We lose if LOST wins.

Some bad ideas just keep coming back again and again, like a vampire that hasn't been properly disposed of with the wooden stake to the heart. The United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) is just such a creature. Pronounced dead several times over the past couple of decades, it was largely for gotten--except by its internationalist sponsors. It has been resuscitated and now stands poised for action in the U.S. Senate.

The Law of the Sea Treaty is not just a bad idea; it is a very dangerous, concrete thing, a revolutionary legal document that heralds a major step into world government and grants vast powers to the United Nations. All of the blather, bombast and assurances of its supporters notwithstanding, there's no way to get around that fact. The treaty does create new jurisdictions and governing structures with real powers that threaten our national sovereignty. Among other things, LOST establishes an International Seabed Authority (referred to as ISA, or "the Authority"), a new UN agency to control the minerals and other wealth of the sea floor. This also means granting the ISA control over two thirds of the Earth's surface--no trifling matter. LOST designates this vast, watery commons as "the Area."

Article 136 of the treaty declares: "The Area and its resources are the common heritage of mankind." And Article 137 informs us: "All rights in the resources of the Area are vested in mankind as a whole, on whose behalf the Authority shall act." That's certainly reassuring: The UN kleptocracy that has given us the massive Iraqi oil-for-food rip-off, and that has proven to be a bottomless sinkhole of corruption for nearly 60 years, is to administer the wealth of the oceans for the benefit of "mankind."

In case you didn't know, "the Authority" is already up and running; the ISA was launched in 1994, when the 60th nation ratified LOST. Like all UN-formulated entities, the ISA mimics the UN, with a sprawling bureaucracy and a confusing, Byzantine system of geopolitically weighted voting and representation. For the past decade, the ISA has been growing like The Blob. Headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica, it is comprised of a Secretariat, Assembly, Council, Legal and Technical Commission, Finance Committee, and the usual proliferation of committees, commissions, panels, task forces, etc. For dispute resolution there is an International Tribunal ("the Tribunal") in Hamburg, Germany. Or, if you prefer, you may opt for the International Court of Justice at The Hague, where Judge Shi Juiyong of Communist China sits as President. Some choice!

There are now 145 member nations, the only major holdout being the United States. As with the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol and other efforts by the UN and one-world elites to install what they euphemistically call "global governance," U.S. resistance to joining this new collective regime is being portrayed as contempt for "the world community" and disrespect for "the rule of law."

The Law or the Sea Treaty opened for signatures at the UN in 1982. At the UN's 20th anniversary celebration of that event in 2002, Korea's Tommy Koh, president of the 3rd UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, declared that LOST is nothing less than "a comprehensive constitution for the oceans" covering "every aspect of the uses and resources of the sea." It's difficult to get more comprehensive than that. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, at the same event, echoed President Koh, referring to the treaty as "a constitution for the oceans." Acting President of the UN General Assembly Clifford S. Mamba of Swaziland may have unintentionally let the cat out of the bag on that occasion, declaring that the treaty represented a major effort to achieve a 'just and equitable international economic order."

Back in 1974, you may recall, a raucous UN General Assembly led by Fidel Castro and the Soviet-directed "Non Aligned Movement" voted for a Marxist manifesto entitled "A New International Economic Order," or N.I.E.O. The Law of the Sea was a key element of the N.I.E.O. scheme for global socialist wealth distribution. It still is, though its advocates at the UN have learned that they make more progress toward their goal if they are less strident and more honeyed in their utterances.

Under LOST, the UN will finally have the tax and regulatory powers it has lusted after for so long, together with a commercial income stream, independent of the purse strings of national legislatures. Any entrepreneur wishing to explore or mine the ocean floor would have to pay the Authority and provide technical assistance to "the Enterprise," the ISA's own commercial ocean mining corporation. Articles 192 through 237 are loaded with environmental legalese that will provide UN globocrats and their NGO allies at Greenpeace and the Sierra Club with previously undreamt-of opportunities for regulating not only commercial, recreational and naval shipping, but also land sources of marine pollution, such as agriculture, manufacturing, mining, construction, logging and urban waste management.

If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to tell your senators to send this fanged fossil back to the grave permanently.