Washington’s Blog
December 17, 2009
Numerous high-level officials and experts warn that the economic crisis could lead to unrest world-wide – even in developed countries:
• Today, Moody’s warned that future tax rises and spending cuts could trigger social unrest in a range of countries from the developing to the developed world, that in the coming years, evidence of social unrest and public tension may become just as important signs of whether a country will be able to adapt as traditional economic metrics, and that a fiscal crisis remains a possibility for a leading economy, it said that 2010 would be a “tumultuous year for sovereign debt issuers”.
• The U.S. Army War College warned in 2008 November warned in a monograph [click on Policypointers’ pdf link to see the report] titled “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development” of crash-induced unrest:
The military must be prepared, the document warned, 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.” “An American government and defense establishment lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external security commitments in order to address rapidly expanding human insecurity at home,” it went on. “Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD [the Department of Defense] would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance,” the document read.
• Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said:
“The global economic crisis … already looms as the most serious one in decades, if not in centuries … Economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they are prolonged for a one- or two-year period,” said Blair. “And instability can loosen the fragile hold that many developing countries have on law and order, which can spill out in dangerous ways into the international community.”***
“Statistical modeling shows that economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one-to-two-year period.”***
“The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and economists are divided over whether and when we could hit bottom. Some even fear that the recession could further deepen and reach the level of the Great Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic political consequences wrought by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the instability, and high levels of violent extremism.”
Blair made it clear that – while unrest was currently only happening in Europe – he was worried this could happen within the United States.
• Former national security director Zbigniew Brzezinski warned “there’s going to be growing conflict between the classes and if people are unemployed and really hurting, hell, there could be even riots.”
• The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned the the financial crisis is the highest national security concern for the U.S., and warned that the fallout from the crisis could lead to of “greater instability”.
Others warning of crash-induced unrest include:
• The head of the World Trade Organization
• The head of the International Monetary Fund (and see this)
• The head of the World Bank
• Senator Christopher Dodd
• Congressman Ron Paul (radio interview on March 6, 2009)
• Britian’s MI5 security agency
• Leading economic historian Niall Ferguson
• Leading economist Marc Faber and billionaire investor Jim Rogers
• Leading economist Nouriel Roubini
• Leading economist John Williams
• Top trend researcher Gerald Calente
• European think tank Leap2020
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Oslo Attempt to Shut Down Preachers Fails
4 Arrested, but Charges Dropped by Authorities
Posted: December 14, 2009
11:16 pm Eastern
By Bob Unruh
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
Four Christian ministers who traveled to Oslo to deliver the message of Christ at the festivities surrounding the Nobel prizes were arrested over the weekend but then released after authorities decided to drop all charges.
Word of the effort to reach out to the Norwegian city while President Obama was in attendance to accept the Nobel Peace Prize comes from Joel Thornton of the International Human Rights Group.
He worked previously on behalf of preacher Larry Keffer, who operates through the Biblical Research Center in Tampa, Fla.
Keffer had been arrested at least twice for talking about Jesus in Oslo, where Obama traveled to accept the prize for which he was nominated only days after he took office.
Keffer, whose previous arrests came while he was working with Norwegian evangelist Petar Keseljevic and whose cases still are being challenged, was working with other American evangelists, including Keseljevic, Ruben Israel and Larry Craft this week in Oslo.
The team had been ordered to leave the city center area in Oslo and stay away or face arrest late last week. Then as they were preaching near the entrance of a Will Smith concert over the weekend, all four were taken into custody by police.
"Ruben and Larry Keffer were arrested after a 10-minute discussion with the police," Thornton reported to WND. "Then Larry Craft continued to preach while Petar Keseljevic videotaped.
"Craft and Petar were then arrested even though Petar was not preaching or sharing his faith," Thornton said.
"The four were held in jail for over eight hours. They were given a chance to pay fines and be released without the need for a hearing. They all refused to pay the fine," Thornton reported.
"The state's attorney left for about 30 minutes. When he returned he informed the men that the charges were being dropped and all evidence of the arrest was being removed from the record," he said.
"It seems convenient that the police got the evangelists off the streets during a large public event, but wanted to keep no record of their actions, particularly when you consider that this type of behavior is a violation of Norwegian and European law," Thornton said.
WND reported when police ordered the evangelists away from Oslo's city center and threatened them with arrest, late last week.
"They brought banners with messages about abortion, change, homosexuality, and Old Testament Scriptures regarding the effects of wickedness upon any nation. One of the banners stated that Hitler was wrong for killing the Jews, and abortion is also wrong," Thornton said.
Almost immediately, police agents told the evangelists to remove their banners and their signs, then move across the street, even though the nation's laws formally recognize freedom of speech.
"A few minutes later the Oslo police again approached the evangelists and ordered them to lower their voices. Again, the evangelists complied with the order of the police.
"At this point the Oslo police ordered the evangelists to stop sharing their message or be arrested based on the Oslo police law. Oslo police stated that they were ordering them to leave because they were afraid of a riot – even though there was no one in the crowd who was upset about the message being delivered by the evangelists," Thornton reported.
Then, as the evangelists prepared to leave, they were told they were banned from the center of Oslo for 24 hours and would be arrested if they returned under any circumstances.
At the American embassy, they were told they could call a telephone line for citizens if they wanted to lodge a complaint. Thornton said Runa Bunaes, the chief of operations for the Oslo police, confirmed she would stand by the orders of the officers on the streets.
Posted: December 14, 2009
11:16 pm Eastern
By Bob Unruh
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
Four Christian ministers who traveled to Oslo to deliver the message of Christ at the festivities surrounding the Nobel prizes were arrested over the weekend but then released after authorities decided to drop all charges.
Word of the effort to reach out to the Norwegian city while President Obama was in attendance to accept the Nobel Peace Prize comes from Joel Thornton of the International Human Rights Group.
He worked previously on behalf of preacher Larry Keffer, who operates through the Biblical Research Center in Tampa, Fla.
Keffer had been arrested at least twice for talking about Jesus in Oslo, where Obama traveled to accept the prize for which he was nominated only days after he took office.
Keffer, whose previous arrests came while he was working with Norwegian evangelist Petar Keseljevic and whose cases still are being challenged, was working with other American evangelists, including Keseljevic, Ruben Israel and Larry Craft this week in Oslo.
The team had been ordered to leave the city center area in Oslo and stay away or face arrest late last week. Then as they were preaching near the entrance of a Will Smith concert over the weekend, all four were taken into custody by police.
"Ruben and Larry Keffer were arrested after a 10-minute discussion with the police," Thornton reported to WND. "Then Larry Craft continued to preach while Petar Keseljevic videotaped.
"Craft and Petar were then arrested even though Petar was not preaching or sharing his faith," Thornton said.
"The four were held in jail for over eight hours. They were given a chance to pay fines and be released without the need for a hearing. They all refused to pay the fine," Thornton reported.
"The state's attorney left for about 30 minutes. When he returned he informed the men that the charges were being dropped and all evidence of the arrest was being removed from the record," he said.
"It seems convenient that the police got the evangelists off the streets during a large public event, but wanted to keep no record of their actions, particularly when you consider that this type of behavior is a violation of Norwegian and European law," Thornton said.
WND reported when police ordered the evangelists away from Oslo's city center and threatened them with arrest, late last week.
"They brought banners with messages about abortion, change, homosexuality, and Old Testament Scriptures regarding the effects of wickedness upon any nation. One of the banners stated that Hitler was wrong for killing the Jews, and abortion is also wrong," Thornton said.
Almost immediately, police agents told the evangelists to remove their banners and their signs, then move across the street, even though the nation's laws formally recognize freedom of speech.
"A few minutes later the Oslo police again approached the evangelists and ordered them to lower their voices. Again, the evangelists complied with the order of the police.
"At this point the Oslo police ordered the evangelists to stop sharing their message or be arrested based on the Oslo police law. Oslo police stated that they were ordering them to leave because they were afraid of a riot – even though there was no one in the crowd who was upset about the message being delivered by the evangelists," Thornton reported.
Then, as the evangelists prepared to leave, they were told they were banned from the center of Oslo for 24 hours and would be arrested if they returned under any circumstances.
At the American embassy, they were told they could call a telephone line for citizens if they wanted to lodge a complaint. Thornton said Runa Bunaes, the chief of operations for the Oslo police, confirmed she would stand by the orders of the officers on the streets.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Enviroment, Eugenics Quotes
Enjoy the following quotes from our "leaders"
Infowars Wordpress
December 7, 2009
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme
“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”
– Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
– Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.”
– Professor Maurice King
“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.”
– David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”
– Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”
– Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
– Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
“Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.”
– Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
“The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.”
– Sir James Lovelock, BBC Interview
“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”
-Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.”
– Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit
“All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
– Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
“Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish and unethical animal on the earth.”
– Michael Fox, vice-president of The Humane Society
“Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.”
– Sir James Lovelock, Healing Gaia
“The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
– Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”
– Prof. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
“A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.”
– United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment
“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
– Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor
“… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.”
– Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind
“One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say in order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.”
– Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier
“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
– Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the World Wildlife Fund
“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
– John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.”
– Christopher Manes, Earth First!
“Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”
– David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.”
– Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
– Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports
“Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.”
– Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC
"It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
– Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
– Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony, climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
-Christine Stewart, fmr Canadian Minister of the Environment
“The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift Global Consciousness to a higher level.”
– Al Gore, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize
“The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.”
– emeritus professor Daniel Botkin
“We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis.”
– David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive manager
“Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send out entire planet’s climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced – a catastrophe of our own making.”
– Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth
“By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic.”
– Sir James Lovelock, Revenge of Gaia
“Climate Change will result in a catastrophic, global seal level rise of seven meters. That’s bye-bye most of Bangladesh, Netherlands, Florida and would make London the new Atlantis.”
– Greenpeace International
“Climate change is real. Not only is it real, it’s here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon – the man-made natural disaster.”
– Barack Obama, US Presidential Candidate
“We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth.”
– Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
“In Nature organic growth proceeds according to a Master Plan, a Blueprint. Such a ‘master plan’ is missing from the process of growth and development of the world system. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all resources and a new global economic system. Ten or twenty years from today it will probably be too late.”
– Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
“The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.”
– UN Commission on Global Governance report
“Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.”
– Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
“In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways.”
– Dr. Robert Muller, UN Assistant Secretary General
“Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance as a means of solving otherwise unmanageable crises.”
– Lester Brown, WorldWatch Institute
“A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income.”
– Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
“Adopting a central organizing principle means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, to halt the destruction of the environment.”
– Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced – a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”
– UN Agenda 21
“The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human sepcies has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution. Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.”
– Rene Dubos, board member Planetary Citizens
December 7, 2009
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme
“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”
– Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
– Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.”
– Professor Maurice King
“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.”
– David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”
– Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”
– Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
– Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
“Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.”
– Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
“The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.”
– Sir James Lovelock, BBC Interview
“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”
-Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.”
– Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit
“All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
– Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
“Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish and unethical animal on the earth.”
– Michael Fox, vice-president of The Humane Society
“Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.”
– Sir James Lovelock, Healing Gaia
“The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
– Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”
– Prof. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
“A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.”
– United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment
“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
– Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor
“… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.”
– Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind
“One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say in order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.”
– Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier
“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
– Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the World Wildlife Fund
“I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
– John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.”
– Christopher Manes, Earth First!
“Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”
– David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.”
– Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
– Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports
“Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.”
– Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC
"It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
– Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
– Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony, climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
-Christine Stewart, fmr Canadian Minister of the Environment
“The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift Global Consciousness to a higher level.”
– Al Gore, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize
“The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.”
– emeritus professor Daniel Botkin
“We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis.”
– David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive manager
“Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send out entire planet’s climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced – a catastrophe of our own making.”
– Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth
“By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic.”
– Sir James Lovelock, Revenge of Gaia
“Climate Change will result in a catastrophic, global seal level rise of seven meters. That’s bye-bye most of Bangladesh, Netherlands, Florida and would make London the new Atlantis.”
– Greenpeace International
“Climate change is real. Not only is it real, it’s here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon – the man-made natural disaster.”
– Barack Obama, US Presidential Candidate
“We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth.”
– Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
“In Nature organic growth proceeds according to a Master Plan, a Blueprint. Such a ‘master plan’ is missing from the process of growth and development of the world system. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all resources and a new global economic system. Ten or twenty years from today it will probably be too late.”
– Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
“The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.”
– UN Commission on Global Governance report
“Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.”
– Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
“In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways.”
– Dr. Robert Muller, UN Assistant Secretary General
“Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance as a means of solving otherwise unmanageable crises.”
– Lester Brown, WorldWatch Institute
“A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income.”
– Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
“Adopting a central organizing principle means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, to halt the destruction of the environment.”
– Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced – a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”
– UN Agenda 21
“The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human sepcies has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution. Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.”
– Rene Dubos, board member Planetary Citizens
Independent Journalists Denied Access to Copenhagen Climate Talks
Alex Kelly
Investigate West
December 8, 2009
COPENHAGEN — Climate change has become the story of the decade and probably the century. So it’s no surprise that the global climate negotiations beginning here today are making the headlines of nearly every major news organization in the world. With thousands of journalists in attendance, the conference seemed at low risk of going underreported. Or so I imagined.
Late last night, I stood in line to receive my press pass to cover the negotiations. I was glad to have access to the front lines of the climate debate and the resources to report it. Imagine, then, the surprise I felt upon arriving at the press desk only to learn that my accreditation had been rescinded. The reason given: the UN had accredited too many journalists.
Incredulous, I showed the UN official, a man in his mid-20s, a copy of the email I received from the UN press office just a few weeks earlier. It contained three simple words: “Received and approved,” followed by directions for collecting my press pass. The man behind the counter glanced at the paper and told me he would be back in a few moments. He returned with a simple message: We are very sorry, but our records show that you have been denied, and we cannot provide you accreditation at this time.
Excuse me? Really? I flew almost 5,000 miles from the Pacific Northwest to Copenhagen to be denied access to an event I have spent half a year preparing for? Standing next to me was our video journalist, Blair Kelly, who took the email from his hands and told him to get his supervisor.
A few moments later, a woman emerged from behind the canvas that separated the UN officials from the throng of delegates, journalists and observers.
Our accreditation, she explained, had been approved by a separate organization, the Fresh Air Center. The center lobbies for independent journalists and provides them with resources such as interview spaces and access to the internet. The UN officials said the Center’s decision to accredit me had been made before the UN reviewed the application.
She added that another problem with my application is that I am a college student. Had this not been the case, I likely would have been accredited, she said. However, she had no explanation for why two members of our InvestigateWest team who are professionals also were denied credentials.
We asked if there would be any later opportunity to apply for a press pass. We had done our research, and knew that the UN press website advertised a late credentialing phase for those who were not yet accredited. Once again, they were very sorry; the late accreditation phase was no longer an option, as the size of the UN delegation’s personal media was larger than the press office anticipated, she said.
Our best hope, according to her, was to apply again, but this time as observers through a non-governmental organization. (We tried that later. It didn’t work.)
We walked through the lobby of the Bella Center wondering: What just happened? Our ability to report on the talks was wholly dependent on having unimpeded access to those directly involved in the negotiations. Moving through the final security checkpoint, we knew we would not enter the Bella Center again, and then it dawned on us: We were pushed out of the conference not because of a priority for senior reporters, but by the inclusion of journalists picked by the delegates themselves.
We’re still looking into this, but it appears that legitimate, independent journalists, have been pushed aside for a delegate’s media entourage. Stay tuned.
Investigate West
December 8, 2009
COPENHAGEN — Climate change has become the story of the decade and probably the century. So it’s no surprise that the global climate negotiations beginning here today are making the headlines of nearly every major news organization in the world. With thousands of journalists in attendance, the conference seemed at low risk of going underreported. Or so I imagined.
Incredulous, I showed the UN official, a man in his mid-20s, a copy of the email I received from the UN press office just a few weeks earlier. It contained three simple words: “Received and approved,” followed by directions for collecting my press pass. The man behind the counter glanced at the paper and told me he would be back in a few moments. He returned with a simple message: We are very sorry, but our records show that you have been denied, and we cannot provide you accreditation at this time.
Excuse me? Really? I flew almost 5,000 miles from the Pacific Northwest to Copenhagen to be denied access to an event I have spent half a year preparing for? Standing next to me was our video journalist, Blair Kelly, who took the email from his hands and told him to get his supervisor.
A few moments later, a woman emerged from behind the canvas that separated the UN officials from the throng of delegates, journalists and observers.
Our accreditation, she explained, had been approved by a separate organization, the Fresh Air Center. The center lobbies for independent journalists and provides them with resources such as interview spaces and access to the internet. The UN officials said the Center’s decision to accredit me had been made before the UN reviewed the application.
She added that another problem with my application is that I am a college student. Had this not been the case, I likely would have been accredited, she said. However, she had no explanation for why two members of our InvestigateWest team who are professionals also were denied credentials.
We asked if there would be any later opportunity to apply for a press pass. We had done our research, and knew that the UN press website advertised a late credentialing phase for those who were not yet accredited. Once again, they were very sorry; the late accreditation phase was no longer an option, as the size of the UN delegation’s personal media was larger than the press office anticipated, she said.
Our best hope, according to her, was to apply again, but this time as observers through a non-governmental organization. (We tried that later. It didn’t work.)
We walked through the lobby of the Bella Center wondering: What just happened? Our ability to report on the talks was wholly dependent on having unimpeded access to those directly involved in the negotiations. Moving through the final security checkpoint, we knew we would not enter the Bella Center again, and then it dawned on us: We were pushed out of the conference not because of a priority for senior reporters, but by the inclusion of journalists picked by the delegates themselves.
We’re still looking into this, but it appears that legitimate, independent journalists, have been pushed aside for a delegate’s media entourage. Stay tuned.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Globalist Hypocrites Arrive In Copenhagen for Summit
Record numbers of stretch limos and private jets are descending on Copenhagen as thousands of CO2 belching, caviar scoffing, prostitute molesting, hypocritical climate crooks prepare to orchestrate the next round of mass raping in pursuit of their much cherished world government and its handmaiden, a global tax on carbon emissions.
In another stark reminder that these globalists couldn’t give a damn about CO2 emissions, only eviscerating economies and the middle class, their own behavior is completely at odds with how they are indignantly demanding other people live their lives.
A London Telegraph report reveals how the combined CO2 footprint of the conference will amount to no less than 41,000 tons, equal to that produced by an African country over the same period.
Despite the fact that the climate crooks constantly berate and browbeat Joe Public about not driving hybrid vehicles and taking two holidays a year via commercial airliners, the Copenhagen criminals are arriving in luxurious private jets before whizzing around town in gas-guzzling stretch limos.
“We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention,” Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s biggest limousine company told the Telegraph. “But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report.”
“Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”
“And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? “Five,” says Ms Jorgensen.”
While readying speeches about how the middle class will be forced to lower their living standards, pay higher taxes on all forms of travel, and make personal sacrifices in order to save the planet from the alleged menace of CO2, Copenhagen globalists will be relaxing on the 140 extra private jets that are being forced to drop off attendees in Copenhagen and then fly back to other airports and even other countries just to park due to the lack of spaces.
Elitists will scoff scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges, while lecturing the general public about how eating meat is harming the earth.
And while the climate crooks wag their finger at you for having the audacity to own an SUV, they will be running up a bill of over $200 million dollars, and guess who is going to be picking up the tab?
“According to an analysis by the Taxpayer’s Alliance, a conservative cost of Copenhagen is £130million.
It includes £6.3million on flights, £20million on hotels and £3.3million on food,” reports the Daily Mail.
“The figure also includes the salaries for delegates and the contribution from the Danish government of £37 million. Most of the money will come from taxpayers.”
Meanwhile, eco-fascism has proven it’s still very much alive and well with the news that “56 major newspapers in 45 countries are today publishing a shared editorial calling on politicians and negotiators gathering in Copenhagen to strike an ambitious deal on combating climate change.”
Of course, behind the contrived grandstanding on behalf of such publications that they are somehow speaking with one united voice in the interests of humankind, all this really shows is that the same establishment attempting to bang the last few nails in the coffin of freedom, by taxing carbon dioxide, the life-giving gas that humans exhale and trees absorb, also happen to own and control the vast majority of the global media.
Far from being an upstanding act of benign advocacy, as it is being framed, the fact that 56 major world newspapers are all spewing the same propaganda, especially in light of the Climategate scandal that most of them have failed to even acknowledge in any depth whatsoever, smacks of the kind of editorial control the Nazis exercised in 1930’s Germany or Joseph Stalin enjoyed in Communist Russia.
Meanwhile, according to an article in Spiegel Online, prostitutes are preparing for globalists to descend on Copenhagen by offering free sex. The Mayor of Copenhagen attempted to limit the expected deluge of summit attendees enjoying the use of prostitutes by sending a letter to hotels across the city urging delegates and guests at the conference, “Be sustainable, don’t buy sex.” Prostitutes responded by offering free sex to any Copenhagen attendee who produces the Mayor’s letter.
Summits of this size are routinely accompanied by a huge spike in the sex trade in whatever city they happen to be taking place. While servants of the global elite and their masters lecture us about our moral imperatives, half of them are out committing adultery on a nightly basis during the same global conferences at which they habitually pose with righteous indignation.
Make sure you have plenty of vomit bags on standby over the next couple of weeks, because you are going to be endlessly lectured by a gaggle of amoral, money-grubbing, control freak thugs who couldn’t care less about the environment unless they can invoke it as a pretext for taxing you out of existence while declaring the very particles that you breathe to be a deadly poison.
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, December 7, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Copenhagen Spokesman Calls for “Creation of Vision” through Works of Fiction at UNESCO Conference
Jurriaan Maessen
Infowars
December 1, 2009
“Broadcasters play a vital role by informing and educating the public about the realities of climate change and the costs of inaction. Armed with information, citizens are better equipped to push for meaningful and responsible follow-through from their elected representatives. This is all the more essential in the final days before Copenhagen.”
Statement by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for UNESCO’s International Conference on Broadcast Media and Climate Change
At a UNESCO conference in September of this year on how to best sell the global warming hoax to selected target audiences, spokesman and media-manager of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change Eric Hall called for the creation of “an imagination, and a vision” through works of fiction for people to chew on in the run-up and exceeding the Copenhagen conference next week.
“That”, Hall explained, “will come through film, it will come through soap operas, it will come through reality TV, it will come through novels.”
He made the statement at the conference “Broadcast Media and Climate Change”, organized by the United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organisation. Attended by a wide range of public and private broadcasters from around the globe, the meetings were recorded on tape for all to see and hear, highlighting the need for- as one attendee described it: “raising awareness on climate change worldwide”.
To put Eric Hall’s call for fiction-induced mind control into context, here follows a short summary of the conference. Because the video’s are copyright-protected, they are not posted here (I have included the accurate time-codes so the reader may easily look them up). The entire transcript archive of the conference can be accessed here.
Jean Reveillon, Director General of the European Broadcasting Union, outlines the mission at the very start of the conference (Session 1, 00:8:36):
“We believe that the subject at hand is of great importance and the very idea that people from the media- and in particular broadcasters- be able to come together and reflect on the best way to cover information on climate change in order to provide the best possible public service mission that is ours to the world (…)”
During the first session of the conference, we see a familiar face. Mr. IPCC and co-receiver of the Nobel peace-prize Rajendra K. Pachauri tells us via satellite link (Session 1, 01:05:00):
“Earlier speakers have referred to the importance of bringing about behavioural changes- and may I submit that these behavioural changes would essentially be in the nature of changes in lifestyles. There a several things that we can do in our individual lives and I think the broadcasting community perhaps needs to go out and tell people- and create a grass-roots movement (…).”
When broadcasters tell people what to do, any movement as a result of it would of course no longer be grass-roots. Vice-Chair of the IPCC, Jean-Pascal Van Ypersele, seconds Mr. Pachauri’s statements, saying (Session 1, 01:12:08):
“We are very much convinced in the IPCC that media- in particular broadcast media which talks to so many people at the same time- have a particular role to inform and educate the citizens throughout the world; and the IPCC is really keen on collaborating with you and trying to provide the best information, the most understandable information so that you can do your very important work.”
In response, the Director General of the European Broadcasting Union immediately replied:
“Thank you very much. And indeed I can confirm that we from the media want to do our best to accomplish that mission.”
Another UN PR-person states (Session 1, 01:19:42):
“It is very important that the media seize this moment and help the United Nations and help others if they can. Very soon the United Nations will be putting out as part of its campaign a public service announcement. We hope you will work with us as far as that is concerned. I also pray that you’ll examine all roads. You look truly at revolutionary ways on climate change coverage.”
An interesting intermezzo was provided by speaker Alex Kirby, a 20-year BBC veteran environment reporter, who openly stated he cares not for opposing views of the IPCC fairytale, bizarrely comparing climate-sceptics to Apartheid proponents (Session 1, 01:36:35):
“I’ve never thought it is part of the journalists’ job to try to inject an artificial and spurious balance into an unbalanced reality. If I have been sent to do a story on Apartheid or poverty or starvation, I hope to God I would not have tried to do a balanced story. And I think the same applies to climate change.”
Even more interesting than the statement itself is the fact that it is not included in the transcript of his speech, posted here on the UNESCO-website.
But the most curious statement coming out of the mouth of a UN communications person is that uttered by Eric Hall- chief PR-man at the United Nations. Hall outlined the way that climate change can best be hammered into the collective is through works of fiction (Session 2, 00:39:06):
“Probably the majority of the world does not read news at all. They don’t look at news as to change, to get their information or to change their behaviour. If climate change is about behavioural change, ultimately which I believe it is, then from a media perspective you must, you must look at it in a way that it’s not just about news. It’s about creating an imagination, and a vision, of what a climate change world- or a successfully avoided climate change world- will look like. That will come through film, it will come through soap operas, it will come through reality TV, it will come through novels.”
Hall draws an analogy with media-coverage in the Cold War era:
“If we did not have that visual imagination from the non-news part of the media about what a post-nuclear world would have looked like, we would have been in much more serious trouble that we have been if we wouldn’t have got the kind of agreements we had on the nuclear problem – itself a similar human civilization threatening problem.”
It seems that the greatest work of fiction shoved in humanity’s face today is the man-made global warming contrivance. Thanks to the leaked documents of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, the mass mind control activities of most of the broadcasters is breaking down. The recent comments by high level media people about climategate indicates that the propaganda effort is blowing up in the face of those who perpetuate the lie all this time. If UNESCO’s Walter Erdelen would have known that crucial information would be leaked to the general public almost three months later, he probably wouldn’t have bragged about his organisation’s role in perpetuating the myth nor highlighted UNESCO’s large role in the selling of it:
“This crucial role is largely invisible to the public eye. UNESCO has long sponsored the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), which are precisely what their names imply, and are fundamental to the progress made by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Fully 91% of coordinating authors of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report were WCRP scientists, and thus had the support of UNESCO behind them.”
This is a good example of a statement turning into a confession in retrospect. All those institutions involved will, after all, be held to account for the role they have played in this whole sordid affair.
Infowars
December 1, 2009
“Broadcasters play a vital role by informing and educating the public about the realities of climate change and the costs of inaction. Armed with information, citizens are better equipped to push for meaningful and responsible follow-through from their elected representatives. This is all the more essential in the final days before Copenhagen.”
Statement by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for UNESCO’s International Conference on Broadcast Media and Climate Change
At a UNESCO conference in September of this year on how to best sell the global warming hoax to selected target audiences, spokesman and media-manager of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change Eric Hall called for the creation of “an imagination, and a vision” through works of fiction for people to chew on in the run-up and exceeding the Copenhagen conference next week.
“That”, Hall explained, “will come through film, it will come through soap operas, it will come through reality TV, it will come through novels.”
He made the statement at the conference “Broadcast Media and Climate Change”, organized by the United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organisation. Attended by a wide range of public and private broadcasters from around the globe, the meetings were recorded on tape for all to see and hear, highlighting the need for- as one attendee described it: “raising awareness on climate change worldwide”.
To put Eric Hall’s call for fiction-induced mind control into context, here follows a short summary of the conference. Because the video’s are copyright-protected, they are not posted here (I have included the accurate time-codes so the reader may easily look them up). The entire transcript archive of the conference can be accessed here.
Jean Reveillon, Director General of the European Broadcasting Union, outlines the mission at the very start of the conference (Session 1, 00:8:36):
“We believe that the subject at hand is of great importance and the very idea that people from the media- and in particular broadcasters- be able to come together and reflect on the best way to cover information on climate change in order to provide the best possible public service mission that is ours to the world (…)”
During the first session of the conference, we see a familiar face. Mr. IPCC and co-receiver of the Nobel peace-prize Rajendra K. Pachauri tells us via satellite link (Session 1, 01:05:00):
“Earlier speakers have referred to the importance of bringing about behavioural changes- and may I submit that these behavioural changes would essentially be in the nature of changes in lifestyles. There a several things that we can do in our individual lives and I think the broadcasting community perhaps needs to go out and tell people- and create a grass-roots movement (…).”
When broadcasters tell people what to do, any movement as a result of it would of course no longer be grass-roots. Vice-Chair of the IPCC, Jean-Pascal Van Ypersele, seconds Mr. Pachauri’s statements, saying (Session 1, 01:12:08):
“We are very much convinced in the IPCC that media- in particular broadcast media which talks to so many people at the same time- have a particular role to inform and educate the citizens throughout the world; and the IPCC is really keen on collaborating with you and trying to provide the best information, the most understandable information so that you can do your very important work.”
In response, the Director General of the European Broadcasting Union immediately replied:
“Thank you very much. And indeed I can confirm that we from the media want to do our best to accomplish that mission.”
Another UN PR-person states (Session 1, 01:19:42):
“It is very important that the media seize this moment and help the United Nations and help others if they can. Very soon the United Nations will be putting out as part of its campaign a public service announcement. We hope you will work with us as far as that is concerned. I also pray that you’ll examine all roads. You look truly at revolutionary ways on climate change coverage.”
An interesting intermezzo was provided by speaker Alex Kirby, a 20-year BBC veteran environment reporter, who openly stated he cares not for opposing views of the IPCC fairytale, bizarrely comparing climate-sceptics to Apartheid proponents (Session 1, 01:36:35):
“I’ve never thought it is part of the journalists’ job to try to inject an artificial and spurious balance into an unbalanced reality. If I have been sent to do a story on Apartheid or poverty or starvation, I hope to God I would not have tried to do a balanced story. And I think the same applies to climate change.”
Even more interesting than the statement itself is the fact that it is not included in the transcript of his speech, posted here on the UNESCO-website.
But the most curious statement coming out of the mouth of a UN communications person is that uttered by Eric Hall- chief PR-man at the United Nations. Hall outlined the way that climate change can best be hammered into the collective is through works of fiction (Session 2, 00:39:06):
“Probably the majority of the world does not read news at all. They don’t look at news as to change, to get their information or to change their behaviour. If climate change is about behavioural change, ultimately which I believe it is, then from a media perspective you must, you must look at it in a way that it’s not just about news. It’s about creating an imagination, and a vision, of what a climate change world- or a successfully avoided climate change world- will look like. That will come through film, it will come through soap operas, it will come through reality TV, it will come through novels.”
Hall draws an analogy with media-coverage in the Cold War era:
“If we did not have that visual imagination from the non-news part of the media about what a post-nuclear world would have looked like, we would have been in much more serious trouble that we have been if we wouldn’t have got the kind of agreements we had on the nuclear problem – itself a similar human civilization threatening problem.”
It seems that the greatest work of fiction shoved in humanity’s face today is the man-made global warming contrivance. Thanks to the leaked documents of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, the mass mind control activities of most of the broadcasters is breaking down. The recent comments by high level media people about climategate indicates that the propaganda effort is blowing up in the face of those who perpetuate the lie all this time. If UNESCO’s Walter Erdelen would have known that crucial information would be leaked to the general public almost three months later, he probably wouldn’t have bragged about his organisation’s role in perpetuating the myth nor highlighted UNESCO’s large role in the selling of it:
“This crucial role is largely invisible to the public eye. UNESCO has long sponsored the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), which are precisely what their names imply, and are fundamental to the progress made by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Fully 91% of coordinating authors of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report were WCRP scientists, and thus had the support of UNESCO behind them.”
This is a good example of a statement turning into a confession in retrospect. All those institutions involved will, after all, be held to account for the role they have played in this whole sordid affair.
Stealth Treaty Seeks Strict Controls Over Internet
David Bollier
On the Commons
December 2, 2009
A sweeping international treaty to regulate how knowledge and creativity may flow on the Internet is now being negotiated. Haven’t heard of it? Funny thing, that’s exactly what the backers of the treaty want. The film, music, publishing and information industries don’t want a public debate about the issues or an open debate in Congress. So they have been working hand-in-glove with the U.S. Trade Representative to move U.S. policymaking offshore and throw a dark cloak of secrecy around everything. The next stop: draconian penalties for anyone who is accused of violating copyright law.
Details about the treaty are murky. But the latest draft, according to a leak summarized on the Boing Boing website, would require:
That Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the U.S. and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM [Digital Rights Management systems], even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM).
Who would have guessed that such nasty stuff was embedded in a treaty called the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)”? That title was presumably meant to reassure people that it’s a non-controversial measure. But fighting counterfeits seems to be just the cover story. The real goal is to win a backdoor expansion of copyright law, much stronger enforcement powers and greater corporate control of the Internet — all without having to go through that pesky process known as democracy.
If the first subterfuge was the misleading title, the second subterfuge was to call ACTA a “trade agreement” rather than a multilateral intellectual property treaty. A trade agreement can be implemented by the Executive Branch on its own, and does not require congressional approval. An intellectual property treaty would require a congressional vote.
This could turn out to be a fatal legal maneuver, Eddan Katz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out in a recent blog post, because an executive agreement like ACTA must “color within the lines of U.S. law.” Yet the U.S. Trade Representative has been quoted as saying that the treatment will “stick as closely to U.S. law as possible.”
Oh, that’s reassuring. As Katz asks: “How can the USTR negotiate an international agreement that sets new global IP enforcement norms requiring changes to U.S. law and policy as an Executive Agreement, without the knowledge or involvement of Congress?” (For more on this point, see Katz’s law review article in the Yale Journal of International Law .)
The bad faith only gets worse. Beyond the misleading title and backdoor legal maneuvers is Very Deep Secrecy. Or more accurately, selective Very Deep Secrecy. Key Washington insiders and corporate players have been granted full access to the draft treaty — but we the little people have been excluded. Wanna read the draft? You can’t. The official rationale is that such disclosures would jeopardize national security. Seriously.
When I blogged about the so-called ACTA treaty — Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement — in March 2009, Public Knowledge and others were trying to open up the treaty process through Freedom of Information Act requests and public pressure. As criticism mounted, the U.S. Trade Representative in September came up with an ingenious “solution” — let a handful of public-interest advocates read the ACTA draft — but only after signing a a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that prohibits them from publicly discussing it.
NDAs are a standard tool among Silicon Valley tech companies to prevent proprietary secrets from circulating. Notwithstanding President Obama’s other laudable initiatives in open government, this NDA approach to citizen participation is worthy of Dick Cheney or George W. Bush.
Wait, there’s more! Even this form of restricted access is selectively granted. The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) decided to pick and choose who would be invited to sign an NDA and thus be allowed to read the document (but not talk about it publicly).
This Orwellian farce prompted James Love of Knowledge Ecology International — a long-time critic of ACTA and the USTR — to prepare a petition that has garnered thousands of signatories. The petition reads in part:
The opportunity to see the ACTA documents under the NDA was offered to a large number of business interests, but very few public interest or consumer groups, and there were no opportunities for academic experts or the general public to review the documents.
USTR officials have indicated that this policy of access by invitation and NDA fully addresses the legitimate demands for more transparency of the negotiation, and it is being considered as a model for the future.
We are opposed to this approach because it creates a small special class of citizens who have rights superior to the majority of the population, and because it gives the government too much discretion in deciding who can monitor and criticize its operations. We have no confidence in this new approach.
Some of the people who have signed such NDAs are grateful for the chance to have had special access to some information, but they also feel constrained by the inability to discuss the contents of the documents, and are confident that nothing they have seen constitutes information that in any way would prejudice the national security of the United States if it were in fact disclosed.
In our opinion, the ACTA negotiations would not exist without the support and engagement of the U.S. government, and they are too important to continue under such questionable practices.
The only rationale for keeping the proposed ACTA text from the public is to suppress criticism and critical thinking about the norms that are being proposed. It is Orwellian and an insult to our intelligence to claim that the secrecy of the ACTA text has anything to do with national security concerns, as the term is commonly understood.
A secret process of arbitrary access, conditioned upon signing non-disclosure agreements to block public debate, does not enhance openness and transparency, and does not inspire respect for the norms that will eventually emerge.
Public Knowledge also prepared a petition as well, which has been signed by the American Association of Law Libraries, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Future of Music Coalition, Internet Archive and Sunlight Foundation, among others.
Even some Senators are getting upset about the USTR’s high-handed approach to democracy. Senators Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders have sent a letter to the USTR asking that the ACTA text be made public:
ACTA involves dozens if not hundreds of substantive aspects of intellectual property law and its enforcement, including those that have nothing to do with counterfeiting. . . . There are concerns about the impact of ACTA on the privacy and civil rights of individuals, on the supply of products under the first sale doctrine, on the markets for legitimate generic medicines, and on consumers and innovation in general.
The Motion Picture Association of America has no qualms about the secrecy. In its own letter to the USTR, the MPAA dismissed such concerns with a wave of the hand: “Outcries on the lack of transparency in the ACTA negotiations are a distraction. They distract from the substance and the ambition of the ACTA…”
You heard right: democratic process is a “distraction.” At a time when the U.S. is trying to rehabilitate its international image and show others how democracy works, the ACTA treaty is not a very good advertisement for the “American way.”
At this point, it’s unclear how the whole misbegotten mess will play out, but there is no doubt that the key players, including the U.S. Government, are trying to use international law to neuter the Internet, subvert the innovation and participation that open platforms enable, and violate people’s privacy and due process rights — all of this without meaningful public dialogue.
I don’t think the USTR or President Obama really want to go there. It would ignite a political and cultural explosion. If they are too frightened to have an open, honest debate at the draft proposal stage — it they are too frightened of the citizenry — imagine the political blowback that will occur if the treaty actually becomes enforceable law. Let’s face it: A public reckoning will have to occur at some point, and the sooner the USTR backs away from the ledge and opens up its deliberations, the better it will be for it, President Obama and the rest of us.
For more about ACTA, see analyses by Public Knowledge, Michael Geist of University of Ottawa, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
On the Commons
December 2, 2009
A sweeping international treaty to regulate how knowledge and creativity may flow on the Internet is now being negotiated. Haven’t heard of it? Funny thing, that’s exactly what the backers of the treaty want. The film, music, publishing and information industries don’t want a public debate about the issues or an open debate in Congress. So they have been working hand-in-glove with the U.S. Trade Representative to move U.S. policymaking offshore and throw a dark cloak of secrecy around everything. The next stop: draconian penalties for anyone who is accused of violating copyright law.
Details about the treaty are murky. But the latest draft, according to a leak summarized on the Boing Boing website, would require:
That Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the U.S. and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM [Digital Rights Management systems], even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM).
Who would have guessed that such nasty stuff was embedded in a treaty called the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)”? That title was presumably meant to reassure people that it’s a non-controversial measure. But fighting counterfeits seems to be just the cover story. The real goal is to win a backdoor expansion of copyright law, much stronger enforcement powers and greater corporate control of the Internet — all without having to go through that pesky process known as democracy.
If the first subterfuge was the misleading title, the second subterfuge was to call ACTA a “trade agreement” rather than a multilateral intellectual property treaty. A trade agreement can be implemented by the Executive Branch on its own, and does not require congressional approval. An intellectual property treaty would require a congressional vote.
This could turn out to be a fatal legal maneuver, Eddan Katz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out in a recent blog post, because an executive agreement like ACTA must “color within the lines of U.S. law.” Yet the U.S. Trade Representative has been quoted as saying that the treatment will “stick as closely to U.S. law as possible.”
Oh, that’s reassuring. As Katz asks: “How can the USTR negotiate an international agreement that sets new global IP enforcement norms requiring changes to U.S. law and policy as an Executive Agreement, without the knowledge or involvement of Congress?” (For more on this point, see Katz’s law review article in the Yale Journal of International Law .)
The bad faith only gets worse. Beyond the misleading title and backdoor legal maneuvers is Very Deep Secrecy. Or more accurately, selective Very Deep Secrecy. Key Washington insiders and corporate players have been granted full access to the draft treaty — but we the little people have been excluded. Wanna read the draft? You can’t. The official rationale is that such disclosures would jeopardize national security. Seriously.
When I blogged about the so-called ACTA treaty — Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement — in March 2009, Public Knowledge and others were trying to open up the treaty process through Freedom of Information Act requests and public pressure. As criticism mounted, the U.S. Trade Representative in September came up with an ingenious “solution” — let a handful of public-interest advocates read the ACTA draft — but only after signing a a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that prohibits them from publicly discussing it.
NDAs are a standard tool among Silicon Valley tech companies to prevent proprietary secrets from circulating. Notwithstanding President Obama’s other laudable initiatives in open government, this NDA approach to citizen participation is worthy of Dick Cheney or George W. Bush.
Wait, there’s more! Even this form of restricted access is selectively granted. The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) decided to pick and choose who would be invited to sign an NDA and thus be allowed to read the document (but not talk about it publicly).
This Orwellian farce prompted James Love of Knowledge Ecology International — a long-time critic of ACTA and the USTR — to prepare a petition that has garnered thousands of signatories. The petition reads in part:
The opportunity to see the ACTA documents under the NDA was offered to a large number of business interests, but very few public interest or consumer groups, and there were no opportunities for academic experts or the general public to review the documents.
USTR officials have indicated that this policy of access by invitation and NDA fully addresses the legitimate demands for more transparency of the negotiation, and it is being considered as a model for the future.
We are opposed to this approach because it creates a small special class of citizens who have rights superior to the majority of the population, and because it gives the government too much discretion in deciding who can monitor and criticize its operations. We have no confidence in this new approach.
Some of the people who have signed such NDAs are grateful for the chance to have had special access to some information, but they also feel constrained by the inability to discuss the contents of the documents, and are confident that nothing they have seen constitutes information that in any way would prejudice the national security of the United States if it were in fact disclosed.
In our opinion, the ACTA negotiations would not exist without the support and engagement of the U.S. government, and they are too important to continue under such questionable practices.
The only rationale for keeping the proposed ACTA text from the public is to suppress criticism and critical thinking about the norms that are being proposed. It is Orwellian and an insult to our intelligence to claim that the secrecy of the ACTA text has anything to do with national security concerns, as the term is commonly understood.
A secret process of arbitrary access, conditioned upon signing non-disclosure agreements to block public debate, does not enhance openness and transparency, and does not inspire respect for the norms that will eventually emerge.
Public Knowledge also prepared a petition as well, which has been signed by the American Association of Law Libraries, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Future of Music Coalition, Internet Archive and Sunlight Foundation, among others.
Even some Senators are getting upset about the USTR’s high-handed approach to democracy. Senators Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders have sent a letter to the USTR asking that the ACTA text be made public:
ACTA involves dozens if not hundreds of substantive aspects of intellectual property law and its enforcement, including those that have nothing to do with counterfeiting. . . . There are concerns about the impact of ACTA on the privacy and civil rights of individuals, on the supply of products under the first sale doctrine, on the markets for legitimate generic medicines, and on consumers and innovation in general.
The Motion Picture Association of America has no qualms about the secrecy. In its own letter to the USTR, the MPAA dismissed such concerns with a wave of the hand: “Outcries on the lack of transparency in the ACTA negotiations are a distraction. They distract from the substance and the ambition of the ACTA…”
You heard right: democratic process is a “distraction.” At a time when the U.S. is trying to rehabilitate its international image and show others how democracy works, the ACTA treaty is not a very good advertisement for the “American way.”
At this point, it’s unclear how the whole misbegotten mess will play out, but there is no doubt that the key players, including the U.S. Government, are trying to use international law to neuter the Internet, subvert the innovation and participation that open platforms enable, and violate people’s privacy and due process rights — all of this without meaningful public dialogue.
I don’t think the USTR or President Obama really want to go there. It would ignite a political and cultural explosion. If they are too frightened to have an open, honest debate at the draft proposal stage — it they are too frightened of the citizenry — imagine the political blowback that will occur if the treaty actually becomes enforceable law. Let’s face it: A public reckoning will have to occur at some point, and the sooner the USTR backs away from the ledge and opens up its deliberations, the better it will be for it, President Obama and the rest of us.
For more about ACTA, see analyses by Public Knowledge, Michael Geist of University of Ottawa, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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