‘UN control of the Mississippi’ is the new ‘Obama’s citizenship’

The source of the Mississippi at Lake Itasca: The UN's future northern outpost? (Wikicommons)

For the dedicated few who have grown tired of the federal courts repeatedly swatting away challenges to President Barack Obama’s citizenship, a familiar foe is rising to fill the conspiratorial void.

Breathless tweets and angry blog posts, sparked by an article on FoxNews.com, call the nation’s attention to the emerging belief that the United Nations will seize control of the Mississippi River and other U.S. territorial waters.

The catalyst for this rumor is the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty, which is intended to establish a comprehensive set of rules governing the oceans and to replace several previous U.N. conventions addressing the same issues. The treaty was negotiated between 1972 and 1983, took effect in 1994 and has never been ratified by the United States.

Democrats in Congress strongly support signing the treaty and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced that signing the Law of the Sea Treaty was a top priority of the Obama administration, just as it was for former President George W. Bush.

“Critics say the treaty, which declares the sea and its bounty the ‘universal heritage of mankind,’ would redistribute American profits and have a reach extending into rivers and streams all the way up the mighty Mississippi,” writes John Abrams for Fox News’ “Lost and Found.”

Unfortunately, Abrams provides neither names the critics nor cites their arguments in defense of this leap of logic, though he does quote Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation, who calls the treaty “very socialist.”

There are more legitimate economic concerns about an independent authority managing mineral rights to deposits outside of a country’s territorial waters, which has solidified opposition to the treaty within the Republican Party. And military concerns over full access to all territorial waters played out during the recent incident between a U.S. Navy ship in Chinese waters. But ceding control of the Mississippi River to the United Nations is an entirely new revelation to an international agreement that has been 37 years in the making.