THE GLOBAL-GOVERNANCE DECEPTION
By Steven Yates
February 12, 2006
NewsWithViews.com
Those following my work know that what motivates much of my writing is the conviction that we are in the midst of an ongoing process—a revolution in permanence, one might call it, aimed at transforming every institution and ultimately enslaving individuals. This process aims at erasing America (as I put it in an earlier article). Once, not terribly long ago, it worked its effects in secret. Now, those who know what to look for can see evidence of this process everywhere, operating almost in the open. Its short term goals: regional economic integration and the gradual erosion of national sovereignty. Its long term goal: world government. Its advocates call this “global governance,” of course.
One of the process’s major strategic tools is “free trade” ideology, which pursues global micromanagement behind a rhetoric of democracy, prosperity, and so on. Another is sustainable development (Agenda 21, public-private partnerships, Smart Growth, economic development in “corridors,” the New Urbanism, the Wildlands Project, etc.). Still another is the dumbing down of all state-sponsored education. This has involved the ratcheting down of subjects like history and logic in favor of pure vocationalism, so graduates will have “job skills” or be “lifelong learners” without learning of this country’s founding documents or their historical and philosophical background. These strategic tools are different strands of an integrated package, the goal of which is a totally managed and administered planet.
Those who believe this are still often dismissed as “conspiracy kooks.” These days, it is hard to resist the urge to return the ridicule.
For today, we have the World Wide Web. Most of the evidence for the process I and many others describe is available not merely on conspiracy-focused Web sites but on the advocates’ own home bases on the Web. One can find references to “global governance” everywhere on official sites from that of the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Trilateral Commission (TC), or others. Each of these managed-trade abominations, from NAFTA forward, has a site devoted exclusively to it, usually with the complete text of the document.The entire text of Agenda 21 is on the United Nations web site.
And speaking of the UN, the organization’s self-conception as an incipient world government ought to be considered fully out in the open, with the UN Development Programme just unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This could well go down as the biggest bribe in history: $7trillion unlocked to “solve the world’s problems at a stroke,” under the condition that the nations of the world will assent to the “admission that the nation-state is an old-fashioned concept that has no role to play in a modern globalised world …”
A conspiracy, by definition, is hidden from you. It involves relatively small groups of persons working against your best interests (oftentimes employing illegal means) without your knowledge. I have occasionally encountered the criticism that if “conspiracy theories” were really true, none of us could know about them.
The “global governance” folks aren’t hiding! So where’s the conspiracy?!
Perhaps the “global governance” folks are counting on most Americans today, mostly brain-dead products of dumbed-down government schools, being more interested in the Superbowl or the next installment of Survivor. Or as too busy-busy-busy working the two or three jobs necessary to survive in today’s economy to pay attention to these larger issues that don’t affect them directly and immediately. Most Americans either won’t or can’t make the time to learn the truth.
Thus this process of permanent transformation or revolution—its origins actually traceable to the 1700s (House of Rothschild, Bavarian Illuminati, Freemasonry, etc.; Rousseau’s social philosophy for revolutionist foot soldiers not in the inner circles)—was able to emerge gradually in the 1970s and go into overdrive during the noxious 1990s.
The 1970s gave us Zbigniew Brzezinsky’s Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. This book proposed—in surprisingly readable language—the specific “economic integration” strategy that the Trilateralists would begin putting into motion and which would emerge as NAFTA. It described the nation-state (i.e., our nation-state) as obsolete. The Trilateralists were soon joined by the heavily subsidized (Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, etc.) environmental movements, scaring us to death with prospects ranging from population growth to global warming.
The 1990s were a disaster by any measure! That decade gave us: political correctness, Agenda 21, Bill Clinton (Rhodes Scholar, CFR), Hillary Clinton, thePresident’s Council on Sustainable Development, theWorld Business Council on Sustainable Development, and The Prince of Wales International Business Leaders Forum (Prince Charles—as Joan Veon has ably documented—has been at least since 1990 a prime mover in the sustainable development movement). It gave us NAFTA, the Summit of the Americas (which started the push for a Free Trade Area of the Americas—FTAA), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the ongoing destruction of America’s middle class via “downsizing” and “outsourcing.” It gave us School-To-Work andWorkforce Investment movements in government-sponsored schools—piggybacking on earlier disasters such as Mastery Learning and Outcome-Based Education. (These are all disasters to us, of course, who believe that schools should graduate educated citizens able and willing to find their own way in the world, not barely literate subjects trained only for obedient “service sector” work in a public-private partnership). [See video "Liberty or Sustainable Development"]
So far, the 2000 decade has given us: George W. Bush’s brand of Neocon pseudo-conservatism stemming from its Project for a New American Century, illegal immigration gone completely out of control with proposed “guest worker” programs, Homeland Security, The USA Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, the (Orwellian) New Freedom Initiative, CAFTA, the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), the CFR’sBuilding a North American Community, Kelo v. New London, Conn., an “official” federal debt about to surpass $8.2 trillion, one increasingly disastrous foreign war (Iraq) and a potentially much more destructive one looming on the horizon (Iran). It should be clear who is benefiting, in one way or another, from each of these: the “global governance” elites, who know only power, money, and Hegelian dialectic (manufacture a crisis, which will provoke a predictable reaction, allowing a specific response—the power grab that was wanted all along).
The power elite may use a rhetoric of peace. History, though, reveals its preference for wars. Wars destabilize. They cause debt, death, destruction, and demoralization. Populations will turn to anyone who promises relief from their suffering. It’s all quite visible, for those not too brain damaged from their government school to connect the dots.
So I ask again, where’s the conspiracy?!
To be sure, there are people who are alert, and aware that something is going on. Maybe more than we think. This is why street protests erupt outside every WTO Summit (Seattle 1999, Cancun 2003, Hong Kong 2005). This is why Argentinian authorities had to contain rioters not far from the Summit of the Americas meeting last November. The peoples of the world do not want “free trade.” They do not want “globalization” in its present form. They know it isn’t working to their advantage. It is only widening the gulf between rich and poor in their countries, and in fact is widening this gulf the world over. “Globalization” is enabling multinational corporations to dictate the fate of entire countries working in partnership with our government and those countries’ puppet regimes. The latter either cooperate or are violently overthrown (see John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man).
A recent conversation with one of my associates, a fellow watcher of this process, brought home to me the fact that there are multiple strains of the “global governance” process operating almost independently of one another. If one effort stalls, or meets with opposition, another takes its place. The overall process thus goes forward. For example, at present the FTAA is stuck in neutral. At least three South American governments—Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina—want nothing to do with it. So what happens? The power elite has turned its attention to the SPP, signed by President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin on March 23 last year.
This boneheaded scheme would slowly integrate the three NAFTA nations under an assemblage of unelected regional bureaucracies and public-private partnerships. The official line is that the SPP will build a prosperous ‘North America the Beautiful,’ while protecting the U.S., Canada and Mexico all three from terrorism. The likely goal: a North American Union, modeled on the European Union. Those who pay attention to such things are already seeing in controlled city newspapers more and more uses of the phrase North America as if it referred to a supranational, regional entity, as opposed to acontinent.
So other things being equal, if you want to see our future look at the European Union. One sees falling birthrates among native Europeans (documented by Patrick J. Buchanan in Death of the West), a large unassimilated Muslim minority—their legacy of out-of-control immigration—and near-depression levels of unemployment. The latter two combined to yield the riots that torched suburbs around Paris and elsewhere in France last November. In other words, the EU is dysfunctional. Europe is dying!
Continue with “economic integration” on this side of the Atlantic, combine it with our illegal immigrant problem, and we will begin circling the same drain—if our globalized financial system doesn’t crash and burn first.
The power elite—who as multibillionaires don’t have to live with the carnage their policies bring about—are nevertheless pedaling as fast as they can, working on so many deals one person cannot keep track of them all. Take for example a “free trade” accord I hadn’t even heard of until the other day:AFTA—the Andean Free Trade Agreement. This one would pull Colombia, Ecuador and Peru into a NAFTA/CAFTA-style arrangement with the U.S. The U.S. and Peru have already signed a deal; the idea is to bring in Colombia and Ecuador.
Uh, wait a second! The regime in charge of Colombia deals with labor union activists not with negotiation but by shooting them. Over 2,100 have been shot since 1991. Some people think unions are a bad idea. Be that as it may, when a government simplymurders pro-union activists, I think there’s a problem. When the powers-that-be behind our government want to maneuver us into a “free trade” deal with that government, there’s a bigger problem!
The situation is even worse. When Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo wanted stronger labor provisions written into AFTA, the effort was rejected out of hand by our Republican Congressman in charge of trade policy, Bill Thomas (R-CA). Which means that our Republican-controlled Congress is willing to enter into trade deals with governments that not only do not respect workers’ rights under any rule of law, they do not respect workers’ lives.
Small wonder the peoples of the world would like to reject “globalization.” Nations like Venezuela and Bolivia are being pushed “leftward” by the policies of a power elite they associate with American predatory capitalism. It’s really a form of radical corporatism—or, less politely, fascism, in which Big Business and Big Government merge as policymakers (every public-private partnership does this in miniature). Many peoples of the world now recognize the truth about “free trade”: multinational corporate predators automatically move operations to where labor is cheapest and most easily controlled—with deadly force, if necessary—destroying their native economies and ways of life for the benefit of a powerful, immensely wealthy few.
Americans ought to recognize this, too. This is why, after all, so many Americans now must work at “service sector” flunky jobs—flipping burgers, answering phones in call-center cubicles, shuffling papers, etc. Very little is actually made (i.e.,manufactured) in America anymore. A healthy advanced economy manufactures what it needs, and is self-sufficient, not dependent on foreigners. The massive shift to “services” we saw in the noxious 1990s is a sign of what William Norman Grigg calledAmerica’s Engineered Decline.
The first thing Americans must do is “unplug” from the government school monopoly and from a mainstream media controlled by five or six megaconglomerates. If they do not, then America will continue gradually disappearing, just as European nations are gradually disappearing. America will be replaced by an enlarging edifice of unelected globalist bureaucrats.
Here is the “global governance deception” in a nutshell. Our policymakers, often backed up by academic charlatans and controlled-media shills (Thomas L. Friedman comes to mind), talk and act as if “globalization” was a natural process, resulting only from changing technology. What is being rammed down our throats is manifestly is not a natural process. It is being orchestrated and micromanaged for the benefit of an elite that knows no national loyalties and worships money and power as surrogates for God. (I mean that literally: I think there is a religious sensibility at work here in a demonic sort of way.)
There could be a normal (i.e., voluntary, uncoerced) globalization process, based on the Internet, other new information technology and global communications. Except on a comparatively very small scale, that’s not what’s happening!
Just ask yourself: why do we need multi-thousand-page “free trade” deals to have free trade? You can do business online, by putting up your Web site and offering your product or service to buyers anywhere in the world, with no trade deals at all!
If my associates and I want to start an online bookstore, for example, we don’t need NAFTA to sell books to Mexicans, we don’t need CAFTA to sell them to El Salvadorans, and we don’t need AFTA to sell to Peruvians. All we need are our products ‘out there’ in cyberspace, willing buyers in those countries, and for governments to keep their grubby paws off. And we need large corporations not to resent the competition so much they set out to destroy us by lobbying those governments for silly (but expensive) regulations.
“Free trade” deals are the product of economicparasitism, not a sincere desire for freedom and prosperity for all!
The elite-driven process has already backfired in the Middle East. The power elite’s need for control (its preferred currency is fiat dollars, after all) has led the U.S. into an unnecessary war that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks—a war planned at least a full year earlier (go here). Now the U.S. is the most hated nation in the region (with the possible exception of Israel). It could backfire in our own hemisphere, if South American governments and peoples come to associate “globalization” or “global governance” with the U.S. I doubt any of these peoples are inherently violent.
Most just want to be left alone and not have their lives turned upside down by forces they don’t understand and can’t contain. But when people think all peaceful options are exhausted and their backs are against a wall, they will eventually turn to violence. With our open borders policy, some just may show up in American cities and pose a terror threat. They won’t go after David Rockefeller. They don’t know who he is. They won’t go after Henry Kissinger. Their bombs will kill and maim ordinary Americans, like you and me.
There’s nothing more dangerous than people who believe they have nothing to lose. That is the kind of world the “global governance” deception is likely to give us.
Note: This is a revised and expanded version of an article which appeared in The Times Examiner (based in Greenville, S.C.) on February 1, 2006.
© 2006 Steven Yates - All Rights Reserved
Steven Yates, Ph.D., is the most published professional philosopher in South Carolina. He teaches as a lowly adjunct instructor of philosophy at University of South Carolina Upstate (occupational punishment for his utter lack of political correctness and for pursuing issues from the standpoint of adherence to Constitutionally limited government, personal moral responsibility guided by a Christian worldview, and the rule of law as opposed to arbitrary rule by politicians, judges, and unelected bureaucrats). Later this month he will be joining the faculty at Greenville Technical College in Greenville, S.C., also as an adjunct.
He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1994) and Worldviews: Christian Theism vs. Modern Materialism (delayed, but due out this summer). He also works on manuscripts with names such as In Defense of Logic and Philosophical Questions as well as on a science fiction novel, Skywatcher’s World. His articles and reviews have appeared on LewRockwell.com as well asNewsWithViews.com and other websites. He has also published in academic journals including Inquiry, Metaphilosophy, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Reason Papers, Public Affairs Quarterly, Journal of Libertarian Studies, Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and others.
He recently held a year-long fellowship with the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Ala., has appeared at conferences ranging from the American Philosophical Association to the South Carolina Society for Philosophy, and made numerous talk radio appearances. He spoke on “The Real Matrix and Sustainable Development” at the recent 6th Annual Freedom 21 National Conference in Reno, Nev. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where he also directs the Worldviews Project and is a member of the S.C. Chapter of Citizens Committee to Stop the FTAA.
His blog is at:
http://itshappeninghere.blogspot.com
E-Mail: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.
Posts
