UN's “New Urban Agenda” to Assault Liberty in a City Near You

With its “New Urban Agenda” set to be formally adopted by dictators and member governments next month, the United Nations is plotting its latest monumental assault on private property, the free enterprise system, national sovereignty, and human liberty. Taken as a whole, the UN’s radical new plan outlines a vision of an Orwellian world order of centrally planned, “compact” mega-cities run and guided by UN dictates and under total surveillance. Despite all the nice-sounding rhetoric about “equality” and “prosperity,” the text of the document also demands policies that have been repeatedly proven to cause misery, inequality, poverty, and death. Humanity should resist.

The UN’s “New Urban Agenda” seeks to hijack control from local voters and communities over the way cities and “human settlements” are “planned, designed, financed, developed, governed, and managed,” the document explains. The draft UN agreement, set to be “approved” at the UN Habitat III summit in Quito, Ecuador, next month, also purports to lay down “priorities and actions at the global, regional, national, sub-national, and local levels” that should be imposed on humanity. Why the dictator-dominated UN ought to be involved in local or even national policy in the first place is never adequately explained throughout the agenda’s 24 pages.

What is clear, though, is that, if implemented, humanity will be subjected to unprecedented government controls on literally everything. That the UN envisions central economic planning, which has resulted in tens or even hundreds of millions of preventable deaths over the last century, is clear from the document itself. Consider, for example, the UN’s demand that cities, in submission to the global agenda, “change to sustainable consumption and production patterns.” There is only one way for consumption and production patterns to be “changed” to fit the UN agenda, and that is through government control over consumption and production.

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For evidence of how well the strategy works (or not), a quick trip to the enslaved nations of Cuba or North Korea that practice government control over consumption and production might be illuminating. The two are among the poorest nations on Earth. The former Soviet Union and other communist states also provide bountiful historical evidence of the brutality, terror, and death that is so often associated with central planning and government control. Yet the UN document gets even more explicit, using overtly Marxist rhetoric in calling on authorities to ensure “equal access for all to economic and productive resources and opportunities.”

In other words, private property rights need to be severely limited, if not quashed entirely. The rest of the document makes that clear, too, as do previous UN Habitat reports that explicitly call for ending private land ownership.

Redistribution is also key. “We will support the development of vertical and horizontal models of distribution of financial resources to decrease inequalities across sub-national territories, within urban centers, and between urban and rural areas,” the document states. Put in simpler-to-understand terms, wealth must be commandeered and redistributed by central planners to level out society. Wealth redistribution at the international level is also called for repeatedly throughout the document, with the UN agenda making repeated reference to UN schemes by billionaires and dictators aimed at allowing the UN to acquire its own taxing power.

The UN document is filled with blabbering about “inequality,” promising to redistribute the wealth of what remains of the Western middle class to the UN and its oftentimes brutal Third World member regimes that have impoverished billions. The word “inclusive” appears dozens of times in the document without definition as well. What the document does not explain is that the mysterious term was concocted and pushed by the wealthiest crony capitalists on the planet — including the Rothschild banking dynasty — who have absolutely no intention of surrendering their billions and trillions in ill-gotten wealth. Instead, it is an amorphous term serving mostly as cover for government control, much like the Orwellian phrase “sustainable development.” More on that later.

Under the UN’s “New Urban Agenda,” every facet of human life even beyond economics will be under the purview of authorities. For example, the document directly calls for governments to ensure that everyone receives “education, food security and nutrition, health and well-being,” areas of human life that in the free world have traditionally been considered primarily the responsibility of individuals, families, and voluntary associations such as churches and charities — and occasionally local communities. Governments are even expected to provide “adequate and affordable housing,” the UN agenda states.

There are already a number of UN member regimes that purport to provide “housing” — Cuba and North Korea again come to mind. Free people, of course, can solve their own housing needs. Cattle, prisoners, and slaves, by contrast, rely on their masters to provide housing for them, along with food, healthcare, and more. Left unsaid in the UN document is the fact that free markets and the free enterprise system have already provided a massive surplus of housing and an abundance of housing choices. Centrally planned economies, by contrast, have produced nothing but grinding and often deadly shortages for everyone except the ruling classes and their minions.

The radical UN “Urban” vision also purports to commit UN member governments and dictatorships to adopting what is known as the “smart city approach.” The document describes it in a rather innocuous way, saying the scheme “makes use of opportunities from digitalization.” “We will strengthen the data and statistical capacities at national, sub-national, and local levels to effectively monitor progress achieved in the implementation of sustainable urban development policies and strategies,” the agenda says. The agreement also vows that governments will “support the role and enhanced capacity of national, sub-national, and local governments in data collection.”

What it does not say is that the “smart city” agenda and the massively expanded data-gathering the UN envisions involve total surveillance of every individual in a way that even George Orwell could never have imagined. Privacy, in short, will become a thing of the past.

Another component of the totalitarian vision involves “sustainable development.” Despite sounding rather harmless, even the definitions of the term given by top UN officials and government bureaucrats reveal the real agenda: less freedom, more government, less prosperity, more control, less people, more centralization of coercive power. The new UN agenda is a “critical step” in imposing the totalitarian “sustainable development” agenda “at global, regional, national, sub-national, and local levels,” the document says.

Everybody must submit. To make sure nobody escapes the emerging UN control grid, the declaration calls for ensuring that the “informal economy” — the economy that exists outside of government regulation, control, and direction — is subject to a “sustainable transition to the formal economy.” Indeed, one of the key “principles” upon which the UN plot is based is described as “leave no one behind,” also a theme of the equally draconian UN Agenda 2030.

Even culture will be guided by the supposedly wise and benevolent overlords who will be taking charge of all other aspects of life under the emerging UN plans for humanity. “We will include culture as a priority component of urban plans and strategies,” the document says. “We will support leveraging cultural heritage for sustainable urban development.” With UN control over education and even “values” of children, who are referred to as “key agents of change” in the New Urban Agenda document and other UN schemes, the future of human life will be easy for the would-be masters to engineer.

The nightmarish vision outlined in the UN document is completely alien to the American system of limited government and federalism. As just one example, the document purports to commit national governments and dictatorships to funneling “financial transfers from national government to sub-national and local governments.” That may work for totalitarian regimes, where local government works to implement the dictators’ decrees. But in places such as the United States, sovereign state governments and independent local governments accountable to their communities are supposed to raise their own resources, rather than become administrative units of a centralized regime with no limits to its power.

Another red flag is that the New Urban Agenda is “grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Of course, the UN’s declaration of pseudo-human rights is incompatible with real human rights, granted by our Creator, as enshrined, for instance, in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights. The UN declaration even explains explicitly that the privileges governments and treaties purport to grant can be revoked under virtually any pretext. In Article 29, the declaration is clear that the UN’s bogus “human rights” may “in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.” By contrast, God-given rights cannot be legitimately infringed upon by government — period — whether it upsets the UN or not.

The UN outfit behind the latest “agenda” has a long and controversial history of advocating totalitarianism. As Karl Marx and other totalitarians have understood, private land ownership and private property more broadly must give way if collectivist slavery is to succeed. The very first plank of the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto goes like this: “Abolition of private property in land and application of all rents of land to public purpose.” (Others include government education, progressive incomes taxes, government control of transportation and communication, and more.)

In its very first report on “Human Settlements” coming out of the 1976 UN Habitat I Conference, the dictator-dominated outfit made its agenda perfectly clear. “Land cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market,” claimed the UN report, a predecessor of the latest agenda. “Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes.”

As has become typical in recent years, the mass-murdering communist dictatorship enslaving mainland China is blazing a trail on the totalitarian “urban” agenda. The New American reported in 2013 that the brutal regime is plotting to herd hundreds of millions of rural peasants into centrally planned Orwellian super-cities in the years ahead — at gunpoint if necessary. Similar outrages are regularly promoted to Americans by establishment voices. Obama has only been too eager to join in. In fact, just this week, in violation of every principle upon which the United States was founded, Obama called for surrendering more U.S. sovereignty and “binding ourselves to international rules” crafted by unelected, unaccountable, oftentimes murderous foreign regimes.

Indeed, one illegal Obama program to “diversify” American cities, known as the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing decree, is perfectly in line with the UN’s “New Urban Agenda.” The Obama program uses federal bribes to break up higher income and ethnically homogeneous communities by encouraging and subsidizing the redistribution of people based on race, income levels, and other factors. So, for example, if your suburb is too wealthy, the federal government might seek to put government housing there to drop welfare recipients into it. The UN document outlines exactly such schemes, vowing, for instance, to “encourage mixed-income development to promote social inclusion and cohesion.”

In fairness to the UN, the economic model promoted in the latest “agenda” is not quite socialist or communist, but rather a hybrid of government-directed fascism and technocratic governance often described as “technocracy” by critics who have studied it. In many ways, it is similar to the horrifying “governance” (more accurately described as oppression) practiced today by the Chinese Communist Party — an outfit that has murdered more innocent people than any other group in human history, with conservative estimates starting around 60 million victims, not including those slaughtered in forced abortions.

Regardless of labels, though, the UN vision outlined in the “New Urban Agenda,” the Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, the UN Paris Agreement, and other grandiose plots is deeply totalitarian. It is not compatible with human liberty or dignity. It replaces the choices of individuals with the choices of tyrants. Much of it is flatly unconstitutional when it comes to the United States. For the sake of humanity and prosperity, the UN’s extremist agenda must be defeated. The surest way to do that is with an American exit, or Amexit, from the UN.

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected].

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