Monckton fearmongers about “world government,” communists

Monckton claims draft climate change treaty proposal will create “world government.” From a presentation Monckton gave in St. Paul, Minnesota:

MONCKTON: I have read that treaty, and what it says is this: that a world government is going to be created. The word government actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the west to Third World countries in satisfaction of what is called coyly a climate debt, because we've been burning CO2 and they haven't, and we've been screwing up the climate. We haven't been screwing up the climate, but that's the line. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement. [10/14/09]

Monckton claims treaty is the work of communists. Monckton continued:

MONCKTON: How many of you think that the word election or democracy or vote or ballot occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn't appear once. So at last the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left within a year because they'd captured it, now the apotheosis is at hand.

They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He's going to sign. He'll sign anything. He's a Nobel Peace laureate -- of course he'll sign. And the trouble is this. If that treaty is signed, your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution. And you can't resile from that treaty unless you get the agreement of all the other states' parties. [10/14/09]

Monckton refers to language from climate change negotiating text -- not the actual treaty -- that does not say national sovereignty will be displaced. Monckton claimed to “have read that treaty.” In fact, there is no final language that has been released, as the negotiations over such language will occur in Copenhagen in December. The “ad hoc working group on long-term cooperative action” under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has released “revised negotiating text” of several alternate proposals discussed by nations at the negotiating table. The language to which Monckton referred, the beginning of paragraph 38 of the “revised negotiating text,” says: “The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following: The government will be ruled by the COP [Conference Of the Parties] with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate.” It does not say that the institutions set up by the agreement will abrogate U.S. sovereignty.

Monckton's claim that Constitution says that treaties have “precedence over” Constitution is false. Monckton claimed of the agreement being negotiated, "[Y]our Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution." In fact, the Constitution does not say that treaties “take precedence over” the Constitution. Rather, it says: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” In 1957, a Supreme Court plurality opinion stated that "[t]his Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty":

This Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty. For example, in Geofroy v. Riggs, 133 U.S. 258, 267, it declared:

“The treaty power, as expressed in the Constitution, is in terms unlimited except by those restraints which are found in that instrument against the action of the government or of its departments, and those arising from the nature of the government itself and of that of the States. It would not be contended that it extends so far as to authorize what the Constitution forbids, or a change in the character of the government or in that of one of the States, or a cession of any portion of the territory of the latter, without its consent.”

Monckton baselessly claimed that U.S. could not withdraw from proposed agreement. During Monckton's St. Paul presentation, he said that “you can't resile from that treaty unless you get the agreement of all the other states' parties.” Similarly, while being interviewed by Beck, Monckton said, "[Y]ou can't resile from a treaty. And once you've signed a treaty, the only way you can get out of that officially is by getting all the other states' parties to agree to let you go." In fact, the “revised negotiating text” is silent on the methods for nations to withdraw once they have signed it. But the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, pursuant to which the current negotiations are being conducted, specifically allows unilateral withdrawal from the framework convention and any protocols added to the convention:

1. At any time after three years from the date on which the Convention has entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from the Convention by giving written notification to the Depositary.

2. Any such withdrawal shall take effect upon expiry of one year from the date of receipt by the Depositary of the notification of withdrawal, or on such later date as may be specified in the notification of withdrawal.

3. Any Party that withdraws from the Convention shall be considered as also having withdrawn from any protocol to which it is a Party.

Monckton has previously pushed debunked, dubious claims

Monckton has previously reportedly pushed debunked global cooling theme. In an April 23 post, global warming skeptic Marc Morano wrote that Monckton argues that “there has been no 'global warming' for at least a decade” and that “there has been seven and a half years' global cooling.” Media Matters for America has noted that climate experts reject the idea that the relatively cooler global average temperatures in several of the past 10 years are any indication that global warming is slowing or does not exist.

Monckton reportedly pushed dubious claim that Gore “chickened out” from facing him during congressional hearing. Morano also wrote that Monckton told him that “House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday.” Morano further wrote that on April 23, Monckton “was informed that the former Vice-President had 'chickened out' and there would be no joint appearance.” However, witnesses who disagree with Gore on the cap-and-trade legislation that was the subject of the hearing, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), also testified at the hearing.

RealClimate.com: Monckton caught in “deliberate manipulation.” The blog RealClimate.com has taken issue with a letter Monckton wrote to New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt in April, saying that Monckton “just made up the IPCC projection curves” regarding predicted global temperature changes and compared Monckton's claimed IPCC projections with the actual IPCC projections, which showed a much smaller predicted change in temperature. RealClimate has also taken issue with other work that Monckton has done.

Media conservatives hype Monckton's global government claims

Beck interviews Monckton to advance his “communist world government” claims. Beck interviewed Monckton on the October 19 edition of his radio show. During the interview, Monckton echoed the world government claim he made in St. Paul, saying of the climate change negotiations, “So what we are talking about is a fledgling world government, and because it's not elected, it's essentially a communist world government.” During the interview, Beck also fearmongered about the loss of U.S. sovereignty, saying: “Well, I do know that if you look at the transnationalism and the transnationalists that, you know, The New York Times has denied, that, you know, that Barack Obama is surrounding himself with, you know, this is the direction they're going.”

Limbaugh: Monckton is a “voice of sanity.” Introducing an audio clip of Monckton's comments in St. Paul, Limbaugh stated: “The hysteria on the left on virtually everything is all over the place. So you got to hear a voice of sanity in this. Last Wednesday, St. Paul, Minnesota, during a presentation at Bethel University, a portion of remarks made by Lord Christopher Monckton regarding the United Nations' climate change treaty.” Later, introducing audio of Monckton's claim that “communists ... piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement,” Limbaugh said, “Way back a long time ago I said to you that the -- it was after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall came down -- I said, folks, the environmental movement, radical environmentalism is the new home of displaced communists.” Limbaugh later added: “And so, by Jove, very, very serious stuff here. Lord Monckton desperately trying to be heard. Well, unless something happens we are screwed, yes. That's what he's saying.”

Radio host Jim Quinn also leaps on Monckton global government bandwagon. On his radio show, The War Room, Jim Quinn stated of Monckton's remarks: “It is not just a climate treaty. It creates a one-world government and annihilates American sovereignty and constitutional authority. That is what's up for grabs in December in Copenhagen. It's not just about carbon. It's not just about the Mother Earth. It is about a global government.”

Malkin: “Lord Monckton's warning to America” Conservative commentator and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin posted an excerpt and transcript from Monckton's St. Paul comments on her website under the headline: “Lord Monckton's warning to America.”

Conservative media have previously advanced global government paranoia

Beck on Obama administration official Harold Koh's views: “Forget about your sovereignty.” On his radio show, Beck stated that Koh “believes in internationalism. He believes that we should not have a Constitution, that the Constitution is trumped by international law.” Koh has also repeatedly been a target of false smears by Beck's Fox News colleague Sean Hannity. Beck later added: "[T]he idea is, have our courts answer to international law. Forget about the Constitution. Forget about your sovereignty." [4/1/09]

Dobbs claims Obama “will be pushing for a brand new world order” at G-20. Lou Dobbs said, "[A]t this so-called G-20 summit, President Obama will be pushing for a brand new world order. Wow. That's just what we need, a president who's proved himself to be so adroit so far will be pushing for not only a new fundamental transformation of America, but for a new world order. He'll be pushing at the G-20 for a new world economic regulation structure to ensure what he calls balanced growth." [9/22/09]

Morris: Obama “effectively ceded massive areas of American sovereignty,” repealed Declaration of Independence at G-20. In his April 6 column, Dick Morris claimed of a G-20 communiqué establishing a new Financial Stability Board (FSB), “On April 2, 2009, the work of July 4, 1776 was nullified at the meeting of the G-20 in London” -- an assertion Morris repeated on that night's edition of Fox News' Hannity, when he asserted, “Basically, from an economic standpoint, [Obama's] repealed [the Declaration of Independence]. We no longer have economic sovereignty.” Additionally, on Fox News' America's Newsroom, Morris claimed of the FSB, "[I]t effectively ceded massive areas of American sovereignty to Europe and to the global economic mavens." Morris later claimed that “this literally is a massive surrender of sovereignty to an essentially European body.” [4/3/09]

Crowley: Obama ceded “economic sovereignty” at G-20. On The McLaughlin Group, regular panelist Monica Crowley claimed the G-20 communiqué is the “the first step to abrogating American sovereignty here.” [4/5/09]

Fox Nation headline: “Scary! Obama nominee wants one world order.” The Fox Nation linked to a March 30 New York Post article using the headline, “Scary! Obama nominee wants one world order.” In the article, Post reporter Meghan Clyne asserted that Koh is a “fan of 'transnational legal process,' arguing that the distinctions between US and international law should vanish.” [3/30/09]

Cliff Kincaid on Savage: Obama “push[ing]” for “new world order.” On The Savage Nation, Accuracy in Media editor Cliff Kincaid asserted that Obama's nomination of Koh as legal adviser to the State Department “is beyond worrisome. This is terrifying that -- the thought of this kind of guy with these views becoming the top lawyer at the State Department. But seen in the light of the some of the other appointments Obama has made, it's consistent with his push, which is now out in the open, for the U.S. to become really subsumed into this, quote, 'new world order' that everybody keeps talking about, in which our sovereignty has been sacrificed for the, quote, 'greater good.' ” [4/6/09]

Fox News contributor Payne: “I think that we are heading toward a one-world sort of government. I think Obama probably likes that.” On Fox News' Fox & Friends, Fox News contributor Charles Payne asserted: “Listen, one day I think that we are heading toward a one-world sort of government. I think Obama probably likes that.” [3/24/09]

Fox News guest Alex Jones: “I've never seen an awakening this big. ... Michael Savage is talking about how he thinks, you know, Obama may stage crises to bring in martial law.” In an interview with Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano FoxNews.com's online program Freedom Watch, syndicated radio host Alex Jones stated that he was talking about “how hundreds of mainstream news articles a week are saying there is a new world order, a global government. It will be run by the very banks that are collapsing society by design, and we will pay carbon taxes to them.” He later stated: "[T]he good news is, I've never seen an awakening this big. And I'm seeing, you know, people like Glenn Beck talk about the new world order on Fox. I'm seeing you talk about it for years before him. We're seeing [CNN host] Lou Dobbs talk about it. We're seeing, you know, mainline talk-show hosts -- [radio host Rush] Limbaugh is even talking about global government now. [Radio host] Michael Savage is talking about how he thinks, you know, Obama may stage crises to bring in martial law." [3/18/09]

Transcripts

From the October 19 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Glenn Beck Program:

MONCKTON: Now the extraordinary thing about the draft treaty, which I have now seen, is that it goes far further than anything that was planned at any previous session. What they're now going to do is to set up a world government -- and the word government actually appears in the treaty -- but, you heard it here first, the word election, democracy, vote, or ballot does not appear anywhere in the 200 pages of the treaty. It is going to be a dictatorship.

BECK: All right, you're talking -- hold on just a second. You're talking about paragraph 36 and 38 from what I understand.

MONCKTON: That's absolutely right --

BECK: Tell me --

MONCKTON: -- the word government appears in there.

BECK: Can you -- do you have it in front of you?

MONCKTON: I don't have it in front of me, but I can remember it quite well.

BECK: All right, of course you can.

MONCKTON: And what it says is this: there will be a new vast, interlocking bureaucratic entity created at huge expense to you and me, and that bureaucratic entity will have three purposes, the first of which is twice stated to be government. The second purpose is stated to be the transfer or redistribution of wealth from countries like ours to Third World countries in reparation for what is described in the treaty as climate debt. In other words, we've been burning CO2 in huge quantities, they say that's altering the climate. Actually, we now know it isn't, but they say it is, and therefore they say we have to pay, get this, anything up to 2 percent of GDP every year to poorer countries.

Now the third element in the tasks of this new government will be what is called an enforcement. In other words, the power of the new government to make democratic countries hand over their cash whether they like it or not, but more than that there will be an interlocking series of so-called technical panels which will have the right directly to intervene in the economies and in the environments of individual countries over the heads of their elected government. So what we are talking about is a fledgling world government, and because it's not elected, it's essentially a communist world government.

[...]

BECK: Well, now here's what -- now this is the global climate treaty that we are expected to sign, right?

MONCKTON: That's right.

BECK: And this is something that the president has made a priority, et cetera, et cetera.

MONCKTON: That's right, the danger is that now that he's been given his Nobel Peace Prize, if he goes to Copenhagen with Al Gore at one elbow and Jim Hansen at the other in front of the keening zombies in their tens of thousands, he will sign anything. And he won't read the small print. Nobody seems to have read the small print until I picked it up.

It's quite extraordinary that this has got as far as it has with nobody noticing that what they're going to do is what Morris Strong, who originally -- he's a Canadian bureaucrat who originally set up the structure of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change some twenty-odd years ago. He has always wanted this to transmogrify into a world government, and he is now going to get his way far faster than any of us had realized unless we can stop him, and we only have weeks to stop this.

BECK: Well, I do know that if you look at the transnationalism and the transnationalists that, you know, The New York Times has denied, that, you know, that Barack Obama is surrounding himself with --

MONCKTON: Yes.

BECK: -- you know, this is the direction they're going. Now here's the -- here's the concern.

MONCKTON: Yes.

BECK: The concern is that President Obama would sign this, and then it would be ratified by Congress.

MONCKTON: Well, now I'll tell you what has to happen. Under your Constitution, I think it's Article 6, there has to be a two-thirds majority of the Senate in order to ratify it. Now I don't think that he'll get a two-thirds majority in the Senate. I'm reasonably sure there are enough senators, including Blue Dog senators, who will realize that if they hand over your democracy and your Constitution and make it subject to this new treaty, because that's how your Constitution works. Article 6 taken with the Vienna Convention on the interpretation of international treaties means that an international treaty prevails over your Constitution.

And so if he signs away your Constitution, he is signing away for the first time your democracy to an alien bureaucratic entity that you don't elect. That's the danger. Now if he can't get it through the Senate, during his election campaign he and his staff began saying that they didn't like that part of the Constitution that meant they had to get two-thirds of the Senate to agree. And the way that he is proposing to do it -- and this was announced during his campaign -- is to get a simple majority in both houses, which he can, of course, get, because he has a reasonable majority in both houses, so that the treaty will be enacted into your domestic law.

Now that is slightly less drastic than if the Senate were to ratify it, because at least, in theory, you can repeal a domestic law whereas you can't resile from a treaty. And once you've signed a treaty, the only way you can get out of that officially is by getting all the other states' parties to agree to let you go. And since you'll be the country that's paying most in the way of reparations, there's no way they will let you go once they've got you into it.

From the October 19 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: So now we're confused again. We've had other environmentalist wackos saying it's too late. We can't do anything anyway, but we're still going to do it. The hysteria on the left on virtually everything is all over the place. So you got to hear a voice of sanity in this. Last Wednesday, St. Paul, Minnesota, during a presentation at Bethel University, a portion of remarks made by Lord Christopher Monckton regarding the United Nations' climate change treaty.

MONCKTON [audio clip]: I have read that treaty, and what it says is this: that a world government is going to be created. The word government actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the west to Third World countries in satisfaction of what is called coyly a climate debt, because we've been burning CO2 and they haven't, and we've been screwing up the climate. We haven't been screwing up the climate, but that's the line. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

LIMBAUGH: Way back a long time ago I said to you that the -- it was after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall came down -- I said, folks, the environmental movement, radical environmentalism is the new home of displaced communists. Here's Lord Monckton.

MONCKTON [audio clip]: How many of you think that the word election or democracy or vote or ballot occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn't appear once. So at last the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left within a year because they'd captured it, now the apotheosis is at hand.

They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He's going to sign. He'll sign anything. He's a Nobel Peace laureate -- of course he'll sign.

LIMBAUGH: That's Lord Monckton, by the way. This is last Wednesday at St. Paul, Minnesota. Here is the final sound bite.

MONCKTON [audio clip]: So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom for the world. It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your prosperity away forever, and neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back again. That is how serious it is.

LIMBAUGH: Lord Christopher Monckton, who has repeatedly asked, by the way, to debate Al Gore on the whole subject, and Al Gore refuses. Al won't even take questions about it. Never ever, ever get it back, because -- did you see the first bite? He said regardless who we elect in the future we'll never ever, ever get it back, because if the climate treaty is passed we'll be living under a world government.

And the idea is a transfer of wealth from countries like ours to the Third World to make even how we have polluted the planet all these years and they have not. And so, by Jove, very, very serious stuff here. Lord Monckton desperately trying to be heard. Well, unless something happens we are screwed, yes. That's what he's saying.

From the October 19 edition of Clear Channel's The War Room with Quinn & Rose:

QUINN: At 8:36 this morning, I am going to play a four-minute speech from Lord Monckton, former science adviser to [former British Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher. He has read the Copenhagen bill. It is not just a climate treaty. It creates a one-world government and annihilates American sovereignty and constitutional authority. That is what's up for grabs in December in Copenhagen. It's not just about carbon. It's not just about the Mother Earth. It is about a global government. Wait until you hear this speech.