Agenda 21: Is The U.S. On The Verge Of "Takeover"?

by The Huffington Post, businessinsider.com
May 18th 2012 11:56 AM

NDAA's indefinite detention provisions have been temporarily blocked by a federal judge in New York. (See David's interview yesterday on RT about the ruling below.)

But just as quickly as one unconstitutional weed has been pulled from the garden by a loose alliance of Tea Party activists, Occupiers, and civil liberties-minded journalists, something even weirder has emerged: Agenda 21.

Do you know about this one? We're about to venture into Glenn Beck / Alex Jones / late-night radio territory, so buckle your seatbelts. Folks like Jones and Beck have gained tremendous credibility in the wake of the NDAA and "anti-protest law" H.R. 347, and in the wake of news that the U.S. government is, indeed, constructing a $2 billion data center in the Utah desert to log and analyze Americans' phone calls and emails.

Agenda 21 is described by as the U.N.'s "program of recommended sustainability measures adopted in 1992."

In recent days, Republican-led lawmakers in both Kansas and New Hampshire have advanced measures to block Agenda 21's execution.

How scary is Agenda 21? Well, you can read it for yourself here on the U.N. web site -- that's the Agenda 21 "RIO DECLARATION ON ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT" from June 1992.

Despite being an old document, the U.N. claims that "the full implementation of Agenda 21, the Programme for Further Implementation of Agenda 21 and the Commitments to the Rio principles, were strongly reaffirmed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg, South Africa from 26 August to 4 September 2002."

Here's my take: at first the document reads like something out of a high school student government assembly... It's extraordinarily vague and idealistic. Keep in mind, the recent issue with NDAA's indefinite detention provisions, and with cybersecurity bill CISPA, stemmed from the vague language within those bills.

It starts to get creepy further down, however. "Women have a vital role in environmental management and development. Their full participation is therefore essential to achieve sustainable development," the document affirms under Principle 20.

It's worth noting that the human rights of female citizens in the United States are protected by the Constitution, not by some obscure U.N. declaration.

Here's a quote from another Principle: "States shall enact effective environmental legislation. Environmental standards, management objectives and priorities should reflect the environmental and developmental context to which they apply. Standards applied by some countries may be inappropriate and of unwarranted economic and social cost to other countries, in particular developing countries."

This would seem to suggest that developing nations would be granted rights and privileges that developed nations such as the United States would not be able to enjoy. An unequal footing.

Furthermore, despite the extraordinarily vague wording of the declaration, and the fact that "environmental sustainability" sounds like a nice idea -- at least in theory -- some have extrapolated that Agenda 21 would be used within the United States to bring about forced relocation, private property seizure, and re-forestation programs.

It goes without saying that such measures would be blatantly unconstitutional.

It goes without saying that Agenda 21 needs a closer look. The United States should not be bound by creepy "sustainability" declarations that were decided upon decades ago by non-citizens, who are not U.S. elected officials.

While Agenda 21 could amount to nothing more than bureaucratic rambling, it deserves our attention, especially in the wake of a string of bizarre proposals in Congress to curtail online communication, allow for censorship, and revoke due process rights for U.S. citizens -- and even to revoke one's citizenship altogether. I'll leave further research to more talented minds... I'm frankly exhausted by the NDAA fight, and need some downtime before digging deeper.

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