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The United Nations has been conniving for years to figure out a way to levy taxes on people and businesses so that its overpaid international bureaucrats will not be at the mercy of U.S. congressional appropriations. The internationalists have finally devised a way to do this -- persuade the U.S. Senate to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. That UN treaty has already created the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which claims the power to levy taxes concealed under such euphemisms as assessments, fees, permits, payments, or contributions. Do you remember the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST)? President Ronald Reagan rejected it in 1982. But it's back again with some powerful advocates. For the sake of American sovereignty and our pocketbooks, it should be shelved again. The real purpose of the taxing power is to compel the United States to pay billions of private-enterprise dollars to the ISA bureaucrats, who can then transfer our wealth to socialist, anti-American nations (euphemistically called "developing countries") ruled by corrupt dictators. The LOST piously asserts that this is for "the benefit of mankind as a whole." The 202-page Law of the Sea Treaty has been ratified by 153 countries, so it entered into force in 1994. The LOST gives the International Seabed Authority total jurisdiction over all the oceans and everything in them, including the ocean floor with "all" its riches ("solid, liquid or gaseous mineral resources"), along with the power to regulate 7/10th of the world's surface. Headquartered in Jamaica, the ISA has an Assembly, a Council, a bureaucracy and commissions, all drawing tax-free salaries. If the United States ratifies the treaty, we would have the same vote in the ISA as Cuba. The LOST gives the ISA the power to regulate "all" ocean research and exploration and to deny access to strategic ocean minerals, many of which we need for our national defense or industries. The LOST gives the ISA the power to impose production quotas for deep-sea mining and oil production. The LOST also created the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, with the power of a super supreme court to decide all disputes and enforce its judgments. Of course, there is no guarantee that the United States would have even one judge on this 21-member international court. The lobbyists for LOST claim that the original problems Reagan identified have been fixed. That is not believable because the text of the treaty can't be changed unilaterally. The late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's favorite foreign policy adviser, spoke out against the treaty after it was supposedly fixed. The Law of the Sea Treaty would be an unprecedented surrender of American sovereignty, independence of action, and wealth. Americans should speak up against the globalists who are working overtime to erase our sovereignty and integrate us into various multinational structures and tribunals. |
