Part 8 (2/2)

Bandow explains that to these African, Asian, and Latin American autocracies, ”no fight was more important than that over the LOST.” After all, didn't the treaty itself explicitly articulate its purpose to ”contribute to the realization of a just and equitable international economic order which takes into account the interests and needs of mankind as a whole and, in particular, the special interests and needs of developing countries”?9

The Law of the Sea Treaty does more than just increase the flow of wealth from developed nations to third world dictators.h.i.+ps. It confers on them the power to tax American property.

No longer do they have to ask for money. They can demand it. And it's a lot of money. According to the US Extended Continental Shelf Task Force, which is currently mapping the undersea region, the resources there ”may be worth billions if not trillions” of dollars.10

The treaty gives a new multinational body-the International Seabed Authority (ISA)-the right to impose taxes on offsh.o.r.e oil and gas wells equal to 7 percent of the royalties they would otherwise pay to their nation's treasuries. The Seabed Authority, based in Kingston, Jamaica, would rule the waves-and the seabed beneath. A body much like the United Nations' General a.s.sembly, it is governed by 160 member nations, each with one vote.

Secretary Rumsfeld stresses that ”pursuant to the treaty's Article 82, the US would be required to transfer to this ent.i.ty a significant share of all royalties generated by US companies-royalties that would otherwise go to the US Treasury.”11

”Over time, hundreds of billions of dollars could flow through the Authority with little oversight. The US would not control how those revenues are spent: The treaty empowers the Authority to redistribute these so-called international royalties to developing and landlocked nations with no role in exploring or extracting those resources.”12

Rumsfeld calls this transfer of wealth by its real name: welfare. ”This [treaty] would const.i.tute ma.s.sive global welfare, courtesy of the US taxpayer. It would be as if fishermen who exerted themselves to catch fish on the high seas were required, on the principle that those fish belonged to all people everywhere, to give a share of their take to countries that had nothing to do with their costly, dangerous and arduous efforts.”13

US CAN'T CONTROL WHO GETS OUR MONEY

The money could go anywhere, with the US having little if any control over it. The money would go into a global fund that a thirty-six member committee of the ISA would allocate around the world. The United States would sit on the committee and have one vote, only one.

The treaty specifies that the distribution of the aid would be decided by the council based on ”consensus,” a provision that treaty advocates have said amounts to giving the US, in effect, a kind of veto. But experience has proven that without a formal veto the requirement of consensus would give us very little real leverage with which to direct the flow of aid, even to stop the money from going to terror-sponsoring nations or ent.i.ties.

And one wonders if President Obama's representatives on the ISA Council can be counted on to fight to direct the revenue to good countries. After all, it's his administration that gives $1 billion in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and $1.3 billion to the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt!

Rumsfeld explains that ”these sizable 'royalties' could go to corrupt dictators.h.i.+ps and state sponsors of terrorism. For example, as a treaty signatory and a member of the Authority's executive council, the government of Sudan-which has harbored terrorists and conducted a ma.s.s extermination campaign against its own people-would have as much say as the US on issues to be decided by the Authority.”14

Under the treaty, the transfer of these funds does not end with nation-states. These royalty revenues would even be extended to ”peoples who have not attained full independence or other self-governing status.”15 That means that groups like the Palestinian Authority and potentially other groups with terrorist ties could get in on the bounty.

The point is that it is our money, not the United Nations'. American firms prospected for the oil, financed the drilling, invented the deep-sea technology, took the risk of a dry well, and are ent.i.tled to reap the rewards of their efforts.

AIDING THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES DOESN'T HELP THEM

But, our liberal friends ask, shouldn't we extend our aid to the third world? Don't we have a moral obligation to fight poverty and help them feed their people?

But wiser heads in the developed world realize that increasing the flow of revenue to third world autocracies would just expand their opportunities for graft and corruption. The funding would not flow to their needy people but to the avaricious Swiss bank accounts.

Indeed, some economists like Dambisa Moyo, an African woman who wrote Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, believe that foreign aid is really counterproductive.

She argues that aid is just an invitation to corruption. It means that governments become like private franchises, raising their money abroad and spending it in unaccountable ways. Their citizens don't care. It's not their money. And the effort of ambitious people to get their hands on the aid sparks civil wars, coups, corruption, and political instability, which makes real economic growth impossible.

Moyo, who studied at Harvard, earned a doctorate in economics at Oxford, and worked at the World Bank, poses the challenging question: ”Has more than $1 trillion in development aid to Africa over the last several decades made the African people better off?”16

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