Rogues’ Gallery: False Opposition
By William F. Jasper The New American, May 31, 2004
This is the second installment in a series of articles looking at the forces behind the scenes propelling us toward globalization through NAFTA, the FTAA and the WTO.
"The Battle of Seattle." That is the common name given to the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial conference of November 30-December 3, 1999, where a 1960s-style generation of political street rioting was born anew. Images of tear gas, burning cars, chanting mobs, baton-wielding riot police, frightened diplomats, and millions of dollars in damage were left indelibly on the minds of those who viewed the footage on the nightly news. What started as relatively peaceful demonstrations by tens of thousands of anti-WTO activists from mostly leftist groups — labor unions, environmentalists, socialists, Communists — turned suddenly violent, as cadres of anarchists sallied out from the main body of demonstrators to attack police, bystanders and property.
Most of the organizers of the demonstrations denounced the violence and disavowed any connection to the individuals who had initiated the riots. The violent anarchists had accomplished a very important objective: They had made the motley, scruffy anti-WTO demonstrators appear to be reasonable, responsible citizens by comparison. And the anti-WTO demonstrators, in turn, made President Bill Clinton and the one-world revolutionaries inside the WTO negotiations look positively conservative, even as Clinton and company set about constructing a revolutionary structure — the World Trade Organization — which would have many of the features of an embryonic world government. (In our April 5 issue, we examined the backgrounds of some of these key globalist architects; see “A NAFTA/FTAA Rogues’ Gallery.") The real issue at stake was (and remains) national sovereignty; the WTO architects were (and are) furtively creating an unaccountable global apparatus without constitutional restraints, that could overrule the laws of sovereign nations, and that was designed to gradually assume more powers. The WTO, which was approved by Congress in 1994, clearly was not about promoting “free trade," as its promoters falsely claimed. It was about a massive, unconstitutional transfer of power. But the leaders of the demonstrations against the WTO were not opposing this central threat posed by the WTO. Instead, they were upset that the WTO’s focus on trade was too narrow; they insisted that, to be acceptable, the WTO regime must not only mandate global trade rules, but also global laws concerning the environment, labor, health and other matters. “We want to fix the WTO, not abolish it," insisted the leaders of a coalition of the big environmentalist groups — including World Wildlife Fund, National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth — in an open letter to the WTO Ministerial. What kind of opposition is that? Answer: compromised, controlled, paid, phony opposition. These “Watermelon Marxists" — green on the outside, red on the inside — want a bigger, more powerful WTO, and a place at the table as equal-partner dictators in the new global regime. It is worth noting that all of these groups are heavily funded by the big tax-exempt foundations which are run by the world government advocates from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the same architects who designed the WTO. Big Labor, like the environmental lobby, also opposed U.S. withdrawal from the global trade authority. “We need a rules-based trading system," the AFL-CIO explained on October 29, 1999, in the lead-up to Seattle. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney (CFR), like the leaders of the enviro-extremist groups, wants to see a WTO with more power, specifically power to mandate global labor policies. This same dynamic is being played out today, with Sweeney and other top labor leaders pushing for incorporating the UN’s International Labor Organization (ILO) standards into the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). A May 5 Reuters news story reported:
Top Democrats have warned CAFTA is in trouble in Congress because of its labor provisions, which they say are too weak. They want the agreement renegotiated to require the five countries — Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua — to incorporate the International Labor Organization’s “core labor standards" into their laws.
There were (and are) many articulate, principled, patriotic, constitutionalist, no-compromise opponents of the WTO and its regional subsidiaries such as NAFTA, CAFTA and the FTAA. But you don’t see or hear them in the controlled “debate." They have been frozen out of the equation because for them sovereignty, freedom and the Constitution are not negotiable. The public “debate" — at least as presented by the CFR Insider-dominated media and political institutions — has been between the one-world principals and their paid agents. Following the Battle in Seattle, Francis Fukuyama, a full-fledged globalist (he’s a member of both the CFR and the Trilateral Commission), explained that the Marxist globalists should be grateful to the capitalist globalists for the WTO. “By creating the WTO, global capitalism has solved the left’s collective action problem," he opined in the December 1, 1999 Wall Street Journal. “The WTO," Fukuyama explained, “is the only international organization that stands any chance of evolving into an institution of global governance, setting rules not only for how countries will trade and invest with one another, but also for how they will deal with issues like labor standards and the environment." To those who will take the time to examine the evidence, it soon becomes overwhelmingly apparent that the tie-dyed revolutionaries in the streets actually are working in concert with the silk-tied revolutionaries in the suites. Both are part of a giant pincer strategy, applying simultaneous “pressure from above and below." Their scripted “confrontations" are about as genuine as the ludicrous Monday Night television “wrestling" matches between those strutting, steroid-drenched grapplers in masks and tights. More phony debates, more charades and more rigged wrestling matches are on the agenda, as the battles over CAFTA, FTAA, WTO expansion and other trade agreements heat up. Coalitions of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) claiming to represent tens of millions of U.S. voters and hundreds of millions of people around the globe are putting pressure on Congress to oppose CAFTA and FTAA unless they are expanded to include environmental, labor, health, education, and other matters. Americans committed to preserving our constitutional republic, our independence and our economic viability must expose this false opposition; we must not allow them to usurp our voice and speak in our name. In the remainder of this article we profile several key agents who have been playing major roles in this rigged debate. An old rule of politics is very apropos in this respect: Follow the money. That’s what you must do if you want to know who is working for whom, and what their real agenda is. An important corollary is: Follow the arguments. No matter how strongly they protest against the FTAA (or CAFTA, or the WTO), if they are willing, ultimately, to compromise U.S. sovereignty for their own objectives, they are themselves compromised. And a final corollary: Follow the connections. As the examples below illustrate, the agents charged with controlling the opposition usually have identifiable ties to principal organizations that are leading the charge for world government.
Ralph Nader (Source: Newscom)
Ralph Nader — “Citizen Ralph" is the quintessential Establishment revolutionary — fed, funded, pampered and promoted by the globalist elites and one-world corporatists he claims to be fighting. With generous funding from Insider foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Field, Rubin, Stern, et al.), over the past several decades Nader has launched a plethora of radical “public interest" groups that have become a permanent, full-time lobbying force for ever bigger government. They include: Public Citizen, Congress Watch, Citizen Works, Public Interest Research Group, Center for the Study of Responsive Law, Center for Auto Safety, Government Purchasing Project and the Congressional Accountability Project. Nader’s two main organizations involved in trade issues are Public Citizen and Global Trade Watch (GTW). The GTW website tells us: <blockquoteThanks to initial support from the Ford Foundation, last year we launched a major project on international harmonization of standards that unites GTW and Public Citizen’s medical, legal, energy/environmental, and product/auto safety divisions. NAFTA and the WTO include requirements to either globally standardize regulatory policies or declare other nations’ standards as “equivalent." We now work with numerous local, state, and federal policy-makers, and also with NGOs, to make them aware of these issues and facilitate their input and participation. [Emphasis added.] Harmonization. That’s one of the euphemisms adopted from the socialist/internationalist lexicon of the European Union. The globalist architects of the EU insisted for years that harmonization of national laws and social policies would not compromise national sovereignty or local control. But that is precisely what it has done. How could it have been otherwise, when local and national governments are required to bring their laws into conformity with the emerging supranational government? Robert Wright, a senior editor for The New Republic, acknowledged Nader’s deceptive role in the anti-globalization charade in the magazine’s January 17, 2000 issue. Mr. Wright, an ardent one-worlder, was jubilant concerning the global structures developing under NAFTA and the WTO. In a cover story — entitled “America is surrendering its sovereignty to a world government. Hooray” — Wright noted that “Nader and most of the Seattle left would gladly accept a sovereignty-crushing world body if it followed the leftish model of supranational governance found in the European Union.” “Indeed,” he said, “it was partly to please the Seattle activists that President Clinton espoused a future WTO whose member nations would meet global environmental and labor standards or else face sanction.” Nader, who ran for the White House in 1996 and 2000 on the Green Party ticket, has adopted the same deceptive tactics and rhetoric that the European Green Parties and the Socialist Group in the EU Parliament have used to drive their countries further into the EU trap. Nader remains the committed socialist that he was in the 1960s. During an interview in Australia in 1972, he explained his solution for America’s problems: “What is needed is socialism or communism of one sort or another.” For the past four decades (and continuing to the present), Nader has worked closely with top apparatchiks from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), the Marxist cabal with long-standing ties to the Soviet KGB and Castro’s DGI. In 2003 he endorsed the California gubernatorial campaign of Peter Camejo, a longtime Trotskyite communist activist in the Socialist Workers Party.
Lori Wallach
Lori Wallach — As a founding member of the International Forum on Globalization and the director and chief spokesman for Ralph Nader’s Global Trade Watch, Lori Wallach is one of the Insider-designated top leaders of the “anti-globalization” movement. Ms. Wallach was the subject of an extraordinary 27-page-long cover story/interview in the Spring 2000 issue of Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a globalist, CFR-laden outfit which is for the WTO and the FTAA. The adulatory puff piece, entitled “Lori’s War,” was intended to signal to the CFR media crowd that Wallach is the “go to” person for Establishment-approved opposition in interviews, debates, congressional testimony, panels, etc. She has testified on trade issues more than 30 times before congressional committees and has received prominent coverage from nearly all of the major radio and television networks and newspapers. Interestingly, at about the same time that the Foreign Policy globalists were singing her praises, Wallach was also being glorified by Inter Press Service (IPS), the Marxist propaganda agency with correspondents and outlets in more than 60 countries and headquarters at UN Plaza in New York City. In an article entitled “Lori Wallach, Tireless Campaigner Against Corporate Globalisation,” for its April-May 2000 “Women As Leaders” series, the IPS lauded Wallach as “the trade debate’s guerilla warrior.” It’s not a coincidence that Inter Press Service has the same IPS acronym as the Institute for Policy Studies; it was created by radicals from the Marxist think tank in 1981 and the two have been joined at the hip ever since. Wallach has worked closely with these IPS/IPS comrades for years, especially in the super-radical International Forum on Globalization (IFG), where she served on the Drafting Committee of the “Alternatives to Economic Globalization” report, IFG’s shockingly blatant call for socialist world government under a vastly empowered UN. In the course of her Foreign Policy interview in 2000, Wallach admitted that GTW is funded by the Ford Foundation. She also stated that she favors “a global regime of rules” in which the WTO’s authority would be expanded to cover other things beside trade issues. She called for “empowering institutions such as the International Labor Organization (ILO), which right now is toothless and useless.” In its January-February 2004 issue, Foreign Policy very graciously gave Wallach valuable space for an essay entitled “Trade Secrets: The real message of the recent collapse of trade talks in Cancun,” alongside an article by billionaire George Soros (CFR), who funds both sides of the controlled FTAA “debate.” (See the first installment of “A NAFTA/FTAA Rogues’ Gallery” for more on Soros.) Activists who genuinely and unalterably oppose the FTAA and WTO know their chances of receiving similarly favorable treatment and opportunities are about nil. Likewise, they will not be invited to speak at meetings of the CFR and World Economic Forum, as Wallach, the supposed nemesis of globalization, frequently does. Wallach leads a charmed life, flitting between confabs of the CFR corporate/government elite and their paid “opposition” on the Left.
John Cavanagh (Source: Newscom)
John Cavanagh — A former economist for the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the World Health Organization, John Cavanagh is now director of the subversive Institute for Policy Studies and a perennial activist in many of its Marxist spin-off organizations and projects. He has been particularly active and influential at the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), an ultra-left coalition funded by the usual foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Turner, et al.) and run by Cavanagh’s pal and fellow Marxist, Jerry Mander. Together with Mander, Lori Wallach, Sarah Anderson (IPS officer), Walden Bello (IPS Transnational Institute), Robin Broad (CFR fellow and Carnegie Endowment associate) and twelve other radicals, Cavanagh served on the IFG Drafting Committee that wrote the “Alternatives to Economic Globalization” report. That report, a global socialist manifesto, proposes a radical transformation of the UN, with new empowered institutions. Cavanagh is the co-author with Richard J. Barnet (CFR, IPS) of Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order. He has also appeared on CFR-sponsored panels on trade with pro-FTAA CFR members Peter Hakim, Bruce Stokes and Thomas McLarty. During one of those CFR panel discussions concerning the FTAA Quebec Summit, Cavanagh had the temerity to insist that he represents the “mainstream” political perspective. Cavanagh claimed that another of his foundation-funded coalitions, the Hemispheric Social Alliance, represents “about 45 million people across the hemisphere.” And, he said, “It’s not as though we are extreme groups; we represent the mainstream public opinion of these societies.” The only places Cavanagh and his IPS cadres could legitimately claim “mainstream” status would be in the Soviet Politburo or Fidel Castro’s Peoples’ Paradise.
Luis Inacio Lula da Silva (Source: Newscom)
Luis Inacio Lula da Silva — In 2002, Lula da Silva (known as Lula) took some lessons in image makeover from Hillary Clinton, Yasir Arafat and Vladimir Putin. It was his fourth run for president of Brazil; this time he would moderate his Communist Workers’ Party’s image. It worked; he is now the chief executive of Latin America’s most populous country and its biggest economy. Congratulations for his election win poured in, from Fidel Castro, the Socialist International, Communist parties — and the Council on Foreign Relations. Kenneth Maxwell, director of the CFR’s Latin American Studies program, wrote an op-ed for the September 27, 2002 Financial Times scolding Lula’s critics for mentioning Lula’s long Red record. After all, Maxwell said, echoing the CFR line, “the Cold War is long over.” Maybe he should explain that to Comrade Lula, who insists on wearing his Communist red star lapel pin from the Cold War era and still participates in the Sao Paulo Forum (SPF), the international terrorist conference he helped found with Fidel Castro. To help celebrate his electoral victory, Lula invited Castro and Hugo Chavez (Venezuela’s Marxist president) as his first official state guests. Marco Aurelio Garcia, who founded the SPF with Lula and still serves as Lula’s top adviser, is a hard-line Marxist-Leninist, who participated in Salvador Allende’s Cuban-directed attempt to communize Chile. “We have to first give the impression that we are democrats,” Garcia explained to Brazil’s Communist faithful. “Initially, we have to accept certain things. But that won’t last.” But these words, even coupled with ominous, visible reality, didn’t perturb the Pratt House globalists. On December 5, 2002, CFR “expert” Kenneth Maxwell was defending Lula again, this time in the New York Review of Books. Maxwell, who had recently returned from a Brazil trip, said “Lula’s triumph seemed like the realization of an American dream,” and he was miffed that anti-communists might spoil that dream. He dismissed Lula’s Castro, Chavez, and SPF connections as inconsequential. Interestingly, two days later, on December 7, the online edition of the People’s Weekly World ( PWW), official newspaper of the Communist Party USA, also ran an article on Lula. In it, PWW interviewed Luis Fernandes, a leader of the Communist Party of Brazil, who helped run the Lula campaign. Comrade Fernandes enthusiastically explained that when Lula won, all his fellow Communists “came out into the streets dressed in red” to celebrate. PWW went on to report: “During the election campaign, Lula charged that FTAA would clear the way for ‘annexation’ of Latin America by the United States while Mercosur is a buttress against U.S. control.” Mercosur is a regional trade bloc that includes Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay as full members, and Chile and Bolivia as associate members. Lula’s line is that the Mercosur countries must accelerate their integration as a sub-region to avoid being swallowed up by the much larger FTAA. The truth is that the socialist, sovereignty-destroying program Lula is pushing for Mercosur would demolish almost all currently existing national barriers of member countries against absorption by the FTAA. In fact, CFR one-worlders (like Maxwell) have been pushing for Mercosur integration for decades. They know that Mercosur, like FTAA, is part of the global WTO regime. Mr. Lula knows this too, of course; he and his top administration officials hobnob regularly with the CFR crowd at globalist conclaves. In fact, Lula himself was the main speaker at a special “Meeting With President Lula” sponsored by the CFR in New York on September 25, 2003.
Hugo Chavez (Source: Newscom)
Hugo Chavez — No one appears better poised, at this time, to assume the mantle of leadership of the revolution in Latin America from Cuba’s aging dictator than Hugo Chavez. Since winning Venezuela’s 1998 presidential election, Chavez has been taking his country ever leftward toward dictatorship. He has rewritten the constitution and assumed more and more powers. He uses his “Bolivarian Circles” — armed thugs and neighborhood spies, patterned after Castro’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution — to beat, intimidate and murder his opposition. During his 1999 visit to Beijing, Chavez praised mass murderer Mao Zedong and declared: “I have been very Maoist all my life.” Communist China has stepped up investing in projects in Venezuela, one of the world’s top oil producers and one of the major foreign suppliers of oil to the U.S. Chavez has given hugs and praise to Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and Libyan terrorist-in-chief Col. Qaddafi. Castro, whom Chavez refers to as “dear brother,” has sent his KGB-trained DGI agents to help Chavez transform Venezuela’s internal security service, the DISIP, into a Soviet-model secret police force. After his failed 1992 coup attempt, Chavez went to Cuba, Libya and Iraq. He came back with plenty of money to launch his political campaign. He is a veteran member of the Sao Paulo Forum terrorist network and has opened Venezuela to al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and the ELN and FARC narco-terrorists of Colombia. Hakim Mamad Ali Diad Fattah, a Venezuelan-born Arab who is now back in Venezuela, may have been another intended hijacker on September 11, 2001. Fattah entered the U.S. with forged documents (most likely provided by the DGI-DISIP) and took lessons at the same New Jersey flight school attended by Hani Hanjour, who authorities say crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. According to the FBI, Fattah had talked about blowing up an airliner. After 9-11, Chavez refused to provide information on Fattah and other individuals raising money for Hezbollah in Venezuela. In 2002, General Marcos Ferreira resigned as head of Venezuela’s Border Security because Chavez was ordering him to destroy files on Hezbollah terrorists and to allow known terrorists to cross Venezuela’s borders in transit to Cuba and Colombia. Despite his notorious words and deeds, the CFR brain trust has been all too willing to look benignly upon Chavez’s militant revolutionary plans. One reason is obvious: Along with Brazil’s Lula (see above) he is pushing for Mercosur integration, a major stepping stone to the FTAA.
John Sweeney
John Sweeney — Thanks to the financial and moral support of AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, the “anti-globalization” charade — frequently accompanied by riots and destruction — has provided the spectacle needed for the appearance of popular opposition. If the anti-FTAA/WTO demonstrations relied solely on the radical Greens, with their peculiar (and often repellent) appearance and extreme, anti-human proposals, they would alienate far more people than they attracted. The labor unions provide some balance, with lots of normal-looking “working guys.” Union-chartered buses transport thousands of union activists to marches and demonstrations; millions of dollars of union dues help fund the AFL-CIO’s anti-FTAA/WTO campaign. But it is not truly an anti-FTAA campaign. Sweeney (CFR) told activists at a Miami rally on November 19, 2003 that they must “radically rewrite” the FTAA to “protect workers from profit-hungry multinationals and repressive governments.” This fits with his other proposals to empower the UN’s International Labor Organization to enforce a global labor code. It also dovetails with his support for the Clinton and Bush amnesty proposals for illegal aliens, a very definite blow to the U.S. citizens who make up most of his union member base and whose jobs are being taken by a continuing deluge of foreign workers. Like most of the phony opponents of the FTAA, Sweeney is comfortable in both the pro and con camps. Some of his staunchest supporters in the union are Communist Party loyalists and 1960s radicals from the Institute for Policy Studies, Democratic Socialists of America and the American Friends Service Committee. But he is also invited to elite gatherings of the World Economic Forum, David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission and Council of the Americas, and Gorbachev’s State of the World Forum.
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