To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine Part 8

In a further blow to the CRU's credibility, the emails showed scientists discussing ways to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests, for example, by deleting correspondence and other information that might be sought. That seems to have been a particular concern for Phil Jones. In one email he writes, "Mike, can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4. . . . Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same. . . . We will be letting Caspar to do likewise." Another email from Jones is even more d.a.m.ning:The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it-thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that.7 The United Kingdom Information Commission found that the efforts to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures may have been illegal, but they could not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had expired.

THE CORRUPTION OF THE IPCC REPORT.

The Climategate scandal, as it became known, led to increasing scrutiny of the IPCC report. This resulted in new revelations undermining the report itself.

Several sources used in the report were not scientific or peer-reviewed studies, but talking points lifted from political organizations or recreational magazine articles. For instance, the report argued 40 percent of the Amazon's forests could be drastically affected by drier weather created by global warming-a claim taken from the World Wildlife Fund, an activist group that lobbies for big-government environmental policies like cap and trade.

One of the report's most controversial claims-that climate change was increasing the number and severity of natural disasters-also came from a non-peer reviewed source at the time. When the study was finally published in 2008, it included a key addendum: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relations.h.i.+p between global temperature increase and catastrophic losses."8 Equally embarra.s.sing were the sources of the report's claims that ice is rapidly melting on the world's mountaintops, and that there is a "very high" possibility the Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035. The first claim was based on anecdotes from a Climbing magazine article and a student paper. The second claim once again came from the World Wildlife Fund.

The warning of disappearing Himalayan glaciers was particularly startling, since it could potentially affect hundreds of millions of Asians who depend on the glaciers as a source of water. The scientist who put the claim in the report, Dr. Murari Lal, later admitted it was included for purely political reasons: "We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action."

Unfortunately, the corruption of climate science goes beyond the IPCC and the CRU. A computer programmer named E. Michael Smith recently discovered that NASA's G.o.ddard Science and s.p.a.ce Inst.i.tute and NOAA's Climate Data Center in North Carolina reduced the number of their temperature data stations from 6,000 in the 1970s to 1,500 in 1990. Most of the lost stations were in colder climates, creating a bias toward warmer readings.

If politics were poker, you could say the Left went "all in" on global warming, willing to use any means necessary to achieve their goals.

THE ENDGAME.

The distressing corruption of climate science is intended to justify intrusive and coercive policies that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. Americans don't want to be banned from using our own natural resources, we don't want our companies bankrupted by suffocating regulations, and we don't want cap-and-trade energy taxes. But these are key goals of the secular socialists, because these policies centralize power in their machine.

Allowing American individuals and businesses to develop a vast, cheap supply of energy, as occurred throughout most of American history, doesn't further socialist goals. To the contrary, this kind of independent initiative threatens the machine. They say our energy development must be carefully planned, strictly regulated, and vigilantly overseen-and they just happen to be the planners, regulators, and overseers.

Secular socialists claim to champion science, yet they debase, distort, and deny the scientific process to further their political agenda. Science is supposed to be an open process of discovery and peer review, yet the most influential global warming alarmists worked furiously to hide their data and silence dissenting views. Meanwhile, the Left point to these scientists' corrupt, politicized research as "evidence" that the earth faces an imminent environmental apocalypse unless we adopt their extremist green policies.

In the end, secular socialists view science much like they view morality: it's just another tool to exploit for gaining and maintaining power.

CHAPTER NINE.

Corruption at the United Nations The United Nations was formed after World War II as a vehicle for world leaders to promote peace, human rights, and economic development. Tragically, from these n.o.ble origins, the UN has evolved into a corrupt, inept, bureaucratic machine that protects the world's worst dictators.h.i.+ps.

In some ways, the UN machine is even worse than the machine of the American Left; first, since even the most despotic governments are ent.i.tled to UN members.h.i.+p, the UN is not limited by elections or the need to keep up democratic appearances. And second, lacking America's legal framework for government transparency, the organization is even more p.r.o.ne to corruption than is the American Left.

Despite the fact that a handful of Western democracies pay the vast majority of the UN's annual budget (the United States alone pays 22 percent), the UN's most influential voting block is a group of 130 undeveloped countries called the G-77. Using the UN's one country-one vote system, the G-77 has hijacked the UN to turn it into a mechanism for redistributing wealth from developed to developing countries.

The most recent and dramatic example came out of the December 2009 UN Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen. The agreement emerging from the conference called for transferring $100 billion a year from developed to undeveloped countries, a move ostensibly meant to repay the so-called "climate debt" that rich countries owe poor ones. One of the proposed methods for transferring this money is a 2 percent global tax on international monetary transactions among industrialized countries-in other words, taxation without representation.

Redistributing wealth is not some side project at the United Nations; it is the organization's main purpose today. In November 2009, a resolution sponsored by a number of oppressive and Marxist states, including China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, Sudan, and Venezuela, and pa.s.sed largely thanks to the G-77 block, called for, among other things, "the promotion of equitable access to benefits from international distribution of wealth."1 It also reaffirms the need "to work urgently for the establishment of an international economic order . . . which shall correct inequalities and redress existing injustices, [and] make it possible to eliminate the widening gap between the developed world and the developing countries."2 Pursuing this agenda, it's unsurprising the G-77 uses its voting muscle to empower deeply anti-American, anti-Israel, and avowedly socialist activists within the UN bureaucracy.

For instance, a current member of the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee is Swiss national Jean Ziegler, who calls the United States an "imperialist dictators.h.i.+p" whose trade embargo against Cuba const.i.tutes "genocide." Another top UN diplomat is Nicaraguan Miguel d'Escoto, President of the UN General a.s.sembly for the 2008-2009 session. A former foreign minister in Daniel Ortega's far-left Sandinista government in the 1980s, he called Ronald Reagan a "butcher" and Israel an "apartheid" state. He also deemed Evo Morales, the staunchly socialist and anti-American Bolivian president, "World Hero of Mother Earth," and declared Fidel Castro "World Hero of Solidarity." D'Escoto claimed these human rights abusers "embody the virtues and values worth emulation by all of us."

These are the kinds of figures who run the UN bureaucracy. Attempts by Western democracies to elect responsible people with successful track records are routinely stymied, since we're outnumbered at the UN by the various interest blocs of the developing world. As a result, the UN has descended into an abyss of anti-Western extremism that will almost certainly grow even worse before it ever gets better.

INSt.i.tUTIONALIZED CORRUPTION.

Like all socialist machines, the UN is rife with corruption. It starts with the budgeting process. The UN website says the budget for 2008-2009 was $4.171 billion.3 But this number does not include "extra-budgetary" items such as peacekeeping operations or UN organizations such as the UN Development Program and the World Food Program, which consume as much as $12 billion a year.

In fact, the UN's finances are so opaque that n.o.body knows what the annual budget really is. In 2009, when pressed by Forbes magazine about budget figures, the spokesperson for the Secretary General shockingly admitted that the budget is "not something that we keep track of in any systematic way."4 Predictably, this lack of transparency facilitates ma.s.sive corruption, the most infamous scandal being the Oil-for-Food program, from which Saddam Hussein's Baath Party siphoned off an estimated $10 billion. A UN committee later found that the program's head, Benon Sevan, had received bribes and illicit kickbacks from the Iraqi government.

Since then, numerous reform efforts have been blocked or rendered toothless. The Procurement Task Force, an anti-fraud unit created in 2006 following the Oil-for-Food scandal, is a great example. After identifying fraud and waste in numerous UN programs, the program was shut down in 2009 due to pressure from Russia and Singapore, whose citizens had been cited by the task force for corruption.

Simply put, corruption is accepted and expected at the UN. And like the Left's political machine in the United States, reform efforts run up against systemic resistance. UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon has yet to approve a permanent director of investigation for the Office of Internal Oversight Services after more than two years. In fact, he has repeatedly blocked the person recommended by an independent panel, apparently because he's American.

Consequently, even after the Oil-for-Food scandal, corruption still runs rampant at the UN. For instance:* One of the local UN Office for Project Service directors in Afghanistan spent $200,000 of UN funds to renovate his guesthouse.5 * The UN's auditors in the Sudan mission found UN personnel wasted $1.2 million in unused hotel rooms.6 * The UN's estimate for renovations to its New York City headquarters in 2003 was initially $953 million, then revised to $1.2 billion. By 2009, the estimate reached $1.9 billion.7 The United States initially offered to finance the entire renovation with a low-interest loan, thus isolating the funding stream to create more accountability. But that method apparently didn't provide enough opportunity for graft, so the funds were routed through the regular, unaccountable budgeting process. Even Donald Trump testified to Congress that his company could have taken over the project and completed the renovation for $700 million but was turned down.8 * Investigations into the UN Development Programme (UNDP), whose executive committee is chaired by Iran, showed that Kim Jong-Il's regime siphoned off aid sent for the North Korean people and also embezzled computers, software, and satellite receiving devices and spectrometers that can be used in military and nuclear weapons.9 * A 2007 audit by the Office of Internal Oversight Services of $1.4 billion in peacekeeping contracts showed that $619 million was subject to corruption-an astounding 44 percent corruption rate.10 The UN's culture of corruption begets more severe acts of lawlessness. UN personnel have been accused of s.e.xual exploitation, including rape, in eleven countries. The worst cases were in the Congo, with thirty-eight allegations of s.e.xual abuse and exploitation reported in 2008 alone. Additionally, the BBC11 and Human Rights Watch12 have both reported the UN has suppressed evidence of crimes committed by their peacekeepers in the Congo, including arms trafficking with the Congolese militia.

The UN tolerates corruption for a specific reason: it's viewed as another way to transfer wealth from developed to developing countries. But the beneficiaries of this graft are not poverty-stricken families suffering under dictators.h.i.+ps. To the contrary, the illicit funds go straight to their oppressors-the privileged, powerful bureaucrats that prop up despotic regimes.

BETRAYING HUMAN RIGHTS.

Even though it was created in part to defend human rights, the UN has ama.s.sed an abysmal human rights record.

The UN Human Rights Council is a perverse, Orwellian inst.i.tution that mainly acts to protect human rights abusers from international condemnation. With members.h.i.+p extended to oppressive nations like China, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba, the council focuses on condemning two countries: the United States and Israel.

In 2008, the council condemned Israel for human rights violations 120 times and the United States twenty-seven times, respectively. Meanwhile, dictators.h.i.+ps in China, Iran, and Cuba were condemned just nineteen, seventeen, and six times, respectively.

It's bad enough that human rights abusers use the council to protect each other. But in one unconscionable episode, the council has even abetted ma.s.s murder. In 2007, the UN recalled its human rights monitors from Sudan in the midst of the Darfur genocide due to pressure from China and Egypt. Just months later, in a stunning display of moral depravity, the G-77 selected the butchers of Sudan to chair its block for the 2009-2010 sessions.

Efforts to reform the UN human rights apparatus have failed. Ironically, the Human Rights Council itself stems from an attempt to reform its predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights, which also protected human rights abusers and condemned Western democracies.

Replacing the commission with a new, functioning human rights body was one of the recommendations of the Task Force on UN Reform, which I co-chaired with former Senate majority leader George Mitch.e.l.l in 2005. Although this general idea was adopted, it couldn't survive the UN machine which, by refusing our recommendation to set strict standards for members.h.i.+p in the new council, insured the new body was just as much of a farce as its predecessor.

The Bush administration rightly withheld funding for the new council and boycotted its meetings in 2007 and 2008. But the Obama administration reversed course and joined the group, claiming the United States could reform the corrupt council by "engaging" it. The results have been appalling. While U.S. partic.i.p.ation has not improved the council one iota, it has made the United States complicit in suppressing human rights throughout the globe.

For instance, at the behest of the Islamic bloc, the Human Rights Council has pa.s.sed resolutions calling on governments to outlaw "defamation of religion." Typically, Islam is the only specific religion mentioned in these statutes, showing their true purpose is to ban criticism of Islam worldwide. This gives Islamic dictators.h.i.+ps the cover of international law to a.s.sault free speech, both at home and internationally, such as their efforts to censor the Danish Mohammad cartoons of 2005. While most Americans were horrified by the deadly rioting that broke out after the cartoons' publications, the UN's Islamic bloc insisted the problem was really that Western governments allowed newspapers to publish these "defamatory" cartoons in the first place.

Under Presidents Clinton and Bush, the United States rightly opposed UN anti-defamation measures. But that's changed under the Obama administration. Although it voted against some anti-defamation resolutions, it has not only supported but even co-sponsored one such measure. Condemning broad abstractions like "negative stereotyping of religions and racial groups," the resolution contradicts the spirit, if not the letter, of the First Amendment.

Furthermore, its overwhelming support for the Goldstone Report suggests the council is not being improved by United States members.h.i.+p. The report, a.s.sessing the 2008-2009 conflict between Israel and Hamas, accused both sides of war crimes. This was a textbook case of moral equivalence between a victim acting in self-defense-Israel-and an aggressor-the terrorist group Hamas, which provoked the conflict by targeting Israeli civilians with hundreds of rockets. The report even denied Hamas endangered Gaza civilians, a claim disproved when Israel released the 500-page Malam report, which published decla.s.sified photos, videos, interrogation records, and other evidence showing Hamas committed gross war crimes by operating out of mosques, schools, and hospitals.

THE LONG, HARD ROAD TO REFORM.

It has now been almost five years since the Task Force on UN Reform, which I co-chaired, issued its recommendations. The task force was bipartisan, so its recommendations were not as aggressive as I would have preferred. Still, we agreed upon practical reforms that would turn the UN into a more effective champion of freedom and human rights around the globe.c Among them:* Create an independent internal oversight board, functioning like a corporate independent audit committee, and create an official COO position.

* Develop a clear-cut definition of terrorism, emphasizing that violence against noncombatants or civilians is intolerable.

* Implement better targeted, better enforced sanctions against human rights abusers.

* Create a human rights body with strict members.h.i.+p standards.

The United States should champion a sustained anti-corruption drive to clean up the UN. Highlighting the cost of corruption to the world's poor, we must implement comprehensive, independent audits and insist on transparency on UN staff salaries, expenses, and all other spending. The United States should place our UN funds in escrow until these provisions are implemented, and encourage other democracies to join us in fighting UN corruption and human rights abuse.

As we've seen with the Human Rights Council, the corrupt UN machine will twist reforms to its own advantage. Therefore, until the UN drops its resistance to anti-corruption measures, the United States should work to minimize the organization's importance. Wherever possible, we should operate through well-functioning bilateral and regional organizations outside the UN framework.

The UN could make an immense contribution to world peace, human rights, and the spread of democracy. But it is not doing that-and that's a tragedy. Having proven impervious to all attempts at reform, we need to sideline this dysfunctional, self-perpetuating, bureaucratic machine until it stops acting as a vehicle for the world's most oppressive states to exert their will over the world's free democracies.

CHAPTER TEN.

The First Step in Defeating the Machine As described in previous chapters, the secular-socialist machine gained power through dishonesty, deceit, and deception. But the American people have not been entirely innocent in this process. For years, we avoided hard choices by retreating into a fantasy world where difficult problems simply didn't exist. We thought our country could have wealth without working for it and security without defending it.

The inescapable truth is that we have not been honest with ourselves. We are emerging from a pattern of self-deception that transcends partisan and ideological lines. Repeatedly refusing to face the facts, we have been surprised by obvious events that we only missed due to our determination to deceive ourselves.

The most devastating example is the 9/11 attack-it should not have been a surprise.

In the 1990s, we witnessed the World Trade Center bombing, the bombing of U.S. forces at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, two U.S. emba.s.sies bombed in East Africa, and the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Tom Clancy even wrote a novel in which an airliner deliberately crashed into the U.S. Capitol building. Yet most Americans, like our government, simply couldn't imagine a major terrorist attack on the American homeland. We thought we were safe and nothing could harm us, despite suffering terrorist attacks throughout the decade.

The economic crisis also should not have been a surprise. First, we a.s.sumed any information technology stock was guaranteed to rise in value-and created a bubble. Then we decided that houses were guaranteed to rise in value and that clever mortgages could allow people to live in houses they couldn't afford-and created another bubble. Then Wall Street's brilliant investors decided truly bizarre paper schemes were surefire winners-and created a third bubble.

The enormous budget deficits now paralyzing our state governments also should not have surprised us. Government spending is our fourth bubble in a decade. For years, we elected and re-elected self-serving politicians who made budgetary promises they knew they couldn't keep-and we knew they couldn't keep. Now the bill has come due and state governments must either cut spending or raise taxes. Guess which choice will win out in the more corrupt state capitols.

REPLACING DECEPTION WITH HONEST CONVERSATION AND TOUGH DECISIONS.

Our long, bipartisan flight from reality has gotten us into an enormous mess. Fortunately, while Was.h.i.+ngton and many state capitols continue to live in a fantasy world where they can never run out of other people's money, more and more Americans are demanding honesty and accountability from our leaders. We are ending our habit of self-deception, and we are no longer so willing to let others deceive us.

Consider national security. Despite a terrorist ma.s.sacre at Fort Hood and a potentially catastrophic near-miss terrorist attack in an airplane over Detroit, the Obama administration still refuses to be honest about the immediate threats we face. They hide behind euphemisms ("man-made disasters" instead of terrorist attacks) and political correctness, and insist on treating terrorists as criminals instead of wartime enemy combatants.

But the American people are not complacent anymore. The administration's blase response to the attempted terror attack over Detroit, when Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano declared "the system worked" after the terrorist was subdued by a civilian pa.s.senger, provoked widespread outrage and ridicule. That same response forced the administration to backpedal on their much-touted plans to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, in a New York City courtroom.

The Obama administration is perhaps even more deceptive in domestic policy. Even though the big-government stimulus bill failed to keep unemployment below 8 percent as the administration promised, Congress and the president have refused to rein in spending. Instead, they invented a brand new metric, "jobs saved or created," that allows them to conjure statistics out of thin air supposedly proving the stimulus worked, even as joblessness hovers around 10 percent.

The same deception is seen at the state level. Despite the destructive consequences of reckless spending promises to public employee unions that far outstrip what is offered to most private sector workers, state governments refuse to admit their budgets are unsustainable. Instead, they look to more Was.h.i.+ngton bailouts to keep the union gravy train running.

But once again, the American people are demanding to hear the truth. The tea party movement, born out of anger at the Wall Street bailouts and fueled by the runaway and brazen rush to socialism pursued by this administration and Congress, is a surefire sign Americans are emerging from our pattern of self-deception. When politicians of either party try to mislead their const.i.tuents, tea partiers call them out. They won't sit down, be quiet, and defer to the "experts." Insisting on straight talk, tea partiers won't be deceived, and they won't deceive themselves.

And they're not going away. Increasingly, Americans are pressing our leaders to be honest about how corrupt our state and federal governments have become, and how much of the current bureaucracy must be uprooted if our nation hopes to survive.

Why "2 + 2=4" Will Be the Most Important (and Most Controversial) Slogan of This Decade

Writing shortly after the defeat of n.a.z.ism, as the world faced the rapidly expanding threat of Soviet totalitarianism, Albert Camus wrote in his novel, The Plague, "Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death."

Camus was describing more than the threat of dictators.h.i.+p. He was describing the power of conformity that coerces people into denying the truth and saying things that are patently false but politically correct.

Similarly, the fraudulent party slogans the citizen must believe in George Orwell's cla.s.sic dystopian novel, 1984, are described by the book's protagonist, Winston Smith, as "2 + 2=5." Smith writes, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."