Maurice Strong - Bio

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Maurice Strong

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Maurice Strong has held numerous positions of power: Senior Advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Senior Advisor to World Bank President James Wolfensohn, Chairman of the Earth Council, Chairman of the World Resources Institute, Co-Chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum and a member of Toyota's International Advisory Board.

One of his most high profile roles to date was as the Secretary General of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development - the Earth Summit that was held in Rio de Janeiro. The Earth Summit was a large leap forward for global economic and environmental regulation.

"He's dangerous because he's a much smarter and shrewder man [than many in the UN system]," comments Charles Lichenstein, Deputy Ambassador to the UN under President Reagan. "I think he is a very dangerous ideologue, way over to the Left."[1]

"This guy is kind of the global Ira Magaziner," says Ted Galen Carpenter, Vice President for Defense and Foreign-Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. "If he is whispering in Kofi Annan's ear this is no good at all."

Strong does not solidly commit to any ideology or political stance which always attracts suspicion. He stated to Maclean's in 1976 that he was "a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology." His business dealings belie his political and ideological leanings though. For instance, he has had oil deals with Adnan Khashoggi, who has links to the environmentalist left. Strong is a Progressive who uses his ultra-success in business as a weapon of leverage in politics and vice versa.

He started out in the oil business during the 1950s. Strong was very adept at taking over and then making profitable small, sluggish energy companies during the 1960s. By the age of 35, he was the President of Power Corporation of Canada. He was and still is a very successful businessman. But for some unnecessary reason, Strong has felt the need to exaggerate his earnings and his success. When he left Power Corporation of Canada for greener pastures, he stated his departing salary was $200,000, when in realty it was $35,000, as quoted by a company officer. He also exaggerated his accomplishments once in Who's Who.

A master at networking in politics, Strong made influential friends within the upper ranks of Canada's Liberal Party. One of those connections was Paul Martin Sr. who was Canada's External-Affairs Minister during the 1960s. These 'friends' became Strong's business partners in oil and real estate ventures. He also struck up a friendship with the politically-connected Paul Martin Jr., Canada's Finance Minister at the time. He strategically placed Martin and other young, loyal business minds throughout his network where they proceeded to act as a virtual private intelligence service for Strong. His intel was so good, that Strong seemed to always know what the next political trend would be, giving him a tremendous edge in business and politics alike.

Strong became head of the Canadian International Development Agency in 1966. Strong's success at the CIDA caught the attention of UN Secretary General U Thant who then asked Strong to organize the first Earth Summit - the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. The next year, Strong became the first Director of the new UN Environment Program as a result of the summit. In 1975, he was invited back to Canada to run the semi-national Petro-Canada, which was created by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the wake of OPEC's oil tumult.

Ten years previously, while Strong was at Power Corporation of Canada, he enabled Shell to take over the only remaining all-Canadian oil company, Petro-Canada, by selling a controlling interest in the company's stock to them. This infuriated Canada's anti-American left at the time who were strongly denouncing American ownership of Canada's oil companies. When Strong returned to Petro-Canada, he announced he would rectify this and was lauded for it.

Strong left Petro-Canada after a couple of years to pursue other various business ventures. One of these business deals was with Adnan Khashoggi. Through Khashoggi, Strong wound up owning the 200,000-acre Baca Ranch in Colorado. The Ranch became a "New Age" center that was run by Strong's wife, Hanne. The center catered to 'seekers' such as Zen and Tibetan Buddhist monks, a breakaway order of Carmelite nuns and followers of a Hindu guru named Babaji. By 1985, Strong returned to being an Executive Coordinator for the UN Office for Emergency Operations in Africa. He was in charge of running the 3.5 billion dollar famine-relief effort in Somalia and Ethiopia. In 1989, he was appointed the Secretary General of the Earth Summit.

Don't mistake Strong's breadth of contacts for open-mindedness. All of his contacts and friends lean far to the left. One of those was the late Paul Nathanson, who was the wartime Treasurer of the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Committee. Strong was quoted as saying the Depression left him "frankly very radical." He is a man used to getting things done and his predisposition to having the world managed by bureaucrats is disturbing to say the least. As Elaine Dewar wrote in Toronto's Saturday Night magazine:

It is instructive to read Strong's 1972 Stockholm speech and compare it with the issues of Earth Summit 1992. Strong warned urgently about global warming, the devastation of forests, the loss of biodiversity, polluted oceans, the population time bomb. Then as now, he invited to the conference the brand-new environmental NGOs [non-governmental organizations]: he gave them money to come; they were invited to raise hell at home. After Stockholm, environment issues became part of the administrative framework in Canada, the U.S., Britain and Europe.

During this time, Strong continued strong international networking, building influence and accumulating wealth and power as he went. He became a member of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission). He found time to serve as President of the World Federation of United Nations Associations, on the Executive Committee of the Society for International Development and as an advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund. Most importantly, he served on the Commission on Global Governance, which laid the groundwork for his international power grab.

Too numerous to list here, this is a subset of his network of powerful contacts:

Strong brilliantly cultivated relationships even with Republican Presidents and won them over as friends. Elaine Dewar again:

Strong blurted out that he'd almost been shut out of the Earth Summit by people at the State Department. They had been overruled by the White House because George Bush knew him. He said that he'd donated some $100,000 to the Democrats and a slightly lesser amount to the Republicans in 1988. (The Republicans didn't confirm.)
I had been absolutely astonished. I mean yes, he had done a great deal of business in the U.S., but how could he have managed such contributions?
Well, he'd had a green card. The governor of Colorado had suggested it to him. A lawyer in Denver had told him how.
But why? I'd asked.
"Because I wanted influence in the United States."

So Strong gave political contributions (of dubious legality) to both parties; George Bush, now a friend, intervened to help him stay in charge of the Rio conference; he was thereby enabled to set a deep green agenda there and Bush took a political hit in an election year.

The majority of Strong's friends are far more compatible ideologically. This explains why you will see them committed to the same institutional endeavors. For example, James Wolfensohn (whom Strong had hired out of Harvard in the early 1960s to run an Australian subsidiary of one of his companies) appointed him as his senior advisor almost immediately upon being named chairman of the World Bank. "I'd been involved in . . . Stockholm, which Maurice Strong arranged," said Wolfensohn, who, more recently, has been credited with co-drafting (with Mikhail Gorbachev) the Earth Charter presented for consideration at the Rio + 5 meeting in Brazil earlier that year. As head of the Earth Council, Maurice Strong chaired that meeting.

Strong is also involved in the UN Education Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Through his work in UNESCO, Strong promotes Gaia, the Earth God, among the world's youth. Strong is also the director of The Temple of Understanding in New York. He uses The Temple to encourage Americans concerned about the environment to replace Christianity with the worship of "mother earth." Strong also directs the UN's Business Council on Sustainable Development. Under his leadership, the council tries to affect peoples' lives through UN policies that attempt to reduce the availability of meat products, limit the use of home and workplace air conditioners, discourage private ownership of motor vehicles, encroach on private property rights and work to reduce the number of single family homes.

From Discover The Networks:

In 1995 Strong headed a Massachusetts-based company called Molten Metal Technology, Inc. (MMTI), which claimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste but had failed to demonstrate that the technology could work on a commercial scale. Another MMTI leader was Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist and Al Gore’s former top Senate aide. On “Earth Day” in April 1995, Gore traveled to MMTI's headquarters and praised the firm for its environmentally responsible work. At that time, MMTI had already received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research-and-development grants. And although the company had no other sources of revenue, Gore's laudatory speech caused its stock value to soar to $35 per share.
But in March 1996, MMTI's corporate officers learned that the DOE was planning to drastically cut back its funding in the near future. Between March and October 1996, seven MMTI officers—including Maurice Strong—quietly sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, whose per-share value continued to hover around $35. Then on October 20, MMTI issued a press release announcing, for the first time, that its DOE subsidies would be scaled back dramatically. The next day, MMTI's stock plunged by 49%, and it eventually dwindled to a mere $5 per share. In early 1997, stockholders filed an insider-trading class action suit against MMTI and its officers. The suit closely resembled a previous insider-trading lawsuit in which Maurce Strong had also been involved.[2]

Strong has warned memorably: "If we don't change, our species will not survive. . . . Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse." The solution? Global governance of course...

And what better way to accomplish that than through the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act, better known as Cap and Trade. This all ties into the fact that Maurice Strong helped create the Chicago Climate Exchange. The CCX was created April 15, 2003.[3] He is still a Director and reportedly, one of the primary driving forces behind CCX.

External Links

References

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  1. ↑ Who is Maurice Strong? Ronald Baily, National Review, Sept. 1, 1997
  2. ↑ Maurice Strong? Discover The Networks
  3. ↑ CCX Directors Chicago Climate Exchange, Apr. 15, 2003
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