World government and world socialism. Those are the explicit goals of the Socialist International, one of the planet’s most influential organizations, but one that is virtually unknown to the vast majority of Americans, since it is rarely reported on in the United States’ major media.
The headline story that currently tops the home page of the Socialist International’s website reports on the organization’s influence and clout at the recently concluded United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. The brief article, however, does not even begin to do justice to the Socialist International’s central role, not only in pushing the current alarmism over global warming, but in actually launching and promoting the global militant environmental lobby, from 1970 to the present day.
Your correspondent not only witnessed first-hand the Socialist International (SI) at work in Copenhagen, but also witnessed the same at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), better known as the Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro. I wrote about that at the time (“Socializing at Rio: Socialists Run the Earth Summit,” August 10, 1992), pointing out, for instance, the key role at the summit of Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who was then Vice President of the Socialist International, and noting as well the prominence of other SI leaders at UNCED.
The Socialist International 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. We must, however, agree to an obligation and be committed to carrying this out,” Papandreou stressed, while addressing the UN summit on December 18.
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 that 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 (Jacvob 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 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 Ruddhave been especially outspoken, making hysterical pronouncements on the supposed need for UN governance to stave off imminent catastrophic global warming.
The SI 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 one 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. 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 the UN’s top man, 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. “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.”
This is a continuation and expansion of the world government effort that was given top priority in 1992 with the launch of the Commission on Global Governance, a joint UN/SI venture, and the release of its 1995 report, Our Global Neighborhood. As this writer reported at the time (“A Plague of Power,” April 3, 1995), it was top SI leaders Willy Brandt, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Julius Nyerere, Ingvar Carlsson, and UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali who created the Commission and initiated the ongoing “global governance” campaign
Green, Pink, and Red
Ever since its inception in 1951, the Socialist International has made cosmetic efforts to distance itself from the communist varient of socialism. 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 Willy Brandt, was exposed as a KGB/Stasi agent, Brandt was forced to resign as Chancellor of West Germany. The Guillaume-KGB connection helped explain the incredible political positions Brandt had been taking vis-á-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. It’s membersinclude 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 a apparatchik in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and remains a stalwart supporter of Russia’s top KGB man, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Perhaps one of the most important former members of the CSWS is Carol Browner, former Administrator of the Environmentasl 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.
Another SI poster child is Sergei Stanishev, Prime Minister of Bulgaria and chairman of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (formerly called the Bulgarian Communist Party). And, of course, we should mention, once again, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, since his communist Sandinista regime has some special SI connections.
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 here 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 is 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 the Bloomberg story.
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 advisers 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.
Photo: Socialist International press conference at Copenhagen Climate Change Conference
Related articles:
Socializing at Rio: Socialists Run the Earth Summit