Fool Me Twice
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The Obama administration has also already overseen the release of four official defense and engagement reviews specifically designating climate change as a major consideration in planning global development and security strategies. This acknowledgment was prominently featured in the Congressionally mandated National Security Strategy of April 2010; the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review, the administration’s first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review; as well as the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development.11
In a shocking misuse of taxpayer money, in February 2012, one week after the Palestinian Authority entered into a unity government with the Hamas Islamist terror organization, the U.S. announced the continuation of a $100 million, five-year program initiated in 2010 to construct “environmentally and socially sustainable” buildings for the Palestinians. The website for the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem posted the plans, which include a community center and school to be built to meet “stringent third-party-verified ‘green’ certification standards.”12 Already, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is funding the projects, has constructed the Safeer Center, a West Bank child-care program, one of the first of the U.S.-funded Palestinian “green” buildings to open. “Its energy-efficient insulation (visible through a small cutout), rainwater collection system and temperature-regulating window shades provide a healthy facility for more than 3,000 children,” boasted the U.S. consulate site. “These and others provide models for efficiency in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where the mostly imported energy is expensive,” the site added.
MORE UN HELMETS ON U.S. TROOPS
Getting back to seminal Unified Security Budget report, another one of its schemes is the creation of a standing international peacekeeping force, which is also a top priority of the Connect U.S. Fund, one of the report’s sponsors. The Connect U.S. Fund is a Soros-funded organization promoting global governance. Its mission, according to the group’s website, is to influence “policy through integrative collaborative grant making on human rights, non-proliferation, climate change and development, and effective foreign assistance.”13 The Connect Fund provides grants to pro-UN groups such as Human Rights First, which states it has used top military brass to secure U.S. politicians’ commitments against torture. Another grantee, the Center for Victims of Torture, produced a 2008 draft executive order against torture endorsed by prominent national security figures.14 Months later, a virtually identical executive order was issued by Obama.15
The Connect Fund is directly tied to the White House. Obama’s hand-picked assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration, Eric P. Schwartz, served as the Connect Fund’s executive director just prior to his White House appointment.16 Even before his appointment, Schwartz coordinated meetings on behalf of Obama’s White House transition team with the Washington Working Group on the International Criminal Court, a group that openly advocates placing more blue United Nations helmets on U.S. troops and coercing the U.S. to join the UN’s International Criminal Court, which could prosecute American citizens and soldiers for “war crimes” and other offenses.17
PANETTA’S CHECKERED PAST AND OBAMA’S SECOND-TERM PLANS
Here it is instructive to detail how the Unified Security Budget’s publisher, the Institute for Policy Studies, is tied to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. In Aaron Klein’s articles and in our most recent book, Red Army, we showed how a review of Panetta’s voting record, while a member of Congress from 1977 to 1993, evidenced a strong affinity for the IPS agenda. Panetta was also reportedly on the IPS official 20th Anniversary Committee, celebrated in April 1983, at a time when the group was closely aligned with the Soviet Union. In his authoritative book, Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies, author S. Steven Powell writes:
April 5, 1983, IPS threw a large twentieth-anniversary celebration to raise funds. On the fundraising committee for the event were 14 then-current members of the U.S. House of Representatives, including Leon E. Panetta (D-CA), chairman of Budget Process Task Force of the House Committee on Budget (chairman of Subcommittee on Police and Personnel, Ninety-ninth Congress).18
Researcher Trevor Loudon, a specialist on communism, obtained and posted IPS literature documenting members of the 20th Anniversary Committee, which also included Sens. Chris Dodd (D-CT), and Gary Hart (D-CO), with an endorsement by Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-OR). Besides Panetta, Congressmen on the IPS committee included Les Aspin (D-WI), George E. Brown Jr. (D-CA), Philip Burton (D-CA), George Crockett (D-MI), Tom Harkin (D-IA), and Richard Ottinger (D-NY).
Along with serving on the IPS committee, Panetta supported the IPS “Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy Line” in 1983.19
Powell wrote that in the 1980s, Panetta commissioned the IPS to produce an “alternative” budget that dramatically cut defense spending, meaning Panetta has a history of promoting IPS defense reports.20 According to Powell, writing in the November 1983 issue of the American Opinion:
The congressional supporters for the Institute for Policy Studies included many of those who biennially commission I.P.S. to produce an ‘Alternative’ Budget that dramatically cuts defense spending while increasing the spending for social welfare to levels only dreamed of by Karl Marx.21
“In this pact of I.P.S. intimates [are] such luminaries as…Leon Panetta (D-CA), Chairman of the Budget Process Task Force,” wrote Powell.
Just as Panetta promoted IPS military reports twenty to thirty years ago when he was a U.S. Congressman, current IPS military reports deeply influence legislation proposed by progressive politicians. For example, Rep. Barney Frank’s (D-MA) Sustainable Defense Task Force reached conclusions that are strikingly similar to the IPS 2010 Unified Security Budget report. Frank’s task force concluded the Pentagon could cut $960 billion between 2011 and 2020 (virtually identical to Obama’s proposed $1 trillion reduction in Defense spending over ten years). The Navy would be drastically cut back to 8 aircraft carriers, instead of 12 planned, and 7 air wings. The overall Navy fleet would be slashed to 230 ships instead of the current 285, let alone the 313 envisioned by the service. Eight ballistic missile submarines will be cut from the planned force of 14, leaving just 6. Building of nuclear attack submarines will be cut in half, leaving a force of 40 by 2020. The 4 active guided missile submarines would be cut too. Destroyer building would be frozen and the new DDG-1000 Destroyer program cancelled.22
Meanwhile, groups funded by Schwartz’s Connect Fund organized a January 2009 national conference calling for a “Responsible U.S. Global Engagement” agenda for Obama’s new administration.23 It is exactly that “responsible” engagement that will most likely spell out the future of warfare during Obama’s second term, a “responsibility” doctrine that could remake no less than the Middle East, North Africa, and the very purpose of armed force itself, as we shall now see.
“RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT” (R2P) AND REMAKING NATIONS
A core doctrine of progressive international relations thinking is called “Responsibility to Protect.” The joint CAP and IPS report specifically cites the need for the U.S. and the international community to “carry out its Responsibility to Protect (R2P) duty when civilian populations are in danger around the globe.” Recent events in Libya, the report notes, “illustrate the need to protect civilians from governments who would subject them to mass atrocities.” “Responsibility to Protect” was the military doctrine cited repeatedly by Obama as the main justification for U.S. and international airstrikes against Libya. Indeed, the Libya bombings have been widely regarded as a test of R2P.24
In Red Army and throughout Aaron Klein’s reporting, concerns about the origins of “Responsibility to Protect” have been raised, with connections that tie right into the sponsors of the IPS Unified Security Budget report, most prominently George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
Responsibility to Protect, or Responsibility to Act, as cited by Obama, is a set of principles, now backed by the United Nations, based on the idea that s
overeignty is not a privilege but a responsibility that can be revoked if a country is accused of “war crimes,” “genocide,” “crimes against humanity,” or “ethnic cleansing.”25 The term “war crimes” has, at times, been used indiscriminately by various UN-backed international bodies—including the International Criminal Court, or ICC—which has applied it to Israeli anti-terror operations in Gaza. There is also concern the ICC could be used to prosecute U.S. troops.26
Soros’s Open Society is one of only three nongovernmental funders of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, the main body behind the doctrine. Government sponsors include Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Rwanda, and the United Kingdom.27 In Red Army, we showed how the R2P center’s patrons include former UN secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Irish president Mary Robinson, and South African activist Desmond Tutu.28 Robinson and Tutu have made solidarity visits to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip as members of a group called The Elders, which includes former president Jimmy Carter.29 Annan once famously stated:
State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined—not least by the forces of globalization and international co-operation. States are … instruments at the service of their peoples and not vice versa.30
The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy served on the advisory board of a 2001 commission that originally formulated R2P. The center was led at the time by Samantha Power, who is now National Security Council special adviser to Obama for human rights. Power is reported to have heavily influenced Obama in consultations leading to the decision to bomb Libya.31 That 2001 commission was named the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. It invented the term “Responsibility to Protect” and defined its guidelines.32 Also on the advisory board was Arab League secretary general Amre Moussa as well as Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, a virulent denier of the Holocaust who long served as the deputy of late Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat.33
Soros himself outlined the fundamentals of Responsibility to Protect in a 2004 Foreign Policy journal article titled “The People’s Sovereignty: How a New Twist on an Old Idea Can Protect the World’s Most Vulnerable Populations.”34 In the article, Soros wrote,
True sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments.
[ … ]
If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified.
[ … ]
By specifying that sovereignty is based on the people, the international community can penetrate nation-states’ borders to protect the rights of citizens.
In particular, the principle of the people’s sovereignty can help solve two modern challenges: the obstacles to delivering aid effectively to sovereign states, and the obstacles to global collective action dealing with states experiencing internal conflict.
The inventor of R2P doctrine, Ramesh Thakur, recently advocated for a “global rebalancing” and “international redistribution” to create a “New World Order.” In a piece in the March 2010 issue of the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, Thakur wrote,
Toward a new world order, Westerners must change lifestyles and support international redistribution.35
Here he was referring to a UN-brokered international climate treaty of which he argued, “Developing countries must reorient growth in cleaner and greener directions.” In the opinion piece, Thakur also discussed recent military engagements and how the financial crisis has impacted the U.S. “The West’s bullying approach to developing nations won’t work anymore—global power is shifting to Asia … A much-needed global moral rebalancing is in train.” Thakur continued:
Westerners have lost their previous capacity to set standards and rules of behavior for the world. Unless they recognize this reality, there is little prospect of making significant progress in deadlocked international negotiations.
And, Thakur contended:
[T]he demonstration of the limits to U.S. and NATO power in Iraq and Afghanistan has left many less fearful of “superior” western power.
Of course, should Obama be reelected, with the implementation of the progressives’ agenda radically expanded, “Western power” would be diminished much, much further.
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WHAT SOLYNDRA? NEW “GREEN” STIMULUS, FEDERAL “GREEN BANK”
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S “GREEN” initiatives are from the same mold as the rest of the progressives’ political program: full of hidden agendas masked by crafty political rhetoric, loaded with corruption and favors for his donors and political cronies, founded on dubious science and “voodoo” economic principles, and aimed at weakening the U.S. economy and national defense.
In our most recent book, Red Army, we gave chapter and verse on how the progressives exploit the power of the environmental movement to weaken America. This, for example, is the usually concealed but sometimes explicit agenda of former Obama “Green Czar” Van Jones, the founder of a Communist revolutionary organization who adopted the Saul Alinsky stratagem of “boring from within” the system in order to destroy it. Jones was forced to resign after being exposed in 2009 by reporters including Aaron Klein. As we noted in Red Army, he has continued his work for groups advising the Obama White House, including the Center for American Progress and the Presidential Climate Action Project.1
Here we expose shocking second-term plans to “green” the Pentagon, even as America’s true defense capabilities are radically diminished, as we documented in the previous chapter. Also uncovered herein is a giant international spread-the-wealth scheme, with Uncle Sam paying penalties to the developing world for our “climate crimes,” based on the questionable “science” behind global warming. This second-term “green funding” includes a new massive “green” stimulus, even as crony pay-offs from Obama’s 2009 “stimulus” bill are exposed amid wasteful spending schemes, with one of the authors of the green legislation providing hundreds of millions in federal funds to companies with which he is personally connected.
Also integral to the progressives’ green agenda is the “shutting up” of conservative opposition to bogus “climate science,” its corrupt cronyism and financially unsustainable green industries. This includes revived proposals for using the Federal Communications Commission to shut down conservative talk radio critics of the green (and greed) agenda.
In his January State of the Union address—his last before the 2012 election—President Obama laid out his vision for “an economy that’s built to last—an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.”2
Just when the wisdom of investing in the solar energy boondoggle seemed most ludicrous, with numerous federally funded “green” companies embarrassingly filing for bankruptcy, Obama used SOTU to double-down on a “new energy future,” seeking an “all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy—a strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.” Evidently reaching hard for an accomplishment to tout, after billions in wasted and corrupt “stimulus” spending, Obama boasted: “In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries.”
The timing of the president’s “battery boast” could not have been any worse. Just two days after his national speech, New York–based Ener1, the parent company of an electric car battery maker that received a $118 million “stimulus” grant from the Obama administration, filed for Chapter 11, becoming the third alternative energy corporation to seek bankruptcy protection after receiving stimulus funds from the Energy Department.3
Less than two months later, government-bailed-out General Motors announced it was slashing production of its battery-powered Volt model, putting 1,300 out of work, due to lack of customer demand for the green vehicle.4
Obama’s State of the Union speech also came just after th
e colossal failure of the scandalous $535 million loan guarantee to the Solyndra solar company. “Some technologies don’t pan out; some companies fail,” Obama allowed. Still, he pledged, “I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy.” Obama made clear that his future plans will even further increase the use of public money to finance so-called clean energy. “It was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock—reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.”
What follows are Obama’s specific second-term plans for billions more in federal funding to “green” companies, including a “green stimulus.”
“GREEN” STIMULUS; FEDERAL GREEN BANK?
An organization that calls itself the Presidential Climate Action Project, or PCAP, has been working with the Obama administration since day one to help craft and implement White House environmental policy. Following Obama’s victory in 2008, PCAP began working with John Podesta, co-chair of Obama’s transition team, to help the incoming president formulate an initial one-hundred-day environmental agenda. Podesta, of course, is president and CEO of the highly influential progressive think tank Center for American Progress. In a November 2009 interview with Aaron Klein, PCAP’s executive director, William S. Becker, boasted how his group’s specific climate recommendations received a “very positive reception from the moment we delivered (the one-hundred-day proposal) last November to John Podesta.”5