Here Come the Black Helicopters!

this entity 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 constitute massive 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 entities.

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 dictatorships 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 mass 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 entitled 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

Her answer is a resounding no. She elaborates: “In fact, across the globe the recipients of this aid are worse off; much worse off. Aid has helped make the poor poorer and growth slower…. The notion that aid can alleviate systemic poverty and has done so is a myth. Millions in Africa are poorer because of aid. Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.”¹⁷

Moyo says that revenues such as what the Law of the Sea would cause to flow to the third world creates a pot of money over which various factions, tribes, parties, and regions can compete. She likens it to diamond mines or oil wells, “a kind of curse because it encourages corruption and conflict, while at the same time discouraging free enterprise. Not only is aid easy to steal, as it is usually provided directly to African governments, but it also makes control over government worth fighting for. And, most importantly, the influx of aid can undermine domestic savings and investment.”¹⁸

US foreign aid has failed in its primary mission of alleviating poverty. Since 1980, the United States has given more than $309 billion (in inflation-adjusted money) in development assistance to poor countries. (This sum does not include military aid or humanitarian relief for natural disasters.) And it hasn’t worked.

Of the 97 countries that got development aid from the United States between 1980 and 2006:

• a quarter actually saw a net drop in their per capita GDP.

• 28 had almost no growth—less than one percent.

• 39 had minor growth averaging only 1–4 percent per year.

• Only 4 had real economic growth of 5 percent or more. They were Bosnia, Serbia, Cambodia, and Botswana.

WE’D HAVE TO GIVE AWAY OUR TECHNOLOGY, TOO

But sending money to third world dictators is not even the most obnoxious part of the Law of the Sea Treaty. Beyond taxing royalties, the treaty obliges American energy companies that wish to drill more than two hundred miles off our Continental Shelf to share their technologies—for free—with the ISA.

Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and John Cornyn (R-TX)—both opponents of the treaty—warn that under it “nations with mining and resource recovery technologies like the United States will be obligated to share those technologies with Third World competitors, and that is one of the many issues, which trouble those of us opposed to the treaty.”¹⁹

They add: “in other words, US companies would be forced to give away the very types of innovation that historically have made our nation a world leader while fueling our economic engine.”²⁰

In a phrase out of Star Trek, the treaty sets up an “Enterprise” to facilitate third world access to drilling technology. It provides that “if the Enterprise or developing States are unable to obtain” drilling equipment commercially, there is a duty imposed on signatory nations to “facilitate the acquisition of mining technology.”²¹

Sensibly, the Cato Institute argues that “the Enterprise and developing states would find themselves unable to purchase machinery only if they were unwilling to pay the market price or were perceived as being unable to preserve trade secrets. The clause might be interpreted to mean that industrialized states, and private miners, whose ‘cooperation’ is to be ‘ensured’ by their respective governments, are then responsible for subsidizing the Enterprise’s acquisition of technology.”²²