Published: March 23, 2007
Women's Post

Paranoia, says my  clever brother Bruce, "is the family disease." "Well, ok then" I said to myself, "let's take that bad boy out for a walk." China announced this week that it was bumping its defence budget by 17%. I suspect one of our so-called great men is behind that monstrous threat: Maurice Strong.

While we all watch Conrad Black being taken apart by the Yanks, one of Canada's most dubious characters is hiding out in China, still fomenting trouble at the age of 77. When history comes to write his story, it will be one of extraordinary back room deals that make him rich, while decreasing the self-determination of others. Strong's true talent lies in behind-the-scenes manipulation of the political process. He is reputed to be very, very wealthy, despite being a self-confessed, life-long socialist.

Socialism for everyone else, apparently. As godfather of Kyoto and Rio, he is responsible for the virulant anti-capitalist stance of the enviro movement. Strong was the UN official who was chief co-ordinator of reforms that set up the Iraq Office, which oversaw the Oil for Food program. In 2005, he resigned from the U.N., when a $1,000,000 cheque was found to have been delivered, endorsed and cashed by him, that came from Saddam Hussein's UN sanctioned regime.

While Strong protests innocence, he vanished to China soon after and returns seldom. Particularly since, following right after the Oil for Food indictments in New York this fall, revelations of pay-outs that propped up North Korea's nuclear community were found to have come winding through various UN outfits which Strong, as special envoy to Kofi Annan for the Korean peninsula from 2003-2005, controlled.

But it is in Strong's machinations for "global governance" that he is most terrifying. Global governance is UN speak for "give us money and go away while we run the world." One of his most flesh-crawling recommendations was that the U.N. take a .5% tax on foreign-exchange transactions, raising, by the estimate of economist James Tobin, $1.5 trillion annually for a supra-government, which answers to no voter in no country. Not only that, under his aegis, at the same time, a two-stage system revoking veto power by the five members of the Security council was recommended.

No wonder he's pitched up in China, the only functional Stalinist state left with nuclear ambitions. Is he, I wonder, about to trigger another Cold War? This one in the name of someone, anyone, standing up to the evil American Empire? I suspect he's going to try. That, and hiding out from any indictments that might come down from his fiddling with the massive budgets he supervised and spent, under the aegis of the U.N.

There is nothing wrong with the U.N., except for this one small thing. Its structure, and lack of oversight by the democracies of the world, has made it a snakes' nest for international manipulators who work against freedom and self-determination of ordinary men and women, in the service of a fascist ideology that is the most murderous and destructive in human history. We need to rescue it – and soon.