By TOM TOPOUSIS

March 27, 2009 –

Freedom is out of fashion at Ground Zero.

Once hailed as a beacon of rebirth in the aftermath of Sept. 11, the Freedom Tower has been stripped of its patriotic name — which has been swapped out for the more marketable “One World Trade Center,” Port Authority officials conceded yesterday.

More than seven years after the terror attacks and amid an effort to market the tower to international tenants, sentiment gave way to practicality.

“As we market the building we will ensure that the building is presented in the best possible way,” said PA Chairman Anthony Coscia.

“One World Trade Center is its address. It’s the address that we’re using. It’s the one that’s easiest for people to identify with, and, frankly, we’ve gotten a very interested and warm reception to it.”

Today, Mayor Bloomberg said on his radio show on WABC, “It’s up the Port Authority. If it were me and I didn’t have to rent space … I would like to see it stay the Freedom Tower.

“But it’s their building and they don’t need me dumping on it. If they could rent the whole thing by changing the name I guess they’re going to do that.”

Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles Burlingame was the pilot aboard American Airlines Flight 77 that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon, said the renaming of the tower is one more example that the nation is forgetting 9/11.

“If we can’t say the word freedom out loud, God help us,” she said.

“I understand the decision from a marketing point of view. But it saddens me that it’s no longer economically viable to declare who we are.”

The issue of the name change — toward which the PA has been shifting for more than a year — came up at a news conference after the agency signed a lease with its first major tenant.

A Chinese firm, Vantone Industrial Co., will lease six floors. A four-page press release for the lease signing included the name “Freedom Tower” twice — only in parentheses.

The only other tenants so far are the federal and state governments.

“Freedom Tower” was coined by then-Gov. George Pataki, who oversaw the initial designs for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center and wanted a tower to rise a symbolic 1,776 feet at a time of heightened patriotism.

Pataki yesterday bristled at the name change.

“The Freedom Tower is not simply another piece of real estate and not just a name for marketing purposes. In design and name, it is symbolic of our commitment to rise above the attacks of Sept. 11,” he said.

“Where One and Two World Trade Center once stood, there will be a memorial with two voids to honor the heroes we lost. In my view, those addresses should never be used again.

Coscia said the agency is simply referring to the 102-story tower by its legal name.

“It’s part of a complex of what we’re hopeful will be five buildings that will redefine the landscape of lower Manhattan, so we refer to it by that term,” he said.

When pressed during the news conference on whether Freedom Tower will appear anywhere on the building, Coscia replied, “Next,” and turned to answer a question from another reporter.

THIS IS NOT THE FREEDOM TOWER

By Andy Sullivan
Thu Mar 12, 2009 3:34pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI raided the former office of Obama administration official Vivek Kundra and arrested two people in a corruption probe on Thursday, but Kundra is not a target of the investigation, a spokeswoman for Washington’s mayor said.

The FBI searched the offices of the District of Columbia’s chief technology officer, a post formerly held by Kundra, as it investigates employee corruption there, spokeswoman Mafara Hobson said.

President Barack Obama named Kundra, 34, last week to be the federal government’s chief information officer, responsible for overseeing the government’s computer systems.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called the investigation a “serious matter” and declined further comment.

Yusuf Acar, who works in the city’s technology office, and another man, Sushil Bansal, were arrested, FBI spokeswoman Lindsay Godwin said.

Godwin declined to say whether the two were arrested on bribery charges, as reported by The Washington Post. The charges remain under seal, Godwin said.

Acar describes himself as the information office’s chief security officer in a video posted on its website.

Bansal is a former Washington government employee who heads Advanced Integrated Technologies Corp., a technology firm that has won contracts from the city’s technology office.

He won the Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2008 from an association of Indian-Americans. The company could not immediately be reached for comment.

(Additional reporting by Jim Vicini and Ross Colvin, Editing by Patricia Zengerle)

Obama official not a target in FBI raid: spokesperson

By Michael Filozof
March 08, 2009

In 1945, the United Kingdom implemented a program of change at the hands of a new left wing government. The structure of support built up in previous decades, the way change was sold to the public, outcomes themselves have much to teach us about America’s future.

To most Americans, the iconic image of British strength, resolve, and power is that of the cigar-chomping, bulldog-faced Winston Churchill defiantly growling “we shall never surrender” and “this is our finest hour” as Nazi bombs rained down on London every night during the summer of 1940.

Churchill almost single-handedly saved Britain from defeat at the hands of the Nazis, stepping up to become Prime Minister after Neville Chamberlain resigned in disgrace after diplomatic attempts to achieve “peace in our time” with Hitler proved folly.

But relatively few Americans may be aware that, despite his historic victory over one of the most evil regimes in history, Churchill was unceremoniously booted by British voters when his Conservative Party was defeated within weeks of Germany’s surrender.

What followed marked the beginning of the end for the greatest empire since Rome.

The election of 1945 was a decisive victory for Britain’s Labour Party. Labour gained 394 seats in the 640-seat House of Commons, named Clement Attlee as Prime Minister, and implemented historic changes in Britain, turning a once-great empire into a second-rate socialist welfare state in a span of 20 years.

The Labour government nationalized key industries in Britain, including rail, mining, air transport, utilities, and communications. Labour also created a “cradle-to-grave” welfare state and nationalized medicine with the creation of the National Health Service. Oppressive taxation was enacted to pay for the massive increase in government spending; by the 1970s income and estate taxes on the wealthy had skyrocketed to 80%.

In foreign policy, the Labour government engaged in wholesale decolonization, and the world is much worse off as a result. In 1947 British India was decolonized and partitioned into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. The resulting chaos displaced 12 million refugees and caused a million deaths. Sixty years and several wars later the former colonies are nuclear-armed powers, still locked in chronic tension over control of the mountain region of Kashmir.

Burma, Ceylon, and the Palestinian Mandate were also decolonized in the immediate postwar period. Burma — now Myanmar — is home to one of the most repressive military dictatorships in the world. Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, is experiencing a decades-long guerrilla war, and the 60-year Arab-Israeli conflict in the former Palestinian Mandate knows no end. In subsequent decades, Britain also withdrew from East Africa, leaving in its wake the oppressive 30-year dictatorship of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and a tribally-divided Kenya, recently wracked by election violence. Sudan, another former East African possession of the British Empire, is home to the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

By the 1960s, the Labour Party had overturned nearly all of the traditional aspects of a British culture that had been historically staid, stoic, and reserved. Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s government decriminalized abortion and homosexuality, abolished capital punishment, and revised immigration laws to allow large numbers of Third World emigrants to Britain for the first time. Consequently, today’s Britain is a land of social dysfunction, including high rates of drunkenness, property crime, welfare dependency, racial strife, promiscuity and irreligiosity. The illegitimate birth rate in the U.K. hit 50% in 2008, while a mere 10% of the population regularly attends church. Such behavior would have been unimaginable in prim Victorian society a century ago.

Although Britain’s Conservatives managed to form governments in the postwar period, they were unable to fully reverse the changes implemented by Labour. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher did manage to lower tax rates and privatize some industries in the 1980s, but Conservatives never abolished the welfare state, the NHS, or reversed the social decline that had taken place in the postwar period.

The Britain that strode across the world as an economic and military colossus during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - bringing technology, learning, literature, order, and an unprecedented creation of wealth — was gone forever by the 1960s, its culture replaced by a trite and ephemeral trendiness epitomized by Beatlemania, punk rock, and “Cool Britannia.”

The Ideological Clique Behind the Change

These changes did not take place by accident. They were planned by British cultural elites, particularly by members of the Fabian Society, who had worked for over a half-century to promote the policies finally implemented by Labour governments after 1945.

The Fabians advocated a gradual, democratic socialist takeover rather than violent revolution. Fabians sought control over more banal aspects of life — transport, utilities, medicine — that were far less threatening to the general public than the prospect of armed revolution.

The society was named after the Roman general Fabius Maximus, whose tactic was to wait for the ideal opportunity. The society’s motto — “For the right moment you must wait… but when the right moment comes you must strike hard” — is eerily similar to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s sentiment that “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” because “crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that [we] could not do before.”

Fabian Society membership was a Who’s Who of prewar British intellectuals, writers and artists who had rejected classical free-market economics, traditional religion, nationalism and imperialism. They included nerdy academic socialists like Harold Laski and G.D.H. Cole, as well as a motley collection of misfits, pacifists, deviants and utopian radicals.

The writer H.G. Wells, advocate of eugenics and a utopian global state, was a Fabian. Noted for his infidelity, he had an affair with the American eugenicist and founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger. Playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw, an advocate of feminism, socialism, and vegetarianism, was a Fabian; he opposed British involvement in World War I but became an admirer of the USSR in the 1930s. “Sexologist” Havelock Ellis, who married a lesbian and was said to only become aroused when watching women urinate, was a member, as was Edward Carpenter, a vegan gay-rights activist and nudist. Economist John Maynard Keynes, whose theories influenced the policies of nearly all Western governments since the 1930s and are in vogue in the Obama administration today, was briefly a member.

The Fabian Society was disproportionately influential in the Labour government of 1945; though the Society numbered only several thousand, more than half of the Labour Party MPs were members. Nearly all leaders of the postwar Labour Party have been members, including Attlee, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair.

Just as the Fabians influenced the Labour Party agenda, today’s Democratic Party reflects the disproportionate influence of a clique of elite cultural and academic leftists now seeking to implement a socialist agenda they have been promoting since the 1960s. This agenda includes nationalized health care, taxpayer-funded abortion, federal control of education, gay marriage, openly-practicing homosexuals in the military, and much, much higher taxes.

Like the Fabian-influenced Labour government, the Obama administration has embarked on a course to “remake” America. The administration will effectively nationalize transportation and utilities through its “green energy” initiatives (indeed, Congresswoman Maxine Waters recently advocated nationalizing the oil industry) openly seeks to nationalize health care (the $787 billion “stimulus” bill includes billions of dollars to begin centralizing health care records) and is using the mortgage and banking crisis to effectively nationalize the financial services and banking sector.

In foreign policy, the Obama administration has announced a deadline to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq, and indicated a willingness to cease implementation of a missile-defense shield in Europe. Obama, who campaigned as a “citizen of the world” and effectively apologized to Middle Eastern audiences for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in his first televised interview as president, seeks to curtail American military hegemony and replace it with reliance upon global institutions such as the U.N.

On immigration, Obama and the Democratic Party support citizenship for 12 million mostly Spanish-speaking illegal aliens currently residing in the U.S.; such a plan would invariably allow those new citizens to sponsor even more non-English speaking family members to emigrate to the U.S.

The agenda of the American Left bears an uncomfortable similarity to that of the Fabian Society intellectuals that reshaped British society. If this agenda is successfully implemented by Barack Obama, the election of 2008 in the United States will be a watershed event, much like the British election of 1945.

But this analogy is not an optimistic one. If one wants to know what the United States will look like fifty years after Obama, one need only look at the fall of Britain from its imperial height in 1945 to the Britain of today — a second-rate, secularized “nanny state” whose disarmed citizens are monitored by thousands of police cameras and whose police actively prosecute “hate crimes” and offenses against “multiculturalism.”

Like Britain, the United States will almost certainly remain an important financial center and regional power several decades from now, but the center of global gravity will long since have shifted to the Chinese as the United States abandons it global dominance and becomes preoccupied with a liberal, postmodern, domestic agenda. It does not have to be this way — the United States can still assert itself as global hegemon if it has the will to do so - but the successful implementation of the Obama agenda will assure that it does not.

If Obama achieves the goals articulated in his campaign, his presidency will surely mark the end of “the American Century” just as the election of 1945 signaled the end of Victorian and Edwardian British global dominance.

Obama and the Triumph of the Fabians

The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 10, 2009

BRUSSELS: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday the next NATO secretary-general doesn’t necessarily have to be a European.

Biden said it was no longer “a matter of policy (that) any member nation should be ruled out” for the 26-nation alliance’s top position. Since NATO’s creation in 1949 it has always gone to a European while NATO’s military command is headed by a U.S. general.

His comments suggested that a bid by Canada’s Defense Minister Peter Mackay stood a chance.

Canada has around 2,500 combat forces stationed in Afghanistan’s volatile southern region.

Denmark’s Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen has been viewed as the front-runner for the job. Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski wants to become the first time an official from the ex-Soviet bloc would receive the post.

The vice president added that Washington had not yet made a decision on a candidate but said a successor to current NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer would be picked at a NATO’s leaders summit in April.

De Hoop Scheffer’s term ends at the end of July.

The NATO secretary-general chairs the alliance’s ministerial meetings and summits and oversees the day-to-day running of the alliance.

The main task is to forge consensus on key security challenges of the alliance, which have become larger than during the Cold War, so that the member nations can take unanimous decisions.

NATO has recently taken on military operations far beyond Europe’s borders, most notably in Afghanistan.

De Hoop Scheffer took office in 2004. There is no written limit on the term of secretary general but in recent years NATO nations have informally agreed that the post should be limited to five years to avoid a repeat of the 13-year term of Joseph Luns of the Netherlands.

NATO decisions must be through consensus of all members. U.S. opinion is unofficially heavily weighted by tradition given its military muscle.

Biden suggests non-European can be NATO chief

Iceland has no army, no navy and no air force - but it does have riot police.

On Tuesday night the black-uniformed troopers came out to quell the latest riots in Reykjavik, which erupted in front of parliament. The building was splattered with paint and yoghurt, the crowd yelled and banged pans, shot fireworks and flares at the windows and lit a fire in front of the main door.

Yesterday the protesters gathered again, hurling eggs at the car of Geir Haarde, the Prime Minister, and banging cans on its roof.

The transformation of the placid island into a community of seething anger - there have been half a dozen riots in recent weeks - is more than a regional oddity.

In Riga last week 10,000 protesters laid siege to the Latvian parliament; yesterday hundreds of Bulgarians rallied to demand that the Socialist-led Government should take action or step down, in a second week of demonstrations, and last month the police shooting of a 15-year-old Greek boy led to days of running battles in the streets of Athens and Salonika.

The protests went beyond the usual angry reflexes of societies braced for recession. The Greek riots heralded sympathetic actions across the world, from Moscow to Madrid, and in Berlin the Greek Consulate was briefly stormed. The Riga unrest spread rapidly to Lithuania. It is, some say, just the beginning: 2009 could become another 1968 - a new age of rebellion.

The LSE economist Robert Wade addressed about 1,000 Icelanders recently at a protest meeting in a Reykjavik cinema, warning that large-scale civil unrest was on the way. The tipping point, he said, would be this spring.

“It will be caused by the rise of general awareness throughout Europe, America and Asia that hundreds and millions of people in rich and poor countries are experiencing rapidly falling consumption standards; that the crisis is getting worse, not better, and that it has escaped the control of public authorities, national and international,” he said.

The global liquidity emergency became a full-blown crash so quickly that there was no time to hold governments to account. Now leaders all over Europe have declared themselves to be the saviours of the economy and are nationalising assets, extending loans and guarantees to failing banks and manufacturers. But the price is high: unemployment is starting to soar and cuts in public spending are hurting hospitals, schools and universities. Personal bankruptcies are at record levels.

Every segment of society has been hit, but it is the young who feel the pain most - and just as in 1968, it is they who are leading the rebellion.

The Greek disturbances, the worst since 1974, were triggered by the killing of the teenager, but the anger was stoked by a sense that the young were going to have to pick up the bill for the miscalculations of the political class. Unemployment among Greeks aged 15 to 24 has reached 21.2 per cent; for 25 to 34-year-olds it is 10.5 per cent. The good years have come to an end suddenly.

The boom in Iceland led to the few narrow streets of the capital becoming jammed with expensive 4×4s. Latvia had double-digit growth for years; now GDP is set to contract 5 per cent in the coming year and Latvian youths are beginning to rail against mismanagement and corruption.

In the EU, migration was always a way out of a tight domestic labour market. No more: the sheer magnitude of the recession means there is no easy escape. There are reports of anti-immigrant trouble brewing in Spain. Usually at this time of year migrant workers, most of them from Morocco, pile into the country to pick strawberries. This year the Spaniards are making it clear that they are unhappy about migrants taking jobs.

Each flare-up touches on a separate aspect of the crisis. In Greece it was partly about the failure of the education system (as in 1968). In Vilnius it was over high taxes. In Iceland it is about massive debt. In Russia unrest in Yekaterinburg and Vladivostok was about dearer car import duties.

But there are common threads. Across Europe, protesters demand a change of government. Politicians in wealthier countries can try to prop up banks and industries, but it does not work in heavily indebted nations with bloated and exposed financial sectors.

And there is a shared shock that the good times have gone. “The explosion conceals a compressed desperation,” the Greek psychology professor Fotini Tsalikoglou said of last month’s outburst in Athens. “Many young people live with the unbearable knowledge that there is no future.”

New age of rebellion and riot stalks Europe

Tony Blair is poised to become the first President of Europe after it was confirmed that French leader Nicolas Sarkozy is determined to help him win the post.

A senior aide to President Sarkozy told a private gathering of senior British and French politicians that he is to tell fellow EU leaders that Mr Blair is the only man who can help Europe stand up to the rest of the world.

The remark by Alain Minc, a key member of Mr Sarkozy’s inner circle, is the second French blow to Gordon Brown’s standing in two days, coming after Mr Sarkozy said Mr Brown’s decision to combat the recession by cutting VAT was a ‘mistake’.

Mr Minc, a political wheeler-dealer, entrepreneur and TV show host, was attending a meeting last month of the Franco British Colloque, a high-powered discussion group of British and French politicians, civil servants and opinion-formers.
Members are under orders not to reveal the confidential discussions, but The Mail on Sunday has established that Mr Minc used the meeting to win support for Mr Sarkozy’s campaign to ensure Mr Blair becomes the President of Europe.

The role is due to be created next year – but only if the EU’s controversial Lisbon Treaty is ratified in the autumn by Ireland and the Czech Republic, the two EU countries which have so far refused to do so.

Mr Minc told the gathering, which was also attended by French Prime Minister Francois Fillon: ‘When the Lisbon Treaty is ratified, Europe will move into a new phase. Europe will need a strong leader and Nicolas Sarkozy will nominate Tony Blair for the position.’

Mr Minc explained why Mr Sarkozy was determined to overcome opposition to Mr Blair from a handful of EU leaders, notably German chancellor Angela Merkel.

He said: ‘We have to unite and say to Mrs Merkel that we cannot afford not to have Tony Blair, who will be a strong figurehead, is entirely respected around the world and will be a commanding leader at the helm of Europe.’

Mr Minc has been described by one commentator as ‘France’s Peter Mandelson’. Indeed, his AM Conseil consultancy has employed Lord Mandelson as an ‘adviser’ in the past and the two are members of the Policy Network think-tank.

The conference took place in Versailles, days after Mr Blair visited Paris to chair a conference for Mr Sarkozy on the economic crisis, in what was seen as the latest part of a charm offensive to boost his chances of winning the EU presidency.

Mr Blair paid glowing tribute to Mr Sarkozy’s recent performance in the rotating EU presidency, saying: ‘Under his leadership, Europe looked as if it were acting in concert.’

Mr Blair was referred to as Prime Minister Blair throughout – Mr Brown was not even invited.

The post of President of the EU’s Council of Ministers will replace the current system under which the EU nations on a six-monthly basis. Supporters say it is the only way to give the presidency rotates among EU a strong voice.

Critics claim it is another step on the road to a European superstate.

President Blair? - Former PM set to become EU chief

The U.S. Army is to invest $6 million in riot equipment, a fact that has furthered fears that troops will be used inside the U.S. in order to quell any civil unrest resulting from the ongoing economic crisis.

The U.S. Army Contracting Agency, based at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, has a post on the Federal Business Opportunities website, requesting the equipment and has received several notices of interest from potential vendors.

The request titled “84–RIOT EQUIPMENT” outlines the need for hard polyethylene Shin and Chest Guards, shock absorbing Forearm Protectors, Interior leg brace supports as well as knee and ankle protectors.

The ACA asks that the equipment be able to “safely withstand a substantial blow… from non-ballistic weapons or flying debris”.

The Solicitation also states:

The associated North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) code for this procurement is 453998 with a small business size standard of $6M. This requirement is a [ Small Business ] set-aside and only qualified offerors may submit bids.

Interested vendors include Irish Brigade inc., manufacturers of hunting and safety gear with facilities located in the heart of Kansas City , Missouri. Federal and Military resource company MCLEARVISION, LLC is another interested party, as is Kentucky based U. S. CAVALRY STORE, INC.

In our article yesterday we highlighted the fact that Urban warfare training drills are taking place across the country as top analysts as well as officials predict a potential “summer of rage” across Europe and America as civil unrest from the economic fallout builds.

Are such drills really for the purpose of preparing troops for foreign combat zones? Undoubtedly - but other factors indicate that the drills may very well also be aimed at preparing troops for dealing with mass civil unrest as the economic crisis worsens.

There’s no question that U.S. authorities have been closely observing riots that have toppled governments in Iceland and Latvia and also threatened to do so in several other European countries. The fact that they have contingency plans in place to deal with such scenarios should they unfold in America cannot be disputed.

Indeed, before a media exposé forced them into a denial, Northcom revealed that one of the duties of at least 20,000 active duty troops that are being placed inside the United States would be dealing with “civil unrest and crowd control”.

The U.S. Army War College in November released a white paper called Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development. The report warned that the military must be prepared for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,” which could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse,” “purposeful domestic resistance,” “pervasive public health emergencies” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.” The “widespread civil violence,” the document said, “would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.”

U.S. Army To Buy $6 Million Of Riot Equipment - Will The Economic Crisis Lead To Civil Unrest?

A “second wave” of countries will fall victim to the economic crisis and face being bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, its chief warned at the G7 summit in Rome.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s warning comes amid growing concern that at some point in the next year a major economy could have to seek support from the Fund. Mr Strauss-Kahn, who was yesterday attending the Group of Seven leading finance ministers’ meeting in Rome, said: “I expect a second wave of countries to come knocking.”

The IMF managing director also said the rich world was now in the midst of a “deep recession”. It came as the G7 pledged to avoid slipping into protectionism and repeating the same political and economic mistakes as were made in the 1930s. Ministers also pledged to do more to support their banking systems, sparking speculation that a number of countries, including Germany and France, will unveil new bail-outs and possibly set up “bad banks” as they scramble to fight the crisis.

But with some countries’ economies effectively dwarfed by the size of their banking sector and its financial liabilities, there are fears they could fall victim to balance of payments and currency crises, much as Iceland did before receiving emergency assistance from the IMF last year.

Some have speculated that the UK may have to seek IMF support if capital markets become frightened of the size of its foreign financial liabilities, which increasingly appear to have become supported by the state. But there are a swathe of Eastern European countries which appear particularly vulnerable and may need IMF support.

With the Fund’s warchest expected to run dry later this year, the Japanese confirmed in Rome that they would supply an extra $200bn of capital to the Washington-based institution.

Mr Strauss-Kahn, who warned recently that his resources could run dry within six months, said: “This is the largest loan ever made in the history of humanity.

IMF chief warns second wave of countries will require bail-out

Elite members of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, recently considered a proposal for a new global television network to usher in a state of “global governance.” The concept strikes some as authoritarian, even totalitarian. But the parent company of Fox News was one of the sponsors of this year’s gathering.

The media proposal, which was included in “The Global Agenda 2009” report, is to create “a new global network” with “the capacity to connect the world, bridging cultures and peoples, and telling us who we are and what we mean to each other.” Several prominent U.S. media figures signed on to the alarming and controversial proposal.

Isn’t it nice that we might have a TV network telling us “who we are?” And “what we mean to each other?” Perhaps we will learn that we are global citizens. Perhaps a global leader of some sort will tell us that. Who might that be?

This proposal doesn’t come from a fringe organization. The WEF is an exclusive club of very rich and powerful people from around the world. It describes itself as “an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas.”

This year’s conference featured speeches by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Chinese Premier We Jiabao. Many U.S. corporations, including some getting Wall Street bailout money, were sponsors. News Corporation, the parent of Fox News, was a “strategic partner” of the event.

Valerie Jarrett, Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Relations and Public Liaison, represented the Obama Administration at this year’s event and called leaders from all nations to “seize gladly” the duties of collaborating and boldly embrace “a new era of global financial responsibility.”

But the WEF also envisions cooperation and collaboration in global media ventures. It asks, “How can we save journalism to help it save the world?” Clearly, this is advocacy journalism on a global scale.

Indeed, the list of “Recommendations” says it is imperative to start “Communicating a global agenda, and motivating and mobilizing people to support it…”

Is this journalism? Or is it brainwashing and propaganda?

It says that “a genuine, global voice” is needed that shares a “fundamental commitment” to being an international media voice, and makes mention of “the media voices we think of as international” coming from London (the BBC), Qatar (Al-Jazeera) or Atlanta (CNN).

BBC is known for its anti-American programming, Al-Jazeera for its pro-terrorist slant, and CNN for its left-wing and pro-Democratic bias.

It will take “innovative public-private funding” to bring this new network into being, apparently meaning that the taxpayers in the U.S. will have to be soaked in order to help bring this about. But no price tag is put on the venture and no objection was apparently raised to government funding of such a network on a global basis. An “overview” statement does, however, decry “censorship and self-censorship.”

Elsewhere in the report (page 31) the idea of “international taxation” is proposed for “global action” of various kinds. Perhaps this is a vehicle for raising revenue for the new “global voice.”

The media proposal was developed by one of several “Global Agenda Councils” under the auspices of the WEF. The new TV network proposal was issued under the supervision of Pat Mitchell, the president of the Paley Center for Media and former President and Chief Executive Officer of the Public Broadcasting Service. She was the chair of the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Media.

Other members of the Council on the Future of Media were Betsy Morgan of the left-wing Huffington Post (former general manager of CBSNews.com); Rui Chenggang of China Central Television, an official political propaganda arm of the communist regime; and Zafar Siddiqi of CNBC Arabiya, a subsidiary of General Electric which is described as a 24-hour Arabic language financial and business information channel.

There is no indication in the published report that the Huffington Post executive raised any objection to working hand-in-glove with the communist propaganda channel. Is the Chinese media model a precedent for the new “global network?”

The conference was covered by media organizations such as CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, Forbes and Fox, but no coverage that we could find was devoted to the proposal for a government-financed global media network. Talk about self-censorship!

John J. DeGioia, President of Georgetown University and the “Rapporteur of the Global Agenda Councils focusing on Society and Values,” summarized the work of Mitchell’s panel. He says (page 46) that, “We believe that this new moment also calls for a new media platform, across all media channels, a global non-profit ‘CNN’ providing a new form of independent journalism to inform, illuminate and deepen knowledge about issues that improve the state of the world.”

According to DeGioia’s biography, he walks the walk and is dedicated to helping “prepare young people for leadership roles in the global community.” His bio adds, “He is a member of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and Chair of its Education Committee and he represents Georgetown at the World Economic Forum and on the Council on Foreign Relations.”

The media council took advantage of what a description of its work said was an “enormous opportunity” to “redefine the media and its roles in a global, interconnected society.”

Under the title of “Recommendations” (page 182), the Council on the Future of Media declares that “The Council is championing a new global, independent news and information service whose role is to inform, educate and improve the state of the world?one that would take advantage of all platforms of content delivery from mobile to satellite and online to create a new global network.”

It goes on, “In a world where there are calls for global governance as a response to a global financial crisis, where scientific research, capital flows and production chains are globalized, the media and the communities in which we imagine ourselves remain fiercely localized.” Hence, a global network will work against “localized” or national-based systems and convince people to go “global” with their outlook and solutions. In other words, the new network will help undermine old-fashioned notions of national sovereignty and patriotism.

There are 22 members (page 183) of the Council on the Future of Media. In addition to Mitchell and Morgan, American members include:

Alex S. Jones, former media reporter for the New York Times and now Director, Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Susan King, former Washington correspondent for ABC News and now Director, Journalism Initiative, Special Initiatives and Strategy, Carnegie Corporation of New York.

John Lavine, Dean, Medill School of Journalism Northwestern University.

Nicholas Lemann, former Washington Post reporter and now Dean, School of Journalism, Columbia University.

David Nordfors, Director, Innovation Journalism and Senior Research Scholar, Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, Stanford University.

Monroe Price, Director, Centre for Global Communications Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, the University of Pennsylvania.

Orville H. Schell, Director, Center on US-China Relations, Asia Society.

There doesn’t appear to be one identifiable conservative member on the list. Of course, everyone on the list is a certified objective media professional, neither liberal nor conservative. Just ask them.

Emerging global elite to use new global media to educate ‘global citizens’

Posted: January 06, 2009
9:07 pm Eastern

By Drew Zahn
2009 WorldNetDaily

Henry Kissinger

Conflicts across the globe and an international respect for Barack Obama have created the perfect setting for establishment of “a New World Order,” according to Henry Kissinger, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former secretary of state under President Nixon.

Kissinger has long been an integral figure in U.S. foreign policy, holding positions in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. Author of over a dozen books on foreign policy, Kissinger was also named by President Bush as the chairman of the Sept. 11 investigatory commission.

Kissinger made the remark in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” hosts Mark Haines and Erin Burnett at the New York Stock Exchange, after Burnett asked him what international conflict would define the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

Read “Hope of the Wicked,” where author Ted Flynn reveals the greatest deception in modern history – corporations, foundations and governments converging to bring about a New World Order.

“The president-elect is coming into office at a moment when there is upheaval in many parts of the world simultaneously,” Kissinger responded. “You have India, Pakistan; you have the jihadist movement. So he can’t really say there is one problem, that it’s the most important one. But he can give new impetus to American foreign policy partly because the reception of him is so extraordinary around the world. His task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period when, really, a new world order can be created. It’s a great opportunity, it isn’t just a crisis.”

Kissinger’s comments are captured at roughly the two-minute mark of the following video:

The phrase ‘new world order’ traces back at least as far as 1940, when author H.G. Wells used it as the title of a book about a socialist, unified, one-world government. The phrase has also been linked to American presidents, including Woodrow Wilson, whose work on establishing the League of Nations pioneered the concept of international government bodies, and to the first President Bush, who used it in a 1989 speech.

“A new partnership of nations has begun, and we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment,” said Bush before a joint session of Congress. “Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective – a new world order – can emerge: A new era … in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony.”

The phrase “New World Order” causes alarm for many Americans, particularly those concerned about an international governing body trumping U.S. sovereignty or those that interpret biblical prophecy to foretell the establishment of a one-world government as key to the rise of the Antichrist. Conspiracy theorists, too, have latched on to the phrase, concerned that powerful financial or government figures are secretly plotting to rule the world.

Kissinger’s ties to government and international powers – as well as his use of the phrase – have made him suspect in the eyes of many who are wary of what “new world order” might actually mean.

“There is a need for a new world order,” Kissinger told PBS interviewer Charlie Rose last year, “I think that at the end of this administration, with all its turmoil, and at the beginning of the next, we might actually witness the creation of a new order – because people looking in the abyss, even in the Islamic world, have to conclude that at some point, ordered expectations must return under a different system.”

As WND reported, Kissinger was also part of last year’s super-secret Bilderberg Group, an organization of powerful international elites, including government, business, academic and journalistic representatives, that has convened annually since 1954.

According to sources that have penetrated the high-security meetings, the Bilderberg meetings emphasize a globalist agenda and promote the idea that the notion of national sovereignty is antiquated and regressive.

CNBC’s Haines concluded the Kissinger interview by asking, “Are you confident about the people President-elect Obama has chosen to surround him?”

Kissinger replied, “He has appointed an extraordinarily able group of people in both the international and financial fields.”

Kissinger: Obama primed to create ‘New World Order’