Fourteen Journalists’ Perspectives On Maurice Strong: Godfather of Crestone/Baca: “Father Earth/Savior of the Planet,” World-Class Robber Baron, and Globalist/Environmental Con-man
Compiled by Dr. Eric T. Karlstrom, Emeritus Professor of Geography, CSUS, October, 2016
Maurice Strong at 1992 Rio Earth Summit
ETK (Webmaster) Introduction: Crestone/Baca’s current identity as “sustainable,” interfaith spiritual community (and more?) is largely attributable to two foreigners; the Canadian, Maurice Strong, and his Danish wife, Hanne. In order to understand much of what is happening in Crestone, Colorado today, it is important to understand the amazing and enigmatic career of Maurice Strong. Certainly, much of Crestone/Baca’s ideology/mythology regarding sustainability, global warming, New Age (Gaia) spirituality, etc. is directly related to the 1992 U.N. Rio Earth Summit, for which Maurice Strong was Secretary General. The following oft-quoted statement by Strong should send shivers up the back and neck of any thinking American citizen, especially when they realize how powerful and well-connected to the world’s ruling elite this man was:
“Isn’t it the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”- Maurice Strong
Maurice Strong wore so many hats during his amazing career that it is very difficult for most to get a sense of his over-arching convictions and “contributions.” The following articles and book excerpts serve to give a perspective on the many legacies of one of the most influential Illuminati agentur of all time, and certainly of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Contents of Post:
1. Excerpts on Maurice Strong from: “Cloak of Green: The Links Between Key Environmental Groups, Government and Big Business”by Elaine Dewar (1995)
2. Maurice Strong, Environmental Champion Dies at 86, Sam Robert, 2015
3. History of Maurice Strong, Judi McLeod
4. The Wizard of the Baca, Daniel Wood, 1990
5. Maurice Strong: Master of Sustainable Development Deception (The Dangerous Worldview of Maurice Strong and Sustainable Development) by Brannon Howse (May 16, 2010)
6. Who is Global Warming Propagandist Maurice Strong?, Christian Hawk, 2008
7. The Global Warming Scam; Obama, Maurice Strong, Al Gore, Chicago Climate Exchange, Judi McLeod, 2003
8. One World Religion: The Aspen Institute and the Club of Rome, TerrorismIlluminati website
9. On the way to parliament: Uncle Mo in activist mode by Judi McLeod, 2003
10. Ontario’s Predictable Energy Disaster; Mortgaged To Falsified Climate Science. The Solution Is Readily Available. by Dr. Tim Ball, 2013
11. The Plan, Agenda 21: The Death Knell of Liberty, Jim O’Neill, 2011
12. Green energy policy? Nothing that works, Viv Forbes, 2015
13. Champagne socialist full of bubbles: Maurice Strong profits from pushing leftist ideas, Lorne Gunter, 2003
14. Maurice Strong, the Father of America’s Destruction, Richard Salbato, 2009
1. In order to better understand the life, times, and ideologies of Maurice Strong, I am first including, verbatim, the following segments of Canadian journalist, Elaine Dewar’s, excellent book, “Cloak of Green: The Links Between Key Environmental Groups, Government and Big Business” (1995). In addition, thirteen other perspectives on the life and career of Maurice Strong are included below:
The 1992 Rio Summit’s Enviro-Spirituality Con as Cover for Corporate Conquest of World
…. “The Rio (Earth) Summit (of 1992) would take long steps towards a world in which nation states have withered away in favor of supranational and global institutions. It was a central event for those working on “the Agenda.”
Elaine Dewar’s (1995):
… Advertised as the World’s Greatest Summit, Rio was publicly described as a global negotiation to reconcile the need for environmental protection with the need for economic growth. The cognoscenti understood that there were other, deeper goals. These involved the shift of national regulatory powers to vast regional authorities; the opening of all remaining closed national economies to multinational interests; the strengthening of decision making structures far above and far below the grasp of newly minted national democracies; and above all, the integration of the Soviet and Chinese empires into the global market system. There was no name for this very grand agenda that I had heard anyone use, so later I named it myself- the Global Governance Agenda.
… in 1991, I was just starting to see this big picture. I was no longer beguiled by the surface of things. I had also come to a kind of despair: I no longer believed that helping Paiakan or the environmental groups around him would improve the air my children breath and the water they drink. Local environmental conditions continued to get worse…. Yet breathable air and drinkable water did not claim the centre of the environmental debate. One heard constantly about global ozone depletion, climate change, the megadeaths of species in distant forests, wilderness parks… One heard mainly of fearful things beyond the reach of any single jurisdiction: they were shuffled around like props in a cheap diorama…. People I spoke to seemed to worry more about things beyond their governor’s control than about what was being dumped in their own sewers. A whole generation of believers in the climate crisis was being groomed in the schools: my children came home certain that the climate had already changed from good to bad, and the sun was no longer safe to play under. They were not told that they were repeating hypotheses, not facts, that these hypotheses were drawn from models made from inadequate observation, that some of the models might well be inadequate in themselves, or have been found to be inadequate.
In short, local problems had been decoupled from the debate about environment and grand phenomena had been hooked to local political ends. Decisions about land use are always political decisions… The shifting argument about which areas had to be protected to protect us all from a climate crisis reinforced the emerging Agenda ideology that nation states cannot regulate effectively for the planet.
The increasingly successful fusion of an ephemeral, ill-defined spirituality, often hastily borrowed from native peoples, with environmental science bothered me as well. It seems to me that the purpose of this fusion was to silence debate. Shaky science and attendant global management proposals could be pulled into the realm of the unquestionable once wrapped in the penumbra of sanctity. Critics could be attacked in their character. This is why religious belief and democratic politics don’t mix well. Democracy requires continual and creative compromise: religious belief cannot be compromised. The more leaders in nongovernmental organizations wrapped themselves in spirituality, the more suspicious I became about their commitment to democracy.
I was also beginning to think I understood why fear about transnational environmental phenomena played a large role in the Agenda. How do you persuade democrats to give up sovereign national powers to govern themselves? How do you make them hand over power to supranational institutions they cannot affect, control, or remove? You make it seem as if this will serve their best interests. You terrify them with the grave dangers national governments cannot protect them from.
I had started to assemble facts into patterns and to recognize patterns that recurred. I had recognized a pattern to the ideas presented to me: I had also spotted patterns of behavior. For example, I knew that what was said to be driven from the bottom up, from the grassroots, was actually being driven from the top down. I had come to this conclusion by following the inter-connections among the NGO’s active on the Agenda. Many of the NGOs shaping this environmental debate were connected, like pearls on a thread.
Who Is Maurice Strong?
A central figure in all of these organizations was Maurice Strong, the secretary general of the Rio Summit…. He played a large role in selling the world on the Global Governance Agenda. How had he come to be such a central figure? Whose interests did he represent?
Strong’s staff had sent me his curriculum vitae. His tower of hats made Elizabeth May’s look pathetic. He listed so many businesses, honors, and NGO involvements, it was impossible to understand how one man could do so much. At first his curriculum vitae also struck me as odd, as if it was designed to sell a life, not as if a life had produced the document. When I had checked it and reviewed it, it also seemed to mirror the patterns of the Global Governance Agenda- NGOs, governments, politicians, native peoples, Marxists, Maoists, and democrats tied in knots with power companies and other great trade empires. His cv was a record of a lifetime of arrangements.
He was born in Oak Lake Manitoba, in 1929, had only a grade 11 formal education, but had been granted 27 honorary degrees from universities around the world. (The latest count is 35.) He had combined private, public and non-profit ventures at several points in his career, giving rise to questions about conflicts of interest, but as one of his protégés, the writer John Ralston Saul, like to put it, there was nothing in this that would have startled anyone in the U.S. establishment. That master of the golden brain, John J. McCloy, the man biographer Kai Bird credits with the creation of the national security apparatus of the U.S., had done such things for almost a century.
Many of Strong’s non-profit associates were also participants in the Agenda, either as advocates or as funders of advocates. Strong had been a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation; a director of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in Gland, Switzerland, a director and vice-president of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Switzerland; a director of the Beijer Institute of the Swedish Academy of Sciences (now a separate NGO called the International Institute for Environmental Technology and Management); the Aspen Institute; the Bretton Woods Committee of Washington, D.C. He’d been on that particular board since April, 1985. The Bretton Woods Committee was formed to promote the virtues of the international development banks after Bramble, Rich, et al. came close to beating a U.S. administration-backed appropriations vote in 1984. Strong had also worked with the YMCA; the Vatican’s Society for Development, Justice and Peace; the North/South Institute; the Club of Rome; the Interaction Policy Board. Perhaps the most important, he was chair of the World Economic Forum.
Strong had received his share of awards. He was a member of the Royal Society of Great Britain; the Royal Society of Canada; he’d won a Mellon Award; a Pearson Peace Medal; an Order of Canada; the Henri Pittier Order (from Venezuela); a Commander of the Order of the Golden Ark (the Netherlands). He became a member of the U.N. Environmental Program’s Global 500 in 1987. Those in the know said he also deserved a prize for crafting the world’s greatest human network. Many of Strong’s friends, said his friend Senator Jack Austin, were also hubs of networks in their own right.
The cv also showed Strong’s meteoric rise, starting with his first job as an apprentice fur trader to the Hudson Bay Company back in 1945. But he was best known for his government service. He created the Canadian International Development Agency, CIDA. He had been one of Canada’s representatives on various development banks. He had chaired the board of the federal government’s International Research Centre, IDRC. He had set up Canada’s national petroleum company, Petro-Canada; he had chaired the Canadian Development Investment Corporation. He became both an undersecretary general at the United Nations and the secretary general of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. He was the first executive director of the United Nations Energy Program. He ran the office of the African Emergency for the U.N. Development Program, which dealt with African famine. He was a member of the Bruntland Commission.
We had agreed that I would come to Geneva to see him in time for the third preparatory meeting for the Rio Earth Summit. The national delegations were supposed to negotiate the fine points of the international conventions Strong’s staff had drafted on forestry, climate change, biodiversity, an Earth Charter, and a document Strong called Agenda 21. Needless to say, depending on the words said or unsaid, Strong and his staff had considerable ability to affect the interests of major powers.
When I arrived, Strong was presiding at a staff meeting, sitting at the head of a long polished table in what had once been a gracious drawing room. He announced what he had done on his last round of travels. These achievements had to do with adding more pearls to the thread. He’d convinced Brazilian soccer star Pele to make public appearances. Former U.S. Democratic politician Bella Azbug was organizing women’s NGOs for him. Ted Turner had promised millions of dollars worth of coverage on CNN, guaranteeing the world would pay attention to the Rio Summit.
We went upstairs to his office, a once comfortable library painted a weird shade of apple green. The bookshelves were almost empty…. He settled into his chair. I’m not sure what I expected of the man I at the centre of the story, but surely not this? His brown suit was rumpled, his hair white and askew. He was nondescript, of average height, average weight, with a small moustache, but his hands were huge- big enough to pull hot iron into shape. He coughed and coughed. He’d caught some form of pneumonia and had spent almost a month in bed back home in Colorado at the Baca Grande ranch.
Family Background
… His family were descended from United Empire Loyalists, who left he U.S. and settled first around Cobourg, Ontario, then made their way west to Manitoba to settle around Brandon. His father had worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway as a junior station manager; his mother was a doctor’s daughter from Estevan, Saskatchewan… Strong’s family was run over by the Depression when his father lost his job…. His mother died in a mental institution at age 56, killed by the Depression is how Strong saw it, a victim of economic devolution….. Strong became a socialist in a family of committed Liberals….
He also had family connections in the wider world of political action which he used later. Born on the U.S. side of the border a generation ahead of him were his distant cousins Tracy and Anna Louise Strong. The children of Congregationalist missionary based in Friend, Nebraska, their lineage went all the back to the men who had helped endow Harvard and Yale. Christian activist Tracy Strong became the director the YMCA’s Prisoner’s Aid committee during World War II and later the international program of the World Alliance of YMCA’s based in Geneva. Anna Louise Strong, his sister, was a Marxist and a journalist and possibly a spy, although for whom it is difficult to be certain. In 1921, she got into the new Soviet Union as part of a Quaker aid committee and got to know members of the emerging Soviet hierarchy, including Trotsky; she wrote about the new Soviet Union for the Nation and for Hearst International. She became a member of the Comintern (Communist International), later married the Soviet Union’s wartime deputy minister of agriculture (a man who was purged later by Stalin). During the period between the two wars she travelled in China, corresponded and dined with Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote in praise of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. She was treated with deep suspicion by the FBI, who thought she worked for Stalin’s notorious spymaster Beria, but she also lectured at Stanford to U.S. intelligence personnel headed to China. In fact, she was flown to China by the U.S. Navy right after the war’s end. She spent two years with Mao and Chou En-lai in the crucial period leading up to the defeat of the Koumintang. When she returned, she carried secret messages from Chou En-lai. She was arrested in 1949 during a trip to the U.S.S.R. as an American spy. After Mao was victorious in China, she was denied her U.S. passport, and her association with persons in the U.S. State Department was listed as part of the grounds for her dismissals. Nevertheless, she managed to visit a nephew working in Mexico for the Rockefeller Foundation and visit Guatemala in 1954, writing in praise of President Arbenz. She returned to China during the Cultural Revolution and died there in 1970, a full-fledged Friend of the Revolution, her burial organized by Chou En-lai himself. In part because of his connections to Anna Louise Strong, the Chinese trusted Maurice Strong.
Early Career
(Strong) got his grade eleven in 1945, and in July, while the war still raged in the Pacific, he boarded the Hudson’s Bay Company’s schooner, the Fort Severn, at Churchill heading for duty as an apprentice fur trader at Chesterfield Inlet on Hudson Bay…. The Hudson’s Bay Company owned mineral rights to large stretches of the Canadian north. One of Strong’s tasks was to take the samples of minerals brought in by the Inuit and others and send them south.
According to Strong, sometime during the summer of 1946, a big handsome man named Bill Richardson also arrived in Chesterfield Inlet…. It was Bill who introduced Strong to the world of oil, gas, big money, and geopolitics…. In the summer of 1947 Maurice Strong went to New York…. Where he was introduced to David Rockefeller, grandson to the man who’d made the oil business global. Rockefeller already had charge of the U.N. account at the Chase Bank.
… Strong started work at the U.N., preparing accreditation cards and passes, on September 15, 1947. He met lots of famous people. Paul Martin saw him there. Strong met Andrei Gromyko, who made the speech for the Soviet Union in favor of creation of the state of Israel. When the U.N commission recommended that Palestine be split into the state of Israel, Gaza, and Jordan, it was a green light for joint venture oil partners like Socal and the Texas Company, which had exclusive oil concessions in Saudi Arabia.
Two months after he arrived at the U.N., Strong quit, went back to Winnipeg, joined the RCAF, scrubbed out, and then became a trainee analyst at the brokerage firm of James Richardson and Sons. After oil was struck at Leduc, he became an oils analyst in Calgary. There he met Jack Gallagher who’d spent twelve years working for Standard Oil of New Jersey and its Canadian subsidiary, Imperial Oil. Gallagher had been hired by Dome Mines to build an oil and gas exploration company called Dome Explorations (Western) Limited…. Dome Exploration became one of the largest so-called independent oil exploration companies in Canada- but its controlling shareholders were embedded deep in Wall Street with ties to the family who started Standard Oil (Rockefeller). By 1951, Strong had married, bought a house, and gone to work at Dome as Gallagher’s assistant. In Gallagher’s memory, Strong was no genius; his most important characteristic was that he had a flexible mind.
In 1952, Strong sold his new house, quit his new job, and travelled with his new wife around the world. His friends thought he must have made a fortune because prairie people, seared by the Depression, often could not bring themselves to walk away from any job. His friends knew he reveled in finding multiple virtues and uses for every course of action he took. Nothing was done for its own sake.
When Strong arrived in Africa, the pre- and post-war colonial governance structures were crumbling and there was a struggle for power and market share among the major oil companies- British, French, and American. They were like bridgeheads for their governments. David Rockefeller was active in Africa: the Rockefellers had made a decision to do business with South Africa in spite of Apartheid, so that meant they had to mend fences among new African leaders as they searched for business opportunities in the newly emerging national states on the continent…. In Nairobi, Strong got a job with CalTex, the joint venture between the Texas Company and Socal to exploit Saudi oil. His job involved travel. He went to Eritrea, Zanzibar, Tanzania, Uganda, Mauritius, Madagascar, Zaire, a roll-call of places soon to be embroiled in the gilt-edged tyrannies of the Cold War. He stayed in Africa for a year. Then he and his wife hopped freighters home, passing through India, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), Hong Kong, the Philippines until they arrived back in Calgary in December 1954.
Strong then tried to get a job in the Department of External Affairs: he was told that he couldn’t even apply without a university degree. So, he said, he decided to use business as a platform, a means to power. He never explained to me what he wanted this power for….
He seemed to understand early that power is augmented by influence spread throughout a number of networks. He moved rapidly into three. He not only went back to work at Dome, he also volunteered at the YMCA very quickly after his return, and by 1956 he was already so close to the federal Liberal Party, in the person of federal cabinet minister Paul Martin, that Martin regularly visited Strong’s house when he was in Calgary.
The YMCA had a worldwide network that crossed Cold War barriers. It was one of the few Western organizations that maintained its facilities in Eastern Europe and mainland China.
… In June 1962, just as Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservative federal government was reduced to a minority and nationalism exploded in Quebec, Maurice Strong arrived in Montreal as senior executive of one of the most important companies in the country (Power Corporation). He was also a player in the international YMCA network and in the Liberal Party. He described the particular virtues of running Power Corporation. “We controlled many companies, controlled political budgets. We influenced a lot of appointments… Politicians got to know you and you them.”
Strong also began to influence Canada’s foreign policy. As part of the thaw after the Cuban missile crisis the Rockefeller interests were pushing for, he led a Canadian YMCA group to the Soviet Union and brought Soviet youth back to Canada. In the summer of 1964, while Strong helped Prime Minister Pearson with the creation of the Company of Young Canadians, he also started to criticize the tiny department of External Aid. Fostering Third World development and U.S. business through foreign aid was also part of the Rockefeller agenda.
… Soon the job of director general of external aid opened up: someone, it can’t be recalled who, told Prime Minister Pearson that Maurice Strong was just the man for the job. In June 1966, Strong left Power Corporation to become the director general of external aid, reporting to the minister of external affairs, Paul Martin… The same month he joined External Aid, he also became president of the YMCA of Canada. While working for the federal government in charge of Canada’s foreign aid program, he also pulled the Canadian Y out of its special relationship with the U.S. on the International Committee.
… By 1962, the U.S. had also begun to use the new USAID to back nationalist movements abroad to counter communism.
Strong As International Spymaster, Power Broker, Business and United Nations Potentate
…. Since Strong had almost no staff at External Aid, he made a deal with SNC (now SNC-Lavalin), a Quebec-based engineering company, to offer “technical facilities” to External Aid in Africa…. SNC was also required to hire for the field anyone Maurice Strong wanted hired and no one Strong didn’t approve of…. One of the most successful projects was the construction of a series of microwave towers across north Africa. These towers permitted African countries to phone each other directly instead of running their communications through France (where they could be listened to).
These odd arrangements between External Aid and SNC were the root for the government agency CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency, which strong created in 1968 to replace External Aid. Before Strong had even finished the legislative framework for CIDA, Prime Minister Pearson, planning to retire, also dreamed up the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) a similar organization to CIDA but more loosely tied to the government…. Since IDRC was not created as agent of the Crown (as CIDA is), it was able to receive charitable donations from corporations and individuals as well as government funds Strong became its chairman- in October 1970.
By the time Strong got the part in his story about how he used SNC as a private front for federal government skullduggery in Africa and Quebec it was Saturday afternoon. He had invited me over to his rented house in Aniers, a village outside Geneva. His house was a plain modern box with French doors opening onto a nice rolling lawn. We sat in his living room. He appeared relaxed. His second wife, Hanne Marstrand, drifted around. She showed little interest in this conversation about SNC and CIDA, as if she’d heard it all before, but it was news to me. I found myself sitting bolt upright. His meaning was quite clear. He had helped create a federally funded but semi-private intelligence/influence network that could have impacts both in Canada and abroad. He later confirmed this interpretation, although he said he had never described it that way before. I was shocked. It had never been acknowledged that Canada had a foreign intelligence or influence capacity outside its embassies. Yet Strong was telling me that he had created one of virtually nothing. There was no reason to suppose that this network wasn’t still running through CIDA and its cousin IDRC: I had reason to believe it was.
It seemed to me that Strong and the federal cabinet got away with this semi-private intelligence/influence system because he’d hidden what he was doing in plain sight. CIDA, the successor organization to External Aid, made regular reports to Parliament and was audited by the auditor general. It was frequently excoriated for the absurd wastes of its tied-aid practices. CIDA may well be wasteful, but that is surely part of the point of the arrangement. Strong ran federal funds through a Quebec-based engineering company, which gave that group bankability and yet tied it to the federal power. Other Quebec companies also got a large cut of federal largesse through tied-aid programs, meaning the aid recipient had to purchase Canadian products and services. Meanwhile, Strong’s hand-picked people in Africa got private companies to hide behind. While the public works done abroad may not have given much benefit to the poor, they made foreign political actors happy. As Paul Palango would later suggest in his book, “Above the Law,” some Quebec political leaders were made happy too because they got a cut from these contracts as campaign contributions. Maurice Strong got information and could exert influence.
The whole layered arrangement was also useful to more parties than the government of Canada. Who? Any group with heavy levels of investment or loans outstanding in Quebec who required continued political stability there- parties like the Chase Manhattan Bank (Rockefeller), like Empire Trust, which had just merged to become the Bank of New York, like the M.A. Hanna Company. Only four years earlier, M.A. Hanna Company had helped organize a coup to preserve interests in Brazil. Canada and Canadian investments were at least as important to M.A. Hanna as those interests in Brazil.
…. (In 1969), Strong got a call from the Swedish representative at the U.N. The Swedes had pushed a resolution at the U.N. to hold an international conference on the human environment at Stockholm. Strong said he was asked if he would take over running it…. Strong’s appointment had always puzzled me. Given his history in the energy business, in he seemed never to have shown interest in the environment except as something to be used, why him?
Strong explained that when he became active “in the international network,” he was seen to have some influence in developing countries. These developing countries, led by Brazil, were resisting the conference. As Senator Passarinho had explained, nationalists in the Brazilian military were convinced this U.N. environmental conference was part of a plot to grab Brazilian resources. The Swedes thought that Strong could deal with Brazil.
… Strong, a federal civil servant, had certain private investments to take care of too. He had been involved throughout his tenure in government in real estate in Toronto through a company called Plural Properties (with Paul Nathanson) and another called M.N.S. Investments, which was one-third owned by former External Affairs Minister Paul Martin, one third by Nathanson and one-third by Strong. These companies had just taken over and reorganized a Toronto real estate company, renamed Y and R Properties. Strong put CIDA’s new director general of special advisers, John Gusave Bene, a war-time Czech immigrant to Canada, on Y and R’s board. Strong had recruited Bene to manage the special people he’d hired through SNC as they continued their work at CIDA.
… Strong went to New York both as an undersecretary general of the U.N. reporting to U Thant and as the secretary general of the Stockholm Conference. Plaudits rained upon him: The New Yorker said he might save the world. He was made a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1971- a position he retained until 1977. The Rockefeller Foundation made a grant for the running of his Stockholm Conference office. He became a member of the Century Club and the Yale Club. He was handed the writing services of Barbara Ward, a British political theorist who promoted the virtues of the one-party states of Africa, and of Rene Dubos, a French ecologist who’d spent his life working at Rockefeller University.
Around this time, and partly to service the Stockholm Conference, the government of Canada began its practice of funding NGOs. Previously treated as private organizations, charities and other groups opened themselves to the money and policies of the federal government- becoming, in effect, PGOs, private government organizations, while calling themselves NGOs, nongovernmental organizations… Canada put together a participatory task force to involve various Canadian environmental groups and business representatives in its delegation to Stockholm. Strong’s former protégé William Turner, by then president of Power Corporation, went to the Stockholm Conference as an NGO concerned with transportation. Why not? Power Corporation owned Canada Steamship Lines. Shipping owners were worried that there would be a convention signed at Stockholm to require the transport of oil in double-hulled ships. This is when Strong first demonstrated that the phrase NGO could be applied, like a democratic varnish, to dignify any group. This rubric could be applied to private organizations funded by government (PGOs); government organizations privatized (GOPs); three people meeting in a basement; or a highly organized business lobby. By calling them all NGOs, he dignified them as the vox populi.
The Stockholm Conference may have also served as a cover for certain triangular reconfigurations of the global power map. In 1969, as Strong was invited to put he conference together, Canada and China also began to negotiate in secret at Stockholm the resumption of their diplomatic relations. This move also fit with the Rockefeller view of global affairs.
… Strong found there was real scope at the U.N. for anyone with his skills. He could raise his own money from whomever he liked, appoint anyone he wanted, control the agenda. He told me had more unfettered power than a cabinet minister in Ottawa. He was right: no voters had put him in office, he didn’t have to run for re-election, yet he could profoundly affect many lives.
Just as he had done at Power Corporation, he used the U.N. as a public platform from which to promote certain ideas. Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos co-wrote “Only One Earth,” a paeon to the idea of globalism. They published it themselves and stuck a U.N. logo on it….
As the Stockholm Conference opened in 1972, Strong warned urgently about the onset of global warming, the devastation of forests, the loss of biodiversity, the polluted oceans, and the population time bomb. He suggested a tax on the movement of every barrel of oil and use of these funds to create a large U.N. bureaucracy to blow the whistle on pollution wherever it was found. As I read this old speech, I realized it could almost be repeated at the Rio Summit. How could the same issues be on the table twenty years later?
After Stockholm, some Western countries followed the U.S. lead and set up new departments of the environment and passed laws and regulations. Environment issues became part of various national governments’ administrative frameworks. The public process of environmental impact assessments in the U.S. became identified in the public mind with a new meaning of democracy- the right of affected parties to group together and be heard before public land use decisions are made.
The other by-product of the conference was the creation of the new U.N. bureaucracy, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). Like so many of the organizations Strong has made, this one too had multiple uses. In 1974, UNEP rose out of the undeveloped soil of Nairobi, Kenya, Strong’s old stomping ground. Placing UNEP in Africa was explained as a sop to the developing countries, who had been suspicious of Western intentions. But it was also useful for the big powers to have another international organization in Nairobi. After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Nairobi became the key spy capital of Africa. Strong became UNEP’s first executive director.
Right after the Yom Kippur War, OPEC raised prices 70 percent and placed an embargo on those states that sided with Israel. When (oil) supply was curtailed by major oil companies to the eastern half of Canada at the beginning of winter, to alleviate public concern and suspicion of oil company motives, Pierre Trudeau’s minority government announced its intent to create a national oil company…. On January 1, 1976, Strong became the first chairman and CEO of Petro-Canada. He also returned to the chair of IDRC.
Strong the World-class Robber Baron
Within a month of startup, Strong hired Doug Bowie… as vice-president/environment reporting direct to Strong, no intermediaries…. Bowie found Petro-Canada was able to go places U.S.-owned private oil giants could not easily enter- such as the disputed area in the sea between Vietnam and China.
In spite of the new conflict of interest guidelines, Strong quickly braided layer on layer of public and private interests. He remained for a time both a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, chair of the IRDC, and chair of Petro-Canada… He also set up a number of new private business ventures… In February, 1976, a month after he started work as chairman of Petro-Canada, he contacted Bill Holt, an accountant introduced to him by a former Empire Trust executive in 1971. Strong invited Holt to manage his continuing partnership with Paul Nathanson. A new entity called Stronat was registered in Alberta in April, 1976. The first deal Strong asked Holt to manage was to purchase the control block in Commerce Capital Corporation, an entity that originated as M.N.S. Investments, owned by Strong, Nathanson, and Senator Paul Martin. Holt arranged a Royal Bank loan, closed the $10-million deal in ten days, and then Stronat resold the control block immediately. Stronat then joined with Ken Rotenberg of Y and R Properties in Toronto to create the Rostland Corporation. Holt and Strong sat on Rostland Corporation’s board.
…. Around the same time he organized the purchase of the control block in Commerce Capital Corporation, Bill Holt had also been asked to set up a company fist called China Ventures and then SinaCorp with a Toronto marketing expert, Harvey Kalef. The China Travel Agency (owned by the Chinese government) had offered Kalef exclusive rights to distribute products made by China’s state industries. After touring China, he’d decided to purchase such goods and then resell them abroad. An accountant he knew suggested he go and see Maurice Strong, who had both access to capital and a sentimental attachment to China because an aunt of his “had walked with Chairman Mao.” Stronat put up $2 million as SinaCorp’s working capital. Kalef was to manage the project.
In November 1976, about the time of the election in Quebec and during the dangerous power vacuum in China, Kalef’s chartered Japan Airlines 747 took off from China loaded with jade, antiques, rugs, gold jewelry, and furniture and flew to Los Angeles. There Kalef had rented space to sell goods in the new Pacific Design Center. Those things he did not sell he packed on a plane sent on to Toronto. That same month, Jian Qing was arrested (in China), and the Gang of Four was crushed.
In January, to his surprise, Kalef was told Stronat was closing down the venture, that he was no longer needed. In Strong’s recollection, he closed the business because Stronat lost money: Kalef had bought too much and paid too much. Strong was particularly rueful about a huge supply of gold chains that no one seemed to want. Strong said he had them melted down into gold bars and sold into a rising commodity market.
I later put it to both Kalef and Strong that it appeared to me their venture had to do with someone trying to move their capital out of China in the lull before the storm. No, no, said Kalef, it had been planned months before Mao’s death. Not the case, said Strong, we dealt with state companies and not individuals.
I should have remembered that as usual with Strong, this China venture had extraordinary flexibility. There was a great deal of room for the satisfaction of many interests. For starters, cash went into China, a low value restricted currency zone, and goods moved outside where they again be converted into a strong currency. Strong had said Stronat had lost money. That meant those running the state companies in China must have ended up with an extraordinary gain. It is interesting to note that not so long after these events Power Corporation of Montreal began to negotiate with state corporations in China: these early negotiations paved the way for important developments more than a decade later.
I sat enthralled in Strong’s living room. I had come to Geneva to solve the puzzle of who Strong is, whose interests he represents. Now, instead of holding in my hands a neat explanation, I was on the edge of falling into his immensely complex, layered world. The NGO story was part of a business story, the business story was part of a political story, and all of them were pages from a book about the Cold War. Maurice Strong was a Rockefeller man, a Liberal man, a businessman, a man with relations to those at the top of the crumbling East bloc, a bridge between so many different centers of power.
In 1977, while Strong was still chairman of both Petro-Canada and the IDRC, he also caused Stronat, his partnership with Paul Nathanson, to invest in agribusiness in the U.S. Dr. Carroll Wilson had introduced him to Scot Spangler (Harvard MBA), who had spent time in Africa working for the new governments of Tanzania and Uganda. Spangler then ran a Texas-based company called ProChemCo. He wanted to take over a larger public company called AZL or Arizona-Colorado Land and Cattle Company. AZL, a conglomerate, owned other companies active in feed lots, land, oil and gas, engineering. It even owned a commodities trading house and a bank. One of its ranches was the Baca Grande in Colorado.
Stronat, a private multinational octopus, purchased control of ProChemCo. through various entities it controlled in Texas, Bermuda, and the Netherlands-Antilles. The corporate name was changed to Procor. In February 1978, it bought an AZL convertible debenture worth $10 million. It gave AZL a two-year option to buy Procor for the same amount. Strong, Hold, and Spangler were so welcome at AZL they were invited to join its board before this deal closed and without actually owning any shares. Strong became chairman of the executive committee.
Why this extraordinary welcome to people who owned no shares? Strong explained that AZL rolled out the red carpet for him because of this little problem AZL was having with Adnan Khashoggi. Strong claimed his role was to keep Khashoggi off the board of AZL.
Khashoggi had been the biggest shareholder of AZL since1974. One of his executives had been on a the board until 1975. With Khashoggi’s help, AZL had entered a number of deals in Iraq, Egypt, and Sudan, often through the head of state of those countries. As has been detailed in a number of books, Adnan Khashoggi is another man of layered influence- an arms dealer/representative of Saudi Arabia, he has had relationships with a number of intelligence agencies. In the 1970s Khashoggi brokered vast arms purchase arrangements between Saudi Arabia and corporations of the U.S. defense establishment. At the same time, he enjoyed private business partnerships with members of the Saudi royal family, who were also officials of the Saudi government. In 1975, as a byproduct of the Congressional investigations of illegal foreign and domestic campaign contributions, the Securities and Exchange Commission wondered if Khashoggi’s huge sales commissions could actually be a clever means to pay bribes by U.S. corporations to foreign officials. When the SEC tried to serve a subpoena on Khashoggi’s executives in March 1976, he left the U.S. and did not return until October 1978. It’s difficult to understand why Strong would be needed to keep Khashoggi off the board of a publicly traded U.S. company while Khashoggi was so busy avoiding an SEC subpoena.
Nevertheless, Strong insisted, there was pressure on him to let Khashoggi in the door. Strong and his future wife, Hanne Marstrand, first met with Khashoggi at Khashoggi’s brother’s house in London. Strong also met Khashoggi at Khashoggi’s own apartment in New York’s Olympic Towers. More often, he met with Khashoggi’s brother to inform him about AZL since Khashoggi continued to be its biggest shareholder.
… By the summer of 1979, as a rolling wave of panic drove the price of oil from $13 to $34 a barrel, Strong had started a new international energy company, International Energy Development Corporation, S.A., or IEDC. He said it was designed to help the Third World cope with these new energy conditions by searching for oil and gas in their own territories. He based the company in politically neutral Switzerland, which required an act of the Swiss parliament since he is not a Swiss citizen. The partners of IEDC were AZL, Sulpetro, Volvo Energi, Sheikh Al Sabah, who was Kuwait’s finance minister and head of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation; the Arab Petroleum Investment Corporation. Staff included a former Algerian politician and director of OPEC and the former worldwide vice-president of exploration for Exxon. IEDC paid license fees to explore for oil and gas in places like Angola, Mozambique, Chad, the Sudan- and even Australia.
It was in the fall of 1979, around the time the Parti Quebecois announced their plans to hold a referendum on the future of Quebec, that AZL’s business got really complex. In October, AZL began the actual purchase of Procor, the first step in a series of maneuvers that resulted in a global version of Power Corporation. By April, AZL had bought Procor and converted its AZL debenture into common shares of AZL Only then did Strong and Nathanson actually own AZL, though they’d been directing it since 1978. In May 1980, Strong also joined the board of a publicly traded Swiss company known by the acronym Sogener. It was chaired by Leonard Hentsch, Strong’s banker friend from the Y network. Strong became Sogener’s executive committee chairman. He moved control of AZL to Sogener, and thus Sogener became the dominant but unseen partner in IEDC.
Strong and the “International Network”
Why? What was Strong up to? Some answers lay in the nature of Sogener and its reach into various corners of the globe. Like a Swiss-French version of SNC, its engineering divisions contracts were in mainly in Africa, in Angola and Libya. Sogener had just sold this engineering division to a Greek shipping magnate named Latsis, a friend of the Saudi King, Fahd. Sogener had done this transaction under the direction of Michel LeGoc, a man with his own very special political connections. Formerly a high French defense official, in 1960 LeGoc had left the French government and formed a mergers and acquisition company called Interfinexa with backing from important banks in Paris and Geneva.
Sogener had cash on hand when Strong joined its board. By then LeGoc had already found a takeover target for Sogener- Credit Immobilier, a publicly traded company active in real estate finance in both France and Switzerland. On Credit Immobilier’s board sat jean Pierre Francois, said to have served with the Resistance in Lyons in World War II along with Francois Mitterand’s lawyer, Roland Dumas…. Francois owned shares in Credit Immobilier and voted the shares belonging to others. After lunch with Maurice Strong, he agreed to sell the control block. LeGoc made sure Francois later got a legion d’honeur. A circular transaction ensued. Credit Immobilier bought Stronat while Stronat borrowed to buy the control block in Credit Immobilier. When this complex deal closed, Credit Immobilier paid out Stronat’s loan and raised a further seventy million Swiss francs in a public offering.
(ETK note: It is an interesting coincidence(?) that the huge European conglomerate that figures in the fictional book/movie; Episode 3 of “The Godfather,” is named “Immobiliare.”)
Paul Nathan died in New York in the fall of 1980, leaving control of this huge transnational conglomerate, loaded with cash, in the hands of Maurice Strong and John Wanamaker, Strong’s friend and Nathanson’s executor. This private/public leviathan sprawled across many national boundaries and through many jurisdictions, with directors on its various boards who were also active in foreign governments. Strong and his colleagues had created the capacity for global arrangements.
This capacity was tested even as it was being formed. In February 1980 the Canadian federal election returned Pierre Trudeau and the Liberal Party to power. Right after the referendum in Quebec in May, 1980, the new Liberal minister of Energy, Mines and Resources, Marc Lalonde, decided Petro-Canada should buy Petrofina Canada, a Quebec-based firm owned in Belgium. Chairman Bill Hopper talked to Petrofina Canada. He was rebuffed. In June, Strong was asked to act as an intermediary between Petro-Canada and Petrofina SA, the Belgian parent of Petrofina Canada. Strong said Hopper asked him because he knew the Petrofina directors in Belgium, “particularly Baron Leon Lambert” whose Banque Bruxelles Lambert owned Petrofina shares and like Francoise voted the shares of others. The baron, a Rothschild, was “elegantly dissolute” according to Strong, who had met him years ago at Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb in New York. Petro-Canada’s actions were to be kept a dark secret from Petrofina Canada’s board in Montreal, said Strong; that is why Strong asked Hentsch to make the first contact in Belgium through Sogener, whose board Strong had just joined. It was all a matter of cover.
After Hentsch made his approach to he Belgian chairman, Strong then talked to Lambert. The share price of Petrofina Canada began to soar. In November 1980, a Montreal newspaper claimed Petro-Canada would soon pay $120 per share for Petrofina Canada. Denials flowed. Unfortunately, when the $1.46-billion deal was announced in February 1981, that’s what the price turned out to be. Three provincial securities commissions announced a joint insider trading investigation with the federal Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs. There had definitely been insider trading. The chairman of Petrofina Canada and other top executives had created a stock option plan in June 1980 after Petro-Canada made its first offer. They had bought shares cheaply and sold them dearly as the market rose on rumors. The top executives at Petrofina Canada insisted they had acted without knowledge of the coming offer.
It was soon learned that Sogener had earned a fee of almost $1 million for its services to Petro-Canada and that former Petro-Canada chair Strong was chairman of Sogener’s executive committee. There was a hue and cry. Strong said he urged the investigators on in their work and gave his earnings to a non-profit created by Barbara Ward- the International Institute for Environment and Development. In December 1981, the federal government published the results of its investigation without waiting for the provincial securities commissions. It stated that no one had improperly traded on inside information. The report did not point out that it was then neither improper nor illegal in Belgium or Switzerland to trade on inside information…. Much later Power Corporation bought control of Baron Lambert’s Banque Bruxelles Lambert: then it bought 40 percent of Petrofina SA.
Maurice Strong took a battering over the Petrofina events, but Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau appointed Strong vice-chairman of the Canada Development Corporation (CDC) in 1982. CDC held the crown interest in a number of corporations. CDC was run by a former executive of Power Corporation, who had refused to buy the control block of the ailing Massey Ferguson company from the Argus group when asked to do so. While Strong bided his time, his friend Jack Austin, by then a senator and a member of the federal cabinet, created the Canada Development Investment Corporation (CDIC) to manage or divest all federal government holdings, including the recalcitrant CDC. In 1982, Strong became the chairman of this larger corporation, reporting to Parliament through Senator Austin. This was a privy council appointment. Nevertheless, Strong did not resign from his other private company interests.
In the meantime, Iran and Iraq went to war: both pumped out ever higher volumes of oil to pay for arms and the price of oil fell. Of IEDC’s partners, only the Kuwaitis wanted to continue hunting for oil and gas in Africa. Strong looked for a company he could merge IEDC with. In May 1982, Tosco, a large California-based independent oil company, was paid $200 million in cash by Exxon as compensation when it pulled out of their joint oil shale project. Tosco became a predator’s opportunity.
The Belzburgs’ First City group backed a Colorado man named Ken Good to begin a hostile takeover of Tosco. This started a chain of events which rapidly sheared Tosco of its asserts like a lamb in spring. Tosco’s chairman, Morton Winston, developed a sudden interest in international oil exploration. A French “internationalist” on his board had told him about Maurice Strong’s company, IEDC. Winston went to Geneva and told Strong he wanted Tosco to buy into IEDC. Instead, Strong said he wanted to merge his whole conglomerate with Tosco, which would entail Tosco offering cash to the shareholders of the various publicaly traded companied involved. The subsequent merger between Tosco and Strong’s leviathan was handled by an American lawyer based in Geneva named Warren “Chip” Lindner.
Lindner was another man with interesting connections. He had been a partner in the huge Texas-based international law firm Vinson and Elkins. His partners in London had acted for Adnan Khashoggi and also helped Ghaith Pharoan, another well-connected Saudi, buy the National Bank of Georgia from President Carter’s budget director, Bert Lance. In 1980, Lindner left Vinson and Elkins to work in the office of the World Wildlife Fund International in Switzerland. He had no backgroun in environmental issues, his expertise was in energy finance, but he was hired as vice-president of policy to assist the head of World Wildlife Fund International There he met Maurice Strong, who was serving both as vice-president and on the board of World Wildlife Fund International.
Strong hired Lindner to work at Sogener. While Strong flew around the world seeing to his various interests, including acting as the chairman of the CDIC for the government of Canada, Lindner crafted the merger with Tosco. When it was finalized in January 1983, Tosco paid out a total of $100 million in cash, Tosco shares, and promissory notes for all the shares of the various public companies controlled by Strong’s leviathan. Strong and his public company associates like Holt and Hentsch got Tosco common sharews. Strong and his private associates in Strovest and Stromar, plus Nathanson’s widow, daughter, and estate, also took preferred shares in Tosco. Strong became board vice-chairman of Tosco and signed a voting agreement with the company. Scott Spangler, who’d bought a few AZL shares, got $2.3 million for them. Adnan Khashoggi got around $10 million. Strong’s special preferred voting shares of Tosco were seemingly worth many, many millions. Ken Good and the Belzburg interests ceased to trouble Tosco after being handsomely paid for their shares of Tosco. Good made many generous campaign contributions to Colorado and national politicians seeking office in 1984
In November 1983, Tosco defaulted on $850 million in bank loans some but not all of which had been secured by preferred shares and notes of Tosco, junior to Strong’s Special Class A preferreds. These had been taken on to buy up Tosco’s own shares and other assets. Tosco’s share price had falled rapidly as the price of oil dropped. Apparently, the value of AZL, IEDC, and the previously cash-rich Credit Immobilier, Sogener, and son also went up in smoke. By 1984, just a year after the merger, Tosco wrote down its $100 million investment in Strong’s companies to virtually nothing. Assets previously described as being worth $100 million and paid for in cash, shares, and promissory notes were now described as worthless.
The banks, a familiar group including Chase Manhattan, Credit-Lyonnais, the Bank of Montreal, and the Bank of New York, agreed to payment of their loans with shares and warrants, but insisted that the special preferred shares be taken out and insisted on a fire sale of the Tosco assets. Strong resigned from the Tosco board and exchanged his preferred shares for common shares which he sold on the market for about $5 million. Spangler set up First Phoenix Corporation (so aptly named) and proceeded to buy back from Tosco at bargain prices some allegedly worthless assets. Strong and his Sogener associates bought back Credit Immobilier for $600,000 in cash plus the assumption of $29,475,000 of debt from Tosco or AZL to Credit Immobilier which was immediately canceled.
Before he left Tosco’s board, Strong offered to buy AZL assets too. In October 1985, after Strong had left Tosco’s board, his First Colorado Corporation did buy the Baca Grande ranch and other AZL real estate and oil and gas assets from Tosco. Sam Belzburg was one of the investors along with Strong in First Colorado. First Colorado paid Tosco $8.2 million for these assets, including the 139,000-acre ranch which also encompasses two major mountain peaks. Underneath the ranch lies a huge aquifer whose water First Colorado hoped to sell for billions.
(ETK Note: Sam Bingham’s 1996 book, “The Last Ranch; A Colorado Community and the Coming Desert” provides the following information about Maurice Strong’s attempt to export freshwater from the San Luis Valley, Colorado to the Denver area:
“In 1986, AWDI (Strong’s American Water Development, Inc.) applied to the Colorado State Engineer for the right to pump from under the Baca 200,000 acre feet of water annually, which considering some Western cities were paying from $6,000 to $10,000 an acre foot, worked out to gross cash flows approaching $2 trillion a year.”)
After the Progressive Conservatives, led by Brian Mulroney, came to power in the fall of 1984, Strong resigned from the board of CDIC. He was busy with other things. In 1983, about the time Tosco defaulted, he had been appointed a member of the Brundtland Commission, the World Commission on Environmental and Development. He got his Sogener associate Chip Lindner a job as the commission’s executive director. The secretary general was a Canadian, Jim MacNeill, who would later serve as chair of a charity raising money for Strong’s office at the Rio Summit. Late in 1984, Strong also got a call from an old friend, former U.S. Republican Congressman, Bradford Morse, then head of the U.N. Development Program. Morse had been asked to organize the relief effort to save thirty million people on the brink of starvation in sub-Saharan Africa. He needed Strong’s help.
It was said of Strong that he created the ultimate information network to deal with the famine-stricken areas of twenty-seven countries in Africa, where governments were toppling, civil wars blazing, and donor countries were certain that aid was being diverted from the hungry to feed soldiers. He lived on planes He went in and out of one-party-ruled countries that had been created and funded by the U.S., the U.S.S.R., China, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and their various proxies, countries that had also become the recipients of Saudi Arabia’s chequebook diplomacy. He got the president of Sudan to open his borders to refugees. He flew to Ethiopia to meet the Soviet-backed Megnistu Haile Mariam several times. He pushed Mengistu to let through the truck convoys and allow the U.N. to monitor delivery of food. This was dangerous work. “You can deal with tough people,” said Strong. “(You) cater to the best and the worst.”
He had cut a deal with Mengistu. He had long since given up on the idea of converting others to the Good. He’d learned to identify actors and their motives and them onside. If he had succeeded in Africa, it was because he had done his homework. He knew what Megistu wanted.
The Run Up to the Rio Earth Summit
At the end of December 1986, Strong was asked to lunch with the new Swedish Prime Minister, Ingvar Carlsson. The Brundtland Commission was winding down, but an explosion at the Soviet nuclear power plant at Chernobyl had scattered radioactive materials all over Europe. (ETK note: Was the timing of this environmental disaster a coincidence? Indeed, the Chernobyl “accident” has been found to have been intentional.) At the lunch, Strong proposed a new United Nations conference on the environment to be held on the twentieth anniversary of the Stockholm conference. At first, Strong thought Sweden would host the conference. Then Canada put in a bid. Then, in April 1989, Brazil put in a bid too. Strong scouted Brazil to find out what the prospective president, Collor de Mello, thought about the issues. In the end, said Strong, it was the Brazilians who suggested that he, Maurice Strong, should be the secretary general of this conference.
Once again, the Rockefeller and the Ford Foundations were generous helping Strong with the costs of his U.N. office. This money was given to a new charity set up in Washington, which doled it out. Some very large multinational corporations, including oil and chemical companies based in Britain, Japan, Switzerland, Italy, and the U.S. also put large sums of money into this kitty. Old associates of Strong like Jim MacNeill served on the charity’s board of directors. Strong did not divest himself of all his energy or resource holdings. Instead, his former protégé at Power Corporation, William Turner, voted his shares in Baca Resources, a publicly traded Alberta oil company he controlled. (It in turn controlled an oil and gas subsidiary of the same name in the U.S.) By this point Maurice Strong had become a figure above suspicion.
One World Government
A few days later, at his office, Strong popped candies to keep up his energy. I bounced in my chair across from him, interrupting, accusing. I was full of the conversations I’d had with others in Geneva. I was beginning to understand that the Rio Summit was part of a Rockefeller-envisioned Global Governance Agenda that dated back before World War II, that it was linked to the regional trade agreements just being negotiatied- the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Maastricht Treaty. Like the Stockholm Conference, it was all about integrating East and West. He was part of the push to remake the U.N. itself to fit a brave new unipolar world. He diverted my attention only briefly with talk about his lunch with the French who may have been appraising him as a candidate for secretary general.
“So, what about it, are you a One Worlder?” I finally asked.
“Have you read what I’ve said on that?” he asked. “I’ve said for years the world needs a world system of governance. Every issue (should be) dealt with at the level (where it can) be dealt with effectively… Ozone comes from refrigerants. You’ve gotta have a global agreement (to deal with it) but actions (have to be) taken nationally…. I also point out that people have to understand the U.N. is different from other governments- (there is) no direct access to (a) constituency and no access to the power of taxation and it is as though the (Canadian) federal government depended for its mandate on a day-by-day decision of the provinces. You know how that would work. Eventually, the U.N. will need direct access as a global level of systems, not the most powerful, but increasing…
“… I’ll point out there is a great difference, the U.N. is a long way from being a world government,” he said. “Maybe it will never get a general taxation power. We recommend that there will be a kind of tax…. In dealing with climate change…. (The) U.N. (may) not apply it. (The) most plausible way (is) where (a) government agrees in consultation to levy the tax nationally and (put a) portion on (an) agreed formula of GNP and put it in a U.N. administered fund.”
Such a tax, he said, definitely would not be levied in the cause of world government. But, nonetheless, he was convinced that in not too long a time, world governance would definitely happen. “A century ago,” he said, “Garibaldi was seen as a completely unrealistic for saying Italy could be united, but it did happen. It can become tomorrow’s inevitability. It see it as inevitable- it’s unreal right now- but I do see it as a necessity.” He proposed that governments themselves move towards it, to pass an act to apportion to a fund- that sort of thing was in line with existing constitutional practices. He said this with a rockhard determination.
I then understood that he hoped to get national governments to take the first and second and third steps in the diminution of their own powers at Rio. It was like hearing a distant trumpet sound outside the walls, a signal that a great work had begun. The Rio Summit, like the Stockholm Conference, was aimed at reorganizing the world into very much larger administrative units, with real power redistributed from national governments to vast regional organizations. The idea of relative sovereignty was going to apply to all nation states, not just environmentally sensitive places like the Amazon. The foundations for this had been laid years ago around the time Stockholm, back when it seemed the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and China could all come to at least a triangular agreement. That’s when the Rockefellers had first created their Trilateral Commission, an organization that configured the world in three economic zones- Europe, North America, and Japan.
Spying
During his time at the U.N., he said, when he was done, this business of spying had always been a factor. “In the Cold War,” he said, as if it were long over, “the Soviets showed me dossiers on people (they thought) were CIA. The Americans said x is KGB….. I assumed everybody is on It’s the right way to operate…. I decided the U.N. (is an) open, leaky system and to treat it that way.” He mused about the business of openness in the face of the covert. “I’ve lived a complex life- I’m open about it,” he said. Most of his complexities, he added later, “were known or suspected.”
“The U.N. is riddled with intelligence people,” he said. “It’s good cover. A lot like to get in places where things (are) drafted.”
The Baca Ranch and Rio
It became a kind of game for me to trace connections of the PGOs (private governmental organizations) trying to sell the Global Governance Agenda back to Maurice Strong. I was not surprised to learn that he and his wife Hanne Marstrand even had their own such organization, the Manitou Foundation. Hanne Marstrand is its president; Strong its treasurer. He made sure that Manitou Foundation was accredited as an NGO to the Rio Summit. Manitou was then asked to organize a spiritual meeting for the Rio Summit. Manitou Foundation’s various grant-making exercises include giving land to favoured groups at the Baca ranch. Various religious orders the Carmelites and Tibetan monks also have retreats at the ranch. Certain biological materials are stored there against any future depletions of the gene pool. Manitou Foundation was originally financed by $100,000 from Laurance Rockefeller and $20,000 from Robert O. Anderson, former head of Arco. It also received $1.2 million from the sale of Strong’s shares of American Water Development, Inc. (the company made to pipeline water from the Baca Grande’s aquifer) to his partners in First Colorado Corporation. Later, Manitou also got $21,500 from the charity set up to Strong’s Summit office.
(At U.N. headquarters. Hanne) Marstrand had flown in from the Baca Grande that weekend for the start of the preparatory conference. Marstrand had a talent for New Age spirit matter, an ability to roll up her sleeves and plunge publicly into the latest of most ancient of cultural forms. A Tibetan lama who died in her living room stayed unmoved for the requisite number of days until his well-trained spirit actually left his flesh. Marstrand was familiar with sweat lodge ceremonies of American Indians; she was convinced of the power of crystals and intrigued by the prophecies of neighbors. These interests made her attractive socially to people like Shirley MacLaine and J.J. Ebaugh, Ted Turner’s pilot. Strong and Marstrand have a kind of partnership based on separate talents. Maurice Strong is a genius of arrangements; Marstrand tends the vineyards of the soul.
… Working groups were meeting on two floors, most with their doors open, one closed. No one would say what the group behind the closed door was deliberating, nor would they say why one could not enter. I slipped into a press chair in another room in time to hear a British delegate complain about Strong’s Agenda 21 document.
2. Maurice Strong, Environmental Champion, Dies at 86
By SAM ROBERTS DEC. 1, 2015
Maurice Strong, center, at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. Credit The New York Times
Maurice Strong, a former industrialist and confessed ecological sinner who was in the vanguard of placing environmentalism on the world’s agenda as a high-ranking United Nations official, died on Saturday. He was 86.
His death came on the eve of the United Nations negotiations in Paris on global warming, attended by President Obama and other world leaders.
Achim Steiner, United Nations under secretary general and executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, announced the death but did not say where Mr. Strong, a Canadian, died or give the cause.
He credited Mr. Strong with making “history by launching a new era of international environmental diplomacy.”
For years Mr. Strong, a self-made oil and gas billionaire, sounded the alarm on climate change and tried to goad the governments of developed countries to take responsibility for the ecological degradation wrought by industrialization.
“The environmental crisis is largely of our making,” Mr. Strong said of the industrial nations in 1970, adding that it was therefore incumbent on them to enlist and assist developing nations in addressing the problem.
“We cannot expect them to attach the same priority to environmental action as we do,” he said, “confronted as they are with the compelling and immediate pressures of meeting the basic needs of their people for food, shelter, health care, education and employment.”
Mr. Strong helped globalize the environmental movement early on as secretary general of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, held in 1972. Two decades later he organized the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
After the Stockholm conference, Mr. Strong became the first executive director of the Environment Program.
It was one of several leadership posts he held at the United Nations. In the mid-1980s he directed the agency’s Office for Emergency Operations, mobilizing famine relief for drought-ravaged Africa. More than a decade later he served as Secretary General Kofi Annan’s executive coordinator for bureaucratic reform and as special envoy to North Korea and the Far East.
(He stepped aside as the envoy in 2005 after Tongsun Park, a South Korean with a scandalous past, was found to have been an unregistered lobbyist for Iraq in the United Nations oil-for-food program and to have invested $1 million in a company controlled by Mr. Strong. Mr. Strong was cleared of any involvement in the scandal.)
Maurice (pronounced MORR-iss) Frederick Strong was born on April 29, 1929, in Oak Lake, a prairie hamlet in southern Manitoba. His father, Frederick, was an unemployed railway telegraph operator. The family was so poor that Maurice would collect lumps of coal that had fallen from passing trains to heat their house.
At 14, he left home to become a merchant mariner and a fur trader and to live briefly among the Eskimos. When the United Nations set up its headquarters early on in Lake Success, N.Y., he wangled a job as a guard.
Returning to Manitoba, he enlisted as a securities analyst in Winnipeg, the capital, and was recruited by the legendary oilman John E. P. Gallagher, who was known as Smiling Jack, to work for Dome Petroleum in 1951.
Mr. Strong later scouted service station sites for an oil company in the Middle East and started a graphite mine in Tanzania before returning to Dome in 1955. There he profited from stock options, then served as president of the Canadian Industrial Gas and Power Corporation of Canada. He was later chairman of Petro-Canada and of the Canadian Development Investment Corporation.
As a tycoon, he confessed to The New York Times in 1992, he had been “an environmental sinner.” But he later realized, he said, that “we were running the Earth without a depreciation account, in effect spending our capital.”
In the 1960s, he was appointed to run what became the Canadian International Development Agency by Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. His success in increasing foreign aid brought him to the attention of U Thant, the secretary general of the United Nations at the time, who selected him to convene the 1972 Stockholm conference.
The 1992 Rio summit meeting Mr. Strong organized attracted delegates from 178 nations, including 118 heads of state or of government. It produced an acknowledgment that eradicating poverty was necessary to achieve environmentally sustainable development. But it ended without setting specific, tangible goals. And though donor nations agreed to provide $7 billion in aid to poorer ones, the sum was far short of the $70 billion that the United Nations said was needed annually.
Mr. Strong was the author in 2000 of “Where on Earth Are We Going?” in which he predicted that in three decades environmental catastrophes could wipe out as much as two-thirds of the world’s population.
He and his Danish-born second wife, Hanne, had seven children from previous marriages and lived, among other places, on a ranch in Colorado. There was no word on survivors.
3. History of Maurice Strong by Judi McLeod
Maurice F. Strong, born April 29, 1929, was a Canadian businessman. He is a Canadian expatriate, entrepreneur, environmentalist, and one of the world’s leading proponents of the United Nations’s involvement in world affairs.
Strong had his start as a petroleum entrepreneur and became president of Power Corporation until 1966. In the early 1970s he was Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and then became the first Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme. He returned to Canada to become Chief Executive Officer of Petro-Canada from 1976 to 1978. He headed Ontario Hydro, one of North Americas largest power utilities, was national President and Chairman of the Extension Committee of the World Alliance of YMCAs, and headed American Water Development Incorporated. Molten Metals Technology[1] and Cordex Petroleum[2] were two failed business ventures that went bankrupt and dissolved.
Today Strong lives in the People’s Republic of China, and is President of the Council of the United Nations’s University for Peace. UPEACE is the only university in the UN system able to grant degrees at the masters and doctoral. He is an active honorary professor at Peking University and Honorary Chairman of its Environmental Foundation.
He is Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Institute for Research on Security and Sustainability for Northeast Asia.
Maurice Strong had his start in business as a specialist in oil and mineral resources for a leading brokerage firm, James Richardson & Sons. Moving to Calgary, Alberta, he became assistant to one of the most colorful and dramatically successful leaders of the oil industry, J.P. Gallagher. At Gallagher’s Dome Petroleum, Strong occupied several key roles including Vice President of Finance.
In the 1950s he took over a small natural gas company, Ajax Petroleums, and built it into what became one of the leading companies in the industry, Norcen Resources. This attracted the attention of one of Canada’s principal investment corporations with extensive interests in the energy and utility businesses, Power Corporation of Canada. It appointed him initially as its Executive Vice President and then President from 1961 until 1966.
In 1976, at the request of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Strong returned to Canada to head the newly created national oil company, Petro-Canada[3]. He then became Chairman of the Canada Development Investment Corporation, the holding company for some of Canada’s principal government-owned corporations.
American Water Development
As Chairman of AZL Resources Incorporated and American Water Development Incorporated, Strong instituted a program to pump underground water and send it to the suburban Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo. Townspeople of nearby Crestone, Colorado created a grass-roots movement against the business project. The project was opposed by the Colorado Division of Wildlife and National Park Service, both claiming it would cause significant environmental damages to nearby wetland and sand dune ecosystems. After a lengthy trial, Colorado courts ruled against AWDI and required payment of the objectors’ legal fees, $3.1 million.[4] Afterwards, Strong was quoted as saying, “My interest in the water went beyond it being a good business. I saw development of the water as an exceptional opportunity to apply my sustainable-development principles on a real-life scale.”[5]
Strong first met with a leading UN official in 1947 who arranged for him to have a temporary low-level appointment, to serve as a junior security officer at the UN headquarters in
In 1971, Strong commissioned a report on the state of the planet, entitled “Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet” [6] and co-authord by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos. The report summarized the findings of 152 leading experts from 58 countries in preparation for the first UN meeting on the environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. This was the world’s first “state of the environment” report.
The Stockholm Conference established the environment as part of an international development agenda. It led to the UN General Assembly in December 1972 of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), with headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, and the election of Strong to head it. UNEP was the first UN agency to be headquartered in the third world.[7] As head of UNEP, Strong convened the first international expert group meeting on climate change.[8]
Maurice Strong was one of the commissioners of the World Commission on Environment and Development, set up as an independent body by the United Nations in 1983.
His role in leading the UN’s famine relief program in Africa was the first in a series of UN advisory assignments, including reform and his appointment as Secretary-General of the UN Conference on Environment and Development—best known as the Earth Summit.[9][10]
After the Earth Summit, Strong continued to take a leading role in implementing the results of agreements at the Earth Summit through establishment of the Earth Council, the Earth Charter movement, his Chairmanship of the World Resources Institute, Membership on the Board of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, the Stockholm Environment Institute, The Africa-America Institute, the Institute of Ecology in Indonesia, the Beijer Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and others. Strong was a longtime Foundation Director of the World Economic Forum, a Senior Advisor to the President of the World Bank, a Member of the International Advisory of Toyota Motor Corporation, the Advisory Council for the Center for International Development of Harvard University, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the World Wildlife Fund, Resources for the Future, and the Eisenhower Fellowships. His public service activities were carried out on a pro bono basis made possible by his business activities, which included Chairman of the International Advisory Group of CH2M Hill, Strovest Holdings Inc., Technology Development Inc., Zenon Environmental Inc., and most recently, Cosmos International, and the China Carbon Corporation.
Strong lobbied to change NGO perspectives on World Bank.[11]
In 1999, at the request of then UN Secretary-General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, he took on the task of trying to restore the viability of the University for Peace, headquartered in Costa Rica, established under authorization of the UN General Assembly.[12] The UN’s reputation was at risk as the organization had been subjected to severe mismanagement, misappropriation of funds and inoperative governance. As Chairman of its governing body, the Council, and initially as Rector, Strong led the process of revitalizing the University for Peace and helped to rebuild its programs and leadership. He retired from the Council in the spring of 2007.
From 2003 and 2005, Strong served as the personal envoy UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to lead support for the international response to the humanitarian and development needs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.[13]
2005 Oil-for-Food scandal and hiring practice criticisms
In 2005, during investigations into the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food Programme, evidence procured by federal investigators and the U.N.-authorized inquiry of Paul Volcker showed that in 1997, while working for Annan, Strong had endorsed a check for $988,885, made out to “Mr. M. Strong,” issued by a Jordanian bank. It was reported that the check was hand-delivered to Mr. Strong by a South Korean businessman, Tongsun Park, who in
2006 was convicted in New York federal court of conspiring to bribe U.N. officials to rig Oil-for-Food in favor of Saddam Hussein. During the inquiry, Strong stepped down from his U.N. post, stating that he would “sideline himself until the cloud was removed”. Since then Strong has not returned to his native Canada, and now lives in Beijing.[14]
Strong was the UN’s envoy to North Korea until July 2005. According to Associated Press his contract was not renewed “amid questions about his connection to a suspect in the UN oil-for-food scandal”, Tongsun Park, as well as due to criticism that he gave his step-daughter a job at the UN contrary to UN staff regulations against hiring immediate family.[15]
Maurice Strong has received a number of honors, awards and medals. He has received 53 honorary doctorate degrees and honorary visiting professorships at 7 universities.
References and notes
1. “Molten Metals Technologies Inc”. Lynn M. LoPucki’s Bankruptcy Research Database. http://lopucki.law.ucla.edu/companyinfo.asp?name=Molten+Metal+Technology%2C+Inc.. Retrieved 2008-01-05.
2. “Cordex Petroleum”. Internet Bankruptcy Library. http://bankrupt.com/TCR_Public/990406.MBX. Retrieved 2008-01-05.
3. “Maurice F. Strong Is First Non-U.S. Citizen To Receive Public Welfare Medal, Academy’s Highest Honor”. National Academy of Sciences. http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12032003. Retrieved 2008-01-20.
4. “Rural area beats back water diversion plan” article by Barry Noreen, High Country News May 30, 1994
5. Where on Earth Are We Going?. April 23, 2001. Texere.ISBN 158799092X
On AWDI, page 169: “My interest in the water went beyond it being a good business. I saw development of the water as an exceptional opportunity to apply my sustainable-development principles on a real-life scale.” page 170: “Initially my partners had all given at least passive support to my plans for the project, which I had insisted from inception to be an example of environmental and socially responsible development.” page 171: “I donated my interest to the Fetzer Foundation.”
6. Ward Barbara Dubos Rene. Only One Earth. May 25, 1972. Andre Deutsch Ltd.ISBN 0233963081
7. http://www.unep.org Website of the United Nations Environment Programme
8. “A super agency?”. Globe and Mail. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/v5/content/subscribe?user_URL=http://www.theglobeandmail.com%2Fservlet%2Fstory%2FRTGAM.20070307.wcoclimate07%2FBNStory%2FClimateChange%2F&ord=4762007&brand=theglobeandmail&force_login=true. Retrieved 2008-01-14. Member account login required to access full article.
9. Report of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio, 1992
10. Tribute Special Supplement: On the Road to Rio. (1991). World Media Institute, Ottawa, Canada
11. http://www.mauricestrong.net/2008072115/strong-biography.html
12. “University of Peace Makes New Appointments and Agrees on Major Expansion”. Science Blog. http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/archives/L/2000/B/un001921.html. Retrieved 2008-01-05.
13. “UN urges North Korea-US talks”. British Broadcasting Corporation. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2916473.stm. Retrieved 2008-01-05.
14. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122368007369524679.html
15. The Globe and Mail
External links
· Official website of Maurice Strong
· United Nations University for Peace
Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Strong”
4. THE WIZARD OF BACA GRANDE by Daniel Wood, 1990
A story about a burning bush, Shirley MacLaine, Zen Monks, and mystic crystals.
A story about the biggest water deal ever. A story of how a boy from Oak Lake Manitoba set out to change the world.
Maurice Strong has gained more respect and influence than any other Canadian alive today. Now he’s risking it on a bold experiment that could save us all from ourselves – or just blow up in his face. By Daniel Wood
Highway 17 is a blue line on the map of southern Colorado that runs between nowhere and nowhere. It crosses the Rio Grande outside of Alamosa and cuts due north through the San Luis Valley, a bleak expanse of dust and sagebrush. The surrounding flatness is broken by the distant Sangre de Cristo – “Blood of Christ” – Mountains, which rise in 2,100-metre cliffs along the valley’s eastern flank, 24 kilometres away. Other than that nothing. A rabbit dead on the two-lane asphalt. A high blue sky.
There’s nothing to indicate, nothing except the words of my companion, 60-year-old Canadian Maurice Strong, that up ahead a few kilometres, past the obscure right turn marked “Crestone”, past the Lazy U Ranch and its yard of derelict farm equipment, beyond Crestone itself, population 60, a village of God-fearing Baptists and a couple of recently arrived New Agers, up there in the aspen-covered foothills below towering Mt. Kit Carson, lies tangible evidence of a great-some would say preposterous- utopian dream. Its goal is nothing less than to alter, utterly, the history of the world.
The dream belongs to multi-millionaire Strong, who grew up in Oak Lake, Manitoba, dirt-pore, eating pigweed and dandelions for vegetables during the worst Depression times, and who decided one day in the early 1940s that he would make his mark on the world. Today, his resume reads like the lives of a dozen great men. At the age 25, he was vice-president of Dome Petroleum. At 31, he became president of the Power Corporation of Canada. He went on to found and head CIDA (the Canadian International Development Assistance program) and later Petro-Canada. At the global level, where he’s better known than in his own country, he is considered one of the world’s leading environmentalists.
The dream also belongs to Strong’s mystical, 48-year-old Danish-born wife, Hanne, whose visions have propelled the plan. Together, they have established in the Colorado desert a place they call the Baca, an international spiritual community which they hope will serve as a model for the way the world should be – and, they say, must be – if humankind is to survive.
It all started in 1978 when a mysterious man visited Hanne bearing a prophecy of the coming apocalypse. The dream grew amid omens that defy belief. It has been nourished by the Strongs’ friends, such people as Rockefeller, Trudeau, the Dalai Lama, and Shirley MacLaine. And its future is now entwined with political realities as bizarre – and troublesome – as the prophecies and omens from which the dream began.
Needless to say, there are men out here on this high plain who do not like the sound of these things any more than those of previous generations liked the earlier dreamers who tried to occupy this place. In a region perennially poor, in a land barely tamed since vast herds of buffalo roamed here over a century ago, people with dreams can be seen as intruders and a threat to the way things are. If those people are rich, if they are foreigners, and if they are talking about global harmony and a new world order – well, it conjures up in the minds of many of the locals the kind of xenophobic suspicion that rural America sometimes feels toward strangers. And if these foreigners set out to establish within the morning shadows of the Sangre de Cristo peaks and international community of spiritual seekers – a sort of United Nations of religious beliefs – complete with monasteries and devotees of the Vedic mother goddess and amulet-carrying native American shamans and even Shirley MacLaine and her New Age followers, then such dreams can be seen as an affront to the Baptists and born-again evangelicals for whom Jesus Christ is the Answer. And if, again, these foreigners were to discover, quite to their surprise, that the enormous tract of land they’ve acquired to fulfill their plan happens to sit atop what could be the largest untapped reservoir of water in the U.S.A. – smack in the middle of the parched and booming south-west – and the couple, together with some partners, from a company to sell some of the billions of dollars’ worth of new-found water to folks in Denver and downstream along the Rio Grande, envy and suspicion and bigotry can combine into a potent force.
And that is exactly what has happened. There have been strange rumors and public protests. There have been death threats. Mistrust and the water may jeopardize the dream.
The Strongs are the latest in a line of dreamers who have come to the San Luis Valley pursuing a vision. The Anazasi Indians and the Spanish conquistadors passed this way centuries ago on the trail to oblivion. In the 1880s, miners came, believing they’d found El Dorado in the veins of gold that ran into the grey quartzite along Cottonwood and Willow and Spanish creaks. But the gold ran out. The boom town of Crestone withered. Next came a scheme in the 1970s to build a giant retirement community, called Baca Grande after the nearby 57,760-hectare Baca Grant ranch. Thirty million dollars were sunk into roads and utilities to service the 10,000 lots. But only a few hundred settled. Few now remain.
In 1978, together with the other investors, Strong bought the Baca Grant – sight unseen – as part of a much larger land purchase. He and his wife walked the aspen-lined creeks and climbed among the 4,200-metre peaks above the Baca. They liked the solitude, the silences, the sunsets. They knew nothing about the hidden water. They couldn’t have imagined what trouble it would bring.
One evening a gray-bearded stranger arrived uninvited at their townhouse. He introduced himself as Glen Anderson and told Hanne, “I’ve been waiting for you.” He described to her the visions he had had while wandering in the nearby mountains. He saw that the leaders of all the worl’s religions would gather at the Baca. They’d build their temples and monasteries and churches, and political, educational, and corporate leaders would follow. Together, he told Hanne, these people would give shape to a new planetary order which would evolve from the economic collapse and environmental catastrophes that would sweep the globe in the years ahead.
Hanne grew up amid wealth and risk in wartime Copenhagen. Her mother worked in the Danish Resistance, helping to ferry European Jews out of Germany. And Hanne knew from earliest childhood that she was different, that she had mystical abilities. She saw angels. She could recall past lives. Something made her feel she was once and Indian and that she should go to the U.S. to find her ancestral home. After an education of industrial and interior design. she went to America.
And so when she heard Anderson telling her about his voices, she took it as prophecy. She headed alone uphill into the mountains carrying and Indian pipe and a pouch of medicinal herbs and found a promontory above the Baca. For three days she stayed there, fasting, meditating, observing the land. It was no coincidence, she felt, that “The Old Man” – as she calls Anderson now – came to her. His message could not be ignored. She would – with her husband’s support and his international connections – try to do what Anderson directed.
When Strong heard this, he thought it outrageous. He called the plan grandiose and impractical. But then, these qualities had always been part of his attraction to her. She wasn’t afraid of thinking big. Hanne heard her husband’s doubts and knew enough about the man to know that he, too, had had unrealistic dreams, that he had global visions, that he could be won over.
Strong grew up beside the railroad tracks that passed through Oak Lake, a town of 400 people, 56 kilometres west of Brandon. His father worked for the CPR until the Depression hit, then odd jobs until the war came. Maurice’s school-teacher mother filled his mind with stories from history and images of the world beyond Manitoba, and he recalls watching with a mixture of sadness and thrill the passing freights covered with destitute people travelling . He longed to see the world. When the Second World War came – and life on the prairies gradually got better – he remembers asking his mother why it was the world worked that way. Why the suffering of the ’30s? Why the war and economic recovery now? She told him it didn’t have to be that way. She told him that, if he put his mind to it, he could change the world. You’d be surprised, she’d said, at how far you can go if you don’t accept the limits, if you don’t set any barriers for yourself.
Hanne knew these words, for her husband occasionally repeated them. She hoped that at the Baca the two of them, together, might – just might – be able to change the world. If a visitor turns right at the Y intersection just outside Crestone, as I did many times during my stay, the road climbs into the forested hills overlooking the San Luis Vally, where the dreams of previous occupants are turning to dust. Circles of stones mark long-abandoned native sites from which attacks on the buffalo were launched. Collapsed cabins, rusting machinery, and mounded trailings piles indicate the deserted gold mines. And everywhere, spreading downhill onto the plain, an intricate network of crumbling roads attests to the scale of the retirement community’s failure. Scattered across this landscape is evidence of the newest utopian settlement: an exquisite Catholic monastery for members of the monastic Carmelite order; a $175,000 solar-powered Hindu temple; a strange, mustard-yellow tower called a ziggurat; a mud-caulked southwest Indian hogan; a subterranean Zen Buddhist centre complete with a computer and organic gardens; a house of thousands of crystals, another occupied by an 85-year-old native shaman, This is the Baca today. But today, I’m discovering, is only the beginning. For the Strongs, it is a lifetime project.
I find myself wondering what dedication, what idealism compels them toward such an unlikely dream. And the more i learn, the more aware I become that I’ve entered a world of illusions, where the sufrace conceals things unfathomable. I can’t believe – though I would like to – the supernatural stories Hanne tells. I wonder how an aggressive and calculating businessman like Strong can also be a mystic. I can’t figure out how Shirley MacLaine will affect the Baca when she moves in. And I can’t get the water – the billions of dollars’ worth of water – out of my mind.
I keep going over the conversation in which the Strongs described to me the very first words that passed between them. At the party in New York City over 20 years ago where they’d been introduced, Hanne, well aware of Strong’s reputation, had said to her future husband, “Some people say you’re a genius. And some people say you’re a fake.” Hanne laughed at the memory and laughed harder at her husband’s rebuttal. Strong looked at me at that moment and said, “And she’s still wondering!”
I get the impression that they enjoy this ambiguity, this flirtation between reality and illusion. I get the impression that the tables could have been turned, that Strong could have confronted Hanne: genius? or fake? The magus and the mystic, I tell myself. It’s important to figure it all out. The answers matter. For, as the Strongs mention, they see the Baca as a paradigm for the entire planet and say that the fate of the earth is at stake.
When Strong left Oak Lake in 1943, having skipped four grades for his scholastic abilities and graduated at age 14, he carried with him an abiding sense of the world’s injustices and a desire never again to be poor. He bought a ticket on a train out of town. For a while, adding five years to his age and darkening his pubescent mustache for effect, he worked with the merchant marine along the B.C. coast. He then became an apprentice fur trader in the High Arctic. He did a little prospecting. He lived among the Inuit. He wandered. on day in 1943, after a long rainy ride in an open coal car, he found himself back at Oak Lake, cold, lonely. He could see the lights in the window of his house, but something told him he could not go home again. He rode further on, stopping in Broadview, Saskatchewan. As he sat beside the tracks, a newspaper blew past. He caught it. On the front page he read that Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed that they would, after the war, form a new international organization dedicated to world justice and peace. It would be called the United Nations.
The concept hit him like a thunderbolt. “I knew at that moment,” Strong told me, “I wanted to be part of it.”
In the two decades that followed, he discovered that although his lack of university education prevented him from doing something of consequence at the international level, his shrewdness brought him success in money matters. He arrived in Alberta during the boom of the early ’50s as a young financial analyst specializing in resource development. He befriended oil entrepreneur Jack Gallagher and later joined Dome Petroleum as its third employee. He met and married Pauline, his first wife, with home he had four children. By investing in oil and gas properties and founding a series of resource-based companies, he earned his first million within a few years. He then moved on to the presidency of the Power Corporation of Canada, a leading energy-investment firm. Financial success, corporate connections, and power were his – and he hadn’t turned 32.
But inside him, still unfulfilled, lay the seed planted by his mother – that he could do something to better the world. Then, in 1965, he was asked to meet Prime Minister Lester Pearson. The PM wanted to know if Strong was interested in bringing his managerial skills and his long-held international concerns to the organization now known as CIDA. Strong became director-general of External Aid, which put him in charge of all Canadian foreign aid. He left, willingly, a $200,000-a-year job as a corporate executive for a $27,000-a-year job as a civil servant. It didn’t matter. He knew he would finally get to fulfil his dream of becoming involved with the United Nations.
From there, though his subsequent friendship with Pearson’s successor, Pierre Trudeau, the millionaire energy entrepreneur-turned-international do-gooder found the cause that has come to dominate the past 20 years of his life. With the support of the Canadian government, he has participated in or directed practically every major environmental initiative that has come out of the United Nations from that time to this. He organized the first World Conference on the Environment in 1972. Then he moved to Kenya, where he established and headed the U.N. Environment Program. After that, he joined the World Commission on the Environment, which produced the epochal 1987 Brundtland Report, the incendiary that has ignited the present global “green” movement. Three months ago, he was appointed secretary-general of the U.N.’s world conference on the environment and development to be held in Brazil in 1992. From such platforms, he has proposed a new economic order based on the redistribution of the developed world’s industries and wealth to the Third World. He has called for a massive retooling of western economies away from short-sighted consumption and toward long-term conservation. On occasion, he has said that the one factor that may spare humanity from its environmental folly is a worldwide spiritual reawakening. He hopes the Baca can serve as a seed.
“I believe the great frontier of the future is the frontier between the individual spirit and the Spirit, the cosmos,” he confides to me on one of our many drives through the San Luis Valley. “At our highest moments, we feel a sense of unity with the cosmos. A lot of us have static, though. Our society runs on people feeling unfulfilled, unconnected. The process of atunement is the trick. It takes practice. I remember asking a monk in Sikkim, who’d just come out of three years, three months, and three days of silent meditation, how his efforts had benefitted the world. He asked me: ‘Why isn’t it as important to develop one’s spiritual nature as, say, an athlete in the west developing his physical prowess or an intellectual developing his intellectual abilities?’”
Here is a man, I tell myself, who has fulfilled many, perhaps most, of his ambitions and dreams. He has made millions. He has sat at the table with many of the earth’s most powerful people. He has tried – in a rational and political way – to change the world. And yet, he shared with Hanne a sense of the profound mystical possibilities that exist for those tho are prepared to retreat from the hubbub and listen to the moaning of the wind. The more questionable New Age practices – belief in things like crystals or omens – heaves to Hanne and her occult faith. His is a more sceptical mind.
Nevertheless, he confesses that a few years ago, while walking with the famed author and journalist Bill Moyers in the desert nearby, something strange, something inexplicable happened. According to Strong: “We’d been walking, talking, heading back to my parked car. Suddenly, this bush – some sagebrush – erupted in flames in front of us! It just burst into flames. I was astounded. Moyers was, too. A bush bursting into flames!” He shakes his head at the memory. He knows it sounds, well, flaky. But it did happen, he reassures me. It is the most impressive mystical experience he has had.
He is concerned, above all, about man’s extinction. The words of Percy Shelley’s ironic 19th-century poem Ozymandias – memorized in his youth – have seemed, of late, more and more like the epitaph of human civilization:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkles lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on the lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear –
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sand stretch far away
Along the way during the past 20 years, not unnoticed in his home country, he agreed in 1976, at Pierre Trudeau’s request, to set up and become CEO of Petro-Canada. The country was in the midst of the OPEC-induced oil crunch. Strong had energy-industry connections and well-known doubts about unfettered capitalism. He took the job. His old Alberta Oil Patch friends were aghast. Strong, an apparent free-enterprise pal, was helping the loathed Liberals nationalize parts of the country’s oil and gas industries.
“I’m a maverick,” says Strong, explaining his willingness to leave the international field for controversial corporate job. “I’ve always been regarded as a peculiar type. I’ve been in it, but not necessarily of it.
This observation, I soon discover, holds true for Strong’s involvement in the Baca spiritual community: he is in it, but not necessarily of it. By nature, he is a philosophic and a little shy. He stammers at times. At the Baca, he affects the look of a westerner – cowboy ha, string tie, pointy boots. But his interests are primarily global. He travels endlessly, speaking on the need for environmental legislation in one place, attending a board meeting in a second, visiting influential friends along the way.
As Hanne says, explaining their unusual relationship, “Maurice is out there, trying to save the world. He’s out there, speaking, his diplomacy, his global visions. But you’ve got to have examples. There have to be places where his ideas come to earth. His is the macro – the world. The Baca’s the micro. If there’s a glimmer of hope for the future, that’s what this place is about.”
Hanne prefers to remain in the couple’s new adobe house that sits on the lowest slopes of the Sangre de Cristo foothills. The two-bedroom building, like the Baca itself, is a prototype for the future: the basement, a large cold cellar for storing vegetables, fruit, and Hanne’s growing collection of seeds from rare and endangered plants; in the pantry, a mulching system with its compost-digesting earthworms; throughout the house, passive solar headings and triple-glazed windows. As well, the house is crammed with religious objects: African masks, sacred Nepalese stones, a half-dozen antique Tibetan wall-hangings called tankas. It was beneath one of these, I’m informed, that a visiting associate of the Dali Lama, the Ta Lama, died nine years ago while sitting cross-legged in deep medication. According to Tibetan custom, Hanne tells me, the dead lama was left untouched in an upright position for four days until his spirit had departed. When the body was finally moved, she adds, the attending doctor noted that it didn’t smell and that it heard – and she put her fist against her chest – was still warm.
From the house and the nearby ranch headquarters, the Strongs oversee the religious community’s development, the progress of which has not always been smooth. In 1979, at the Strong’s invitation, the first groups moved to the Baca – the Aspen Institute and the Lindisfarne Association, a humanistic American think-thank and a spiritual society, respectively. Later, they withdrew in the face of the site’s remoteness. Some of the locals were happy to see them go, for they imagined – in the presence of such visitors as Henry Kissinger, the World Bank’s Robert McNamara, and the presidents of the organizations like IBM, Pan Am, and Harvard University – a clandestine, left-wing conspiracy to establish the Baca as the base for a world government. Rumors circulated for a while that Strong had a huge warehouse in Canada full of newly designed and minted currency, ready to issue when the “internationalist conspiracy” was initiated.
The truth is less grand. During the last decade, the Strongs have donated 600 hectares and about $1 million to various religious groups to encourage them to settle in the Baca. As well, several wealthy friends of the Strongs, including Shirley MacLaine, plus 100 or so other practitioners of New Age beliefs, have in the last few years purchased land or homes amid the widely scattered buildings of the traditional religions.
But it isn’t until I see Hanne’s map labelled “The valley of the Refuge of the World Truths”, that I glimpse the Big Picture. We unroll it on the floor of her study, directly beneath the tanka where the lama died.
“Here’s where the Tibetan monastery’s going to go,” she says, pointing. “Here’s where a rabbi from Israel’s going to do a centre for the study of Jewish Mysticism. The Taoists are coming in 1990. So’s a Sufi leader and his group. And here’s Shirley MacLaine’s place”
I look. They’re all there, on the map. So are the names of a score more religious groups and humanistic associations that are slated for 1991 and beyond. “This is still an infant,” she says, her voice motherly. “It’s still a seed. It’s a 20-, 30-, 40- year project. To bring the world’s religions together – that’s a very long road. To create an example of a new future – that, two takes time. But this place will have a key role in the future of mankind.”
I want to believe her. I know, however, that fulling her determination are terrible fears that forces beyond her control may overwhelm both the Baca and the planet.
She eyes me, smiling at my scepticism. I comment on her conviction as she begins rerolling the map. “My only worry,” she says, “is that the gurus and hucksters will come here and it becomes a sort of mecca. That’s why I’ve hesitated so long about Shirley. I told her ‘If you come here, it’ll be overrun with crystal people.’ But Shirley feels the Baca’s the place for her. Her astrologer told her to move here. Some people say it’ll become a ‘spiritual supermarket’. I guess it’ll by my job to protect it. The Baca’s a place for the contemplative life. It’s not a place for a quick fix”
However, I noticed, in the lower left-hand corner of the map, one more unmentioned thing: a tiny, long, and narrow rectangle drawn in blue, and the word Airport. The sun is almost setting. Its light blazes above the mountains of distant New Mexico and sets the rabbit brush beyond the windows aflame. Hanne invites me to join her in her daily ritual of singing the sun down. We go outside and stand side by side on the porch, facing est. She chants her mantra, and ancient Vedic text, she explains, that goes back to the dawn of civilization. I don’t understand a word, but I know that Hanne feels it aligns her with natural forces. I stand there, mirroring Hanne, my arms raised before my face, palms turned from the sun, listening to her chant and thinking this: yes, we live in a self-centered and cynical age. The diseases of our times – the loneliness, the secret yearnings, the drugs, the materialism and money-hunger – are measures of the alienation we feel from the natural rhythms and the possibility of epiphanies that orders at other times have felt. And yet…and yet, I saw the word: Airport. Is the Baca really a grand spiritual experiment, or a clever real estate scheme for aging New Agers? And what will happen with the water?
In the earliest stages of the Baca project, many of the local people viewed the arrival of the Strongs and their worldly friends much as they would an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease. The place was called “Cult City” by kinder folk, and a centre of cannibalism, ritual deaths, and communism by those of a more fanciful mind. In time, according to Crestone’s grey-haired historian and lifetime resident, Gladys Sisemore, most people have come to accept the newcomers. “You have to take the bitter with the sweet,” she says as she sits crocheting, describing her reaction to the strangers she occasionally meets on Main Street. But practically no one in Crestone – practically no one, in fact across the entire San Luis Valley – has accommodated himself to plans to sell the water.
American Water Development associates, Alabama-born Buddy Whitlock, reminding valleys residents he’s and environmentalist, that he has his home there, that he wouldn’t jeopardize the region’s ecosystem. He has reassured people that – if water is pumped out – its first use will be to revitalize the valley. But the ranchers, farmers, and local landowners remain unimpressed. They don’t trust him.
They have formed a coalition, called Citizens for San Luis Valley Water, under the leadership of 52-year-old grain and cattle farmer Greg Gosar. “We know they’ve applied to put in 100 wells, pumping from 2,500 feed deep, We know they’ve already offered to sell 25,000 acre feet to Denver. People feel Maurice misled them. He said the water would be used at first to benefit the valley. The people here are at least 99 percent opposed to the water development. It’s an affront to us. It will devastate the valley. It will depopulate it.
There are people who are narrow-minded enough to resort to violence.”
If the local people knew what was really going on behind the scenes between Strong and his financial partners, including wealthy Vancouver investment financier Sam Belzberg, they would be even more worried.
The fact is: Strong, as chairman of the board of American Water Development, has had a series of disagreements over his management of the Baca property in the last three years. Several other board members didn’t like the idea of the spiritual community in the first place. But Strong was the largest individual investor. He’d cajoled them to go along with the scheme. However, when word circulated that Shirley MacLaine might move there, some of the Christian fundamentalists on the board and the hard-headed, bottom line-oriented Belzberg resisted. Belzberg feared that MacLaine could antagonize the locals. The conflict reached a head last year when Strong, under pressure from his board, removed 640 hectares for the spiritual community from the larger Baca Grant Ranch property and handed these to Hanne for her to control. He then donated his shares in American Water to a Michigan-based bio-energy research foundation and later quite the board, relinquishing any future influence over the water development plans.
Despite the imbroglio within American Water Development’s board, the project continues. The company is moving ahead on its $126-million proposal to drill the wells and construct a pipeline to serve Denver. The local coalition plans to fight every step along the way. The irony is that Strong, as a longtime spokesman for the water project, is till seen as a target for criticism and suspicion. Local people feel he betrayed them and is now trying to salvage things for himself and Hanne. In a poor desert region, you can – so the saying goes – mess with a man’s wife perhaps, but you don’t mess with his water. Strong would rather not talk – nor have me talk – about the recent death threats made against his friend and former business associate, Buddy Whitlock.
It is with this sobering perspective that I explore the territory of the utopian dream, trying to weigh the significance of the occasional passing pickup truck with a rifle slung in a rack across the rear window.
I stop and climb uphill to visit the Haidakhandi Universal Ashram, a Vedic temple that sits on a high bluff amid a pinon pine forest. It’s impossible to overlook the adjacent 14-square-metre solar panel, which heads the stone floors within the ashram. In the future, says Ram Loti, a priestess of the temple, there’ll be hydro-electric power from a small turbine in nearby Spanish Creek, high-tech toilets, and drip-water-fed organic gardens. But as of now, only three devotees live here. She gives me a glossy brochure that tells about future plans. I stop at the Carmelite Monastery, where eight Catholic monks – women and men, all fairly young – spend half their time in total seclusion. For $35 a night, a visitor can stay in one of the hermitage’s 10 small adobe bungalows, joining the monks – if he wishes – at meals and pray and labor.
I stop at the Crestone Mountain Zen Center, where a half-dozen students and Buddhist monks sit. The discussion turns to Shirley MacLaine. Randy Fox, a long-time student of Zen, acknowledges that the actress is a door for millions to a more spiritual world. But, he adds, “The spiritual path takes the whole life. It’s not found in a weekend.”
I also stop at some of the homes of the 100 or so New Agers who have in recent years been buying the properties of the initial Baca retirees. They have come of their own accord, unbidden and unassisted by the Strongs. They have spurned the trendiness of Taos, New Mexico, or Arizona’s popular psychic centre, Sedona, where thousands arrive daily hoping to get their astrological charts read and to find their bliss. Nevertheless, at the Baca these days, psychic Dawn Taylor Carlson offers in-depth instruction in other-world communications. Semu Huaute, 85, gives instruction in native American shamanism and myths. At Barbra Vail’s home, I am assaulted by crystals – thousands of them. They crowd porch railings, windowsills, shelves, and altars. They hang from Vail’s neck and ears. She is thrilled to hear that MacLains has decided to build nearby a New Age study centre where people can take short, week-long courses on the occult. Vail hopes to sell MacLaine one of the biggest crystals.
Toward evening, I arrive at the base of a sand dune toward the southern end of the Baca lands. Ahead of me, rising absurdly from the dune’s crest, is the Islamic ziggurat, built by the Strongs’ friend Najeeb Halaby, former chairman of Pan Am and the father of the Queen of Jordan. I ascend to the tower’s top, where i notice weeds have begun to sprout. Around me: a vast emptiness. In my ears: an engulfing silence. Someplace to the north, I tell myself, one of the world’s most famous actresses and a leading popularizer of things occult will soon settle. She will, inevitably, draw to this special place all the New Age star-chasers, Winnebago-bound celebrity hounds, and cynical journalists that Hanne fears will come. To the south, I know, another of the Strong’s friends, Hisayoshi Ota, a 34-year-old architect and the son of a Japanese tycoon, lives the live of an American cowboy, running a heard of 1,400 buffalo on a ranch adjacent to the Baca. He has decided to forsake the pell-mell life of New York to join the Strongs in their spiritual quest. Below me, beneath the desert’s dust: a sea of fresh water, hidden, untapped, unfathomable.
dreams and reality, dreams and reality, I think. But where does the truth lie? I wait for an answer, a portent, a voice. I know Hanne would hear something. But nothing. Just the faintest whisper of wind in the cottonwoods along the dry bed of Cottonwood Creek far below. Then, the lines from Strong’s recitation of Ozymandias come back: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” I pick at the pealing paint on the ziggurat. I wonder how long it will take for the roots of the weed to widen the tower’s first, tiny cracks. Why should the latest dream to be dreamt here fare any better than those of the retirement community’s developers and the gold miners and the Indian hunters and even the dreams of the wild buffalo themselves?
I leave the Baca with Strong, retracing our route of a week earlier. We pass the Lazy U Ranch and turn south on Highway 17. The desert slides by. Strong tells me he has often wished he could write. He has a novel he’d like to do. It’s something he has been thinking about for a decade. It would be a cautionary tale about the future.
Each year, he explains as a background to the telling of the novel’s plot, the World Economic Forum convenes in Davos, Switzerland. Over a thousand CEOs, prime ministers, finance ministers, and leadings academics gather in February to attend meetings and set economic agendas for the year ahead. With this as a setting, he then says: “What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich counties? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it?” And Strong, driving as I take notes, looks at me. Then his eyes go back to the Highway 17. The man who founded the United Nations Environment Program and who wrote parts of the Burndtland Report and who in 1992 will try to get the world’s leaders, meeting in Brazil, to sign just such an agreement, savors the questions hanging in the air. Will they do it? Will the rich countries agree to reduce their impact on the environment? Will they agree to save the earth?
Strong resumes his story. “The group’s conclusion is ‘no’. The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
“This group of world leaders,” he continues, “form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse. It’s February. They’re all at Davos. These aren’t terrorists. They’re world leaders. They have positioned themselves in the world’s commodity and stock markets. They’ve engineered, using their access to stock exchanges and computers and gold supplies, a panic. Then, they prevent the world’s stock markets from closing. They jam the gears. They hire mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos as hostages. The markets can’t close. The rich countries…” And Strong makes a light motion with his fingers as if he were flicking a cigarette butt out the window.
I sit there spellbound. This is not any storyteller talking. This is Maurice Strong. He knows these world leaders. He is, in fact, co-chairman of the council of the World Economic Forum. He sits at the fulcrum of power. He is in a position to do it.
“I probably shouldn’t be saying things like this,” he says.
Highway 17 cuts straight across the desert, heading out of the land of dreams.
When the truth is finally told, Maurice and Hanne Strong fear the world will come to this. No secret societies. No hostage-takings at Davos. But it will come to the same conclusion: the global economy, sapped by credit and debt loads and environmental disasters, will simply come unstuck. And nothing – not even the inspiration of the Baca – can save humankind from itself. They see the struggles and problems at the Baca as reflections of the problems assaulting the planet. They fear the Baca will be, at best, an oasis in the desert of the future – and at worst, a place where dreams die.
5. Maurice Strong: Master of Sustainable Development Deception
The Dangerous Worldview of Maurice Strong and Sustainable Development
(May 16, 2010) by Brannon Howse – This is an excerpt from Brannon’s book “Grave Influence: 21 Radicals and their Worldviews that Rule America From The Grave.” (368 pages and includes 300 footnotes).
You’ll recall that the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s was largely about the promotion of mysticism, pagan spirituality, and socialism. Many 60s radicals grew up to become educators, reporters, elected officials, corporate officers, and leaders in the radical foundations now implementing sustainable development policies. To drastically understate the case: It’s a big problem.
The end game of sustainable development is global governance. If you doubt my claim, then consider the words of the Commission on Global Governance, an organization allied with the United Nations:
The environment, perhaps more than any other issue, has helped to crystallize the notion that humanity has a common future. The concept of sustainable development is now widely used and accepted as a framework within which all countries, rich and poor, should operate. The aspect that particularly concerns us is the global governance implications.[1] [emphasis mine]
After the Brazil Earth Summit, President Bill Clinton created the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. As DeWeese explains, the Clinton Administration side-stepped Congress to approve the sustainable development agenda and implement its policies in America:
All cabinet officials had to do was change some wording of existing programs and reroute already-approved funding to begin to implement the agenda-without Congress and without debate. Former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown told a meeting of the President’s Council that he could implement 67% of the Sustainable Development agenda in his agency with no new legislation. Other agencies like Interior, EPA, HUD and more did the same thing. To help it all along, Clinton issued a blizzard of Executive Orders.[2]
Some of the groups pushing the sustainable development agenda include Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club, the National Education Association, and a host of government bureaucrats serving both Republican and Democrat administrations.
Americans are watching the destruction of free-market capitalism under our most socialistic, left-wing administration ever. Yet, in my second book, published in 1995, I warned of this and quoted Maurice Strong, who was head of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. I’ll repeat his words to point out that what is happening in America is a long-planned transformation of America into a socialist nation: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”[3]
He also extolled the need to destroy the concept of individual sovereign nations:
It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation.[4]
In a corollary to Strong’s position, Helen Caldicott of the Union of Concerned Scientists has declared the “horrors” of free-market capitalism:
Free enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…Capitalism is destroying the earth.[5]
It is not only free-market capitalism they seek to destroy but Christianity itself, since the Protestant Reformation is what gave birth to free-market capitalism. Bible-minded Christians are further enemies of these globalist goals because Christians do not believe in the worship of nature as does the pantheistic, pagan spiritualism behind the movement.
By destroying the influence of Biblical Christianity within a culture, globalists remove their main obstacle to socialism, radical environmentalism, active euthanasia through socialized medicine, compulsory abortion, the end of parental authority, the elimination of an armed populace, private property, homosexuality (homosexuals are favored because they do not reproduce and add to world population), and the indoctrination of our children with their worldview. Peter Singer, who teaches ethics at Princeton University, makes this clear: “Christianity is our foe…. we must destroy the Judeo Christian religious tradition.”[6]
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW OCTOBER 11, 2008 Maurice Strong The U.N.’s Man of Mystery Is the godfather of the Kyoto treaty a public servant or a profiteer?By CLAUDIA ROSETT – Mr. Strong may have left the U.N. behind, but his current office is a penthouse suite in a building that houses at least three U.N. agencies (UNIDO, UNFPA and UNHCR), plus such diplomatic tenants as the embassies of Mozambique, Cyprus, and the Bahamas, as well as the Venezuelan defense attaché. He received me at his nearby apartment wearing a striped blue polo shirt, dark slacks and in his stocking feet. There were photos of Mr. Strong posing amid a multitude of world leaders at the Rio summit, and a close-up of Mr. Strong gazing into the camera beside a smiling Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The latter photo was taken in her office a few years ago, when “I went to brief her on a couple of things.”
Veteran U.N. bureaucrat Maurice Strong of Canada is being positioned as the next U.N. Secretary-General. He founded the U.N. Environmental Program, which has an “Environmental Sabbath” project that aims to set aside a day of the week as a day of rest for the earth, not God. The project encourages young people to sit around a tree and meditate. Strong, an associate of Vice President Albert Gore, has openly speculated about a collapse of Western industrial society being necessary to usher in a more environmentally-sustainable civilization. He is working with former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to develop an “Earth Charter,” another U.N. treaty, to save the planet and the earth spirit “Gaia” from plunder. Gore himself writes about “Gaia,” the earth spirit or Goddess, in his own book, Earth in the Balance. According to this religious worldview, the interests of plants, animals and things are put above the needs of human beings. The use of natural resources becomes blasphemy against the earth spirit “Gaia.” http://www.usasurvival.org/next-sg.html
6. Who is Global Warming Propagandist Maurice Strong? THE CHRISTIAN HAWK (2008)
A Christian Eye on Politics
How Can a Publically Unknown ‘Behind the Scenes’ Marxist Wield Such Incredible Western Influence?
Never hiding his Marxist/Socialist sympathies nor his strong relationships within China, Strong willingly acknowledges his wish to destroy the western economy. Despite this, he has been Senior Advisor to the UN Secretary General and has amazing access to, and influence over, several western industrialists. New Age ‘shamanist’ Strong is looked upon as a great hero of the new radical ‘environmentalism.’
From Associated Press on February 1st, 2008 comes this report:
“PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Global warming issues took over lecture halls in colleges across the country (the United States) Thursday, with more than 1,500 universities participating in what was billed as the nation’s largest-ever “teach-in.”
Organizers said the goal of the event, dubbed “Focus the Nation,” was to move past preaching to the green choir, to reach a captive audience of students in many fields who might not otherwise tune in to climate change issues.
Faculty members from a wide spectrum of disciplines — from chemistry to costume design — agreed to incorporate climate change issues into their lectures on Thursday. Community colleges and some high schools also took part.
“It’s about infusing sustainability into the curriculum of higher education, so students can graduate prepared to deal with the world they have been handed,” said Lindsey Clark, 23, who organized events at the University of Utah.
The day’s activities were the brainchild of Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland who authored a widely used collegiate textbook on economics and the environment. Major funding came from Nike, Clif Bar and Stonyfield Farms, among other companies and foundations.
Goodstein, who has spent years training people to speak on climate change, said he issued a call to arms to fellow professors across the country a few years ago, as his certainty grew that time was running out to address global warming….”
Already television and other news media in Britain and the United States is filling with this ‘global warming’ propaganda and students on campus are clearly not being spared.
But the truth is that these ‘warming hysteriaists’ continue to enjoy an exposure which goes way beyond any truth or substance in their arguments; propaganda and influence is the name of their game. This Marxist-influenced movement wants nothing less than the destruction of the present world economic status quo.
This is their real game, even though thousands who are being drawn into their insidious web have little knowledge of their true goals. At least Maurice Strong, one of the leaders of the 1992 ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro, was prepared to tell the truth when he stated,
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilisations collapse? Isn’t it part of our responsibility to bring that about?”
Strong, one of the ‘movers and shakers’ of the new radical environmental movement makes no secret of the fact that he is a socialist in ideology and, from his earliest days, he has had a deep interest in and fascination for China. Strong, in fact, has been going to China for more than 40 years in various capacities, personal, United Nations, World Bank and business. Now “retired” (a highly active retirement in his case), he now spends most of his time there and is active as an advisor and has business relationships in the environment, energy, and technology sectors, his principal activities are presently centered at Beijing University, where he is an active Honorary Professor (my many sources here include:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Strong).
British consultant, former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher, writer and columnist, Christopher Monkton, accuses Maurice Strong of stirring up Global warming hysteria and doing it through deception, and falsifying the data (source: http://usaelectionupdate.com/blog/maurice-strong-at-root-of-global-warming-scam/). Monkton is not the only one to have made this connection and accusation.
Strong’s wife is strongly involved in New Age spiritualism (one of several sources which could be quoted: http://www.taxtyranny.ca/images/HTML/Maurice-Strong/article1.html). Indeed, both Mr and Mrs Strong have received ‘shamanistic healing’ training, yet this man – despite his clear socialist sympathies – wields incredible behind the scenes power and influence in the West. He has been Senior Advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Senior Advisor to World Bank President James Wolfensohn, Chairman of the Earth Council, Chairman of the World Resources Institute, and Co-Chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum (source: ‘False Dawn’ by Lee Penn, page 389). It may well cause shudders for some people to realise how certain individuals can be so powerful and influential behind the scenes when they are largely so publically unknown! Mr Strong is also powerfully commited to the scheme of one world religion which, many believe, he tirelessly works to initiate, but others suggest that his real agenda is for one world government.
It is not surprising that conspiracy theorists are enjoying a ‘field day’ with Maurice Strong, for how can it be possible for almost unknown and certainly unelected officials to wield such power and influence? Is it a power which could adversely affect us all in the future?
The Christian Hawk, February, 2008.
7. The Global Warming Scam: Obama, Maurice Strong, Al Gore, Chicago Climate Exchange
Judi McLeod Canadian Free Press
“While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”
The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”
The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.
For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.
Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange. Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself–the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.
Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States. That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.
Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).
Molten Metal Technology Inc.
The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste. Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.
“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR. “First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide.”
“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale. The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.
“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996. But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding. When in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action:
Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers–including Maurice Strong–sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value, $35. On Oct. 20, 1996–a Sunday–the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.
“On Monday, the stock plunged by 49%, soon landing at $5 a share. By early 1997, furious stockholders had filed a class action suit against the company and its directors. Ironically, one of the class action lawyers had tangled with Maurice Strong in another insider trading case, involving a Swiss company called AZL Resources, chaired by Strong, who was also a lead shareholder. The AZL case closely mirrored Molten Metal, and in the end, Strong and the other AZL partners agreed to pay $5 million to dodge a jury verdict, when eyewitness evidence surfaced of Strong’s role in scamming the value of the company stock up into the stratosphere, before selling it off.
In 1997, Strong went on to accept from Tongsun Park, who was found guilty of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, $1 million from Saddam Hussein, which was invested in Cordex Petroleum Inc., a company he owned with his son, Fred.
These are the leaders in the Man-made Global Warming Movement, who three years later were to be funding the man who was to become President of the United States of America.
If we follow the time line on where Obama was during the funding of the Chicago Climate Exchange, he was still a professor at the University of Chicago Law School teaching constitutional law, with his law license becoming inactive a year later in 2002.
It may be interesting to note that the Chicago Climate Exchange in spite of its hype, is a veritable rat’s nest of cronyism. The largest shareholder in the Exchange is Goldman Sachs. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is its honorary chairman, The Joyce Foundation, which funded the Exchange also funded money for John Ayers’ Chicago School Initiatives. John is the brother of William Ayers.
What a flap when it was discovered that the senator from Chicago had nursed on Saul Alinsky’s milk, had his political career launched at a coffee party held by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, and sat for 20 years, uncomplaining in front of the “God-dam-America pulpit of resentment-challenged Jeremiah Wright.
Folk were naturally outraged that the empty suit who would go on to become TOTUS was spawned from such anti-American activism.
But the media should have been hollering, “Stop Thief!” instead.
The same Chicago Climate Exchange promoting public rip-off was funded by Obama before he was POTUS.
Even as man-made global warming is being exposed as a money-generating hoax, Obama is working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through Congress.
Obama was never the character he created for himself in the fairy-tale version in “Dreams of My Father”. He’s the agent of Change and Hope for cohorts making money down at the Chicago Climate Exchange.
The Barbarians are pushing at the gate of the Global Warming fraud, and to borrow a line from children playing Hide and Seek, Here they come, ready or not!
Posted in Global Warming Scam. Tags: al gore, barack obama, cap and trade, climate change, global warming, maurice strong, news, obama. 44 Comments »
8. One World Religion: The Aspen Institute and the Club of Rome
from TerrorisnIlluminati Website
Population Bomb caricature
Today, the means of pushing the New Age one-world religion is the environmental movement of the UN. The more deceptive aim of the Environmental movement, however, is its use to further the eugenics agenda, by arguing for limits to growth, and creating the backwardness that serves British Imperialism.
The Aspen Institute, together with the United Nations, the Club of Rome, the Tavistock, and other such organizations originating from the Round Table, began propagandizing around the issue of nuclear energy.[1]
Because, the proliferation of nuclear energy as an alternative posed a threat to the oil interests that were dominated by the Rockefellers and the Saudis, though claiming that the environment was being destroyed, and therefore arguing against industrialization and for limits to growth.
The American oilman, Robert O. Anderson, was a central figure in this agenda. Anderson and his Atlantic Richfield Oil Co. funneled millions of dollars, through their Atlantic Richfield Foundation, into select organizations to confront nuclear energy. Robert O. Anderson’s major vehicle to spread the new “limits to growth” ideology among American and European establishment circles, was his Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies.
The Aspen Institute was founded in 1949, by Aldous Huxley, and John Maynard Hutchins, in commemoration of the 200th birthday of German philosopher and author of Faust, and a member of the Illuminati, Goethe.
Robert O. Anderson
Robert O. Anderson also contributed significant funds to a project initiated by the Rockefeller family, together with Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King, at the Rockefeller’s estate at Bellagio, Italy, called the Club of Rome.
In 1972, this Club of Rome, and the US Association of the Club of Rome, gave widespread publicity to their publication of the notorious “Limits to Growth.” Supported by research done at MIT, this report concluded that industrialization had to be halted to save the planet from ecological catastrophe.
These organizations were exploiting the panic induced, when Paul Ehrlich, a biologist at Stanford, and admirer of Bertrand Russell, in 1968, wrote his Malthusian projections in a best-selling book called The Population Bomb.
In it, Ehrlich suggested, “a cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people… We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”[2]
Ehrlich also advocated placing birth control chemicals into the world’s food supplies.
Maurice Strong
The chief individual in this agenda is director of the Aspen Institute, Canadian multi-millionaire Maurice Strong. Strong is being heralded as the “indispensable man” at the center of the U.N.’s global power. He has served as director of the World Future Society, trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and Aspen Institute, and is a member of the Club of Rome.
Strong is now:
• Senior Advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan
• Senior Advisor to World Bank President James Wolfensohn
• Chairman of the Earth Council
• Chairman of the World Resources Institute
• Co-Chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum
• member of Toyota’s International Advisory Board
However, also now heads the Golden Dawn, and operates an international drug ring and is also a top operative for British Intelligence.[3] He was a founding member of both the Planetary Citizens.
Strong and other luminaries, like,
• Queen Juliana of the Netherlands
• Sir Edmund Hillary
• Peter Ustinov
• Linus Pauling
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Leonard Bernstein
• John Updike
• Isaac Asimov
• Pete Seeger,
…are listed as original endorsers of Planetary Citizens.
Founded by Donald Keys, a disciple of Alice Bailey and former UN consultant, and presided over for many years by the late Norman Cousins (CFR), the Planetary Citizens organization supports the expansion of UN power and institutions.
In Earth At Omega, Keys maintains,
We have meditations at the United Nations a couple of times a week.
The meditation leader is Sri Chinmoy, and this is what he said about this situation:
“The United Nations is the chosen instrument of God; to be a chosen instrument means to be a divine messenger carrying the banner of God’s inner vision and outer manifestation. One day the world will… treasure and cherish the soul of the United Nations as its very own with enormous pride, for this soul is all-loving, all-nourishing, and all-fulfilling”.[4]
Cathedral of St. John the Divine
Maurice Strong also sits on the board of directors, and serves as director of finance, for the Lindisfarne Center. Lindisfarne was founded by New Age philosopher William Irwin Thompson, a former professor of humanities from MIT and Syracuse University.
Thompson said:
“We have now a new spirituality, what has been called the New Age movement. The planetization of the esoteric has been going on for some time… This is now beginning to influence concepts of politics and community in ecology… This is the Gaia [Mother Earth] politique… planetary culture.”
Thompson further stated that, the age of “the independent sovereign state, with the sovereign individual in his private property, [is] over, just as the Christian fundamentalist days are about to be over.[5]
David Spangler
The Lindisfarne Center is located in Manhattan’s historic Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, dedicated to St. John, traditionally revered by Freemasons of the Johannite creed.
Maurice Strong is the Finance Director. The center is supported by the Lilly Endowment, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation, and lists among its faculty members Amory Lovins, Gaia theory biologist James Lovelock, and Luciferian adept and New Age author David Spangler.
According to Spangler, in Reflections on the Christ:
Lucifer, like Christ, stands at the door of man’s consciousness and knocks. If man says, “Go away because I do not like what you represent, I am afraid of you,” Lucifer will play tricks on that fellow.
If man says, “Come in, and I will give to you the treat of my love and understanding and I will uplift you in the light and presence of the Christ, my outflow,” then Lucifer becomes something else again. He becomes the being who carries that great treat, the ultimate treat, the light of wisdom….[6]
James Lovelock
Located at the same Cathedral of St. John the Divine that houses the Lindisfarne Luciferians is the Temple of Understanding. It was founded by Lucis Trust, and is the controlling authority for World Goodwill of Alice Bailey.
Launched in the early 1960s as the “spiritual counterpart of the United Nations,” its founding sponsors included:
• John D. Rockefeller IV
• then-Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara
• Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger
• IBM president Thomas J. Watson
• Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• Time-Life president James A. Linen
• author Christopher Isherwood
• columnist Max Lerner
• entertainer Jack Benny
The Temple organization, which works closely with the UN Secretariat, the World Council of Churches, and the World Conference on Religion and Peace, promotes the “Interfaith Movement” with its centennial celebration of the World’s Parliament of Religions.
Maurice Strong is also a member of the Bahai World Faith. With Haifa, in Israel, as the site of its international headquarters, the Bahai movement now exercises a strong presence in the United Nations and its One-World Religion agenda. Its involvement in the UN dates back to its founding in 1945.
In 1948, the Bahai community was recognized as an international non-governmental organization. In May 1970, they were granted consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and later with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The Bahai organization has a working relationship with the World Health Organization (WHO), is associated with the UN Environment Program, as well as many other religious, environmental and social programs.
The Baca Ranch
In 1978, Strong bought the Colorado Land & Cattle Company, which owned 200,000 acres of San Luis Valley in Colorado, from Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.[7]
A mystic had informed Maurice and his wife Hanne, that the ranch, which they call “the Baca”,
“would become the center for a new planetary order which would evolve from the economic collapse and environmental catastrophes that would sweep the globe in the years to come.”
The Strongs say they regard the Baca, which they also refer to as “The Valley Of the Refuge Of World Truths”, as the paradigm for the entire planet.
The first groups to join the Strongs in setting up operations at the desert site were the Aspen Institute and the Lindisfarne Association. The Baca is replete with monasteries, and Ashram, Vedic temple, Native American shamans, Hindu temple, ziggurat, and subterranean Zen Buddhist center.
Shirley MacLaine’s astrologer told her to move to the Baca, and she did. She is building a New Age study center there where people can take short week-long courses on the occult.
Another of Strong’s friends, Najeeb Halaby, a CFR member, former chairman of Pan American, and father of the Queen of Jordan, wife to Freemason King Hussein, has built an Islamic ziggurat at the Baca. Apparently, the like of Kissinger, the Rockefeller, McNamara, and the Rothschilds also make their pilgrimage to the Baca.[8]
Few areas in the US are as rife in paranormal activity as Baca. The modern history of unexplained occurrences began in the 1950s when green fireballs were reportedly seen by thousands, and even before that were rashes of “UFOs” that sound like what the Natives called “spirit lights.”
So frequent are such reports in the valley that a UFO “watchtower” was erected.
“From the fall of 1966 through the spring of 1970 there were hundreds of unidentified flying object sightings and many of the first documented cases of unusual animal deaths ever reported,” notes Christopher Obrien, in The Mysterious Valley, a website dedicated to a study of the strange occurrences and sightings in the region.
“During peak “UFO” sighting waves in the late 1960s dozens of cars would literally “line the roads” watching the amazing aerial displays of unknown lights as they cavorted around the sky above the Great Sand Dunes/Dry Lakes area.” [9]
An interview, titled The Wizard Of the Baca Grande, which Maurice Strong conducted with West magazine of Alberta, Canada, in May 1990, he provides details which elucidate the reasons behind the Illuminati’s support of the environmental movement.
Strong concluded with a disturbing apocalyptic scenario he would to include in a novel he says he would like to write:
“Each year the World Economic Forum convenes in Davos, Switzerland. Over a thousand CEOs, prime ministers, finance ministers, and leading academics gather in February to attend meetings and set the economic agendas for the year ahead.
What if a small group of these word leaders were to conclude that the principle risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? Will the rich countries agree to reduce their impact on the environment? Will they agree to save the earth?
The group’s conclusion is “no.” The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?
This group of world leaders form a secret society to bring about a world collapse. It’s February. They’re all at Davos. These aren’t terrorists ¬ they’re world leaders. They have positioned themselves in the world’s commodity and stock markets. They’ve engineered, using their access to stock exchanges, and computers, and gold supplies, a panic.
Then they prevent the markets from closing. They jam the gears. They have mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davros as hostage. The markets can’t close. The rich countries…?” and Strong makes a slight motion with his fingers as if he were flicking a cigarette butt out of the window.”[10]
One of the more important achievements of the Aspen Institute was a conference on Technology: Social Goals and Cultural Options, held in 1970, that paved the way for the UN’s Earth Summit in Stockholm in 1972, chaired by Aspen board member, Maurice Strong.
As remarked Engdahl, the Stockholm conference created the necessary international organizational and publicity infrastructure, so that by the time of the Kissinger orchestrated oil crisis, an intensive anti-nuclear propaganda offensive could be launched, aided through the millions of dollars made available from oil-linked channels of the Atlantic Richfield Company, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and other such elites.
UNCED – Summit Rothschilds
March 12, 2006
UNCED – Summit Rothschilds,
is a video exposing the New World Order globalist plans for humanity on Earth.
Among the groups that were funded were organizations including the World Wildlife Fund, then chaired by Prince Bernard, and later by Royal Dutch Shell’s John Loudon.
As Engdahl noted:
It is indicative of this financial establishment’s overwhelming influence in the American and British media that, during this period, no public outcry was launched to investigate the probable conflict of interest involved in Robert O. Anderson’s well-financed anti-nuclear offensive, and the fact that his Atlantic Richfield Oil Co. was one of the major beneficiaries from the 1974 price increase for oil.
Anderson’s ARCO had invested tens of millions of dollars in high-risk oil infrastructure in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay and Britain’s North Sea, together with Exxon, British Petroleum, Shell and the other Seven Sisters.[11]
Rio Earth Summit 1992
Strong was Secretary-General of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held at the June 1992 UN Earth Summit in Brazil.
It was hoped that an Earth Charter would be the result of the Earth Summit, but it was not the case. Nevertheless, an international agreement was adopted, named Agenda 21, which laid down the international “sustainable development” necessary to form a future Earth Charter agreement.
Maurice Strong hinted at the overtly pagan agenda proposed for a future Earth Charter, when in his opening address to the Rio Conference delegates he said, And, he said,
“We must therefore transform our attitudes and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of divine nature”.
According to Strong,
“The real goal of the Earth Charter is that it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments.” [12]
The summit was described by Time magazine as a “New Age carnival.”
On the eve of the UNCED, a midnight-to-dawn homage to the “Female Planet” was held on Leme Beach. After dancing all night, the worshipers followed a Brazilian high priestess to the water’s edge, where they offered flowers and fruits to the Voodoo mother goddess, “Iemanje, mae orixa, mother of the powers, queen of the seas,” known in Western mythology as Aphrodite or Venus, and then invoked the blessings of the sea goddess upon the summit’s deliberations.
At the culmination of the program, a group calling itself the “Sacred Drums of the Earth”, performed a ceremony by which they would, “maintain a continuous heartbeat near the official site of the Earth Summit, as part of a ritual for the healing of our Earth to be felt by those who are deciding Earth’s fate.” [13]
Thus, the environmental movement, while helping to advance the cause of the oil industry, is an extension of the Aquarian conspiracy, incepted by Alice Bailey, designed ultimately to foster the acceptance a one-world-religion, based on the occult, or the New Age, as it is called.
Al Gore
The Union for Natural Environment Protection, an environmental group based in Sao Leopoldo, Brazil, declared the following about the work of the summit:
A world-wide citizens’ movement is born around the UN system and will be in the years ahead a central focal point for the New World Order which Alice Bailey wrote about many decades ago and which is going to be politically free, socially fair, economically efficient and environmentally sustainable.[14]
The environmental movement is being used as a cover to promote return to the creed of the Ancient Mysteries, in the form of the worship of mother-nature, a pagan notion that equates the goddess with earth, known among the ancient Greeks as Gaia.
Originally, she is the Babylonian Ishtar, known to the Bible as Astarte, or the Egyptian Isis. This pantheistic idea has its origins in ancient paganism, and is central to the Kabbalah and all Western occult tradition, including Freemasons and the Illuminati.
Plato wrote:
“We shall affirm that the cosmos, more than anything else, resembles most closely that living Creature of which all other living creatures, severally or genetically, are portion; a living creature which is fairest of all and in ways most perfect.” [15]
Known as Anima Mundi, the “Soul of the World”, it is related to the concept of the Neoplatonists, the Logos, or the Word, also known as the “Son of God”, or the ancient dying-god.
Footnotes
[1] William Engdahl, A Century of War – Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Chap. 9.
[2] Peter Goodgame, “Globalists and the Islamists”.
[3] EIR, Dope Inc. Part IV; “The Aquarian Conspiracy”.
[4] Jasper, William F. “A New World Religion”, The New American Magazine, October 19, 1992.
[5] ibid.
[6] quoted from Geisler, Norman L. “The New Age Movement”.
[7] Henry Lamb. “Maurice Strong: The new guy in your future!” January, 1997.
[8] “Who is Maurice Strong”. from Donald McAlvany’s Toward a New World Order.
[9] Christopher O’Brien, The Mysterious Valley.
[10] From Donald McAlvany, Toward a New World Order, “Who is Maurice Strong?”
[11] William Engdahl, A Century of War, Chap. 9.
[12] Melanson, Terry. “The Earth Charter and the Ark of the Gaia Covenant” Conspiracy Archive, Aug. 11, 2004.
[13] Jasper, William F. “A New World Religion”, The New American Magazine, October 19, 1992.
[14] ibid.
[15] Timaeus, 29/30.
9. On the way to parliament: Uncle Mo in activist mode
by Judi McLeod September 1, 2003
Before even stepping foot into Canadian Prime-Minister-in-Waiting Paul Martin’s office as his senior advisor, Maurice Strong is in political activist mode.
Although both parties strongly deny it, Strong is expected to hang his hat in the PMO come November. As he prepares to descend on Parliament Hill, the usually laconic Strong is out there saying that Ontario’s power infrastructure has been neglected.
“We’re paying the price for eight years of neglect, of dithering, of uncertainty and mixed signals,” the former chairman of Ontario Hydro told CanWest Global.
It was certainly uncertainty and mixed signals for taxpayers when Strong was Ontario Hydro chairman in 1994. It was in that year that he opened talks on the purchase of 12,500 hectares (30,875 acres) of a Costa Rican forest in a deal the (Opposition) Progressive Conservatives branded as “wacky” in the face of the utility’s then $34 billion debt.
“How is this going to help the ratepayers in Ontario?” Chris Stockwell, Conservative energy critic of the day, demanded to know.
“In my wildest dreams, I can’t fathom how the hell this could be used,” he later told reporters. Citing federal sources, Stockwell said that the tract of land sought by Strong was worth between $10 million and $12 million.
At the time of the Strong Costa Rican forest purchase, Hydro had cut about 10,000 jobs.
The Hydro chairman held private ownership of Costa Rican land not connected to the 30,875 acres.
The purchase was made on the basis that saving a large section of forest would help offset the emission of greenhouse gases by oil or coal-burning generating stations.
It shouldn’t have surprised anybody, when years later, Strong became the architect of the multi-billion dollar Kyoto Protocol.
Hired by Ontario Hydro in 1992, the 65-year-old Strong was given free rein by Bob Rae, the Premier of Ontario’s first (and arguably last) Socialist government.
Dubbed “Uncle Mo” by the Premier, Strong was often a dinner guest at the diplomatic home of Saul Rae, the premier’s father.
History will prove that “Uncle Mo” gets around.
To the present day, Strong can count among his detractors, members of the Kekoldi Indians in Costa Rica.
One of Strong’s companies, Desarrollos Ecologicos (Ecological Development) built a $35 million, 12-suite beach resort at Villas del Caribe on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. It seems that Strong did not have a clear title to the land at the time of construction.
The luxury hotel, run by his son, was built within the Gandoca-Manzillo Wildlife Refuge, where development is restricted, and the Kekoldi Indian Reserve, where the Indian Association must approve construction. It was not.
“He (Strong) is supporting Indians and conservation around the world and here he’s doing the complete opposite,” lamented Demetrio Myorga, President of the Kekoldi Indian Association.
New Strong enemies in Costa Rica came on July 31, and include the staff and supporters of Radio Peace International (RPI), a short-wave radio that carried largely United Nations programming.
After decades of operation, Strong kicked the radio station off the University of Peace Campus.
Staff say they were given no reason for the dramatic toss out, which involved gun-toting guards. They are asking members of the public at large to write letters of protest to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and have retained legal counsel.
Meanwhile, Ernie Eves and the Ontario Progressive Conservatives are not the only ones who can expect media covered carping from UN poster boy Maurice Strong when he arrives at the PMO.
Along with his Rolodex, Strong comes equipped with an agenda that’s destined to favor radical environmentalists.
Environmental activists have been celebrating ever since word leaked out that Maurice Strong would serve as senior advisor to Prime-Minister-in-Waiting Paul Martin.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: [email protected]
10. Ontario’s Predictable Energy Disaster; Mortgaged To Falsified Climate Science. The Solution Is Readily Available.
by Dr. Tim Ball on August 2, 2013 in Government,Legal,Political,Politics,Theory
“It occurred to me…” that eventually all those people texting will eventually end up writing Shakespeare’s plays.
The Province of Ontario is a classic example of the damage done by the false science of global warming and latterly climate change. The major response was to abandon traditional energy sources in favour of alternate energies and Ontario followed that path led by Maurice Strong, architect of the false science. It has been a disaster in every country or region around the world that took the same route. Fortunately, albeit sadly, those places are now examples of the solutions Ontario must pursue to get back on track.
Some major changes are required. First, understanding of how CO2 was targeted and demonized to underpin the push for alternate energies. Second acknowledge that CO2 is not a problem. Third, understand how and why alternate energies are completely inadequate replacements for fossil fuels. Fourth, do a proper cost/benefit analysis to show how alternate energies only appear to be competitive because of government subsidies. Fifth, establish a cost/benefit analysis for the sequence of rebuilding the entire energy structure.
Ontarian’s are paying for the green energy agendas created by Maurice Strong as former head of Ontario Hydro. David Suzuki and Dalton McGuinty pushed to continue Strong’s disastrous policies, which guarantees shortages and higher costs, unless completely new policies are adopted. It will take years to rebuild adequate facilities. Strong and Suzuki found willing politicians who refused to understand and chose to appear green at all cost. It’s wilful because of the clear evidence of false science and failure of similar policies in any place that pursued green energy. As always, it is the people, who they profess to protect who suffer and pay the bill.
Maurice Strong began Ontario Hydro’s problems when appointed Chairman by NDP Premier Bob Rae in 1992. A 1997 article title: “Maurice Strong: The new guy in your future” says,
“Maurice Strong has demonstrated an uncanny ability to manipulate people, institutions, governments, and events to achieve the outcome he desires.”
It concludes, “The fox has been given the assignment, and all the tools necessary, to repair the henhouse to his liking.”
This applied to his UN role, but also applied to his Ontario Hydro role.
One report says,
“Within no time of his arrival, he firmly redirected and re-structured Ontario Hydro. At the time, Ontario Hydro was hell-bent on building many more nuclear reactors, despite dropping demand and rising prices. Maurice Strong grabbed the Corporation by the scruff of the neck, reduced the workforce by one third, stopped the nuclear expansion plans, cut capital expenditures, froze the price of electricity, pushed for sustainable development, made business units more accountable.”
Sounded good, but it was a path to inadequate supply. Key is the phrase he, “pushed for sustainable development”.
In the same year, 1992, Strong, in the keynote speech at the Rio Earth Summit he organized, said:
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, the use of fossil fuels, electrical appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.”
He’d already created mechanisms to eliminate fossil fuels and bring about reduction and destruction of western economies, including Ontario. It’s summarized in his speculation for the plot of a novel.
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
How do you cause civilizations to collapse? Why is CO2 the focus? It’s less than 4 percent of the greenhouse gases and ALL records show temperature increases before CO2, opposite to the fundamental assumption of the IPCC hypothesis. Strong did it through the IPCC using the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Fossil fuels drive the industrial economies and CO2 is a byproduct. Show it’s causing irreparable climate damage and you can demand alternative energy replacements. Strong achieved this with the IPCC and at Ontario Hydro. He used the narrow definition of climate change created by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as only human caused changes. Trouble is this is impossible if you don’t know the amount and cause of natural change.
IPCC created the science to prove human CO2 was the problem and the politics to claim failure to act guarantees catastrophe. Strong controlled who participated through the bureaucracies of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). An Assistant Deputy Minister of Environment Canada (EC), who subsequently controlled most Canadian climate research funding, chaired the IPCC formation meeting in 1985. As Richard Lindzen explained,
“IPCC’s emphasis, however, isn’t on getting qualified scientists, but on getting representatives from over 100 countries”.
Using Weather Departments gave bureaucrats ascendancy over politicians as the Canadian situation proves.
The IPCC Summary for Policymakers (SPM) was designed to deceive. It differs greatly from the Science Report and is deliberately released months earlier. David Wojick, IPCC expert reviewer explained,
“What is systematically omitted from the SPM are precisely the uncertainties and positive counter evidence that might negate the human interference theory. Instead of assessing these objections, the Summary confidently asserts just those findings that support its case. In short, this is advocacy, not assessment.”
Focus on CO2 and the assumption an increase causes temperature increase are built into the computer models. William Kinninmonth, former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre explains,
“… current climate modeling is essentially to answer one question: how will increased atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (generated from human activity) change earth’s temperature and other climatological statistics?”….
“It is heroic to assume that such a view is sufficient basis on which to predict future ‘climate’.”
Indian Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said
“science is politics in climate change; climate science is politics” and we are being “led by our noses by Western (climate) scientists who have less of a scientific agenda and more of a political agenda”.
The Canadian and Ontario governments should listen.
CO2 is not causing warming or climate change, which means there is no scientific need to replace fossil fuels. Replacing them with alternative energies compounds the problems.
A US Senate report notes, “Comparisons of wind, solar, nuclear, natural gas and coal sources of power coming on line by 2015 show that solar power will be 173% more expensive per unit of energy delivered than traditional coal power, 140% more than nuclear power and natural gas and 92% more expensive than wind power. Wind power is 42% more expensive than nuclear and natural gas power.” “Wind and solar’s “capacity factor” or availability to supply power is around 33%, which means 67% of the time wind and solar cannot supply power and must be supplemented by a traditional energy source such as nuclear, natural gas or coal.
Just a couple of examples to illustrate the problem in other countries. A July 16 Reuter’s headline says,
“German operators of coal and gas power plants are sounding the alarm: the operation of many power plants is no longer profitable as a result of the green energy transition.”
In a July 13 UK headline we learn
“Thousands of dirty diesel generators are being secretly prepared all over Britain to provide emergency back-up to prevent the National Grid collapsing when wind power fails. And under the hugely costly scheme, the National Grid is set to pay up to 12 times the normal wholesale market rate for the electricity they generate.”
The result is encapsulated in a July 17 UK headline
“GOING green could see power bills go through the stratosphere – and many families go into the red.”
There are many other problems alternate energies too many to list here, but consider the following for Ontario. Wind turbulence restricts the number of turbines to 5 to 8 turbines per 2.6 square kilometres. With average wind speeds of 24 kph it needs 8,500 turbines covering 2590 square kilometres to produce the power of a 1000 MW conventional station. To put this in perspective Ontario closed two 1000MW plants in 2011 – the Lambton and the Nanticoke coal fired plants. Besides the land, you still need coal-fired plants running at almost 100 percent for back up. Richard Courtney provides a good overview of the limitations of wind power.
Promoting energy policies based on falsified science and alternative energies that don’t work is unacceptable. It is incredible that anyone would continue to promote them when they’ve been tried and already failed everywhere. The people are already paying the price.
Several countries are already switching gears as they realize they must act. In most cases they are doing this without conceding that CO2 is not a problem. Here is a brief summary of the issues to consider in moving forward with energy adequacy in Ontario.
Simple cost/benefit analysis for ‘traditional’ energy facilities;
Ontario should move quickly to shore up energy shortfalls. The quickest and cheapest way is to build clean burning coal plants. They are more expensive to operate in the long term because of the need for constant coal supply. However, with the closing of coal plants in the US the supply will be cheap and readily available. The US has also already developed the clean burning technology, such as plants in North Dakota.
Ontario is rich in shale oil and must develop this potential.
“Crude oil and gas in Ontario has been discovered in commercial quantities in a total of over 300 different pools.” and “Despite this long history of drilling and production history there has been little activity in Ontario targeted at shale oil and gas drilling and production.”
Money currently going to subsidize alternate energies should be directed to development of these resources. This is a good option because the infrastructure is already in place and only needs expanding and upgrading.
Hydroelectric plants are expensive to construct, but much cheaper to operate in the long term. Ontario must develop some of their potential sites, such as those created by the fall of water into Hudson Bay. Manitoba has already developed a great deal of power this way. Part of that potential was scheduled to include running a power line from Manitoba into northwest Ontario, a project that should be rehabilitated. The limitation with hydro and other power sources like tidal is their distance from the market. There is a limit to the distance electricity can be transmitted. Manitoba partially resolved this problem by adopting the Russian system of reducing line loss by converting Alternating Current (AC) to Direct Current (DC), transmitting as DC then reconverting to AC at the point of need.
The province has a long and checkered history of developing and using nuclear power. The cost of building such facilities is high and slow partly because of the concerns about safety. Canada was also hampered by government involvement with the CANDU reactor. The limitations this system placed on advancing nuclear power are well documented. It prevented adoption of better technologies developed elsewhere. The other issue over the years has been the problem of disposing of nuclear waste. Studies at Pinawa in northwest Ontario were done years ago with a view to burying waste in the Canadian Shield. That is still a viable option, in fact more so today, because new systems, such as the pebble bed reactors produce considerably less waste. Nuclear is clearly a long term solution. Once built they run efficiently and safely close to where the power is needed.
Implementation of all these types of energy production will allow Ontario to deal with short term requirements and then prepare for long terms. It is criminal in a country like Canada, with more energy resources to hand than virtually any other country in the world, to have even the threat of inadequate supplies. Despite this the tragedy of using climate for a political agenda has created just such a situation. It is time to confront the eco-bullying with facts and sensible actions. As Michael Crichton said in remarks to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 15, 2003,
“Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good future for the human race. That’s our past. So it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.”
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11. The Plan, Agenda 21: The Death Knell of Liberty
February 27, 2011, 2:31 am by Jim O’Neill 13 Comments
At the U.N. Summit at Rio in 1992, the Conference Secretary-General, Maurice Strong, said “Isn’t the only hope for this planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
————-
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we
came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages,
famine and the like would fit the bill. […] The real enemy then is humanity itself.
– From the Club of Rome’s “The First Global Revolution” p. 75 1993
“Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.”
– John Donne (1572-1631)
The death knell for freedom has been tolling for some time, and only now are people starting to hear it. It started tolling faintly, decades back, and has slowly progressed in volume, until today its tolling is impossible to ignore.
The United States of America — that “shining city on a hill” — had a good run of it, and made a gallant effort at establishing liberty for all. But as the old saw would have it, all good things must come to an end.
Liberty, after all, is an aberration in mankind’s history — a light that has flared here and there over the centuries, only to dissolve back into the darkness.
America is barreling towards becoming a bit player on the world’s stage, and its vaunted middle class — once the envy of the world — is on the verge of being eliminated. For the good of the planet, for the good of Gaia. for the good of the collective — freedom is being replaced by servitude, capitalism by socialism, and property rights by “sustainable development.”
I’m not talking about something we need to be on guard against. It is all already in place. It has been going on for quite some time, and it will continue to go on, at a greatly accelerated pace. We are at the “end game” point.
And the Globalists know it. Why do you think the Democratic (and many Republican) political hacks on Capitol Hill are so dismissive of the American people? They are essentially putting on a “dog and pony show” for public consumption, while the final pieces for America’s defeat are slid into place.
To a great extent the Globalists own the mass media, the entertainment industry, and the Judicial, Executive, and Legislative branches of government.
Why should they worry?
Already, several generations have been indoctrinated, via our school systems, to value globalization and “social justice,” over personal responsibility and free enterprise. They have been repeatedly sold the idea that they should, “Think globally, act locally.”
God has been demeaned, marginalized, and eradicated, at every turn. Our religions are, in many cases, a watered down and diluted mimicry of true spirituality.
The Globalists have come out from the closets, the woodwork, and from under rocks. They know that their time of hiding is at long last over. They are brazen about, and proud of, their anti-American/pro-global stance. Their arrogance and hubris is palpable.
Call them Communists, Marxists, Fascists, or Globalists — call them what you will, they are collectivists who despise America’s middle class, capitalism, and free enterprise.
They have been duplicitous, Machavellian, clever, and patient. And it has paid off — the trap has been sprung. How did this happen? America got hit high, and America got hit low. We suffered sudden catastrophic sneak attacks from without, and insidious long-term betrayal from within.
We were hit low by Alinskyesque “community organizers” in our streets, and propagandists in our schools. We were hit high by “think tanks” like the Trilateral Commission, the CoR (Club of Rome), and the CFR (Council for Foreign Relations).
They have divided us with special interest groups, vociferous “talking point” attacks, and identity politics. They have infiltrated our schools, and indoctrinated our children.
They have opened floodgates using the Cloward-Piven Strategy — overwhelming our judicial system, banking establishment, and border security. They have encouraged corruption and greed at the lowest, to the highest, levels of government. They have twisted and perverted the U.S. Constitution.
They have promoted and encouraged anything and everything that would help bring America down.
They intend on taking over the planet, but first they need to destabilize, and then destroy, the United States of America. Because we are a powerful bulwark of freedom, we have to go first. And to a large extent, go we have.
The Club of Rome (CoR) was founded 1968, in Italy, by Aurelio Peccei, an Italian scholar and industrialist, and Alexander King, a Scottish scientist.
Over the years the list of its members has included ex-presidents, prime ministers, kings, queens, diplomats, and billionaires. Its membership roster reads like a “who’s who” of the world’s “movers and shakers.” It includes U.N. bureaucrats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe
After its inception, it split into two additional branches: The CoB (Club of Budapest), and the CoM (Club of Madrid). The CoB focuses mainly on social and philosophical/religious issues, while the CoM concentrates more on political issues. In addition, there are over thirty affiliated organizations in other countries — such as the USACoR in the United States.
The CoR first garnered public attention with its 1972 report “The Limits to Growth,” which went on to become the best selling environmentalist book of all time. Simply stated, its main thesis is that economic growth cannot continue indefinitely, because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil. It’s sort of an industrialized version of a Malthusian nightmare.
Diagram from The First Global Revolution
Twenty years later, the CoR published The First Global Revolution — a quote from the book appears at the start of this article. This book also made a big splash, and helped to re-energize and expand the whole environmentalist movement.
Another quote from the book worth keeping in mind is, “It would seem that humans need a common motivation, namely a common adversary… sucha motivation must be found to bring the divided nations together to face an outside enemy, either a real one, or else one invented for the purpose….”
“One invented for the purpose.” Enter global warming and greenhouse gases. But something even more important happened the year before The First Global Revolution came out.
At the instigation of the CoR, and their ilk, in 1992 the United Nations held the Conference on Environment and Development — informally known as the Earth Summit — in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
At the Earth Summit, 178 nations signed an agreement called Agenda 21 — so called because it dealt with the United Nation’s agenda for the 21st century.
It consists of numerous chapters detailing the role that different parts of society should play in implementing “sustainable development.” There are chapters for central governments, local governments, businesses, and community organizations.
Ideological model for planned and enforced “sustainable development”
George Bush senior, then President of the United States, flew down and committed the United States to the U.N. FCCC (Framework Convention on Climate Change) agenda.
Ever since then, the Executive Branch — Republican and Democrat — has been bypassing Congress, and passing “soft laws” foisting Agenda 21 on the American public.
Check out the U.S. Department of Energy website.
Check out the U.S. Department of Agriculture website.
Check out the U.S. Department of the Interior website.
No matter where you go, environmentalism permeates the U.S. Government bureaucracy. Sometimes it’s blatant and out front; other times you may need to dig a little — but it is always there.
The Agenda 21 Globalists wine and dine each other, and hold conventions and conferences around the world. They give each other praise, pats on the back, and prestigious awards. The Norwegian Globalists just gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, and for the same reason that they gave one to Al Gore — promoting globalization and Agenda 21.
Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” also received an Oscar from the Hollywood elite. These honors have been bestowed on Gore, not for exposing the truth — for “An Inconvenient Truth” is merely a slickly packaged lie — but because the film spreads the falsehoods of Agenda 21 so well.
It can only be shown to school children in the U.K. if accompanied by a disclaimer. The U.K.‘s “The Daily Mail” reports that “…teachers will have to warn pupils that there are other opinions on global warming, and they should not necessarily accept the views of the film.”
The Daily Mail also noted that the lawyer who successfully sued to have the disclaimer attached, said it did not go far enough. “He said ‘no amount of turgid guidance’ could change the fact that the film is unfit for consumption in the classroom.” Yet American students see it over, and over. With no disclaimer.
In June of 2009, NASA said that global warming is caused by solar cycles — i.e. the sun. Unsaid was the fact that the greenhouse gas theory is full of holes. Actually it’s a fairy tale, a convenient lie to force the world to bend to the will of the globalists.
Under pressure from the Obama Administration NASA now teaches that global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect, and “bad” gases like CO2 — which we humans unfortunately emit each time we breathe. Bad humans!
Al Gore, the CoR, the U.N., and all of the environmental organizations and their adherents, don’t care what the truth is. They could care less about what causes global warming. They have their “outside enemy… invented for the purpose,” and they are not about to let go of it.
The Globalists actually tried Global Cooling first, but for various reasons it didn’t fly. Look at page 22 in the 1974 Annual Rockefeller Report, and you’ll find the mention of a conference called to investigate “…the future implications of the global cooling trend now underway….” Things sure warmed up in a hurry.
So what is the “purpose?” What’s really behind all the global warming hoopla? Power. It’s the same old Marxist/Communist/Fascist collectivist schtick, dressed up in new clothes.
Global warming is all about a power grab by a wealthy elite and their collectivist sycophants — using the U.N. as a cover and tool.
Merely a conceptual work of art, “Power Pyramid” at AdamDodson.org
As always, there are numerous “useful idiots” who swallow the party line whole. Some of them are simply misguided idealists, and some of them are nuts — dangerously nuts.
Behind it all, is a relatively small group of people who are manipulating the world for their own sick, narcissistic ends. It’s a perfect cover. Think about it — who doesn’t feel that fresh air, clean water, and healthy environments are admirable ends to work towards? Any sane person supports such ideals. But hidden in back of the admirable goals are some diabolical designs.
Video, “Michael Shaw Agenda 21“
Don’t take my word for it, and don’t dismiss me without research. We all need to know what’s headed our way shortly. If you aren’t aware of these facts already, then educate yourself on the internet. At least check out Green-Agenda.com.
What have we seen since the Obama Administration took over? The brainiacs in charge of America’s finances have been ignoring our debts, and eagerly proposing ways to sink us deeper into the quagmire. A lot deeper.
At first I thought that they were simply corrupt, venal, self-serving idiots — all of which is undoubtedly true, but they’re also destroying America’s financial foundation, cleverly and intentionally.
They want the American dollar replaced by a new global currency. They want America’s middle class to hang in the wind, and die on the vine. They’re Globalists, and they want America to fail. It’s so easy to see, once you realize what’s going on. (See “Chart: IMF Calls For New Global Currency To Replace Dollar.”)
Why else would they add trillions to an already staggering debt? Why else would they try to rush through a Cap and Trade bill that will, in Obama’s words, make electricity prices “skyrocket.” Why else would they jam ObamaCare down America’s throat? Why else would Obama say he’d bankrupt anybody who built a new coal plant?
Video, “Obama: My Plan Makes Electricity Rates Skyrocket“
Once you grasp Agenda 21 and the sly machinations of the United Nations, and globalizing NGOs like the CoR, it all makes sense.
It’s “The Plan.” Ruin America’s economy, destroy her middle class, and put a stranglehold on her energy grid.
At the U.N. Summit at Rio in 1992, the Conference Secretary-General, Maurice Strong, said “Isn’t the only hope for this planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” (See, “Maurice Strong and the Collapse of Industrialized Civilizations.”)
He also said, “Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class — involving high meat intake, the use of fossil fuels, electrical appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning, and suburban housing — are not sustainable.”
Club of Rome member, multi-billionaire George Soros [Gulag Bound link] echoed Strong’s statement last fall, when he told an Australian newspaper, “America, as the center of the globalized financial markets, was sucking up the savings of the world. This is now over. The game is out,’ he said, adding that the time has come for ‘a very serious adjustment’ in American’s consumption habits.” (See, “Soros Sees End of US-led Globalized Market System.”)
Forced to cut back on fossil fuel consumption. Forced to cut back on water usage. Forced to give up our property. Forced to eat less. Forced to warm or cool our homes less. Forced to give up driving. Forced to give up these, and many other things that we currently take for granted. It’s “The Plan” — you had better believe it.
Look at what’s happening to California’s Central Valley — once “the world’s breadbasket,” and now a dust bowl. All due to Agenda 21. (See “A Storm Brews over Food, Water, & Power.”)
I assure you that the globalists will not help the farmers. As the saying goes, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” The globalists want the land unplowed. They want it to go “back to nature.” They want to increase the price of food. They want to ruin the middle class farming community. It’s all part of “The Plan.”
It is not just America this is happening to, of course. Australia, Great Britain, Japan, Canada, Germany… Every country is on the verge of being converted into a vassal state—part of a global hegemony run by the U.N and a power elite.
All this will be more easily accomplished with a greatly reduced population. Did I mention population reduction and control?
Behind all the warm and fuzzy terminology about “smart growth,” “sustainable development,” and “think green,” lies a very chilling fact. The Agenda 21 folks want to reduce the earth’s population—substantially.
In 1996, Club of Rome member and CNN founder, Ted Turner, told Audubon magazine, “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.” A 95% reduction! Recently he has said that getting rid of a mere two thirds of the world’s population would suffice. Getting mellow in his old age no doubt. (See, “Ted Turner: World Needs a ‘Voluntary’ One-Child Policy for the Next Hundred Years.”)
The hard-core environmentalists are all bio-centrists. That is, they believe that humanity is no more important than any other species on this planet. In fact, to hear them tell it, the world would be much better off without any people at all.
Anthropologist and anarchist David Graber put it like this in an L.A. Times book review, “Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. … We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. … Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”
At any rate, because these Globalists are bio-centrists, most of them don’t believe in a divine spark in man, or unalienable rights, or God for that matter. In short, they don’t have many qualms about killing people. Something else to keep in mind.
You know the sardonic comment “Well excuse me for breathing?” These people take that statement literally — and probably won’t excuse you. After all, you’re adding to the earth’s carbon dioxide level every time you breath out.
ICLEI (Local Governments for Sustainability — I know, don’t ask) even has a personal Co2 calculator you can use. ICLEI (pronounced “ick-lee”) believes you should know, and of course want to know, the amount of “your yearly direct personal carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.” To which I say, directly and personally, “Get lost,” or words to that effect. (See “United Nations ICLEI and The City of Spokane.”)
My favorite eco-friendly slogan is “Save the Planet — Kill Yourself.”
There’s something deeply disturbed, and disturbing, about too many of these folks, if you ask me. For example, Yale professor and eco-nut, Lamont Cole, is of the opinion that “To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.”
You should do yourself a favor and peruse the quotes on Free Republic’s “So you’re an environmentalist…” web-page. If you don’t come away convinced that most of these folks are nuttier than a Payday candy bar, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Many of these “useful idiots” may be crazy and harmless, but they can also be crazy and deadly. Behind them, pulling the strings, and waiting to take over, are the Global Elite and their one world government.
Whether or not America will last as a free republic until the 2012 presidential elections is debatable. Iran’s leadership is aching to nuke Israel, and Israel’s only going to wait so long before taking preemptive measures — and there goes a large chunk of America’s oil supply. And what happens if Egypt comes under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood, and they decide to close the vital Suez Canal? Remember that Obama’s drilling ban, declared unconstitutional, is still in effect. (See “Judge Holds Interior in Contempt over Drilling Ban.”)
Long lines for gas — if you can get any at all; America’s power grid will flicker and intermittently fail. Time for the Globalists to make their final moves.
So America, freedom, and Western civilization goes down the drain on our watch. It’s nothing to be proud of, that is for sure.
Is there no hope then? If there are still enough patriotic Americans who value personal integrity and freedom — there’s a chance we can still turn this thing around, but it won’t be easy. Far from it.
But make no mistake, if we lose this one, America and the world will sink into an abyss of Godless tyranny for a very, very long time.
Laus Deo.
http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?page=view&nr=23&type=400
First published October 12, 2009 Canada Free Press. Revised for Gulag Bound, February 6, 2011.
12. Green energy policy? Nothing that works (4/30/15)
By Viv Forbes
Modern industrial society commenced with the use of coal and oil to power factories, trains, ships, and agriculture and to generate electricity. With abundant energy, prosperity increased, and people could save enough to support leisure, education, culture, and environmental concerns. But the dark greens have a dream to dismantle all this, and return society to the hunter/gatherer era. In an unguarded moment, Maurice Strong, a leader of the international green movement, said:
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Maurice Strong, receiving the “Four Freedoms Award” (photo credit: Lymantria)
Greens have thus gleefully spread the global warming scare to justify a massive political war on hydro-carbon fuels. Timothy Wirth, ex-president of the U.N. Foundation, spilled the beans:
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
To mask their real aim of de-energizing modern industry, they continually promote “alternative energy.” The only alternatives to coal, oil, and gas for stable, reliable, and economical grid power are nuclear energy, and in favorable locations, hydro or geothermal. Nuclear power could be one of our cheapest and safest energy sources. However, greens have opposed and denigrated it for decades, and erected such bureaucratic and financial hurdles that it is seldom considered in most pampered Western societies. They are in favor of hydro, providing it does not disturb one fish or frog on their favorite river.
But they continually tout the benefits of wind and solar power.
Wind/solar can be useful in some mobile or remote locations, and for some people with deep pockets who wish to become independent of the grid. But being totally unable to supply 24/7 grid power, they need reliable backup (or massive batteries) for about 75% of their rated capacity. Once we subtract the energy and resources needed to build and maintain the towers/panels, plus the roads and transmission lines, plus backup/batteries and then run it all intermittently, the whole-of-life net contribution of wind/solar to energy supply or emission reduction is negligible or negative.
Another dark green leader, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountains Institute, said:
It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.
Green energy policy promotes this dictum by supporting “Nothing that Works.”
The world focus on carbon dioxide is simply a useful tool in a much larger political agenda.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/04/green_energy_policy_nothing_that_works.html#ixzz4OIhctqsp
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13. Champagne socialist full of bubbles: Maurice Strong profits from pushing leftist ideas
Friday 18 July 2003
“Economic growth is not the cure; it is the disease.”
That is Maurice Strong’s take on what is wrong with the world, today, and what is the greatest threat to the environment. Everything that is wrong can, in Strong’s mind, be traced to three sources — industrialization, wealth and free markets. I’d add a fourth — Christianity — except Strong never quite comes out and blames it for the world’s ills. He merely hints at it with statements such as “We are all gods now, gods in charge of our own destiny,” which he made in his autobiographical 2000 book Where on Earth are We Going?
Actually, Strong’s three sources of evil are really just one source — Western civilization. Although he has reaped enormous personal profits from the Western ways of business and life, Strong has been a lifelong biter of the hands that feed him so well. In 1990, he even mused about a possible revolution against “industrialized civilizations.”
What if it were concluded, Strong romanticized, “that the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? … Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?”
Strong wasn’t exactly speaking for himself in this daydream. His nightmarish scenario involved a “small group of … world leaders,” gathered together at a semi-private conference, who decide to overthrow the established political and financial orders “in order to save the planet.”
But he was not speaking for himself, either. Strong revels in telling fawning audiences that he is “a socialist in ideology,” but “a capitalist in methodology.” His socialist core would explain his attraction to revolutions against rich, industrialized civilizations.
And his membership on a dozen international business and environmental organizations would explain why he thinks such a revolution might spring from a small, semi-private gathering of world leaders.
Those are the circles Strong runs in. They are the people he knows. Undoubtedly, as he has sat through literally hundreds of such gatherings, he has occasionally marvelled at the amount of power represented by the leaders in the room, and speculated on what might convince those leaders to suspend democracy and diplomacy, and join him in the top-down coup of his dreams.
If the idea of a revolt against power, privilege and wealth, led by the most powerful, privileged and wealthy strikes you as a bit incongruous, then you need to understand two more things about Maurice Strong: He has made his fortune, reputation and influence out of peddling radical leftist ideas to the international jet set, to champagne socialists like himself, who very much enjoy what rank and riches have given them, but who despair the consumerism and capitalism they see in those beneath them.
The other piece you need to the Strong puzzle is his contempt for ordinary people and the institutions that give them control over these leaders. Strong thinks only superior mortals who run in his circles and share his philosophy are fit to decide how the world should be run.
Only once has Strong lowered himself to stand for public office — in the 1979 Canadian general election that saw Joe Clark’s Tories squeak into power. But he couldn’t even bear to see that through to election day.
According to an eye-popping indictment of Strong’s smug contempt for democratic accountability, in the book, Fight Kyoto, Calgary journalist and lawyer Ezra Levant points out that Strong withdrew as the Liberal candidate in a Scarborough riding one month before voting day because he found his “constituents’ priorities were parochial.”
Strong is a founder of the Council on Global Governance; the author of the Earth Charter (earthcharter.org), that he wants to be not only the supreme law of the planet — replacing national laws and constitutions — but a new “Ten Commandments,” as well.
Strong is or has been a board member with Earth Council, the World Wildlife Fund, the David Suzuki Foundation, the United Nations Environment Program and two of three of the UN’s big world environment gatherings — Stockholm in 1972 and Rio in 1992.
The 1997 Kyoto accords sprang directly out of Strong’s Rio conference in 1992, with Strong having a hand guiding the accords to fruition all the way, as a special adviser to the UN secretary general, periodically with the status of undersecretary general, himself.
Levant claims Strong has “never stopped pressing for a world where the UN’s resolutions would be enforced as the law in every corner of the Earth.” And Strong has made it clear he sees no harm in carbon taxes, air travel taxes and financial transaction taxes that raise billions or even trillions annually to fund a super world bureaucracy where he and others can influence world affairs without every grubbying themselves by seeking approval from — ugh — voters.
This is the man Paul Martin wants to make a senior economic and environmental adviser in his PMO. But that’s no surprise, either. Levant details how Strong hired Martin to be his personal assistant at Montreal’s Power Corporation, even before Martin had left university, and later helped Martin get his stake in Canada Steamship Lines, the company that is the source of Martin’s personal wealth, not to mention his pride and joy. Martin’s enthusiasm for Strong’s counsel goes way, way back.
_______________________
Lorne Gunter
Columnist, Edmonton Journal
Editorial Board Member, National Post
14. Maurice Strong, the Father of America’s Destruction
Richard Salbato 12-29-09
Rothschild, Rockefeller, Maurice Strong, Al Gore, Goldman Sachs, Mayor Daley, William Ayers, Saul Alinsky, Saudi Arabia, China and the United Nations equals Barak Obama.
When we look at what has happened to the American dream, the American Constitution, the American economy in the past 12 months, it seems that there is a deliberate plan to completely destroy the entire American way of life and even the country as we know it.
When you look at the national debt, the bail outs of the banks, the fake stimulus bill, the health care bill, the coming cap and trade, the loss of jobs at the same time government workers have increased wages by 100% and more, and the exposed lies about Global Warming and Obama’s birth and mother, we can only conclude it is a master plan to destroy America.
But I have had a problem finding out who is behind all these obvious changes, which are against the will of the people. In order to trace “why” and “father” of these problems, I have had to go back 50 years and found the organization and man behind all this and the front man behind Barak Obama.
His name is Maurice Strong, born in Canada, lived in New York, and now exiled in China, but still the power behind Obama and the liberal House and Senate of America. To start to understand this man and his influence read his statement below to a group of reporters.
“In order to save the planet, the group [GIM] decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about? This group of world leaders [GIM] forms a secret society to bring about an economic collapse.”
Maurice Strong – regarding Generation Investment Management LLP
George Soros and his Canadian sidekick, Kyoto architect Maurice Strong, are the brains behind the likes of Al Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev and Barak Obama, all who belong to the above and the “Chicago Climate Exchange” which will make billions on climate change.
Barrack Hussein Obama is the one out in front talking about “Change we can believe in”, but the senator from Illinois is only the latest puppet.
We already know from the Internet that Soros has gone a long way to bankroll Obama’s campaign, but not so well known is that Soros worked in conjunction with Maurice Strong to saturate the American automobile market with the China-produced Chery.
“Like the bad guys in a spy movie, Soros and Strong teamed up on the Chery, a sort of poor man’s made-in-China vehicle, with which they hope to flood the U.S. market next year.”
Strong has been saying all along that China would someday soon replace the U.S. as world economic leader.
Described in countless media write-ups as a cross between the Wizard of Oz and Dr. No, the Canadian oil billionaire was the Secretary General of the 1992 UN Conference on the environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro where the unveiling of Agenda 21 took place and subtly began to change the world as the rest of us know it.
“With little media monitoring, Strong and Gore are cashing in on the lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.” “Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.
“Gore buys his carbon off-sets from himself—the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C.”, of which he is both chairman and founding partner.”
“In order to save the planet, the group [GIM] decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?”
“This group of world leaders [GIM] forms a secret society to bring about an economic collapse,” Strong told the reporter in painting his so-called fantasy scenario.
“It’s February. They’re all at Davos. These aren’t terrorists. They’re world leaders. They have positioned themselves in the world’s commodities and stock markets. They’ve engineered, using their access to stock markets and computers and gold supplies, a panic. Then, they prevent the world’s stock markets from closing. They jam the gears. They hire mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos as hostage. The markets can’t close…
Two weeks ago, financial analyst Jim Rogers said the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made America more communist than China! “This is welfare for the rich,” he said. “This is socialism for the rich. It’s bailing out the financiers, the banks, the Wall Streeters… Even ex-president Putin, just today, said as Russia rid itself of Marxism, America is embracing it.
The world’s second richest man, worth some $44 billion, gave 85% of his wealth in July of 2006 to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The lion’s share of the Gates foundation goes into United Nations sanctioned projects. Make that the fomenting for One World Government anti-American United Nations.
As Henry Ford once said:
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debt.”
Welcome to One World Government. Not only has it slipped in through the back door, it is right here about to keep you awake at night.