Regrettably, we live in an age where police raids are on the rise, modern police surveillance is more invasive than ever, and the government has unfettered access into the most private matters of our lives. Thus, the reality we must contend with is one in which the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees that we are to be free from unreasonable searches or seizures by the government, is on life support. Yet those who drafted the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, considered freedom in one’s home the most essential liberty.
Deeply concerned about preserving personal liberty and property rights, the Framers believed those rights to be of paramount importance—even over public safety. In such an environment, citizens were seen as equals with law enforcement officials, and authorities were almost never permitted to enter one’s home without permission. Modern SWAT team raids where the police crash into the homes of Americans would have been seen as the essence of tyranny. Indeed, it was not uncommon for police officers to be held personally liable for trespass when they wrongfully invaded a citizen’s home. And unlike today, early Americans could resist arrest when a police officer tried to restrain them without a proper justification or warrant—which they had a right to read before being arrested.
This clear demand for a right to privacy stemmed from a deep-seated distrust of those in power and their potential to abuse the authority entrusted to them by the citizenry. Over time, however, that instinctive distrust of government has given way to a false sense of security rooted in the belief that the government is looking out for our best interests. Thus, as our complacency about the need to actively and personally defend our freedoms has increased, the government’s commitment to respecting our Fourth Amendment rights has dissipated.
To our detriment, Americans today seem more attuned to what’s happening on trendy reality TV shows than the goings-on in their federal government. Distracted by their gadgets and caught up in their virtual communities, many Americans have failed to notice what’s happening in their own backyards—with the transformation of law enforcement officials into paramilitary police forces being one of the most alarming developments in recent years. As Balko points out, “Today, every decent-sized city has a SWAT team, and most have several. Even absurdly small towns like Eufaula, Ala., (population 13,463) have them… Where their purpose once was to defuse an already violent situation, today they break into homes to look for illicit drugs, creating violence and confrontation where there was none before.”

While we’re fortunate to have many law enforcement agents who strive to honor and respect the Constitution, to our misfortune, we have failed to raise objections to the mixed messages being sent when those same agents are sent to patrol our communities dressed as storm troopers, equipped with invasive technologies and sophisticated weaponry, and authorized to use military tactics in their efforts to uphold the law. In fact, even the equipment used by police during routine traffic stops, such as sophisticated flashlights containing super-sensitive detectors that sense the contents of your breath, has contributed to the steady erosion of our freedoms. Despite our having a constitutional right to privacy and to not be subjected to unreasonable searches, police conspicuously situate these devices in front of our faces and into our personal space, and we are left with no say in the matter.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court has been a willing accomplice in this depreciation of our essential liberties, handing down rulings that provide the government with endless ways to pervert the letter and spirit of the Fourth Amendment. Such rulings, issued in the so-called name of police safety, national security and citizen protection, have given rise to language the Framers never foresaw nor intended, such as protective sweep exception, hot pursuit exception, inevitable discovery exception and good faith exception, to name just a few.

Yet there are some things which no decent human being can remain silent about. Americans should be outraged when police officers use tasers on defenseless children, autistic teenagers, pregnant women and senior citizens— all incidents that have been in the news in recent years. We should be up in arms over what happened to young Aiyana in Detroit. No family should have to suffer the loss of a child because police officers got carried away during a SWAT team raid. And no community should feel threatened by the presence of law enforcement officials patrolling their streets.
Where does this leave us? Having largely relinquished control over our liberties and our lives to the government, we have come to something of an impasse in terms of our freedoms. The only way forward, especially if we are to revive our ailing Fourth Amendment and restore the balance of power between citizen and government, is to reclaim our rightful sovereignty over our possessions and our lives. That is easier said than done, however. As history shows, power, once handed over to the government, is not easily wrested back.
Constitutional Attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of the Rutherford Institute. (www. rutherford,org)

Statement Introducing the Private Option Health Care Act
May 27, 2010

Madam Speaker, I rise to introduce the Private Option Health Care Act. This bill places individuals back in control of health care by replacing the recently passed tax-spend-and-regulate health care law with reforms designed to restore a free market health care system.
The major problems with American health care are rooted in government policies that encourage excessive relianceonthird-partypayers.Theexcessiverelianceonthird-partypayersremovesincentivesforindividualpatients to concern themselves with health care costs. Laws and policies promoting Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) resulted from a desperate attempt to control spiraling costs. However, instead of promoting an efficient health care system, HMOs further took control over health care away from patients and physicians. Furthermore, the third-party payer system creates a two-tier health care system where people whose employers can afford to offer “Cadillac” plans have access to top quality health care, while people unable to obtain health insurance from their employers face obstacles in obtaining quality health care.

The Private Option Health Care Act gives control of health care back into the hands of individuals through tax credits and tax deductions, improving Health Savings Accounts and Flexible Savings Accounts. Specifically, the bill:
A. Provides all Americans with a tax credit for 100% of health care expenses. The tax credit is fully refundable against both income and payroll taxes; B. Allows individuals to roll over unused amounts in cafeteria plans and Flexible Savings Accounts (FSA); C. Provides a tax credit for premiums for high-deductible insurance policies connected with a Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and allows seniors to use funds in HSAs to pay for medigap policies;
D. Repeals the 7.5% threshold for the deduction of medical expenses, thus making all medical expenses tax deductible.

This bill also creates a competitive market in heath insurance. It achieves this goal by exercising Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause to allow individuals to purchase health insurance across state lines. The near-monopoly position many health insurers have in many states and the high prices and inefficiencies that result, is a direct result of state laws limiting people’s ability to buy health insurance that meets their needs, instead of a health insurance plan that meets what state legislators, special interests, and health insurance lobbyists think they should have. Ending this ban will create a truly competitive marketplace in health insurance and give insurance companies more incentive to offer quality insurance at affordable prices.

The Private Option Health Care Act also provides an effective means of ensuring that people harmed during medical treatment receive fair compensation while reducing the burden of costly malpractice litigation on the health care system. The bill achieves this goal by providing a tax credit for negative outcomes insurance purchased before medical treatment. The insurance will provide compensation for any negative outcomes of the medical treatment. Patients can receive this insurance without having to go through lengthy litigation and without having to give away a large portion of their awards to trial lawyers.
Finally, the Private Option Health Care Act also lowers the prices of prescription drugs by reducing barriers to the importation of Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved pharmaceuticals. Under my bill, anyone wishing to import a drug simply submits an application to the FDA, which then must approve the drug unless the FDA finds the drug is either not approved for use in the United States or is adulterated or misbranded. This process will make safe and available imported medicines affordable to millions of Americans. Letting the free market workis the best means of lowering the cost of prescription drugs.
Madam Speaker, the Private Option Health Care Act allows Congress to correct the mistake it made last month by replacing the new health care law with health care measures that give control to health care to individuals, instead of the federal government and politically-influential corporations.

I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

Action to Take:
We must not let the healthcare issue go away until ObamaCare is repealed. Congress must continue to feel the heat.
Urge our congressman to co-sponsor H.R. 5444. And demand a floor vote on this vital bill. ObamaCare will destroy what’s left of the U.S. economy.
Capitol switchboard: 202-224-3121. A switchboard operator will connect you with the House office you request. Call them all!!

Next to the huge international hoax about global warming allegedly caused by carbon dioxide, the biggest lie being told to Americans these days is that we are “addicted” to oil and that we must convert our economy and society away from its use.
The first time I recall hearing this was during George W. Bush’s 2006 State of the Union Speech and, frankly, I was astounded to hear it from the son of a former President who made his fortune in oil. The latest to repeat the lie is President Barack Obama, but he is allied with environmental organizations that are anti-energy no matter what form it takes.

Americans and everyone else around the world are not “addicted” to oil or other energy sources such as coal and natural gas. They are used to maintain and enhance modern life.

Data from 2006 makes it abundantly clear that 85.5% of the electricity we use comes from carbon-based fuels. Nuclear and hydroelectric energy add over 20% of the rest. All that magical “clean” energy, solar and wind, provides 3% or less of the electricity the nation requires.

As Robert Bryce, an editor of Energy Tribune and author of several books on energy, says, “The simple unavoidable truth is that we humans cannot (and) will not quit using oil. If oil did not exist, we’d have to invent it. No other substance can compare to oil in terms of energy density, flexibility, cost, and convenience.

“About 95% of the world’s transportation fuel comes from oil,” notes Bryce. “Thus, without oil, there is no commerce.” No commerce, no world economy.

Americans are being force-fed lies about energy and the worst of them are about “clean energy research and development.” There are no viable or sensible substitutes for oil, coal, and natural gas.

According to an October 28, 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service “U.S. proven reserves of oil total 21.3 billion barrels and reserves of natural gas are 237.7 trillion cubic feet. Undiscovered technically recoverable oil in the United States is 145.4 billion barrels, and undiscovered technically recoverable natural gas is 1.162.7 trillion cubic feet. The demonstrated reserve base for coal is 489 billion short tons, of which 262 billion short tons are considered technically recoverable.”

So why has the Obama administration announced a shutdown of the auctioning of oil leases? Why have several administrations refused to allow access to the oil beneath the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve or the potentially vast offshore Alaskan reserves?

If the ban on offshore drilling for oil and natural gas on 85% of the U.S. offshore regions is maintained, the nation will be forced to rely on foreign sources, many of whom are unfriendly, even hostile.

Think about this. Beneath a 1.5 million acre tract on the North Slope of Alaska there are an estimated three to nine billion barrels of recoverable oil. In 1987 the Department of Interior recommended development. There has been none because a succession of Congresses has refused to allow drilling on what would amount to a postage-size part of the vast Coastal Plain.

The U.S. must import the vast percentage of the oil we require, some 60%, and yet Americans are being denied the right to access, extract, refine and use the oil we have or look for more. Oil companies are routinely demonized despite the billions they must spend in exploration, extraction and refining.
Are we that stupid?

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, is promising to bring the Cap-and-Trade bill, an energy tax bill now called a “climate” bill, to a vote in July. Studies suggest its passage would destroy more than two million jobs nationwide.

One analysis projected that the bill would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) by $9.4 trillion over the next 25 years. The U.S. doesn’t have 25 years. Our current national debt is $13 trillion and our GDP is $12.9 trillion. Do the math!

Likewise, raising taxes on oil and natural gas companies would reduce the amount of private capital available for vitally needed investments to access our energy resources.

The big, awful oil and natural gas industry has already invested $58.4 billion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and there is no need to reduce carbon dioxide. It plays no role whatever in a global warming that is NOT happening. The Earth has been cooling for a decade.

Significantly, an increase in carbon dioxide would yield more crops and healthier expanded forests.
Finally, let’s get a grip on reality. As bad as the leak has become, there is just one oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico leaking oil. It’s out there because environmentalists and government policies have forced oil companies to explore and drill in hazardous places.
The rest of the rigs, several hundreds, are still safely pumping oil. The BP Deepwater Horizon rig will be capped eventually. That problem will end. The spilled oil will be worked on by the forces of nature, dispersing and evaporating it. In five years, just like the Valdez spill, there will be no evidence of the spill.

The real “addiction” that threatens the United States is a Congress that will not stop borrowing and spending an unsustainable amount of money on programs that should have been abandoned or adjusted years ago.

nHealth in Richmond, Virginia, which sells HSA/high deductible to employers, will not sell any new HSA plans after June 1, 2010, and will terminate all its customers by December 31, 2010, because it cannot survive ObamaCare’s mandates and regulations.

Steamline Timberworks of Richmond, Virginia, saved more than $50,000—28 percent of its health care bill—by switching to nHealth’s health insurance. Because of ObamaCare, this company will lose its current health insurance plan, and its employees will have to switch insurance carriers and may lose access to their current doctors.

Also, American National Insurance Company announced that two subsidiaries—American National Life Insurance Company of Texas and Standard Life and Accident Insurance Company—won’t sell health insurance to people in the individual market after June 30, 2010, because of ObamaCare.

Source: House Republican Conference, Contact: Brian McManus – 202-225-2045

Barack Obama just put out the order to his administration to find places to cut the budget. They may save a million or two, but one can make Vegas odds that nothing significant will come of it. It’s just not possible to stop government spending. It’s not in their genes.

Case in point. While the nation reels from massive deficits and the president rails against bonuses paid to bailed out executives, he should be kicking some government butt over the incredible waste that was just thrown at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Gitmo).

Gitmo, of course, is the location of the infamous detention center for suspected terrorists. Obama has moved many of the prisoners out to Illinois. But in the meantime, the government has just spent over $500 million to renovate the whole place. That includes $188,000 for a sign that reads “Welcome Aboard,” to great visitors as they arrive. The Pentagon also spent $683,000 to renovate a café that sells ice cream and Starbucks coffee. $773,000 to remodel a KFC/Taco Bell restaurant. $207,000 was spent on a swimming pool. $7.3 million on a top-of-the-line baseball diamond and artificial turf for the football field. $206,000 for a go-kart track that is now not used. $249,000 for a volleyball court that stands empty.

In addition, the spending splurge covered $114 million to renovate housing (including 2.2 million for a building that is no longer used); $144 million for new roads; and $219 million to improve the detention facility that Obama is moving to shut down.
Unused, unneeded, empty, but in perfect condition. Meanwhile, the American people suffer under the massive weight of higher taxes, destruction of American jobs, and an Administration that keeps promising change. Bull. Big government means waste, corruption and suffering. Nothing more.

Al Gore stumps the nation spreading the virtues of going green, thrilled at the prospects of new industries that will crop up in the process. Of course, green jobs are the center of the scheme to enforce sustainable development. “We can shut down those old industries and yet be prosperous in the future as we protect the environment,” goes the mantra.

A large part of Obama’s $786 billion stimulus bill was devoted to green or renewable energy projects. Obama and his environmentalist hordes convinced Congress that the money would be used to create an army of home weatherizers, wind-turbine factory jobs and other employment opportunities that would help put to work the nearly 8 million people who have lost their jobs during the recession. “We know the jobs of the 21st century will be created in developing alternative energy,” Obama proudly proclaimed. This, of coursed, from a man who doesn’t know the difference between price and earnings or overhead and profit. Well, he doesn’t know shineola about the economy and job creation either.

Economic lesson number one: Government regulations do not create jobs. Private industry serving the wants and needs of the consumers create jobs. Period.

The reality is that after massive spending programs, not just from the stimulus program, but from energy bills, development bills, and economic packages over the past several years, all of which have poured billions into the “green” industries, alternative energy and the jobs that are supposed to go with them simply have not materialized.
The fact is, no more than 100,000 jobs have been created, economists say, and the prospects are for only modest growth for years to come. Jobs that have been created are for highly educated workers involved in basically experimental industries. There is virtually nothing for the lower educated, manual laborers who so desperately need work.

The answer for them has been the destruction of American industry jobs in the name of protecting the environment as the rustbelt grows. Those jobs have been deported to foreign nations. Of course, that does nothing to protect the environment, as the industries are just relocated. But, as with all “green” claptrap, the reality is destruction of our very prosperous way of life and the redistribution of our wealth to somebody else. Thanks Obama. Good job.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is planning an assault on salt. The government intends to set regulations to limit the use of salt intake by Americans. The regulations would set “legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products.”
Of course, the excuse is “protection” of the health of the American people. Say the feds, limiting salt would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease.

In a complicated process, the FDA would analyze the salt in spaghetti sauces, breads, and thousands of other products that make up the $600 billion food and beverage market.

The main culprits behind the effort to have the FDA regulate salt is the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which has led a fight against salt for 30 years. CSPI wants the FDA to revoke salt’s GRAS statue (Generally Recognized As Safe).
CSPI is the undisputed leader among the food police. It has launched an all out campaign against the eating habits of Americans, attacking Italian, Chinese, fast foods, soft drinks, French fries, extra cheese pizza, and almost anything else that tastes good. You might guess that Michael Jacobson, the head of CSPI, is a rabid Vegetarian, horrified by nearly anything man chooses to eat.

CSPI calls for taxes on foods with fat, sugar, and sodium (called the “Twinkie Tax”). They want government-mandated warning labels on high-fat, high-calorie menu items. They advocate that broadcasters be required to give free “equal time” to government-advertisements of “healthy” foods every time Burger King runs an ad. They want warning labels of contamination from fresh, unpasteurized juices. And they constantly threaten restaurants with legal action over nutritional labeling. CSPI opposed consumption of animals (no meat or fish) and all of their byproducts, including cheese, milk, and ice cream. They oppose any consumption of alcohol, calling for hefty increases in beer taxes, even restrictions on adults, and poster size warning labels in restaurants.    All of that action, of course, serves only to drive up the cost of food while robbing Americans of a freedom to choose what they eat.

CSPI has attacked nearly every food product on Earth, begging the question, “What’s left to eat.” Jacobsen suggests a sandwich of lettuce and bread – but be careful, because the bread has salt in it and the lettuce may have been sprayed with chemicals. In fact, he advises a near starvation diet of not much more than potatoes and carrots (don’t over indulge in them). And he says, the American public cannot be trusted to make their own choices, so he must do it for them.

Now salt has become the main target in CSPI’s war against eating. And it has bombarded the FDA relentlessly with demands to revoke salt’s GRAS, to the point it is now moving to invoke government- mandated blandness, controlling our ability to decide if we like our food a little more tasty or not.
Like Obama’s health care mess, the attacks against salt use and its imagined dangers are both wrong and unpopular. According to scientific research, something rarely used in CSPI’s attacks, salt is not a danger. Research from UC-Davis last fall found that “our bodies naturally regulate the amount of salt we take in,” making government intervention pointless. In recent Rasmussen survey, just 33% of Americans think the government should set limits on salt we can eat. 55% say NO. The Wall Street Journal said meddling in salt is “an illegitimate form of government intervention” parading as paternalism “run amok.”
What will result, if the FDA takes away salt’s GRAS status, is a rampage of law suits by the food police.

Whole industries will be destroyed. The government will set regulations for how much salt we can use in everything we eat. And so the American people will be even less free to decide for themselves.

There is one more point that must be considered in why the government is moving now to control salt. Obamacare. Now that the government has appointed itself as our caregiver, it has to watch the bottom line on expenses. Remember when members of congress denied as absurd, charges that Obamacare would lead to rationing? Well, this is how it will be done. If they believe salt causes health problems, then it must be stopped – to cut costs and protect the people. That, of course, is the reason the government enforced seat belt laws – because people getting hurt in accidents cost government money for rescue services, 911 operators and emergency room services. Since government foots the bill for that in the name of the taxpayers, you have to toe the line and buckle up. Same with salt bans.

So, will the government send agents to confiscate the salt shakers? Will we have to send in an application for permission to salt our pop corn? Or will we call the FDA in mass and say “get the hell out of my life!”You better decide quickly, before we can’t even work in the salt mines to survive the ravages of Big Brother.

2.    The strongest evidence was the ice cores, but newer, more detailed, data turned the theory inside out.
Instead of carbon pushing up temperature, for the last half-a-million years temperatures have gone up before carbon dioxide levels. On average 800 years before. This totally threw what we thought was cause-and-effect out the window. Something else caused the warming!

3.    Temperatures are not rising.

Satellites circling the planet twice a day show that the world has not warmed since 2001. How many more years of NO global warming will it take? While temperatures have been flat, CO2 has been rising, BUT something else has change the trend. The computer models don’t know what it is.

4.    Carbon dioxide is already doing almost all the warming it can do.
Adding twice the CO2 doesn’t make twice the difference. The first CO2 molecules matter a lot, but extra ones have less and less effect. In fact, carbon levels were ten times as high in the past but the world still slipped into an ice age. Carbon today is a bit-part player. Something else out there affects our climate more than CO2, and none of the computer models knows what it is.
Source: Joanne Nova (a veteran believer in greenhouse gases from 1990-2007. Author, “The Skeptic’s Handbook,” joannenova.com.au.

What does all this mean…

“It means even if all economic activity were closed down, if we banned all of the trains, planes, cars, shut off all of the air conditioners and furnaces and completely stopped western civilization for one hundred years, it would change world temperatures by 0.044 degrees Fahrenheit.” In other words – nothing. Lord Christopher Monckton.

Back in the 1950s, international private academies, such as those in Washington, DC and New York City featured the International Baccalaureate (“IB” for short) because it was the choice of diplomats and others of European extraction. Sometimes parents there merely had a tour of duty in the U.S., but because their kids were expected to go home and take the International Baccalaureate test, their youngsters’ future prospects for college and career depended upon a rigorous scholastic regimen, which surpassed anything in American K-12 programs at that time. Many students flunked the test first time around. They got two more shots. Then it was either off to university, to trade school or something far less appealing.

The IB had its basis in the Swiss educational system. The Europeans, for all their faults, didn’t mess around with the basics of schooling back then. The curricula foreign kids got were much tougher than in America, even at most private schools. Not even pictures in elementary textbooks existed. Switzerland was considered la crème of the educational universe. If a parent had real money, that’s where they sent their kids. Former presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, went to boarding school there. A common joke went: How do you tell a European student from an American pupil? Answer: The European kid takes three steps before his book-bag moves!

Those days are gone. Switzerland, France and most other nations are facing the same leftist ideology, political correctness and mental “health” exercises — all passed of as academics.

Nevertheless, folks are misled into believing today’s IB program is top-drawer, just like its predecessor. But the modern IB bears no resemblance to the 1950s-era program. From its inception in the 1940s, there were ideological biases toward socialism, but in areas such as math, science, literature, spelling, geography and history, it was the gold standard. Today, both the IB curricula and its tests have undergone profound changes.

Today’s IB (like most ordinary K-12 curriculums) operates in partnership with UNESCO, and therefore is consistent with United Nations dogma. The IB is U.N. dogma on steroids, and redistribution of wealth is an overriding, subliminal theme.
The biggest difference between the American creed and IB is that our Declaration of Independence insists that government is beholden to the people; it does not exist to protect itself. This view puts teeth into the notion of inalienable, individual rights, which is one reason socialist- leaning schools here at home gloss over the Declaration — as if it were Thomas Jefferson’s unsolicited opinion.

Under the U.S. Bill of Rights, government has only those rights that the people say it has. The U.N. takes the position, in its Universal Declaration on Human Rights (Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR], Article 29, Section 3), that: “rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations” [italics mine]. This small phrase is key: Under the UDHR, people have only those rights the United Nations (ergo, government) says they have.
Take, for example, Flora High School in Richland County, Columbia, South Carolina. It started offering the IB program when the U.S. Department of Education announced $1.2 million targeted to fund the IB program in middle schools (2007). The idea was that they would become “feeder schools” for the IB’s high school diploma program in low-income school districts around the country. (This, by the way, is a typical method of extending potentially unpopular government programs: to start with one state, offer huge bucks to promote it as a “pilot project”; then, get the bugs out and take it national.)

The Earth Charter comprises the backbone of IB science, ethics, literature and history programs, because that is UNESCO’s approach to foreign policy issues. Briefly, the primary elements of the Earth Charter are:

•    Earth worship (pantheism). •    Socialized medicine. •    World federalism. •    Income redistribution among nations and within nations. •    Eradication of genetically modified (GMO) crops.
•    Contraception and “reproductive health” rights (inc., legal abortion).
•    World-wide “education for sustainability” which means planned communities and citizens told where they must live.
•    Debt forgiveness and different standards for third-world nations.
•    Adoption of gay rights and the right of children to all sexual materials and literature.
•    Elimination of any right to bear arms.
•    Environmental extremist positions, including global warming, bans on pesticides and genetically enhanced vegetables.
•    Setting aside biosphere reserves where no human presence is allowed, which means the government may come in and take your land for its own higher purposes — something that is now being debated in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are fundamentally opposite from the U.N.’s UDHR. A few examples:
•    The right to bear arms — UDHR has no right to bear arms. •    No double jeopardy — UDHR does not prohibit double jeopardy. •    Church/state separation — UDHR promotes earth-worship spirituality. •    Limited government — UDHR has no limits on government. •    Reserved powers — UDHR has no reserved powers.

•    Recognition of natural law — UDHR does not recognize natural law.
•    Guarantee that property cannot be taken by government without just compensation — UDHR has no such guarantee.

If one doesn’t look too closely, IB curricula appears to mimic the American creed — that is, the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution: that all men and women are created equal; inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that government exists to protect those rights, and limited government. But the IB program, first of all, attempts to guarantee “happiness,” not just its pursuit. It also lacks the references to universal truths and values that once were staples of American classrooms. International curriculum standards promote UDHR as being the highest of all principles.
Today’s IB is committed not to a melting-pot concept, but to globalism and multiculturalism. Accurate history, correct geography, honoring perspectives or even other nationalities all wind up in a hodge-podge called “diversity” or “multiculturalism,” which is more about lip-service than substance. Globalism venerates the collective, not the individual; world government is celebrated over national sovereignty; centralization of power is honored over local control. That is why “social studies” are mostly about minimizing Western culture. So it is not surprising that American Indian and African worship would be taught in the IB program (with the more gruesome elements left out, of course, such as ritual mutilations, human sacrifice, female infanticide), while red and green ornaments at Christmas are banned from tax-supported U.S. educational institutions.

Today’s IB students approach ethics from the perspective of Muslims, Native Americans, Eastern Europeans, Africans, and so forth, without regard to their inherent rightness or wrongness, or even morality. The Judeo-Christian ethic is no longer a benchmark. Students are further expected to identify and root out cultural stereotypes. Even IB Theatre Arts integrates global concerns and international perspectives through a learning environment that emphasizes non-Western traditions.

In addition, modern IB students are steeped in fringe science. Even Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is blamed on global warming, for example. Meanwhile, medical breakthroughs such as those discovered through the Human Genome Project are beginning to be used to encourage support for selective breeding in humans. Naturally, kidswho don’t even know basic science aren’t aware of this. What they don’t know will make “parent licensing” a lot easier to “sell” when it emerges full-blown in about 10 years — i.e., government deciding who is allowed to become a parent and which children should be aborted.
Health classes focus on topics like overpopulation and AIDS, not the inner workings of the human body. So, solutions to trendy pseudo-problems naturally revolve around abortion, condoms and sexual awareness, which have no track record of success, even if one were to accept the ethics. Indeed, humans are viewed as no more than complex animals.

While there is no actual course called “economics” in most IB programs, students do learn to convert various world currencies as part of a unit in social studies. But they are also immersed in redistribution theology and taught that evil consumerism in the West is denying the good life to people in Third World countries — never mind that political leaders in those countries never seem to get their act together and have a propensity for lining their own pockets with the donations supplied by those “evil consumers.”

When the IB’s public relations publications say the program utilizes a multidisciplinary approach in order to relate various curricula to each other, what kids actually see is mathematics fused with fringe science and environmental extremism. Thus they absorb flawed energy and conservation policies. As voters later on, this message is highly damaging. Combine this with biased history and, yes, you have a multidisciplinary approach, all right, but the pupils are getting a political agenda, not a well-rounded education or a coherent set of facts.

Ultimately, today’s IB is a red herring with extensive funding ties to interests advancing U.N. politics, as opposed to any transmission of substantive, core knowledge, as was the case pre-1955.

Reprinted with permission from the John Birch Society (www.jbs.org).

Beverly K. Eakman is a former educator and retired federal employee who served as speechwriter for the heads of three government agencies as well as editor-in-chief of NASA’s newspaper (Johnson Space Center). Today, she is a Washington, DC-based freelance writer, the author of five books, and a frequent keynote speaker on the lecture circuit. Her most recent book is Walking Targets: How Our Psychologized Classrooms Are Producing a Nation of Sitting Ducks (Midnight Whistler Publishers).