From the blog of Councilman Jess Fields, of the municipality of College Station:
Introduction: College Station Withdrawing from ICLEI
At last Thursday’s council meeting, I proposed to the council to withdraw College Station’s membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) – an international organization founded in 1990 by the United Nations. Our city has been paying somewhere north of $1,000 to be a member of this organization, yet it is not to be found anywhere within the budget. Few have ever heard of ICLEI, and fewer still know that College Station has actually been a member since 2009.
I am truly excited to announce that the proposed 2013 College Station budget will not include funding for this organization. It is an insidious, extreme institution that does not represent our citizens, and for our taxpayers to continue to fund it would be ridiculous.
I applaud our management staff for their thoughtful decision to agree to withdraw from ICLEI in the next budgetary year. In particular, I’d like to thank Jason Stuebe, Assistant to the City Manager, for his extraordinarily thorough research into this and many other topics. Our staff has made the right decision here.
I also want to thank a citizen, Mary Oliver, for her steadfast efforts to bring this issue to my attention over the past couple of years. Without her interest in the subject this might not have been possible. College Station is blessed to have citizens like her who care about what goes on with their local government.
Before I knew that our staff would agree to withdraw from ICLEI, I had begun writing a primer on what this organization is and does, as well as some notes on its history and founders. Because ICLEI is an international organization that seeks to impose its policies at all levels of government, and because its policies have been adopted by many local governments, we must be aware of what it is and what it seeks to do, as well as guard ourselves for any future actions to involve ourselves in their initiatives.
This article, therefore, is intended to give a view into what ICLEI is and what its aims are. Given the new information about our withdrawal from ICLEI, let it serve as an explanation to our citizens why this organization is a threat to our individual rights and our local government’s sovereignty in decision-making.
ICLEI’s History and Its Founders
Before even beginning to consider ICLEI’s ideas and policies, and the implications thereof, the history must be understood. ICLEI has a history spanning more than two decades. Along with that history, the key figures behind the organization should be considered.
The history of ICLEI is given rather succinctly on its own website, which can be found here. The first paragraph of “the ICLEI story” is below:
ICLEI was conceived in 1989 when 35 local government leaders from Canada and the USA met with a leading atmospheric scientist to discuss the depletion of the ozone layer. They pledged to establish local laws to phase out chemicals that deplete the Earth’s ozone layer. Larry Agran, Mayor of Irvine, California, USA and Jeb Brugmann imagined an agency that could coordinate local government responses to global environmental problems.
One question immediately comes to mind: who are Larry Agran and Jeb Brugmann? They must be important to the history of ICLEI, considering that they are the first two people mentioned by name on its history page. Actually, there are only three people mentioned on that entire page. Therefore, getting a sense of who these individuals are, and more specifically, what they believe, would perhaps give us some insight on the organization….”
The Bovine 
The conspiracy theories about Agenda 21 are really missing the point, and I wish people would denounce this kind of stuff. The anti-UN conspiracy theorists are missing the elephant in the room — the global banking and trade organizations who are the real agents of global power and control for the elites. The WTO, World Bank, IMF, G8, etc… are far more sinister than anything the United Nations has ever done.
To be clear — I’m not in favor of the United Nations because it is largely controlled by the US to promote its own agenda, and has often served as a way to legitimize Western imperialism in the third world under a “humanitarian” guise. But the UN is a largely symbolic organization with little real power, especially over the lives of privileged 1st world citizens.
The people who promote this kind of right-wing crankery are only reinforcing the system of power by distracting us from the real issues. The global elites would never place real political power in an organization like the UN which has a nominally representative assembly. That is why they place power in completely unaccountable and undemocratic institutions which answer only to corporate bottom lines.
More on the subject: http://youtu.be/SG1mWX9p8Bs
Still more UN news, this time focused on the family: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive/ldn/2009/feb/09020312
Excerpt:
“MEXICO CITY, February 3, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A leader in the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has declared that the breakdown of traditional families, far from being a “crisis,” is actually a triumph for human rights.
Speaking at a colloquium held last month at Colegio Mexico in Mexico City, UNFPA representative Arie Hoekman denounced the idea that high rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births represent a social crisis, claiming that they represent instead the triumph of “human rights” against “patriarchy.”…”