by Phyllis Schlafly

December 19, 2012

While President Obama and Speaker John Boehner are wrestling with whether or not they will agree to raise taxes, United Nations delegates partying in Doha, Qatar are planning to impose a new kind of tax on Americans. UN conferees have been discussing how they can start a global tax that would hit Americans hard.

The UN bureaucrats are not deterred by the fact that Americans should be protected by our U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 7, which specifies that “all bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” The greedy globalist UN bureaucrats have been conniving for about 20 years to bypass Congress and tax individual Americans, and now they think they have devised a formula to do this.

Their vehicle for this travesty is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UN convention delegates dream they can transform the economic structure of the world by a new global treaty using global warming fears (even though the globe has not warmed for the past 16 years).

UNFCCC’s executive secretary Christiana Figueres will call a “significant number of meetings and workshops” next year to prepare the new document. The plan is for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in 2014 to “convene leaders to mobilize the political will to ensure that the 2015 deadline is met” to start this global tax.

This new UN document will cap greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, and replace our use of fossil fuels with renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. Government will be expected to subsidize green energy because plenty of evidence proves that alternate energy sources are far more expensive and cannot compete in the marketplace.

Obama gave a half-billion U.S. tax dollars to the solar-panel company Solyndra, which promptly went bankrupt and now is arguing about who will pay the $600-per-hour lawyers who worked on the deal. After Obama gave $133 million of a $249 million grant to a firm named A123 to make batteries for electric cars, that company went bankrupt, too, and now is auctioned to a Chinese company, Wanxiang Group.

The Doha delegates are salivating at the thought of creating a new $100-billion-a-year fund by imposing a first-ever global tax on the right to cause carbon dioxide emissions. This fund is to be headquartered in South Korea and sweetened by a gigantic flow of taxes on international monetary transactions, international shipping, and airline travel.

Agenda 21 is a document called the Declaration on Environment and Development and the Statement of Principles for the Sustainable Management of Forests, which was signed by 178 governments including President George H.W. Bush in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. In 1995 President Bill Clinton followed up by an executive order that established a Presidential Council on Sustainable Development, giving globalist busybodies the excuse to work on it ever since.

Agenda 21’s goal is to “save the planet” and “sustain” life on Earth regardless of its adverse effect on human life and our standard of living. It is based on the very un-American notion that private property is “a social injustice since not everyone can build wealth from it.”

We certainly hope our Congress will reject any UN proposal to tax Americans or control our property rights. Farsighted Republicans adopted a Party Platform in Tampa Bay this year stating “We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty, and we oppose any form of U.N. global tax.”

To understand the relationship of Agenda 21 to taxes and property rights, you have to learn a new vocabulary of words and expressions. A basic dictionary of about a hundred words and phrases has been assembled by a group called Democrats Against Agenda 21, and here are just a few of their favorite words: climate change, Common Core curriculum, environmental impact, New World Order, outcome-based education, public/private partnership, quality of life, smart growth, social justice, growth management, high speed rail, land use policies, multi-use dwellings, sustainable development, and wildlands.

Agenda 21 lays down the rule that “Land … cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market.” The UN hopes to require every decision about property use to be based on environmental impact, global land use, and global population control and reduction, which means by the government, not by property owners.

The purpose of this UN attack on property rights is to reduce the U.S. standard of living to that of the rest of the world because the UN bureaucrats resent our prosperity using abundant energy. Agenda 21 was never approved by Congress or ratified as a treaty by the U.S. Senate, so Congress should have no trouble saying No to all UN tax or property restriction proposals.