Vanguard of the Revolution
AMERICAN SOVEREIGNTY, LOST AT SEA?
by
Rod D. Martin, 19 March 2004
Sometimes words can mislead by lulling us to sleep when we should be awake.
Utter the words, "Law of the Sea Treaty" (LOST), and watch people's eyes
glaze over.
When it comes to this treaty, the road warriors of the Left hope yours do,
too.
Don't let them. Keep reading. LOST, if ratified, would represent the single
greatest loss of sovereignty in the history of America. It must be stopped.
For our purposes, the LOST story begins in 1980, when Republicans condemned
this Carter-era treaty in their national platform. It continues in 1981,
when the treaty was sprung on President Reagan. In 1982, he consigned it to
the circular file -- and fired the State Department staffers who had
negotiated it.
End of story? You'd think.
In 1994, Madeleine Albright, then Bill Clinton's UN ambassador, signed the
treaty. But for the subsequent Republican landslide that November, the
Democratic Senate would certainly have ratified it. Foreign Relations
Chairman Jesse Helms, however, put a stake through its vampire heart.
Or so it seemed. Like a zombie in Dawn of the Dead, a decade later, LOST
has been found yet again.
This time, thanks to a rather creepy alliance of liberals like John Kerry
and Joe Biden with squishy "moderate" Republicans led by Senate Foreign
Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, it's steamrolling toward
ratification.
And that's very bad.
Why?
LOST would cede control of the oceans -- 3/4 of the Earth's surface -- to a
powerful new UN entity, the International Seabed Authority (ISA).
This agency would wield unprecedented power to regulate the seas, impose
worldwide production quotas on deep-sea mining, oil output, and other
activities, levy and collect taxes, oversee exploration and research, and
create a court to make rulings and enforce them. And LOST would empower ISA
to collect the profits of private companies and transfer them to socialist,
Third World regimes.
Let's stop and think about this, since Mr. Lugar will not. If production
quotas are imposed, say goodbye to any hope of American self-sufficiency in
strategic materials. And if profits can be collected and transferred, that
means what the United States earns, Sudan, China, or Cuba will keep,
assuming our companies (and jobs) survive at all.
But it gets even worse.
LOST would ban President Bush's Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI),
which interdicts ships suspected, for instance, of ferrying terrorists or
transporting North Korean nukes to the Middle East (or American ports). It
would prohibit us from collecting intelligence in territorial waters
(greatly expanded by the treaty). It would force us to share intelligence
with our enemies and transfer key technologies, from our underwater mapping
systems to our means for detecting enemy submarines.
In other words, this treaty would surrender our sovereignty, redistribute
wealth and power from us to an unelected, unaccountable, runaway UN
bureaucracy, transfer wealth from the world's democracies to its failed
dictatorships, strengthen the militaries of our foes while straightjacketing
our own, and threaten our national security at the worst possible time, when
we're engaged in a global fight to the finish against terrorism and the
tyrants who sponsor it.
This is an atrociously anti-American treaty; yet Senator Lugar and friends
are hell-bent on convincing their colleagues to ratify it. And they're not
playing by the rules. When LOST critics tried to testify against it last
year, Lugar and Company prevented them even from speaking.
Now Lugar is trying to get LOST ratified before anyone can organize and warn
the American people.
In 1980, the Republican Party Platform got it right, condemning this treaty
by name.
In 1982, President Reagan got it right by tossing LOST into the trash.
In 1995, the new Republican Congress got it right by pronouncing LOST "dead
on arrival."
It is now time for a new generation of Republicans to rise up for liberty,
sovereignty, and national security and lead the charge against this
monstrous UN power grab.
President Bush has saved us from two unfathomable sovereignty-shifting
boondoggles already, withdrawing us from the ABM Treaty, and "unsigning"
Bill Clinton's treaty to create the International Criminal Court.
But this is a surprise attack, from the so-called "moderates" inside the
Republican camp. It's going to take all of us to fight them.
It's time to organize, to email, call and write letters, to senators and to
the White House.
Time is desperately short. Before the UN taxes start, before the UN Navy
sails, before U.S. sovereignty gets an unceremonious burial at sea, we must
stop LOST now.
Copyright: Rod D. Martin, 12 March 2004.
-- Rod D. Martin, Founder and Chairman of Vanguard PAC
Little Rock, Arkansas. A former policy director to Arkansas Gov.
Mike Huckabee and Special Counsel to PayPal.com Founder Peter
Thiel, he is the Center for Cultural Leadership's Senior Fellow
in Public Policy and Political Affairs and a Vice President of
the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA).
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