What are you willing to do to stop Congress permitting the largest energy companies, such as Exxon and BP, from purchasing excessive numbers of oil-drilling leases from the federal Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management in areas designated for oil extraction? The oil giants then allow the leases to remain dormant for the entire length of the contracts. Why? Because these drilling leases are bought specifically to prevent medium-to-small drillers from competitively extracting the oil, thereby shrinking the oil supply, especially domestically.

Controlling the leases but letting them sit idle gives the oil giants even greater monopolistic control of the supply of oil, guaranteeing maximum profits while eliminating thousands of American jobs. Congress and the Bureau of Land Management are perpetuating America dependence on, and further enriching, foreign countries, as well as protecting big oil's own considerable investments in drilling sites abroad.

To top off this perfectly loathsome economic policy, these same big-oil giants receive huge annual taxpayer subsidies in the billions of dollars, even though they enjoy obscene profits but pay less than 5 percent in taxes - and, more often than not, no taxes at all!

How's this for a conspiracy theory? A global agenda, unveiled in 1992 during the United Nations Conference on Environment & Development (UNCED, also known as the Rio Earth Summit), that is being progressively implemented in every level of government in America through a United Nations (UN) initiative called Sustainable Development Agenda 21. Agenda 21, as it is referred to in the UN's own documentation (UN.org/esa/sustdev/documents/agenda21), is "a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally, and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts [sic] on the environment."

Its purpose: to centrally own and control the planet's resources under the guise of "smart planning" and "sustainable development." In fact, for most UN-accredited non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Agenda 21 is synonymous with sustainable development.

The two primary goals of Agenda 21 are to (1) decrease the world population to "sustainable" levels as a means to effectively control labor, the planet's number-one resource, and (2) eradicate individual property rights via comprehensive land-use planning that dictates land use according to a global master plan that includes control of everything from food to health to energy to security, and the list goes on.

Locally, in Scott County, the slow incremental steps of this globalist agenda are wide open for all to see. On February 3, the Scott County Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 to adopt the state of Iowa's "Smart Planning Principles" as part of its Comprehensive Plan. The language of such principles sounds laudable on the surface: collaboration, efficiency, diversity, revitalization. Who could not be for these principles?

Thomas E. Woods Jr.'s recent Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century is a must-read book to understand what is at stake for each of us in the states, and what we the people can do to restore our constitutionally protected liberties.

But before we can restore anything, we must first be clear about what is lost, and how we lost it. In Chapter 4, "What Is (or Are) the United States, Anyway?" Woods opens with a fascinating inquiry: "Was the United States created by a group of independent political societies that established a federal government as their agent, reserving all undelegated powers to themselves? Or was the United States the creation of a single, undifferentiated American people?"

Woods asserts that the federal government was created by America's original 13 colonies, operating as separate and distinct states, which established a compact, known as the Constitution for the United States of America, for dealing with foreign nations, common defense when necessary, and commerce between the 13 chartered states.

History, when studied in earnest, reveals that the various states' ratification documents accepting the Constitution emphasized one dominant, overarching principle: Powers not specifically enumerated to the federal government in the Constitution are automatically retained by the individual states. No exceptions.

If there were any doubt that America has just one major political party with two branches, Democrat and Republican, it was permanently dispelled once the nation's primaries ended. I would call it the Progressive Party, with Progressive Democrats on one branch and Progressive Republicans on the other. My definition of a "progressive" is one that believes in political change and social improvement by coercive governmental action. Under a true "republican" form of government, which our founding compact dictates, societal improvement comes from self-determination and mutual respect of each other's property. The only thing that has progressed, under both major parties, is the size and burden of the welfare and warfare state, for this and future generations of Americans.

The evidence of the charade that the two major parties are not one and the same - and that the establishment media is complicit in maintaining this myth that there is a difference and you actually have choices - is this issue's cover story on ballot access in Illinois. Further evidence is the Progressive Party's vitriolic response to the Tea Party movement. Rather than engage Tea Party participants (an obviously growing and organized voting bloc) about their concerns, no matter which party their voter-registration card reads, the Progressive Party demonized them.