New American: The Grasp of Socialist International

The Grasp of Socialist International

Written by William F. Jasper

Tuesday, 16 February 2010 08:30

World government and world socialism. Those are the explicit goals of the Socialist International (SI), one of the planet’s most influential organizations, but one that is virtually unknown to the vast majority of Americans, since it is rarely mentioned in the major U.S. media. For the last two weeks of December 2009 and throughout all of January 2010 the headline story at the top of the home page of the Socialist International’s website boasted of the organization’s prominent influence and clout at the recently concluded United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. However, the brief article, entitled “SI at COP15 in Copenhagen: reaffirming social democratic priorities,” does not begin to do justice to the Socialist International’s central role, not only in pushing the current alarmism over global warming, but also in building a global militant environmental lobby from 1970 to the present. The SI was most notably represented in Copenhagen by its president, George Papandreou, who is also the current Prime Minister of Greece. “At this time, we are observing the birth of global governance,” Papandreou said while addressing the UN summit on December 18. “We must, however, agree to an obligation and be committed to carrying this out,” he stressed. We know now, of course, that the Copenhagen palaver failed to produce a binding agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol or produce the structures the SI is hoping to establish within the United Nations to transform it into a genuine global government. That failure, however, is viewed by the SI as a temporary setback, which will be remedied at future annual climate confabs, such as the UN’s 2010 follow-up to Copenhagen in Mexico City. At its 1962 Congress in Oslo, Norway, the Socialist International plainly declared: The ultimate objective of the parties of the Socialist International is nothing less than world government.... Membership of the United Nations must be made universal. The SI has never wavered from that goal, though it has softened its rhetoric, adopting the mushier, less threatening term “global governance” to replace its earlier appeals to “world government.” This is important to keep in mind, since current and former Prime Ministers and Presidents who are members of the SI comprise a large and influential contingent of world leaders who figure prominently at global and regional summits. Currently, the Socialist International boasts 170 political parties and organizations worldwide, including many that are currently in power running national governments. Prominent SI member parties include: • Britain’s Labour Party (Gordon Brown, Prime Minister), • Australia’s Labour Party (Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister), • South Africa’s African National Congress (Jacob Zuma, President), • Spain’s Socialist Workers’ Party (Jose Zapatero, President), • Nicaragua’s Sandinista Liberation Front (Daniel Ortega, President), • Namibia’s South West Africa People’s Organization (Hifikepunye Lucas Pohamba, President), • Chile’s Socialist Party (Michelle Bachelet, President), and • Egypt’s National Democratic Party (Hosni Mubarak, President). These and other SI member parties and their leaders have been fairly open in their calls for “global governance” to address what they claim are “global crises” that cannot be addressed (they say) in the current system of sovereign nation states. As The New American has reported, Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd have been especially outspoken, with hysterical pronouncements on the supposed need for UN governance to stave off supposed catastrophic global warming. In a speech this past November, Prime Minister Rudd denounced global-warming skeptics — including respected scientists and politicians — as evil “climate-change deniers,” who are “dangerous” and are “holding the world to ransom.” As Chancellor of the Exchequer under Prime Minister Tony Blair, and then as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has pushed for transforming the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and World Bank) into a full-blown United Nations Economic Council, to complement the UN Security Council. Brown is a member of the Fabian Society, the British socialist organization that served as the model for, and incubator of, the SI. Indeed, the SI world headquarters in London and the Fabian Society’s London office are but two hands on the same body. On January 16, 2010, Brown delivered his “Causes to Fight For” speech to the Fabian Society New Year Conference. He has addressed the group many times. Although the Fabians are usually presented as “moderate” and “democratic” socialists, the Fabian Society has been a key ally of the communists from Lenin’s time to the present, including providing special assistance in covering up Josef Stalin’s unspeakable crimes. The Socialist International Congresses, as well as the SI’s various committees and commissions, have issued a stream of reports and statements over the years reiterating its 1962 call for world government/global governance. “Governance in a Global Society — The Social Democratic Approach,” issued by the XXII Congress of the Socialist International in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2003 is a prime example. The declaration of SI’s 2006 Council Meeting in Santiago, Chile, which met under the banner of “Governance, energy, and climate change, new horizons for peace,” is another. The Santiago meeting also provided the occasion for setting up the Socialist International Commission for a Sustainable World Society (SI-CSWS), which is now joined at the hip with the United Nations. SI’s Richard Lagos, the former president of Chile, co-chairs the CSWS with Goran Persson, the former Prime Minister of Sweden. Lagos has also been appointed by Ban ki-Moon to serve simultaneously as Special Envoy of the United Nations Secretary-General on Climate Change. “Global governance is no longer a concept but an urgent necessity,” declared the SI-CSWS at Santiago. It states further: Politics needs to be global to guarantee peace and stability; to safeguard the environment; to generate development and social cohesion; to ensure robust economies that can withstand speculative pressures and create fairness and opportunities for all. No other issue illustrates better the borderless and truly global nature of the challenges facing today’s world and the need to put forward common answers than global warming and climate change. Green, Pink, and Red Ever since its inception in 1951, the Socialist International has made cosmetic efforts to distance itself from communist socialists. It continues to do so, sprinkling its calls for socialism and global governance with assurances of support for “democratic” principles. However, its democratic bona fides and its supposed opposition to totalitarian socialism are as threadbare today as they ever have been. During the Cold War, the SI aligned itself with communist terrorist Yasir Arafat and the PLO, the Soviet Union’s premier terror master. It was also comfortable maintaining close fraternal relations with the communist dictatorships of the Warsaw Pact, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Nicaragua’s Sandinista regimes became SI favorites. When Gunther Guillaume, boon companion and closest aide to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, was exposed as a communist agent of the Soviet KGB/East German Stasi, Brandt was forced to resign as Chancellor. The Guillaume-KGB connection helped explain the incredible political positions Brandt had been taking vis-à-vis Moscow and the communist world. But Brandt’s KGB revelations didn’t phase the SI leadership, who allowed him to continue in office as the longest-serving president of the SI. Not much has changed there; “reformed” communists and communist parties are welcomed with open arms and hold top posts in the SI. The aforementioned SI Commission for a Sustainable World Society is a case in point. Its members include Aleksander Kwasniewski, the former President of Poland, who was a die-hard Communist Party member until it became expedient to switch to the “reform” label. Likewise for CSWS member Sergei Mironov, who was an apparatchik in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and remains a stalwart supporter of Russia’s top KGB man, Prime Minister -Vladimir Putin. Another SI poster boy is Sergei Stanishev, Prime Minister of Bulgaria and chairman of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (formerly called the Bulgarian Communist Party). Still another is Ayaz Mütallibov, the former communist dictator of Soviet Azerbaijan. And, of course, we should mention, once again, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, since his communist Sandinista regime has some special SI connections. Perhaps one of the most important former members of the CSWS is Carol Browner, former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration, and currently Director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy in the Obama administration. For some reason, no “mainstream” journalist has thought it important to question Browner or President Obama about Browner’s membership in and activities with this SI commission. One of the most important SI-Sandinista ties comes in the person of former Sandinista junta member Miguel D’Escoto, who now sits as President of the United Nations General Assembly. As we reported online this past June (“UN’s Marxist Plan for Global Government”), D’Escoto’s UN Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System was chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, who is also simultaneously chairman of the SI’s Commission on Global Financial Issues. Stiglitz’s 2003 book The Roaring Nineties was described by Bloomberg News as “a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s blueprint to reshape the U.S. economy.” Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, “mentored several members of Obama’s economic team, including budget director Peter Orszag, 40, and Jason Furman, 38, deputy director of the National Economic Council,” according to Bloomberg. In his autobiographic Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama writes of the “socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union” while a student at Columbia University in New York City. He has never explained what impact those conferences had on him, nor was he ever asked to do so during his interviews with the major media. Joseph Stiglitz, the socialist economist and SI commission chairman, is now a professor at Obama’s alma mater, Columbia, and a mentor to the advisors who are devising Obama’s plans for socializing virtually all sectors of the American economy. And former Socialist International commissioner Carol Browner is leading the administration’s efforts to foist a regulatory control scheme on the American people that is more ambitious, intrusive, and potentially totalitarian than anything ever imagined by earlier socialist leaders such as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, or Mao Zedong: a global plan to control and regulate all energy production and consumption and all carbon dioxide emissions. “Every breath you take, every move you make, I’ll be watching you.” Those are lyrics to the 1983 hit by the British rock band The Police. If the Socialist International, the UN, and the Obama administration have their way, that may be the new theme song of the Global Green Police. From Davos to Porto Allegre The Socialist International serves as one of the most indispensable bridges by which the globalist elites transport their programs for world government to both the global business/financial leaders and the socialist/communist leaders of the world. This important bridging function was on display during the last week of January, as global leaders flocked to two competing — and, supposedly, opposing — world summits: the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, and the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Allegre, Brazil. The Davos palaver is by far the more glamorous of the two events, usually featuring a roster of the super-rich (with names like Rockefeller, Rothschild, Gates, Buffet, Soros, and Branson), the politically connected (with names like Kissinger, Clinton, Greenspan, Bernanke, Summers, Sarkozy, and Blair), and the just-famous (with names like Pitt, Jolie, Bono, and Gere). Some 2,500-3,000 moguls and magnates, Presidents and potentates, network and confabulate in the planet’s most splendiferous four-day soiree. The annual WEF event, it would seem, represents the ultimate gathering of the lords of capitalism. Meanwhile, the countering WSF in Porto Allegre is a radical congeries of some 30,000-50,000 socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists, Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, feminists, union activists, and environmentalists. Decrying capitalist greed, corporate power, and globalization, the WSF leaders call for building a new global system based on “social and environmental justice.” Their heroes are Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and Brazil’s Lula da Silva. Associated Press reporter Alan Clendenning reported on President Lula da Silva’s celebrity style at this year’s WSF. Wrote Clendenning: Former radical union leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — known almost everywhere as Lula — was greeted like a rock star by activists in a sports stadium chanting “Lula, Lula, the warrior of the Brazilian people!” He got more cheers after promising to scold world leaders and bankers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and to tell them the free market policies they have espoused for decades were to blame for the worldwide financial crunch. Lula, a longtime activist leader of the communist Workers Party of Brazil, is not only a founder of the WSF, but also the key founder (with Fidel Castro) of the even more radical São Paulo Forum, which includes among its member organizations most of the official communist parties of Latin America, as well as notorious terrorist organizations. Among the São Paulo Forum members on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups are the Colombian FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombiana) and ELN (Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional), the Peruvian MRTA (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement), and the Chilean MIR (the Movement of the Revolutionary Left). It must seem odd to some observers, then, that President Lula, the radical socialist, is honored at both the WEF and the WSF. This year he was the first head of state to receive the World Economic Forum’s new “Global Statesmanship Award.” Alas, due to high blood pressure and his doctor’s orders, he was forced to send a substitute to pick up his award and deliver his “scolding” speech to the Davos assembly. Like his communist comrades in Beijing, Lula is the frequent recipient of accolades from the leading lights of the business and financial worlds, for his supposedly pro-capitalist policies. However, like the wily Chinese, Lula is merely following the program of patient gradualism advocated by the Fabian Socialists — and Lenin himself, who, in his New Economic Policy (NEP) gladly embraced partnerships with Western corporations … with the aim of using capitalism to build communism to the point where it is strong enough to smash capitalism. While Lula is not a formal member of the SI, he is a close ally. He hosted the SI’s 2003 Congress in Brazil, and was praised there by SI President George Papandreou. And SI leaders Papandreou, Zapatero, Zuma, Brown, and Rudd — to name a few — were at Davos to promote the Fabian globalist-socialist agenda. Likewise, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not a formal SI member, but at this year’s Davos gathering, she was avidly pushing the socialist program of her British SI comrade, Gordon Brown. Calling for a global financial shake-up, she proposed the forging of a new charter that “may even lead to a UN Economic Council, just as the Security Council was created after World War II.” Safeguarding the environment and reducing the poverty gap, Merkel told the WEF, are principles that “need to be enshrined in the form of a global economic order charter” that “could lead to the establishment of a UN economic council.” “Davos Man,” aka “Global Citizen” While the WEF and WSF appear, at least on the surface, to be opposing each other on the issue of economic globalization, in reality they are both pushing for globalism, i.e., the development of the UN into an all-powerful world government. The “Davos man,” says David Rothkopf, in Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, represents “the rise of a global power elite, a superclass” for the new “global era.” The Davos man represents, says Rothkopf, “the global citizen, the leader for whom borders [are] increasingly irrelevant.” Rothkopf, who is himself a Davos man (president of a high-powered consulting firm, Garten Rothkopf; a former managing director of Kissinger Associates; and a veteran member of the Council on Foreign Relations) and regular WEF -attendee, writes: These global elites have crystallized a tension between the almost 400-year-old idea of the nation-state as the defining unit of global governance, and the emerging reality of a world in which nations are not only diminishing in influence but also are being transcended both by transnational needs beyond their reach and transnational power centers advancing internationalist or supranationalist agendas. Internationalist vs. nationalist. Globalist vs. regionalist. A battle not over a redistribution of wealth but over the redistribution of sovereignty and power. Rothkopf is not exactly being honest in that last sentence above; the battle is indeed about redistribution of wealth — and sovereignty and power. But it is not about redistributing the wealth of the Davos glob-alists; it is about redistributing the wealth of the world’s productive middle classes in the developed nations to the political classes of the developing nations chosen by the globalists. And the vehicles used to redistribute the wealth are the UN and its agencies, along with various national and regional “aid” agencies, as well as those NGOs favored with the imprimatur of the globalist power elite. — Photo of Socialist International President George Papandreou (center) shaking hands with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: AP Images