Tendrils of tyranny: the United Nations has long sought to control all aspects of human endeavor. Its vast bureaucracy is now closer to that goal than ever before.

Even with the rapid growth of the massive federal bureaucracy since World War II, it is difficult for Americans, accustomed as they are to the idea of a government constituted to protect liberty, to conceive or imagine the full scope of a truly invasive totalitarian government. This is a potentially deadly lack of vision. The Germans of the Weimar period, it could be argued, were similarly blind to the dangers of full-blown tyranny; and the sorry result was the cold-blooded murder of millions. Failure to recognize the approach of tyranny led directly to tragedy.

Like the Germans of the 1920s, Americans today face just such a potential tyranny. This time the threat comes in the form of the United Nations--or more specifically, the global power elites behind it who intend to build the UN into a world government. Though the UN is often described in the U.S. press as harmlessly ineffective and incompetent, the organization has, in fact, spread its tendrils of control around the world.

UN official Robert Muller ably described the alarming extent of the UN's reach in 1984. In his book, New Genesis: Shaping a Global Spirituality, the former secretary of the UN's Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) explained that the UN was concerned with a broad range of endeavors, including climate, the biosphere, the oceans, the person "from the fetus to the time of death," the atom, and with "art, folklore, nature, the preservation of species, germ banks, labor," and a whole laundry list of other issues. The life-long UN bureaucrat then became almost enraptured when he realized there were yet so many other areas the UN could control. Muller realized that the UN could yet orchestrate cooperation "for the globe's cold zones, the mountains, our topsoil, standardization, world safety, ... the family, morality, spirituality, world psychology and sociology, the world of senses, the inner realm of the individual, his needs, values, perceptions, love and happiness, ... on consumer protection, ... on the world's elderly, on world law, on the ultimate meaning of human life and its objectives."

No would-be dictator has ever given a more thorough description of the goals of the total state. Of course, to bring the entire world and all aspects of human life under the control of the UN, the world body and its internationalist masters have had to engage in a slow and deliberate campaign to control many of the important elements of human activity. It and its affiliates have already gained control of several and have laid the groundwork for taking control of innumerable others.

Controlling the Money

The elements needed to control worldwide monetary policy were put in place very early in the history of the United Nations. In 1944, representatives from several nations, but most notably from the U.S. and Soviet Russia, met at the Bretton Woods conference to hammer out a design for a postwar international system of monetary controls. The result was the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Soviet agent Harry Dexter White has been credited with much of the planning and execution of the Bretton Woods conference. The purpose of the two UN-affiliated agencies was to pave the way for an integrated world currency and banking structure. To get there, the IMF would work to stabilize and bolster weak national currencies while the World Bank would provide loans to developing nations. The loans had the effect of swamping those nations in unrecoverable debt, creating destabilized situations to be used by internationalists as pretexts for additional international intervention under the auspices of the UN and its agencies and affiliates.

In recent years, work toward creating a single world currency and world central bank has continued, mainly in harmonizing major regions under a shared currency. This has taken place most notably in Europe where the euro has replaced national currencies. In the Americas, a campaign of dollarization --pegging native currencies to or replacing them with the U.S. dollar--has been underway, though it has been little noticed by U.S. citizens, Panama, for instance, is entirely dollarized and Ecuador replaced its national currency with the dollar in 2000.

The work of the IMF and World Bank and the burgeoning of regional currency blocs sets the stage for further worldwide economic integration. This is exactly what the United Nations has in mind. In its 1994 Human Development Report, the UN Development Program said, "Nation-states are weakening as decision-making becomes either local or global.... At least three institutional changes are needed urgently. The design of a strengthened United Nations role in sustainable human development. The creation of an Economic Security Council to reflect a much broader concept of security. The restructuring and strengthening of the existing institutions for global economic management."

Government officials and leading economists are also pushing for further internationalization of monetary policy under the UN. At the 10th Santa Colomba conference in Italy in June 2003, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, several finance ministers from foreign nations, and other banking officials met with economists to discuss further integration. The conference was arranged by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell, who, according to the Wall Street Journal, called for all national currencies to be "convertible into an international money, the dey [an acronym for dollar, euro, and yen] ... or perhaps the intor."

Global Taxation

As of yet, the UN does not exercise any direct taxing authority. Nevertheless, its ardent desire to exercise this authority bears mention. The most famous proposal for a United Nations Tax is known as the Tobin Tax. Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin first proposed the Tobin Tax some 26 years ago. It called for taxes on foreign exchange transactions to be collected by national governments and pooled under an international authority, perhaps the IMF. If implemented the Tobin Tax would be a gigantic windfall for the UN. In the UN Development Program's Human Development Report, 1994, Tobin argued that a 0.05% tax on financial transactions could generate "over $1.5 trillion a year."

Since the Tobin Tax has proven controversial, the internationalists have sought to find other means of implementing global taxation. In 1999, the UN Development Program issued a report that, among other things, called for a tax on e-mail. According to the UN report, the proposed "BIT tax" would be "a very small tax on the amount of data sent through the Internet. The costs for users would be negligible: sending 100 e-mails a day, each containing a 10-kilobyte document (a very long one), would raise a tax of just 1 cent. Yet with email booming worldwide, the total would be substantial. In Belgium in 1998, such a tax would have yielded $10 billion." The revenue, the report said, would be used to transfer wealth from rich nations to poor ones, in order to ensure that poor nations could have access to new communications technologies.

More recently, UN bureaucrats have proposed new taxes on the profits of transnational corporations (TNCs) to prevent them from profiting too much in countries with low tax rates. The idea was sketched out at length in a 2004 report by UN bureaucrat Andrew Mold entitled "A proposal for unitary taxes on the profits of transnational corporations." But wouldn't the transnationals balk'? In his proposal, Mold, who works for the Trade and Regional Integration Division of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, explained how this could benefit them. In bureaucratese, Mold writes: "One possibility to make the proposal politically more palatable may be to lower corporate tax rates through unitary taxes. TNCs might be more prepared to countenance a unitary tax system if the base rates were lower." Also, if the U.S. ratifies the UN's Law of the Sea Treaty, we will be giving the UN the power to tax any activity that takes place on, under, or above the seas and oceans.

Regional Microeconomic Micromanagement 

The UN, of course, is not satisfied with meddling in economic affairs merely at the global level. Its has extended its tendrils of control and influence into regional and local levels through regional economic bodies that concern themselves with all aspects of an area's economic life. The UN employs five such organs:

* The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia;

* The Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) in Geneva, Switzerland;

* The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago, Chile;

* The Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) in Bangkok, Thailand; and,

* The Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) in Beirut, Lebanon.

These regional bodies report to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and are "mandated to support the economic and social development of ... member States, foster regional integration, and promote international cooperation." These are involved in an almost incomprehensible range of activities, including the interconnection of power grids in Africa (ECA), creating mechanisms of global governance to manage African mineral resources (ECA), soil management in Africa (ECA), managing European real estate markets through the Working Party on Land Administration (ECE), etc. These are just a few of the almost innumerable areas in which these regional divisions of ECOSOC take an active role.

Military Matters and Gun Grabs

The UN's military and policing endeavors are just as pervasive as its economic manipulations. They are, however, much better known. For decades the UN has intervened militarily, usually using heavy contingents of U.S. troops, in conflicts around the world. The UN claims, in fact, authorization over all armed conflicts, as demonstrated most alarmingly by repeated U.S. deference to UN authority for what are otherwise perceived as U.S. military matters.

The UN claim of authority over all military and other related issues is merely the semantic foundation of the world body's intention to establish a military monopoly. The United States gave its assent to this plan during the Kennedy administration. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy unveiled the U.S. plan for disarmament before the UN General Assembly. The plan was outlined in detail in a State Department document entitled Freedom From War." The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World. This document was followed a year later by another State Department publication entitled Blueprint for the Peace Race. According to these documents, nations would gradually surrender their military capabilities to the United Nations. "States," according to Freedom From War, "would retain only those forces, non-nuclear armaments, and establishments required for the purpose of maintaining internal order." It is noteworthy that under this plan, "The manufacture of armaments would be prohibited except for those of agreed types and quantities to be used by the U.N. Peace Force and those required to maintain internal order." There is no room in the plan for civilian ownership of firearms.

The plan, originally outlined in Freedom From War, remains official U.S. policy. In what appears to be yet another initiative in keeping with the Freedom From War plan, the current Bush administration has asked for $660 million over five years (from 2005 to 2009) to fund the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI), a plan that seeks to train thousands of mostly foreign "gendarmes" or police with military training for peacekeeping operations. According to the Congressional Research Service, the GPOI plan stems from President Bush's remarks to the UN General Assembly on September 21, 2004 during which he asserted that the world "must create permanent capabilities to respond to future crises." In this sense, the cadres created via GPOI will likely be the seeds of a future, permanent UN military force.

The UN is also heavily involved in civilian disarmament efforts very much like those that would be needed to achieve the goals described in the Kennedy era disarmament documents. In his official report for the year 2000 entitled We the Peoples, Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared: "Controlling the proliferation of illicit [read: civilian] weapons is a necessary first step towards the non-proliferation of small arms." To that end, the UN has participated in a number of schemes to remove weapons from the hands of civilians who, in some cases, desperately need them for self-defense.

Much of the UN disarmament program, whether directed at nations or citizens, emanates from another of the UN's alphabet soup agencies, UNIDIR or The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. The Institute for Disarmament's reach is extensive. Through partnerships and collaboration with academic and research institutes, non-governmental organizations, and students from around the world, the institute projects its influence. UNIDIR lists on its website literally hundreds of studies, projects, books, and articles related to UN efforts to disarm not only nations but also individuals. Efforts to disarm civilians, sometimes referred to as "micro-disarmament initiatives," are now being lumped together under the innocuous sounding aphorism "human security."

Environment

One of the great left-wing causes historically has been the environment. Radical green groups have long pointed to supposed environmental ills to justify calls for expanded government bureaucracy and curbs on property. There is no group better at this than the UN and its internationalist backers. The high-profile example from recent years is the global warming charade. Largely through its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN has succeeded in scaring the world into thinking environmental apocalypse is near. The scare tactics helped push forward the UN's Kyoto Protocol on global warming that would shackle economies in order to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

The Kyoto Protocol, bad as it is, is not the most frightening UN environmental initiative. That dubious honor is reserved for Agenda 21, a comprehensive UN plan to control all aspects of human life that could even remotely be construed to have an impact on the environment. The Agenda 21 plan is breathtakingly totalitarian: it proposes "an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by every person on Earth" and calls for "specific changes in the activities of all people."

As if Agenda 21 were not sufficient, there are several other UN environmental initiatives and treaties that are problematic. Among the noteworthy examples is the Convention on Biological Diversity. Article Ten of that treaty obligates nations party to the convention to "adopt measures relating to the use of biological resources to avoid or minimize adverse impacts on biological diversity." The vague and imprecise language of this clause obligates nations party to the treaty to hold environmental concerns above all others in matters of law and policy. Moreover, Article Ten stipulates that each nation party to the convention "encourage cooperation between its governmental authorities and its private sector in developing methods for sustainable use of biological resources." This clause obligates member states to work with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like The Wildlands Project, which, by the way, proposes returning something on the order of 50 percent of the landmass of the United States back to its primitive condition.

There are yet other disruptive and invasive UN programs, including the World Heritage Convention and the Man and the Biosphere program. That these can interfere at the local level was demonstrated in 1995 when Clinton administration officials invited a group of UN functionaries to Yellowstone National Park with the objective of having the park declared a World Heritage Site in order to stop the operations of a gold mine located outside the park. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which administers the World Heritage Convention, declared Yellowstone to be a World Heritage site "in danger," thus closing the mine. The episode was an object lesson in how seemingly distant UN bureaucrats and programs can have a significant impact at the local level.

Just Scratching the Surface

The foregoing examination of UN activities, initiatives, agencies, and programs has been merely a short and in many ways inadequate summary. It barely scratches the surface. The UN today is a multifaceted organization, and its tendrils of command and control have insinuated themselves into nearly all aspects of life, just as Robert Muller hoped they would. In fact, the UN is involved in far more still:

* The World Court and International Criminal Court (ICC) form the nucleus of a growing UN judicial system, the ICC being incredibly dangerous as it claims jurisdiction over individuals and acts in nations that have neither signed nor ratified the convention creating the court.

* The UN Food and Agriculture Organization is beginning to exercise increasing control over many aspects of the world's food supplies through its Codex Alimentarius or "food code."

* The UN's "Cyberschool Bus" program serves as a propaganda campaign aimed at children in grades K-12. It includes the "Model UN" program that has become common in U.S. schools with about 200,000 students participating annually.

* The UN administers a variety of programs related to navigation of the world's oceans and mining of the seabed through the International Maritime Organization and the notorious Law of the Sea Treaty, asserting complete control over seas and oceans.

* The UN even has its hands in space via the Office for Outerspace Affairs (UNOOSA). UNOOSA maintains a list of objects in Earth orbit and administers wealth and technology transfer programs to help "developing countries" with space-related issues.

The list could go on and on. It is safe to say that at present there seems to be no remaining area of human endeavor in which the United Nations has not taken some degree of regulatory interest. The organization is indeed well on its way to creating a tyrannical and invasive bureaucracy the likes of which have never before been seen.