Corporatists Brought Us to the Brink of This Catastrophe
castgen / CC BY-NC 2.0
You know the story: the globalists want your guns. They want your democracy.
Theyre hovering just beyond the horizon in those black helicopters. They
control the media and Wall Street. Theyve burrowed into a deep state that
stretches like a vast tectonic plate beneath Americas fragile government
institutions. They want to replace the United States with the United
Nations, erase national borders, and create one huge, malevolent
international order.
The only thing that stands in their way is take your pick the Second
Amendment, Twitter, or Donald Trump.
Conspiracy theorists have, in fact, been warning about just such a New World
Order for decades, going all the way back to the isolationist critics of
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and to fears about the United Nations in
the post-World War II moment. During the Cold War, the John Birch Society
and fringe elements of the Republican Party nurtured just such
anti-globalist sentiments, but they never made much headway in the
mainstream world. As the Cold War ended, however, the anti-globalist virus
began to spread again, this time more rapidly, and its threatening to
become a pandemic.
The Agenda 21 Dystopia
On September 11, 1990, just after Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of
Kuwait and just before the reunification of Germany, George H.W. Bush spoke
of a new world order that would unite all countries in defense of the rule
of law and thwart the Iraqi autocrats regional ambitions. The phrase was
meant as a rallying cry, not an actual plan, but that didnt stop the
presidents America First critics from reading all manner of mayhem into his
speech.
The elder Bush, who had long toiled in the shadow of Ronald Reagan, was in
some ways a curious target for those who feared the end of U.S. sovereignty.
As recent posthumous assessments revealed, he was an early champion of
states rights (against civil rights), supported prayer in school and the
NRA, made a U-turn as a presidential candidate to oppose abortion, launched
wars in Panama and the Persian Gulf, and presided over the collapse of the
Soviet Union. Anti-globalists, however, focused on a different part of
Bushs résumé: hed gone to Yale, later belonged to a wealthy elite of Texas
oil barons, served as ambassador to the United Nations, and was a
card-carrying member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and that most
elite of global agenda-setting outfits, the Trilateral Commission.
Such characteristics made him particularly vulnerable to attacks from the
far right. Preacher Pat Robertson, for instance, disliked Bushs staid
Episcopalianism and resented losing to the future president in the 1988
Republican primaries. In his 1991 bestseller, The New World Order, Robertson
refocused all his ire on the presidents presumed global ambitions. Is
George Bush merely an idealist or are there now plans underway to merge the
interests of the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the United Nations? he asked
rhetorically and then, of course, provided the answer:
A single thread runs from the White House to the State Department to the
Council on Foreign Relations to the Trilateral Commission to secret
societies to extreme New Agers. There must be a new world order
There must
be world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and
currency, and a world elite in charge of it all.
Though that 1991 book is largely forgotten, the televangelists attacks on
Bushs globalism resurfaced again and again in different forms. Beginning
in 1994, for instance, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Left Behind series spun
Robertsons dire predictions of a one-world government into 16 novels and
several dreadful movies. Just to ensure that readers wouldnt miss their
point, they even installed the anti-Christ as the head of the United
Nations. More recently, Donald Trumps attacks on Hillary Clintons elitism
echoed some of the very themes Robertson had sounded almost three decades
earlier.
Oddly, though, Bush and Robertson agreed on one thing, on which they even
found common ground with former Vice President Al Gore: the importance of
addressing climate change.
As president, Bush pushed a number of environmental initiatives related to
air quality, ozone depletion, and climate change more generally. In 1992,
his administration even endorsed a tepid action plan, Agenda 21, that came
out of that years global environmental meeting in Rio de Janeiro. In
reality, it was just another of an endless stream of documents produced by
such environmental conferences. For some Americans, however, those two words
came to evoke the most terrifying aspect of the Bush era, proof positive
that he was covertly constructing the very New World Order that he had
invoked.
Perhaps the leading proponent of Agenda 21 conspiracy theories has been TV
and radio personality Glenn Beck. In 2012, he even published a dystopian
novel called (you wont be surprised to learn) Agenda 21. In it, he and
co-author Harriet Parke fingered environmentalists as the true agents of the
coming apocalypse and issued dire warnings about climate change becoming the
lever a future global authority would use to eradicate national sovereignty
and enslave Americans to a collective vision. Just a generation ago, this
place was called America, Beck and Parke wrote. Now, after the worldwide
implementation of a UN-led program called Agenda 21, its simply known as
the Republic. There is no president. No Congress. No Supreme Court. No
freedom.
Once you start looking for Agenda 21, it pops up in all sorts of strange
places. Newt Gingrich ran for president in 2012 with a pledge to rescind the
plan. Ted Cruz linked it to you guessed it George Soros and warned
that its implementation would deprive Americans of their right to play golf
(no joke). Most recently, YouTube and Twitter have lit up with contrived
reports that Agenda 21, not climate change, was somehow responsible for the
latest California wildfires.
And heres the truly bizarre part: while Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, Ted
Cruz, and the rest of them were nattering on about an obscure, non-binding
U.N. document, they were missing the real story. A nightmarish New World
Order was indeed being constructed around them. Its global, malevolent,
aimed at destroying ever more American lives, and according to a recent
Trump administration report getting worse by the minute.
The Real New World Order
A significant number of Americans believe that theyre still relatively safe
behind the walls of Donald Trumps Fortress America. Homeland Security
protects them from international terrorists. Border patrol agents block
caravans of refugees and asylum-seekers. By refusing to ratify membership in
institutions like the International Criminal Court, Congress keeps the U.S.
safe from foreign influences. President Trump has only reinforced such
feelings by pulling the United States out of international pacts like the
Paris climate accord and global bodies like the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Because the world keeps knocking on Americas door, the present wave of
nationalist politicians has added a few more locks for safetys sake. All
such precautions, however, have done nothing to prevent the establishment of
an actual New World Order on American soil. Yes, its happened, even if the
conspiracy mongers havent cared to notice.
There is indeed a new global order. Its called climate change and, unlike
the scenarios imagined by the anti-globalists, its wreaking havoc not in
some dystopian future but right in the here and now: the prairie fires that
struck Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Texas panhandle in the spring of 2017,
killing seven people and destroying an area equivalent to three Rhode
Islands; Hurricane Maria that devastated large areas of Puerto Rico that
fall, leaving nearly 3,000 people dead; Hurricane Michael that swept through
Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia with unprecedented winds and
flooding this October, killing 45 and causing $30 billion in damage; and the
wildfires that raged across California in November, killing more than 80
people and destroying nearly 14,000 homes. And thats just to begin a list
of weather catastrophes in this country.
Global warming did not, of course, create the weather itself. Its only
intensifying it. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently
put it, A changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity,
spatial extent, duration, and timing of extreme weather and climate events,
and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events. This
summer, for instance, saw record-high temperatures in the United States and
around the world. Large stretches of the South and West experienced
near-record droughts in 2018, while other parts of the country suffered from
historic levels of rainfall. (North Carolina recently endured an astounding
years worth of snow in barely more than 24 hours. Both the number and the
severity of Atlantic hurricanes are also on the rise.
And according to a Trump administration report released last month that the
president himself rejects, its going to get a lot worse fast. That Fourth
National Climate Assessment paints a dire picture of plummeting agricultural
yields, declining dairy and seafood production, spreading wildfires,
shrinking water resources in the interior of the country, and flooded areas
on the coasts before centurys end. Extreme weather events since 1980 have
already cost the United States more than $1 trillion. By 2100, the
assessment projects, the costs of climate change will absorb as much as 10%
of this countrys annual gross domestic product. Meanwhile, any hopes that
global carbon emissions had begun to flatline in recent years, thanks to
efforts to move toward renewable sources of energy, were dashed this month
with reports that the output will actually grow by a projected 2.7% in 2018,
a larger percentage than the previous year, on the way to the highest levels
on record.
Americans can blame state governments or Washington for failing to respond
in a timely manner to these disasters, but such intensifying weather
patterns arent a local or even a national phenomenon. Whats happening in
the United States is happening everywhere. The New World Order of climate
change connects people abandoning their homes to rising tides in Florida and
Bangladesh, dying from drought-related fires in California and Australia,
being swept away by huge storms in the Carolinas and the Philippines, or
losing their livelihoods in Nebraska and Honduras. Its an order defined by
a terrifying new rulebook in which more carbon emissions translate directly
into less polar ice, an increase in sea levels, and more extreme weather.
Climate change doesnt care about borders. It thumbs its nose at laws and
legislation. It is unaffected by the size or destructive capabilities of
even the mightiest militaries. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of
this particular New World Order, at least in the United States, is that many
of those most affected by it refuse to acknowledge its existence.
Interviewing people affected by last years prairie fires in the Midwest,
for instance, the New Yorkers Ian Frazier encountered an extraordinary
level of denial:
No one I talked to in Kansas told me that he believed in climate change.
Prevailing opinion holds that nothing about the recent extreme weather here
is much different from whats always been. People say that Native Americans
sometimes used prairie fires as an environmental tool.
Yet the recent fires were both unprecedented and part of a longer-term
transformation of the Great Plains from irrigated farmland into what will
someday be a spreading desert thanks to rising temperatures and extreme
weather above ground and the disappearing Ogallala aquifer beneath it. And
this time, the dispossessed Midwesterners are unlikely to be able to
relocate to California, as they did when dust storms hit in the 1930s,
because the West Coast will have major problems supporting even its existing
agriculture.
If all the death and destruction connected to this New World Order were
simply the result of periodic shifts in the life cycle of the planet as
some climate-change deniers maintain then humans could just prepare for
the inevitable, dinosaur-style extinction to come. But thats hardly the
case. Climate change is the direct result of human action and some humans
are so much more responsible than others.
Blame the Globalists
From 2006 through 2016, before he served briefly as secretary of state, Rex
Tillerson was the head of ExxonMobil. He was supposed to be a cleaner,
greener Big Energy CEO, but during his tenure he never altered the companys
basic DNA of drill, drill, drill. He entered into murky energy deals with
Russia, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Saudi Arabia. Worse, he attempted to profit off
climate change by, among other things, expanding operations into a rapidly
warming Arctic. Even though he publicly acknowledged global warming with
plenty of caveats and misstatements he also helped funnel millions of
dollars to climate denial groups and suitably climate-denying politicians.
Not much changed when Tillerson became Trumps first secretary of state. He
failed to prevent the president from withdrawing from the Paris climate
accord. He dutifully implemented new rules to facilitate the international
funding of coal-fired power plants. And he presided over a gutting of the
State Department meant to hamper its ability to address global issues like
climate change.
Through it all, however, Rex Tillerson remained just the kind of globalist
that Donald Trump had railed against as a presidential candidate. While head
of Exxon, he had, for instance, been a regular participant at the World
Economic Forum at Davos as well as in the Clinton Global Initiative.
Ultimately, Trump criticized his secretary of state for having totally
establishment views on foreign policy before unceremoniously firing him by
tweet.
But theres the establishment Trump likes and the establishment he doesnt.
Despite their very public falling out, the president has always admired
establishment types in the Tillerson mold, those who belong to the
international network of fossil fuel execs (oil, gas, and coal) chiefly
responsible for building the New World Order of climate change. Rockefeller,
Hunt, Getty, Mellon, Drake, Buffet, Koch, and Icahn: these are the
globalists who set in motion the transformation of our world in which a
growing dependency on fossil fuels morphed into an economic system geared to
ever-expanding exploitation of such resources, and finally to an ecosystem
on the verge of catastrophe.
Keep in mind that this is exactly what Donald Trump grew up with in
fossil-fueled New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. Its what hes still
nostalgicfor. Hence, his push for the United States to become energy
dominant by extracting every last drop of fossil fuel from land, sea, and
ice. Hence, his close relationships with petro-autocrats, especially Russian
President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. This
is, in short, his kind of globalism, and its now fully embedded in the
White House, his administration, and Washington.
The U.N.? Environmentalists? George Soros? Peanuts compared to the real
globalists, the ones who have controlled the supply and pricing of energy
for more than a century and now have a representative sitting in the Oval
Office. Think of it as a magicians classic misdirection trick: look over
there at Agenda 21 while the real globalists pick your pocket and poison
your world. As environmentalist Bill McKibben has pointed out, the latest
generation of fossil-fuel globalists knew exactly what they were doing (and
what the consequences would be) when they devoted immense amounts of money
to emphasizing the uncertainty of the science of climate change.
The magician David Copperfield once created the illusion that the Statue of
Liberty had disappeared. The present crew of magical globalists have done
him one better. They have been surprisingly successful in creating the
illusion that the New World Order of climate change doesnt exist when the
proof is increasingly all around us.
Theres no conspiracy, no weather mafia, but the United States is
nonetheless firmly in the grip of a New World Order. Many thousands have
already lost their lives, their liberty, or their ability to pursue
happiness thanks to the global forces now being loosed on our planet and
the more the United States has asserted its exceptionalism in recent years,
the more it has proven to be no exception to the rules of climate change.
Heres the rub: its long past the warning stage. Metaphorically speaking,
the black helicopters have already landed on the White House lawn (and
probably in your own backyard as well). A New World Order is indeed
beginning to tyrannize America and Donald Trump is encouraging the
globalists responsible to do even more of the same. The only way to address
this ultimate threat is through the sort of international cooperation that
the anti-globalists fear the most,a linking of arms across the rising seas
to defeat a malign global force and the powerful elite that maintains it.
This challenge requires the equivalent of war against something as evil as
totalitarianism. Anything less would be like trying to put out a wildfire
with gasoline or like spitting into a (Category 5) hurricane. Anything less
would be an epoch fail.
John Feffer / TomDispatch
#Buffet #bush #climate change #drake #fossil fuels #getty #global warming
#globalists #
