The Piecemeal Surrender of Sovereignty

With my schedule the way it is these days, I don’t get to read much; there just isn’t time. Every day or two, if I want to catch up on the latest outrageous and/or depressing news, I take a look at Little Green Footballs, or Drudge, or the headlines at Fox News’ website.

Yesterday, when I was catching up via Fox, the stories I ran into merged in my overworked brain — they all seemed to gather together in a gestalt evoking the disappearance of American sovereignty.

The armies of Aztlan will not fight their way up Constitution Avenue and plant the Mexican flag triumphantly atop Capitol Hill. General Petraeus is not going to meet Osama bin Laden aboard an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf to sign our articles of surrender.

No, we will surrender (and are surrendering) our sovereignty as a nation-state in little bits and pieces. A minor concession to the UN here, a clause buried deep in an appropriations bill there, a few executive orders that neglect to enforce the law or observe the Constitution…

Then one morning you wake up and say, “Hmm. I wonder where our country went?”

The big story yesterday concerned Congress’ determination to reenact the scene of the last helicopter lifting off the roof of the American embassy, but this time in a Baghdad setting. This is bad craziness, and my mind reflexively turned away from it.

But the smaller news items had their own dark little stories to tell.

A case in point concerns a sting operation that illustrates how all the Al Qaeda members who walk across our southern border can easily pick up the ingredients for a dirty bomb:

Congressional investigators set up a bogus company with only a postal box and within a month obtained a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that allowed them to buy enough radioactive material for a small “dirty bomb.”

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who will ask the NRC about the incident at a Senate hearing Thursday, said the sting operation raises concerns about terrorists obtaining such material just as easily.

Nobody at the NRC checked whether the company was legitimate and an agency official even helped the investigators fill out the application form, Coleman said in an interview Wednesday.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission acknowledged that more checking is needed in such licensing and said that since being told of the GAO sting operation it has tightened licensing procedures.

An NRC spokesman said, “New procedures are being implemented to ensure that barn doors are locked as soon as horses are stolen.” OK, I admit it: I made that one up.

…the investigators from the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm, found a way to purchase as many as 45 of the gauges and could have bought many more because they duplicated the NRC-issued license and removed the restrictions on the amount that could be purchased.

“With patience and the proper financial resources, we could have accumulated from other suppliers substantially more radioactive source material than what the two supplies initially agreed to ship to us,” says the GAO in a report prepared for Thursday’s hearing.

Our enemies are not stupid, and they are very savvy about our bureaucratic systems. The leaders of Al Qaeda are smarter than most congressmen, so if one senator can put together a scheme to game the NRC, how many mujahideen have already done the same or similar things?

And here’s the punch line:

Coleman, the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs investigations subcommittee, said the NRC “still has this good-faith assumption. The problem is there are bad-faith people out there.”

There are bad-faith people out there.

Ya think??

After six years and a congressional sting operation, the NRC has still not cottoned on to the fact that the Twin Towers were brought down by bad-faith people.

And we know who all those bad-faith people are: they’re the grandmothers and little kids of distinctly non-Middle-Eastern appearance who have to take off their shoes and empty their cosmetics cases under the vigilant scrutiny of the TSA.

But when the good-faith people stroll across the border, why, they’re handed a welcome basket of nuclear material, courtesy of the NRC.

Welcome to America! Don’t forget your Geiger counter.

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The second story is an ongoing one about shady financial dealings involving the UNDP (the United Nations Development Program). I’ve been following this story for the last few days; Fox has been doing an excellent job of investigative reporting.

It’s one of those eyelid-drooping accounts of official corruption, with all the intricate and acronym-ridden details that transnational organizations rely on to deter us from monitoring their activities:

The United Nations Development Program, already mired in controversy for its dealings with North Korea, now faces another scandal involving the people who spend its $5.2 billion annual budget — and shut down its computerized financial management system yesterday [July 10] when confronted by FOX News about their activities.

The new scandal involves UNDP’s headquarters financial unit, where checks are signed and purchase orders are approved for its sprawling operations world-wide.

Since the last week of June, FOX News has learned, investigators from the United Nations’ watchdog Office of Internal Oversight Services, or OIOS, have been probing the financial unit for evidence of hiring irregularities and violations of UNDP financial rules.

And already there are some themes similar to the six-month battle over UNDP operations in North Korea: evidence of unauthorized personnel working in sensitive positions that — according to its own regulations — should only be held by UNDP staff; payments with puzzling authorizations that total nearly $2 million; service providers whose employees may violate important UNDP rules and regulations.

FOX News has also learned from UNDP insiders that critical files may have disappeared out of reach of investigators.

This was coupled with dramatic, sudden, and secretive shut-downs of UNDP’s computers in the wake of FOX News email queries Tuesday about the situation.

Some of the money that is being distributed in these shady deals ends up in North Korean bank accounts. From the American taxpayer to the U.S. Treasury to the United Nations to the Axis of Evil — did you have any say in that process?

Does anybody think it serves our national security?

Don’t all raise your hands at once.
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And speaking of “bad-faith people” — the United Nations is an entire bad-faith organization. They might as well add it to their mission statement:

We at the UN take your tax dollars in bad faith and distribute them to Third World dictators, transnational apparatchiks, and our brother-in-law, all with the aim of smoothing the way for the worldwide dominance of Islam.

Some of the names involved in this allegedly sordid tale are Darshak Shah (evidently an Iranian), Fatima Ba, and Kemal Dervis. Is it just coincidence that these people have Muslim names? Did they just happen to be relatives of the guys who are handing out the perks?

All of this takes place under a thick blanket of secrecy and with no accountability. No democratic mechanism mars the daily functioning of the UN’s corrupt machinery.

Reform does not touch it. Reform cannot touch it.

Corruption is built into the very nature of the UN. It was injected into the transit mix and poured into the foundation for that wretched hive of scum and villainy at Turtle Bay.

Whenever we give our money to the UN, or defer to its decisions, we have surrendered another piece of our sovereignty.

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The last little tidbit from yesterday’s Gestalt News was a business story from Dallas:

Dallas-Based Retailer to Accept Pesos

Dallas-based chain Value Giant announced in a press release Thursday that their retail stores will begin accepting Mexican pesos as payment, according to MyFOXDFW.com.

The Value Giant store at Southwest Center Mall will be hosting a promotional event on Saturday to introduce the new policy.

[…]

In January, another Dallas-based business, Pizza Patron, created controversy with its announcement that it would accept the Mexican currency.

Pizza Patron has reported increased profits since the decision was made.

The last line of this article tells us all that we need to know: Pizza Patron has reported increased profits since the decision was made.

The erosion of our sovereignty does not require a grand conspiracy, with Dr. Evil waggling his little finger while he turns us all into his slave bots.

It doesn’t have to involve a secret cabal of powerful men meeting behind closed doors in Bilderberg to plan for world dominance.

It simply requires people acting in their own interests, venal people with a shortage of scruples looking to increase their profits, enhance their power, or preserve their position and perquisites.

Politicians looking to win re-election by any means. People bending the rules to help their relatives get a slice of the pie. And, above all, morally-challenged business executives looking to make a quick buck.

So if making pesos legal tender in Texas is profitable — let’s do it!

If enforcing regulations about safeguarding nuclear materials is difficult or strains the departmental budget — let’s just forget about it!

If channeling illicit funds to Kim Jong-Il’s bank accounts helps expand our little bureaucratic fiefdom — then by all means, let the money flow!

Most of the members of Congress who vote to make the Iraqis try a futile grab at the last departing American helicopter are doing so for the above reasons. They’re looking to the next election, or to repay a favor, or to grab a few moments of sound-bite time on the boob tube.

But some of them were there on the Senate floor in 1974, voting the same way on Vietnam. Some of them know better.

Yet they’re still willing to betray their country, erode its sovereignty, and consign hundreds of thousands of people to torture and death, all while they posture and preen in front of the cameras.

There’s a special place in Hell reserved for them.

It would be better for them if a millstone were hung around their necks and they were cast into the sea.