts and consensus.

Agenda 21 wants to herd people into crowded communities with limited housing space and limited parking spaces. This will promote the green goal of reducing our use of automobiles, allowing only electric cars that can’t go very fast or very far, so people will have to walk, use bicycles and mass transit.

Agenda 21 supports the Wildlands Project, which seeks to re-wild 50% of our nation and turn it into a pre-Columbian wilderness where animals roam freely and humans are crowded into limited spaces. Already, we find that rural roads are not being repaired or maintained.

Agenda 21 has started its attacks on rural and small-town property rights. Six hundred U.S. cities and counties have signed on to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives putting themselves indirectly under supervision of U.N. regulations and restrictions.

Advocates of Agenda 21 believe the earth is overcrowded. They demand an 85% reduction in human population. It’s a major goal of Agenda 21 to lower the U.S. standard of living by cutting our use of energy. Agenda 21 plans to use smart meters, smart grids and smart growth so that our nation’s use of electricity can be controlled, limited and redistributed.

Schools and universities are important to Agenda 21’s goals. The plan is make them indoctrination institutions, where kids are taught “green” propaganda, as well as global education to make them citizens of the world.

The UN will tax “currency transfers, fossil energy production including oil, natural gas and coal, the commercial use of oceans, international airplane tickets and all foreign exchange transactions”.

Taxes of this magnitude would give the U.N. so much power that it would become a de facto world government.

So, Phyllis Schlafly urges, take action to prevent this happening:

Tell your members of Congress to pledge that the day the U.N. adopts this nonsense will be the day we say goodbye to the U.N.

But why wait until then? The UN does enough harm right now.

The UN must be destroyed.

Chris Christie asks Obama, “What the hell are we paying you for? ”

Meet Sunny.

A Sunny day is a happy day.

Here she talks about those super-villains, Millionaires and Billionaires. And Thousandaires.

Communism:  “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.  A central authority with a monopoly of force – which is to say the state – must gather and distribute resources. Condition of the nation: serfdom and poverty.   

Capitalism: “From each according to his need, to each according to his ability”. You decide what you need and work for it by providing others with what they’ll buy. The amount you get will be the measure of your ability. Condition of the nation: freedom and prosperity.

Collectivism: Economic equality achieved at the cost of liberty. 

Individualism: The only desirable equality is an equality of liberty. My liberty should be limited by nothing except everyone else’s. 

Walter Williams writes at Front Page:

Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb, the phonograph, the DC motor and other items in everyday use and became wealthy by doing so. Thomas Watson founded IBM and became rich through his company’s contribution to the computation revolution. Lloyd Conover, while in the employ of Pfizer, created the antibiotic tetracycline. Though Edison, Watson, Conover and Pfizer became wealthy, whatever wealth they received pales in comparison with the extraordinary benefits received by ordinary people. Billions of people benefited from safe and efficient lighting. Billions more were the ultimate beneficiaries of the computer, and untold billions benefited from healthier lives gained from access to tetracycline.

President Barack Obama, in stoking up class warfare, said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” This is lunacy. Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire produced the raw materials that built the physical infrastructure of the United States. Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft and produced software products that aided the computer revolution. But Carnegie had amassed quite a fortune long before he built Carnegie Steel Co., and Gates had quite a fortune by 1990. Had they the mind of our president, we would have lost much of their contributions, because they had already “made enough money.”

Class warfare thrives on ignorance about the sources of income. Listening to some of the talk about income differences, one would think that there’s a pile of money meant to be shared equally among Americans. Rich people got to the pile first and greedily took an unfair share. Justice requires that they “give back.” Or, some people talk about unequal income distribution as if there were a dealer of dollars. The reason some people have millions or billions of dollars while others have very few is the dollar dealer is a racist, sexist, a multinationalist or just plain mean. Economic justice requires a re-dealing of the dollars, income redistribution or spreading the wealth, where the ill-gotten gains of the few are returned to their rightful owners.

In a free society, for the most part, people with high incomes have demonstrated extraordinary ability to produce valuable services for — and therefore please — their fellow man.

People voluntarily took money out of their pockets to purchase the products of Gates, Pfizer or IBM. High incomes reflect the democracy of the marketplace. The reason Gates is very wealthy is millions upon millions of people voluntarily reached into their pockets and handed over $300 or $400 for a Microsoft product. Those who think he has too much money are really registering disagreement with decisions made by millions of their fellow men.

In a free society, in a significant way income inequality reflects differences in productive capacity, namely one’s ability to please his fellow man. …

Stubborn ignorance sees capitalism as benefiting only the rich, but the evidence refutes that. The rich have always been able to afford entertainment; it was the development and marketing of radio and television that made entertainment accessible to the common man. The rich have never had the drudgery of washing and ironing clothing, beating out carpets or waxing floors. The mass production of washing machines, wash-and-wear clothing, vacuum cleaners and no-wax floors spared the common man this drudgery. At one time, only the rich could afford automobiles, telephones and computers. Now all but a small percentage of Americans enjoy these goods.

In a free country, the rich are not rich because the poor are poor;  nor are the poor poor because the rich are rich.

Those are richest who serve others best. (In general, that is. There are of course exceptions, like George Soros.)

They create wealth.

So that, among free countries, where the rich are richest the poor are least poor.

As in the United States of America.

Newt Gingrich warns against Agenda 21. (See our posts Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011, and The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011.)

“Agenda 21 proposes an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by every person on Earth…it calls for specific changes in the activities of all people… Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all humans, unlike anything the world has ever experienced… ” – Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet (Earthpress, 1993)

– and quoted as the introduction to an article by Chris Carter at Canada Free Press, in which he goes on to say:

Agenda 21 seeks to control populations through zoning and seizure of private property, strip national sovereignty, reduce the world population, even control our consumption of meat and air conditioning … all in the name of the environment. And who can be against the environment, right? …

From the report produced by the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements [!], which was the predecessor to Agenda 21: “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 …”

A speech that could have come from the mouth of a villain politician in Atlas Shrugged. 

Our Constitution explicitly protects our private property rights. No wonder President Clinton signed it into law without consent from Congress. In fact, those who drafted the plan considered it to be so toxic that they warned proponents not to use the term Agenda 21.

“Participating in a UN advocated planning process would very likely bring out many of the conspiracy-fixated [!] groups and individuals in our society,” said J. Gary Lawrence, adviser to President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development. “This segment of our society who fear ‘one-world government’ and a UN invasion of the United States through which our individual freedom would be stripped away would actively work to defeat any elected official who joined ‘the conspiracy’ by undertaking Agenda 21. So we call our process something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management or smart growth.”

Rather than defend against the disinformation campaign used to prop up Agenda 21, we must read the document and instead demand why the UN thinks it has any business subjugating the world under its authority …

The UN must be destroyed.

From PowerLine:

If there is a single face of the financial crisis, it is probably Barney Frank, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac’s chief Congressional patron, who shouted down all warnings and resisted all efforts to bring those agencies under control. It is probably too much to hope that Frank will be evicted from Congress any time soon, but in the meantime we can enjoy this song by Kathleen Stewart, “Frankly Barney:”