President Barack Obama has taken the United States one more giant step towards socialism by ramming through the Senate his financial regulation bill.

The bill authorizes the secretary of the Treasury — a political appointee — to seize any financial company (bank or nonbank) simply because, in his opinion, it is too big to fail and in danger of insolvency.

This power can be used for political retribution, pressure for campaign funding, or any other abuse bureaucratic whim or partisan politics can conceive. It is a power Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez would love to have!

The legislation also requires that any business that extends credit, in any form, to clear the loan instrument in advance with the new consumer protection agency. The backlog of pending applications will strangle consumer credit.

And the bill fails to do the one thing it must do — regulate derivatives and make them transparent. Senator Chris Dodd, D-Conn., bowed to pressure from his sponsors on Wall Street and deleted the regulatory provision and set up a commission to study the situation for two years!

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., protested the cop-out with a no vote against the legislation.

So how did it pass?

Four Republicans sold out, that´s how!

Among the RINOs were, of course, Susan Collins and Olympia Snow of Maine. But, surprisingly, Scott Brown, R Mass., the newly elected Massachusetts miracle defected as did the normally stalwart Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

Now the federal government has effectively taken over about one-third of our national economy by passing Obamacare and regulatory reform in almost the same breath.

Repealing this regulatory travesty must be high on our 2011 agenda!

On April 1, the Islamic nation of Maldives proudly announced a breakthrough in long-stalled negotiations to create an international tribunal to receive complaints from individual children.   For twenty years, internationalist efforts to create a new world tribunal for children to challenge the actions of their own governments have been thwarted by political division.  But, after a month of negotiations led by Maldives a unanimous agreement was reached on the components for a new optional protocol to be added to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Maldives is a curious choice to lead negotiations on a human rights treaty.  When Maldives signed and ratified the CRC in 1990-91, it boldly rejected any semblance of religious freedom—a central “right” in the CRC.  The Maldivian reservation proclaims: “The Government of the Republic of Maldives expresses its reservation to paragraph 1 of article 14 of the said Convention on the Rights of the Child, since the Constitution and the Laws of the Republic of Maldives stipulate that all Maldivians should be Muslims.” 

What will this new protocol accomplish? According to Miadhu, a Maldivian news agency, the “protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), will create a procedure whereby children who are being abused or their representatives (such as national child protection NGOS, lawyers, and doctors) could seek assistance from international human rights protection mechanisms when domestic institutions are failing to offer protection.”

This means either a child on his own or a group like the Children’s Defense Fund (formerly headed by Hillary Clinton) or a local social worker could file a petition before this new international tribunal seeking to overrule the decisions of American courts regarding the rights guaranteed by the CRC.

An important principle of international law makes it clear how dangerous such tribunals can be. Article 27 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties provides, “A nation may not invoke the provisions of its internal law as justification for its failure to perform a treaty.” Thus, if the United States Supreme Court held that the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of a parent to engage in corporal punishment, for example, the losing party could then turn to this international tribunal to argue that America is failing to comply with the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Constitution of the United States would provide no defense in such a hearing. International law would be the exclusive authority for resolving the dispute.

This scenario only becomes a reality if the United States decides to become a party to the CRC and to this new protocol. The Obama administration has publicly announced its desire to obtain the ratification of the CRC itself. And at a conference at Georgetown Law School in 2009, the American advocates of the CRC announced their support for this new optional protocol.

For those who cannot imagine the United States accepting these dramatic changes in our law, please remember that it was not long ago that it seemed unthinkable that the federal government would take over General Motors, major banks, and the American healthcare system. Global socialism marches at a quick pace.

From Stalin to Obama, the mainstream media’s history of bias leaves us asking: Who can handle the truth? Andrew Breitbart’s newest venture, Big Journalism, arrives just in time — as Bill Whittle explains in the latest episode of Afterburner.

Download her story (PDF).

“It dawned on me. It’s freedom.”

Kitty Werthmann tells this story of her arrival in the United States:

“I was processed in New York. I stayed in a hotel the first night, and the next morning asked the concierge for directions to the nearest police station. I asked if it was in walking distance, and it was.

“I walked in and told the desk sergeant I wanted to register. He said,’What are you talking about?’ I said I wanted to register, so they’d know where I was. How would they find me if I broke the law? He said don’t worry, they’d find me. And then he said, ‘Lady, get *** out of here.’

“I walked outside and it was a January day with a blue sky.

“I looked up and said, ‘What kind of country is this?’ All of a sudden it dawned on me. It’s freedom.”