Today is a busy day at the conference. It is health care and health freedom day, and the afternoon sessions are on the ever-expanding push for electronic monitoring of all of our lives and activities. Stay with us as we bring you notes and thoughts from Freedom21–Day Two.
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Michael Chapman- President Obama and the UN Agenda to Control American Education
Michael Chapman spoke on the link between National Education Standards, National Curriculum, National Assessments and Agenda 21 Sustainable Development. He says the philosophy of education in one generation becomes the philosophy of government of the next. Children are being trained to become the bureaucrats and politicians who will be in control of the society that has outlawed economic freedom and private property.
The US re-joined UNESCO in 2003 under George W. Bush. “No Child Left Behind was simply the continuation of a program begun under Johnson’s Great Society and it simply required that states honor other educational contracts they had committed to in the past. Obama’s education plan acknowledges that education is a weapon that can be used to change the attitudes in a society.
Chapman explains what Sustainable Development claims to be. While its goals appear on the surface to be noble, it is real aim is complete control over economies, redistribution of wealth, control of population, etc. Chapman demonstrated that like bad pennies, the same nams keep turning up in administration after administration despite party monikers to keep the agenda marching along. Many N0n-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) under these men are working to influence educational efforts toward national curriculum requirements to make Agenda 21 the dominant paradigm through which students will be indoctrinated to view everything they are presented with.
The purpose of education is being converted from the teaching of facts to the transformation of society. Outcome-based education is simply social engineering designed to make good worker bees in an interdependent society without national identities. National education officials are now setting up competitions for grant money which will be awarded to states who set up and ENFORCE global standards as set by the Dept. of Education based on Sustainable Development. States who refuse to compete or cannot meet enforcement goals will receive no federal grant monies.
Current efforts are to move the educational push for globalism from the national and international level to the local level. Students are being encouraged to unplug from the “Americentric” view and go over to a “global” view. For instance, students are encouraged to ignore evidence from sources other than UN approved outlets on the subject of global warming when those UN outlets receive monies precisely for giving the UN the excuse for assuming control over energy production and use.
The US is also attempting to control the “heart attitudes” of students. In other words, they want to control their thoughts and guide them to the group-think necessary for a completely controlled society. Students are no l0nger tested to find out what they know they are assessed to determine if they can make proper judgments. In recent assessments a large majority of 9th grade students were shown to believe that it was the governments responsibility to set prices and redistribute wealth to the “poor.” This was considered to have been a successful curriculum. The Earth Summit statement atates openly that the purpose of education is to influence people’s “proper” attitudes not the teaching of facts. It has been stated that more education is dangerous because people with higher education tend to control and consume more of the earth’s resources, thus demonstrating that the real purpose is to “dumb down” education.
Under Agenda 21 schools are to be turned from education centers to job-training centers. People are being referred to as “economic capital” by educators who are being steered away from producing individual thinkers and toward producing worker drones. Public-private partnerships (economic fascism) are being exploited to implement this because employers now no longer need to spend the money necessary to train employees. Taxpayers now pay what employers used to. This is the purpose of the Workforce Investment Act.
The Obama plan is based on the idea that “environmentally related” job growth will greatly outpace private sector job growth and that is based completely on his dedication to “Cap and Trade” and other elements of Sustainable Development and Agenda 21. In other words, he intends to ram through his version of Agenda 21 and a totally planned economy ala Marxism one way or another. The effort is designed to destroy American belief in “inalienable rights” in favor of temporary rights provided by government.
This was a very compact and fast moving presentation. It was also one of the most important of the conference. I would recomment going to Freedom 21 and taking the “live feed” of this presentation (in fact, I recommend it for the whole conference). I simply cannot do this presentation justice in a “live blog” format. It is jam packed with information that, frankly, everyone who is concerned about what their child is learning at government schools should know.
The Revolution is Here
Professor Alan Quist, professor of political science at Bethany Lutheran College in Minnesota, presented an update of some significant changes happening in educational policies, many in the last three weeks, which may have a more significant long-term impact on the American way of life than even the health care debate or the cap and trade fight currently underway.
Quist notes that there is a worldwide revolution taking place, and it is centered in the effort to undermine the unique position of America and the way in which our country’s foundation was built by our founders, specifically our principles of national sovereignty and of the acknowledgment of a universal moral code . As the US was the only major country founded on ideas rather than on personalities or on power concentrations, it makes America, according to Quist, the only real bastion of freedom in the world. It is that distinction that makes the US the target of every globalist UN initiative undertaken, which he documented with UN publications which say as much.
Quist is concerned that we must win the war of ideas in order to retain our freedoms that we have because of the unique way our country has been structured. That war is being fought most fiercely on the battlefield of education, and we are losing the war. The current education modality in effect in American schools is that of “consciousness transformation”, which is the application of the principles of Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci upon our education system.
The Obama administration issued a press release on July 24th of this year, which may be the first salvo in the final battle over our educational system. The “Race to the Top” may be a race over the edge of the cliff into the total surrender of any last shreds of local control over education not just to the federal government, but to the United Nations through UNESCO. The call for “internationally benchmarked standards” and “national standards” (read federal curriculum control) to be coordinated by the already created National Assessment Governing Board will be delivered to local districts who line up to get the “stimulus” linked to the program, in essence buying total federal control over the development and delivery of curriculum. This will allow the Obama administration to get local schools to teach what they want them to teach. Now enter UNESCO.
The UN, through UNESCO, is planning a full scale tranformation of education and in fact has already written the international curriculum benchmarks (standards) which the Obama administration notes they are wanting to drive American education standards toward. In order to ensure universal coverage, the Obama administration through the NAG Board, will require successful passage of this “nationally standardized test” before any student can be eligible for college (at least no colleges that have ever taken one penny of federal money). That means that the vast majority of private school and home educated students will have to take this UNESCO-driven and aligned testing to be able to go any farther in their formal educational pursuits. In order to help this train down the track, the National Governor’s Association has issued a call for “voluntary national standards” to be adopted by this administration.
It makes one want to go back and look very closely at the recently-passed and enacted House Bill 1, Ohio’s budget bill, which made some significant changes to our education policies in Ohio. Could the revolution have already come to Ohio? We’ll have to get educated on what is happening around us and see.
Dr. Michael Coffman- Global Governance and Agenda 21
Dr. Michael Coffman, of Environmental Perspectives, Inc, is a distinguished veteran in the battle to eliminate global governance. He is an environmental scientist who was instrumental in helping convince even some of the most liberal members of the US Senate that the UN Biodiversity Treaty was simply an unacceptable assault on American sovereignty. So he’s definitely what you might refer to as an expert on UN efforts at global governance.
Dr. Coffman spoke on sustainable development. Agenda 21 is a UN effort to control all land use internationally, nationally and locally. It includes “combatting poverty,” “community development,” and “environmental protection” using groups like the Sierra Club and other “environmental” groups to gain control of these issues.
Dr. Coffman explains that Agenda 21 is designed to “protect” the environment for its own sake rather than utilizing the environment for maximum efficiency in supporting human, animal and plant life. The purpose of Agenda 21 agencies is to protect the environment from humans rather that protect it for humans, a gigantic difference.
Agenda 21 stands against the private ownership of property as a primary evil and a contributor to poverty and therefore all property rights must be removed from the control of the individual to the control of Agenda 21 controlled agencies. How can removal of private property from the hands of owners to government combat poverty? Dr. Coffman showed through a study of existing data that it will, in fact, have exactly the opposite effect. Poverty increases as property rights are destroyed and the UN has dedicated itself to destroying the existence of private property.
Dr. Coffman drew relationships between decreased economic freedom, part and parcel of private property and decreases in per capita Gross Domestic Product. Canadians and Europeans have lower GDP’s than the United States because of lower economic freedom. Especially telling is the discrepancies between former communist bloc countries and the US.
If Agenda 21 is adopted, economic freedom will simply disappear into that agenda which seeks to control the ownership and use of all private property. So-called “smart growth” which is being touted by former VP Al Gore, is a small part of Agenda 21. Local community planners love this system because it gives them complete control over the economic health of businesses in their jurisdictions. “Smart growth” communities have grossly inflated costs on commercial property in their jurisdictions vs. communities without it due to regulatory costs. This slows business growth and stifles economic activity.
Dr. Coffman explained that global warming caused by man is a complete fraud (he was in the past a climate researcher) and that fraud is being used to grab control over huge portions of the economies of huge sectors of industrialized nations. Meanwhile, very few environmental scientists agree with doom and gloom official reports of UN controlled research on the subject of man-made global warming. Dr. Coffman explained that it is much more likely that any global warming that existed (the earth has been cooling for several years) was caused by increased solar activity. He also presented evidence that Temperature only shows a very poor 44%relationship to CO2 levels.
In the meantime Agenda 21 demands huge reductions in CO2 production which will require gigantic expenditures with little hope of cost recovery. Agenda 21 has also required the locking away of huge domestic natural resources, right here in the United States, because of the flawed theory of CO2 caused global warming.
Dr. Coffman showed that the average family will spend close to $11,000 per year in new costs due to energy taxes if the “cap and trade” style parts of Agenda 21 is adopted. That on top of millions of lost jobs (as many as 7 million jobs).
The international community and global banking cartels are bringing global governance to the local level. If “cap and trade” passes what remains of our personal economic liberty will be destroyed.
Fiat Money and the Sustainable Action Plan
Freedom21 speaker Michael Shaw of Freedom Advocates spoke to the nearly 300 people in attendance on Thursday afternoon on why the current American monetary system of fractional reserve banking (often called fiat money) is being managed to drive America away from our national sovereignty and into a global form of governance.
The attack is from a plan by international groups coordinated by the United Nations known as Agenda 21. This document is driving an agenda to take away private property rights, remove individual, unalienable rights from people for “global (human) rights”, and ultimately, in the name of the environment, reduce the “burden” of human population on the planet’s ecosystem. Using the UN’s own documentation, Shaw points out that all rights would be subject to the will of the United Nations. Goodbye unalienable rights (life, liberty, property).
Shaw also discussed that the concept of “sustainable development” is the rallying focus for this radical shift in our country’s way of life.
Three areas in which this transformation is centered include land control by government (illustrated by a document graphic of the “Wildlands” UN initiative, which would put over 50% of the land area of the United States off limits to human development or habitation), the transformation of the educational system to created “global citizens”, and what Shaw referred to as the Three E’s: Equity (the idea of social justice as replacing the rule of law, and American justice system being subjugated by international law); Economy (the destruction of free enterprise and the implementation of government-private “partnerships” replacing private ownership of business and industry); and Environment (sustainable development plan, which drives all of the rest of the transformational efforts).
The American monetary system, with its inherent instability generated by the use of fractional reserve banking, has provided an artificial prop to explode the economy, and a current turnaround in the economy is allowing for a concentration of power by a totalitarian-leaning political elite. Shaw warns against trying to quickly abandon this system in favor of an honest-money (100% reserve) system, due to the significant upheaval that can occur. He also cautions against totally embracing a gold-based system, asking the question “who controls or has a quorum on the current gold reserves?”, which is a legitimate concern, and may be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, allowing large governmental players to continue to exercise control over the economy.
Shaw discussed some ideas on how to transistion the current system to an honest-money system without totally destabilizing the dollar in the process. Freedom Advocates provides materials to help people understand the issue.
The last part of his presentation involved exposing the agenda of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI). This is the organization to push Agenda 21 initiatives to the local governmental level to complete the control mechanism over property rights.
There is more to understand than we have space to discuss here, but a visit to Freedom Advocates, or ordering the video of this conference from Freedom21 is a good place to expand your informational horizon on this issues.
Keynote Address Freedom 21- G. Edward Griffin
G. Edward Griffin has spent years researching the super-secret private banking cartel known as the Federal Reserve System (FED). In his opening address on the subject of “The Creature From Jekyll Island,” Griffin reviewed the history of the creation and the purpose for the creation of the FED. Griffin makes it clear that while the meeting on Jekyll island South Carolina in 1912 was ultra-secret, the details are available to those willing to dig deep enough to find them.
He tied the creation of the FED to the emerging view of competing large corporations that the way to accomplish common goals of the industry was the formation of cartels. The FED is no different from other large business cartel except that it involves the banking industry and not just local banks but national and international banks.
So why would the privately owned and competitive banks want to partner with government? Griffin explained that the purpose is to keep the cartel from acting as an “enforcer” keeping rogue members of the cartel from breaking away from the group. He gave an example of how the dairy cartels got government to pass laws regarding minimum pricing which would require the jailing of dairies not complying with minimum pricing regulations.
What do each of the parties, government and banks, get from the agreement? Politicians get easy access to the money they need to spend on new government programs through the sale of bonds and increased national debt from banking cartels while the cartel gets the power to create “money” ex nihilo- from NOTHING! The cartel can do this because the government puts its tax revenue deposits into cartel banks thus allowing the creation of the money from nothing on the basis of “fractional reserve” banking. This obviously a perfect partnership, from political and banking perspective. It is a nightmare for the public who watches the value of its money lost through inflation as a form of taxation.
Griffin explained that this is the reason for the gigantic bank bailouts of this and last years. Politicians simply cannot let the system collapse which would actually be in the best interest of the public in general because it would require a complete re-start of the system and the exposure of the participants. Whether or not the economy lapses into inflation or deflation is irrelevent, according to Griffin, because slaves really don’t care what type of methods are used to keep them in economic bondage, they simply want out of the situation but have no control any longer over it. Griffin explained that as long as we continue to accept the existence of government subsidies and handouts the deeper into that bondage we will sink. Only whe the American public demands an end to government intrusion into their lives including demanding econonomic freedom and independence.
As a postscript Griffin said that it was imperative that we end the FED!
The Growing American Tyranny and how to stop it
This is the theme of the Freedom21 conference. Conference host Tom DeWeese of the American Policy Center and Amanda Teegarden of Operation Information opened the event with a welcome and a short discussion of why, in our era of nationalized industry, environmental radicalism, and the ever-growing loss of Constitutional freedoms, it is more important than ever to understand and learn how to “connect-the-dots” between all of the seemingly unconnected efforts of the progressive left.
Whether it be education, environmentalism, our financial security, invasive governmental programs, or property rights, each issue has roots in a larger program to eradicate American sovereignty and our way of life. The speakers at this conference each have decades of experience in their subject areas, and thankfully, some wins under their belts against the creeping totalitarian zeitgeist.
Our vice-chairman and I will be bringing you speaker by speaker summaries of their information for your education and action.
Live from Freedom 21 National Conference
The Institute for Principled Policy is pleased to be a co-sponsor of the 10th annual Freedom 21 national conference, being held this year in Oklahoma City, OK. We have a front row (exhibitor) seat to all of the conference, and will be blogging on all of the very important information that will be shared during the next three days.
I want to give you a flavor of what to expect as we report this event. This is from the Freedom 21 agenda: “The people who attend this conference share a common desire to advance the principles of freedom–to all people–for all time. We work through our various organizations, through coalitions, and through cooperative campaigns, such as Freedom21, to better coordinate our efforts to prevail over those people who continue to promote, and advance policies that empower government to ignore the principles of freedom, in pursuit of an unachievable social and environmental utopia.
Freedom cannot be sustained in the presence of “sustainable development.” The two concepts are mutually exclusive. Sustainable development can exist only when people are controlled by government; freedom can exist only when government is controlled by the people.
We hope this conference will provide the knowledge, information, and inspiration for each of us to be more effective in our efforts to advance the principles of freedom—in all that we do.”
The conference is for folks to connect the dots and figure out just what is wrong in our country, and what to do to make it right again. Stay tuned…it’s going to be a rollercoaster ride!