From the beginning of the Social Security system in America, there was a clear mandate from taxpayers: Take care of our disabled, whether because of birth defect, illness, accident, or warfare. Americans have insisted, and been more than willing to fund, the care of our developmentally and intellectually disabled people.

Once again, however, Illinois' developmentally disabled community is taking an undeserved hit with $76 million in cuts in the governor's proposed Fiscal Year 2012 budget that translates into $540,000 in cuts for Rock Island County, alone. The $76 million represents approximately 6 percent of a $1.2-billion budget for services for 40,000 developmentally disabled individuals in Illinois, leaving a waiting list of 21,000 that includes adults, children, and infants.

Other sources of funding, such as grants from United Way and other not-for-profit organizations, work to fill some of the funding gaps, but these organizations are also struggling, resulting in less available resources each year.

Kyle Rick, executive director of the Arc of Rock Island County, explains: "This community of individuals, including the severely developmentally and intellectually disabled, through no fault of their own, needs the most support, but is least able to ask for it, or defend itself against any decrease in resources."

Across the state, calls are being made and letters and petitions are being sent to lobby Illinois legislators to recalculate the cuts to the developmentally disabled community, because cuts will mean job reductions and the loss of critical services that are often the only lifeline these individuals possess.

As Rick wrote in a letter to State Representative Patrick Verschoore: "From Fiscal Year 2002 through the proposed Fiscal Year 2012 [budget], an 11-year period, we will have had only three increases to keep up with inflation, four years with nothing, and four years of cuts. ... The cuts in Fiscal Year 2012 will be the most severe yet."

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.