How Sustainable
Development Has Conned Us All
The New York Times blasted out the headline yesterday, Obama
Pursuing Climate Accord in Lieu of Treaty. In short, Obama will use one or
more Executive Orders to entangle the U.S. in a global treaty on climate
change, without consulting the U.S. Senate. However, the Constitution
requires the Senate to vote on all treaties and the bar is high: It takes a
two-third vote to approve.
The Constitution is out. The Rule of law
has collapsed. Reflexive law has surpassed it all. The balance of this article
will show you how and why.
If you are saying “Huh?”, you had better
read every word of this report and figure it out, because this might be the
most important shard of evidence ever revealed about the wrenching transformation
of American society.
Obama’s principal adviser and “negotiator”
on this so-called climate accord is John Podesta, and this whole
“treaty-by-executive-order debacle can be laid squarely at his feet. Until
just recently, Podesta was a member of the Trilateral Commission. He was
Bill Clinton’s chief-of-staff in the 1990s and the original instigator of
Executive Branch policy of using Executive Orders to bypass Congress on
certain issues. Clinton, also a Trilateral member, created many such EO’s
to side-step Congress, and Congress unfortunately let him get away with it.
Well, Podesta is back: I have stated publicly on several radio programs
since his recent appointment to Senior Policy Adviser To the President that
Podesda is the most dangerous man in Washington.
Enough about Podesda. Just remember that he
is the prime mover in what I am about to reveal.
The NYT article states,
To sidestep that requirement [of a 2/3 Senate
vote], President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call
a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting
their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans
on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators
say it may be the only realistic path.
Several weeks ago, while doing some research
for my upcoming book, Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation,
a book had caught my eye and so I impulsively bought it. The title was Greening
NAFTA by Markell and Knox and published in 2003 by Stanford University
Press. According to the book, there was a supplemental agreement to NAFTA
(1992) called the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation
(NAAEC), which established the North American Commission for Environmental
Cooperation (CEC). The CEC was “the first international organization
created to address the environmental aspects of economic integration.”
(1)
I intended to put the book in my library for
some future date, but since I more recently had a five hour plane flight and
needed something to do, I hastily threw it into my briefcase on the way out
the door. On the first leg of the flight, I skimmed the book, underlining a
few things, but otherwise it generally put me to sleep. On the return
flight 10 days later, I picked it up again and flipped the pages thinking it
would be more of the same, only to fall on a chapter toward the back titled,
“Coordinating Land and Water Use in the San Pedro River Basin.” The San Pedro
River is in southern Arizona, and it just so happened that I had owned a
ranch on that same river when I first got out of college in 1968, and so I
knew the area like the back of my hand. Now I was really interested!
The San Pedro River Basin was the first instance
of CEC involvement because it was a small and relatively unimportant area,
and because the headwaters of the San Pedro River originated in Mexico,
just south of the U.S. border. Greening NAFTA explains,
Under Articles 13 and 14, the Secretariat
can accept and review citizen submissions alleging that one of the three
countries is not enforcing its existing environmental laws. (2)
In fact, the San Pedro submission (i.e., complaint)
came not from a citizen at all, but from the radical left-wing environmental
group based out of Tucson, the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity
(SCBD). The mere accusation that the area was in violation of their preconceived
ideas of normalcy was enough to set off a chain of events that changed the San
Pedro River Basin forever. Here is where the plot thickens. The authors
explain,
Article 13 can be characterized as an example
of postmodern, “soft” or “reflexive” international law because it seeks to
influence public and private behavior without the threat of the enforcement
of traditional, sanction-based “hard” law. (3)
I had only heard (obviously not understanding)
the term “soft law” before, but what is “reflexive law?” The author treats
them as synonyms. After another round of digging, I found the fountainhead
of reflexive law in the following article, Towards a Theory of Law and Societal
Development, written by a professor of international law in Sweden:
Another sociologist of law who have dealt
with legal development in stages is Günther Teubner. He has in an article
in Law and Society Review 1983 put forward a theory that the law moves from
formal to substantive law and onwards to something he calls reflexive law.
Teubner agrees with Nonet-Selznick that we have passed a stage of formal law,
which is consistent with the concept of autonomous law, and after that have
entered a stadium of material law. Teubner does think the transition from
formal to material law should be divided into two types. A “genuine” material
law which is used to realize specific, concrete values, what Teubner calls
for substantive law and another type of material law which Teubner has
labeled reflexive law. This latter legal form is characterized by constitutive
and procedural rules that put limits on legal developments without specifying
concrete material values to be realized. Teubner summarizes the characteristics
of reflexive law by putting it in relief to the formal and substantive law
as follows:
Reflexive law affects the quality of outcomes
without determining that the agreements will be reached. Unlike formal law,
it does not take prior distributions as given. Unlike Substantive law it
does not hold that certain contractual outcomes are desirable. (4) [Emphasis added]
So we see that reflexive law is just over 30
years old, and yet it has since become the principal means by which to collapse
the Rule of Law, based on actual laws, in the United States and in the Western
world. Furthermore, reflexive law starts without first determining exactly
what agreement will be reached, but pushes forward anyway to see how far the
participants can be pushed.
Hard law, which we are all familiar with,
specifies clear outcomes when it is violated. If you speed, you get a
ticket. If you commit armed robbery, you go to jail for a specified period.
This is the traditional Rule of Law upon which our Republic and Constitution
is based. Laws are created by a Legislative Branch, executed by the Executive
Branch and adjudicated by the Judicial Branch.
Greening NAFTA now explains exactly what
reflexive law entails:
Reflexive law tries to align systematically
legal rules with norms that the relevant actors will internalize. It builds
on the realization that the reasons why people actually obey law ultimately
lie outside formal adjudication and the power of the state to enforce
rules. (5)
Again, reflexive law starts out with desired
outcomes, created by unelected and unaccountable actors, for which there
are no laws. Yes, they could appeal to Congress to create legislation, as
would be required by the Constitution. At the end of the reflexive process,
described below, the actual outcomes depend on how well the stakeholders
“internalize” what is proposed. In other words, there is no actual legal
process at all, but rather a jawboning process that cons actors into
compliance.
“Information disclosure” is a principal
policy instrument of reflexive law. That is, the analysis produced is presented
with its “recommended outcomes.” Public meetings are then held to build
consensus between individual citizens and other “actors”. In the case of
the San Pedro River Basin study, the CEC enlisted the University of Arizona’s
Udall Center to hold these public meetings. In sum, there was zero consensus
among actual citizens of the area, as the book simply notes, “Public comment
was emotionally divided on the reduction of irrigated agriculture.” (6)
Really? In fact, the farmers and ranchers in the area were beyond livid, but
the real purpose of the public meetings had nothing to do with getting
their voluntary consensus. Rather, the meetings were designed to publicly
abuse them until they submitted.
The Greening NAFTA authors are very blunt
about this:
This experience reveals two powerful incentives
at work: shame and the desire to be virtuous while saving money or increasing
profit margins. In a post-Holocaust world, human rights NGOs have effectively
used shame to induce compliance with universal human rights norms. Also, voluntary
pollution reduction has been achieved when it is internally profitable for
an industry to reduce its discharges or an industry anticipates increased
regulatory or public pressure to reduce them from the disclosure, such
as through public shaming. Shaming works well with pollution, especially
toxic pollution, because it draws on deep, perhaps irrational, fears of
exposure to the risk of serious illness and an innate abhorrence of bodily
injury. (7)
What of the farmers and ranchers who refused
to be shamed into consensus during the Udall Center public hearings? After
all, they had zero input into the CEC’s study and subsequent “recommendations”,
nor were they consulted prior to the Southwest Center for Biological
Diversity’s original complaint. Well, they were simply offered other incentives
that they were helpless to refuse or refute:
Two concrete incentives that have successfully
induced landowner cooperation under the U.S. Endangered Species Act are
fear of a worse regulatory outcome and immunity from liability for
changed conditions.(8) [Emphasis added]
In the end, the farmers and ranchers succumbed
to the reflexive law process when the regulatory bullies showed up with
threats of what would happen to them if they did not buckle under to the CEC’s
demands. These actors included the Bureau of Land Management, manager of the
San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area (SPRNCA) and the U.S. Department
of the Army. Accompanying them were several NGO’s, including the Nature Conservancy
and the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity. The federal threat was
“We will bankrupt you with regulations.” The NGO threat was “We will bankrupt
you with lawsuits.”
This is “reflexive law” and it is 100 percent
antithetical to the American Republic, the Rule of Law, the U.S. Constitution
and the entirety of Western civilization. Because compliance has always
been posited as voluntary, nobody has been alarmed enough to look any further
at it. However, I will point out that almost every global imposition has
been based on the voluntary aspect of reflexive law. Agenda 21 depended upon
voluntary compliance, which is often referred to as “soft law” among its
critics, who have not perceived the deeper meaning of reflexive law. Common
Core education standards were introduced as a voluntary program. Sustainable
Development in general is always proposed to be a voluntary program. All
of these are based on reflexive law. But, once it gets its tentacles into
your personal property and local community, you will be involuntarily
squeezed until you “voluntarily” comply. There is no legal process available
to defend yourself, your property, or your rights.
Now let’s examine the NYT article mentioned
at the start of this article.
To sidestep that requirement [two-third vote
of the Senate], President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what
they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries
into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections
from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world,
but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path. (9) [Emphasis added]
Did your alarm bells ring? Obama is delivering
us into an international reflexive law treaty that has no actual legal basis
in fact, and that is why they think they are justified in ignoring the Senate.
After all, the Senate deals with “hard law” while Podesta and gang deals with
“reflexive law.” Furthermore, they will use the principal “name and shame”
policy tool of reflexive law to smoke out the resistance for public shaming.
Subsequently, from what you now know about how reflexive law is enforced in
the end, those holdouts will be offered a “deal that they cannot refuse”,
namely, much worse regulatory outcomes, international lawsuits and entanglement,
trade sanctions, etc.
The NYT elaborates further:
American negotiators are instead homing in
on a hybrid agreement — a proposal to blend legally binding conditions
from an existing 1992 treaty with new voluntary pledges. The mix would create
a deal that would update the treaty, and thus, negotiators say, not require a
new vote of ratification.
Countries would be legally required to enact
domestic climate change policies — but would voluntarily pledge to specific
levels of emissions cuts and to channel money to poor countries to help
them adapt to climate change. Countries might then be legally obligated to
report their progress toward meeting those pledges at meetings held to identify
those nations that did not meet their cuts. (10) [Emphasis added]
There is not a single shred of doubt that anything
other than reflexive law is pictured here. It spits in the face of traditional
Rule of Law that our country was founded upon and operated under until 1983
when this treasonous legal system was conceived — by a German, no less.
For all intents and purposes, reflexive law has caused the utter collapse of
Rule of Law as we know it.
Don’t even begin to think this is anything
less than blatant, for the article concludes with the frank braggadocio :
“There’s some legal and political magic to
this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the
Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to
move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold”
in the Senate. (11) [Emphasis added]
Magic, indeed: Merriam-Webster defines magic
as “the art of producing illusions by sleight of hand.”
Source: http://agenda21news.com/2014/09/reflexive-law-sustainable-development-conned-us/#more-2643
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