09/25/15

Pope Lays Out Global Marxist Agenda

Socialist Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is ecstatic over the pope’s address to Congress. In a message to his supporters, titled, “Why we must listen to Pope Francis,” he was particularly pleased with the fact that in his address to Congress, “Pope Francis spoke of Dorothy Day, who was a tireless advocate for the impoverished and working people in America. I think it was extraordinary that he cited her as one of the most important people in recent American history.” Day was a Marxist apologist for socialism and communist regimes. We covered this territory in my column, “With Pope’s Help, U.N. Bypasses Congress on Global Socialism.”

With Republican congressional leaders under fire from conservatives for cowering in the face of a Democratic Party onslaught, all that they needed was to roll out the welcome mat for a Marxist pope who would put them further on the defensive. But that’s exactly what happened.

Phyllis Bennis of the Marxist Institute for Policy Studies was right: “Pope Francis’ address to Congress was almost certainly not what John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and other congressional leaders had in mind when they invited the pope to speak.” Speaking for many on the left, including the pro-abortion lobby,she said, “His clear call to end the death penalty was the only example he gave of protecting the sanctity of life: Even amid a raging congressional debate over Planned Parenthood, he never mentioned abortion.”

The list of left-wing causes in the pope’s address was extensive. Bennis noted “his calls to protect the rights of immigrants and refugees, end the death penalty, preserve the planet from the ravages of climate change, and defend the poor and dispossessed.” And then there was the attack on the policies of peace through strength, which keep us free. “Being at the service of dialogue and peace also means being truly determined to minimize and, in the long term, to end the many armed conflicts throughout our world,” the pope said. He then asked, “Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society?”

He should ask that of Vladimir Putin.

Most Americans understand the rationale for legal immigrants. But illegal aliens who commit crimes are something else. The pope seems not to recognize a difference.

The death penalty is a punishment reserved for heinous killers. But he doesn’t mention abortion, which has taken tens of millions of innocent lives. This seemed strange to conservative Catholics, who are starting to come to grips with the fact that this is a “progressive” pope, who is not hostile toward what anti-communist Pope John Paul II called the “culture of death” through population control and reduction.

Francis’s answer on the arms control issue was to challenge the United States alone and blame its spending on national defense on monetary motives. “Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood,” said the pope. “In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.”

That’s a slander of our brave fighting men and women, many of whom have given their lives or sacrificed their limbs to bring freedom to people around the word, especially Muslims in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Against the global Jihad, what does the pope expect the U.S. to do? Disarm?

Praising “his uniquely progressive papal perspective,” far-left radio host Amy Goodman noted that “The pope has been frank in his criticism of much of the core of U.S. society: capitalism, consumerism, war and the failure to confront climate change.” This is a fraud, of course. They used to warn us against global cooling. It then became global warming and now climate change. The cause always changes until they find something to lure people into schemes for bigger government and higher taxes.

Recognizing the socialism of the pope, Al Jazeera posted an article, “Bernie Sanders, the pope and the moral imperative of systemic change,” by Gar Alperovitz, the co-chair with James Gustave Speth of The Next System Project. Speth, former administrator of the United Nations Development Program, put his name on its 1994 “Human Development Report,” which openly promoted global taxes for world government.

The “Next System” is another name for the replacement of global capitalism by global socialism.

Those endorsing this project, in addition to Alperovitz and Speth, include:

Jane Mansbridge, Harvard University
Gerald Hudson, Service Employees International Union
Annie Leonard, Greenpeace USA
Robert B. Reich, University of California at Berkeley
Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research
Barbara Ehrenreich, Author
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Columbia University
Gerald Torres, Cornell University Law School
Larry Cohen, Communications Workers of America
Julie Matthaei, Cornerstone Cohousing
Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers
John James Conyers, Jr., 13th District, Michigan
Bill McKibben, 350.org
Saskia Sassen, Columbia University
Frances Fox Piven, City University of New York
Manuel Pastor, University of Southern California
Phillip Thompson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Oliver Stone, Academy Award-winning Filmmaker
Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK
Timothy E. Wirth, United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund
Sarita Gupta, Jobs With Justice
Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Van Jones, The Dream Corps & Rebuild The Dream
Lawrence Mishel, Economic Policy Institute
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, California State University
Daniel Ellsberg, Author
Herman E. Daly, University of Maryland
Ralph Nader, Consumer Advocate, Author, Former Presidential Candidate
Ai-jen Poo, National Domestic Workers Alliance
Anna Galland, MoveOn.org Civic Action
Danny Glover, Actor, Social Activist
Tom Morello, Musician, Activist
Jill Stein, 2012 Green Party Presidential Nominee
Nancy Fraser, New School for Social Research

“We have fundamental problems because of fundamental flaws in our economic and political system,” the New Project proclaims. “The crisis now unfolding in so many ways across our country amounts to a systemic crisis. Today’s political economic system is not programmed to secure the wellbeing of people, place and planet. Instead, its priorities are corporate profits, the growth of GDP, and the projection of national power.”

The group goes on, “Large-scale system change is needed but has until recently been constrained by a continuing lack of imagination concerning social, economic and political alternatives. There are alternatives that can lead to the systemic change we need.”

Yes there are. They are called socialism and communism. But they would rather call it “sustainable development,” in order to confuse people about how the American way of life is being targeted for extinction.

05/19/15

Liberal Academic Says America’s Founding Document Outmoded

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Top Vatican adviser Jeffrey Sachs says that when Pope Francis visits the United States in September, he will directly challenge the “American idea” of God-given rights embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

Sachs, a special advisor to the United Nations and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is a media superstar who can always be counted on to pontificate endlessly on such topics as income inequality and global health. This time, writing in a Catholic publication, he may have gone off his rocker, revealing the real global game plan.

The United States, Sachs writes in the Jesuit publication, America, is “a society in thrall” to the idea of unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But the “urgent core of Francis’ message” will be to challenge this “American idea” by “proclaiming that the path to happiness lies not solely or mainly through the defense of rights but through the exercise of virtues, most notably justice and charity.”

In these extraordinary comments, which constitute a frontal assault on the American idea of freedom and national sovereignty, Sachs has made it clear that he hopes to enlist the Vatican in a global campaign to increase the power of global or foreign-dominated organizations and movements.

Sachs takes aim at the phrase, which comes from America’s founding document, the United States Declaration of Independence, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

These rights sound good, Sachs writes, but they’re not enough to guarantee the outcome the global elites have devised for us. Global government, he suggests, must make us live our lives according to international standards of development.

“In the United States,” Sachs writes, “we learn that the route to happiness lies in the rights of the individual. By throwing off the yoke of King George III, by unleashing the individual pursuit of happiness, early Americans believed they would achieve that happiness. Most important, they believed that they would find happiness as individuals, each endowed by the creator with individual rights.”

While he says there is some “grandeur in this idea,” such rights “are only part of the story, only one facet of our humanity.”

The Sachs view is that global organizations such as the U.N. must dictate the course of nations and individual rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. One aspect of this unfolding plan, as outlined in the Sachs book, The End of Poverty, involves extracting billions of dollars from the American people through global taxes.

“We will need, in the end, to put real resources in support of our hopes,” he wrote. “A global tax on carbon-emitting fossil fuels might be the way to begin. Even a very small tax, less than that which is needed to correct humanity’s climate-deforming overuse of fossil fuels, would finance a greatly enhanced supply of global public goods.” Sachs has estimated the price tag for the U.S. at $845 billion.

In preparation for this direct assault on our rights, the American nation-state, and our founding document, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon told a Catholic Caritas International conference in Rome on May 12 that climate change is “the defining challenge of our time,” and that the solution lies in recognizing that “ humankind is part of nature, not separate or above.”

The pope’s expected encyclical on climate change is supposed to help mobilize the governments of the world in this crusade.

But a prestigious group of scholars, churchmen, scientists, economists and policy experts has issued a detailed rebuttal, entitled, “An Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change,” pointing out that the Bible tells man to have dominion over the earth.

“Good climate policy must recognize human exceptionalism, the God-given call for human persons to ‘have dominion’ in the natural world (Genesis 1:28), and the need to protect the poor from harm, including actions that hinder their ascent out of poverty,” the letter to Pope Francis states.

Released by a group called the Cornwall Alliance, the letter urges the Vatican to consider the evidence that climate change is largely natural, that the human contribution is comparatively small and not dangerous, and that attempting to mitigate the human contribution by reducing CO2 emissions “would cause more harm than good, especially to the world’s poor.”

The Heartland Institute held a news conference on April 27 at the Hotel Columbus in Rome, to warn the Vatican against embracing the globalist agenda of the climate change movement. The group is hosting the 10th International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, D.C. on June 11-12.

However, it appears as if the Vatican has been captured by the globalist forces associated with Sachs and the United Nations.

Voice of the Family, a group representing pro-life and pro-family Catholic organizations from around the world, has taken issue not only with the Vatican’s involvement with Sachs but with Ban Ki Moon, describing the two as “noted advocates of abortion who operate at the highest levels of the United Nations.” Sachs has been described as “arguably the world’s foremost proponent of population control,” including abortion.

Voice of the Family charges that environmental issues such as climate change have become “an umbrella to cover a wide spectrum of attacks on human life and the family.”

Although Sachs likes to claim he was an adviser to Pope John Paul II, the noted anti-communist and pro-life pontiff, Sachs simply served as a member of a group of economists invited to confer with the Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace in advance of the release of a papal document.

In fact, Pope John Paul II had worked closely with the Reagan administration in opposition to communism and the global population control movement. He once complained that a U.N. conference on population issues was designed to “destroy the family” and was the “snare of the devil.”

Pope Francis, however, seems to have embraced the very movements opposed by John Paul II.

Sachs, who has emerged as a very influential Vatican adviser, recently tweeted that he was “thrilled” to be at the Vatican “discussing moral dimensions of climate change and sustainable development.” The occasion was a Vatican workshop on global warming on April 28, 2015, sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Roman Catholic Church. Sachs was a featured speaker.

The plan going forward involves the launching of what are called “Sustainable Development Goals,” as envisioned by a Sustainable Development Solutions Network run by none other than Jeffrey Sachs.

“The Network has proposed draft Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which contain provisions that are radically antagonistic to the right to life from conception to natural death, to the rights and dignity of the family and to the rights of parents as the primary educators of their children,” states the group Voice of the Family.

In July, a Financing for Development conference will be held, in order to develop various global tax proposals, followed by a conference in Paris in December to complete a new climate change agreement.

Before that December conference, however, Sachs says the pope will call on the world at the United Nations to join the crusade for a New World Order.

Sachs says, “Pope Francis will come to the United States and the United Nations in New York on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the United Nations, and at the moment when the world’s 193 governments are resolved to take a step in solidarity toward a better world. On Sept. 25, Pope Francis will speak to the world leaders—most likely the largest number of assembled heads of state and government in history—as these leaders deliberate to adopt new Sustainable Development Goals for the coming generation. These goals will be a new worldwide commitment to build a world that aims to harmonize the pursuit of economic prosperity with the commitments to social inclusion and environmental sustainability.”

Rather than emphasize the absolute need for safeguarding individual rights in the face of government overreach and power, Sachs writes that the Gospel teachings of humility, love and justice, “like the teachings of Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius,” can take us on a “path to happiness through compassion” and “become our guideposts back to safety.”

Writing elsewhere in the new issue of America, Christiana Z. Peppard, an assistant professor of theology, science and ethics at Fordham University, writes about the “planetary pope,” saying, “What is really at stake in the collective response to the pope’s encyclical is not, ultimately, whether our treasured notions of theology, science, reality or development can accommodate moral imperatives. The real question is whether we are brave enough and willing to try.”

The plan is quite simple: world government through global taxes, with a religious face to bring it about.

03/12/15

Catholic Church Captured by “Progressive Forces”

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Armando Valladares, Castro’s political prisoner for 22 years, said his Catholic faith was strengthened behind bars by hearing young Catholics shouting “Viva Cristo Rey,” for “Long Live Christ the King,” and “down with communism!” as they faced the firing squad. It has been his hope that Cuba would one day be free of communism. But he is far less hopeful now that Pope Francis has taken measures that he says “objectively favor the political and ecclesiastical left in Latin America” and could undermine the “Christian future of the Americas.”

Meanwhile, Marxist writer Richard Greeman has written an extraordinary article, “Catholicism: The New Communism?,” arguing that “progressive forces” have “captured” the Vatican, and that Francis is conducting a “purge” of traditional elements, such as those loyal to anti-communist Pope John Paul II.

Valladares, author of Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag, was the United States Ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission under the Reagan and Bush administrations. He writes in a recent column that Francis was the “most eminent architect and mediator” of the Obama administration deal with Cuba that will “now provide the repressive apparatus of the Cuban regime with rivers of money and favorable publicity.”

He goes on, “We are witnessing one of the greatest examples of media sleights-of-hand in history: From a well-deserved image of aggressor, a regime which for decades spearheaded bloody revolutions in Latin America and Africa and continues to spread its tentacles in the three Americas, has been craftily made to look like a victimized underdog.”

He says the responsibility lies with the unexpected rise of a Francis-Obama “axis” in foreign affairs that benefits Marxist governments throughout Latin America.

Valladares, who received the Citizen’s Presidential Medal from President Ronald Reagan, was sentenced to 30 years in prison in communist Cuba in 1960 for being philosophically and religiously opposed to communism. He was tortured and kept in isolation for refusing to be “re-educated.” He was released after 22 years in prison, in 1982, when international pressure was brought to bear on the regime.

Valladares says it’s not just the Cuba betrayal that concerns him. He notes that Francis overturned the suspension of Nicaraguan priest Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, a former communist Sandinista foreign minister and a leading pro-Castro figure in liberation theology.

Despite his credentials as a political prisoner turned human rights activist and powerful voice for freedom, his column on the Obama-Francis “axis” has received very little attention. An associate says it seems “too politically incorrect,” an apparent reference to the fact that Francis is a global media star for identifying with the poor, and that liberals and conservatives alike are reluctant to criticize him.

Valladares, however, says the pope has gone far beyond taking up the cause of poor people. His column notes that Francis personally attended something called the World Meeting of Popular Movements last October in Rome. “It gathered 100 revolutionary world leaders, including well-known Latin American professional agitators,” Valladares points out. “The meeting turned out to be a kind of marketing ‘beatification’ of these Marxist-inspired revolutionary figures.”

One of the participants in the Vatican event was Evo Morales, the Marxist President of Bolivia who dedicated his election victory last year to Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the late Venezuelan Marxist ruler, Hugo Chávez.

The Vatican’s own description of the meeting referred to changing “an economy of exclusion” and “an idolatrous system of money.” The statement went on, “Together we want to discuss the structural causes of so much inequality (inequidad) which robs us of work (labor), housing (domus) and land (terra), which generates violence and destroys nature. We also want to face the challenge Francis himself sets puts [sic] to us with courage and intelligence: to seek radical proposals to resolve the problems of the poor.”

Valladares isn’t the only one to notice the “radical” or leftward drift of the papacy. Greeman’s article wondering if Catholicism is the “new communism” appears in New Politics, a socialist magazine “committed to the advancement of the peace and anti-intervention movements” and which “stands in opposition to all forms of imperialism…”

New Politics has strong links to the Democratic Socialists of America, a group that backed Barack Obama’s political career from the start. Its “sponsors” include Noam Chomsky, Frances Fox Piven, Michael Eric Dyson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West and the late communist historian Howard Zinn.

Greeman notes that the world’s Catholic Bishops have “explicitly pointed to capitalism as the basic cause of impending global catastrophe,” in the form of climate change, and have “called for a new economic order.” He was referring to a group of Catholic Bishops who met at the U.N. climate talks last December and blamed “the dominant global economic system, which is a human creation,” for global warming. They argued for “a new financial and economic order” and the phasing out of the use of fossil fuels.

Greeman says the Bishops’ attack on capitalism was generally ignored, even on the left, and he understands why. There have been so many “rapid changes” coming out of Rome “since the ascension to the Throne of Saint Peter” by Pope Francis that it is hard to keep up with them, he says.

Francis will issue a Vatican document, known as an encyclical, on climate change in June or July.

Greeman writes that these “radically anti-capitalist Catholic positions” have got him wondering whether Catholicism is “the new Communism,” Rome “the new Moscow,” and the church “the new Comintern.” The term “Comintern” refers to the Communist International, an association of national communist parties started by Lenin.

Growing up as a “red diaper baby” during the Cold War, Greeman writes, Catholicism was “synonymous with militant anti-Communism.” But changes that started coming years ago in the church have been accelerating under Francis, he writes. He attributes some of this “change” to Francis, who is from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a Jesuit, which is a “progressive” religious order whose “solid organization and discipline” and “attempts to take over the Church” go back centuries.

Greeman refers to the Catholic or “universal” Church as “the only actually existing organized world-party,” whose “vast wealth and influence are now in Francis’ hands.” He writes about “the capture” of the church by “progressive forces,” a development which opens up “huge possibilities for human liberation and perhaps a chance for the planet to avoid climate catastrophe.” He believes Francis “and his allies” are now conducting a “purge of the apparatus” in the Vatican.

Writing in Links, an international socialist journal, Canadian activist Judith Marshall discusses meeting the pope during the World Meeting of Popular Movements and witnessing his presentation to the group. “Pope Francis’ forthright statements on the social ministry of the church hearken back to the 1960s and 1970s when liberation theology was such a dynamic force in promoting struggles for social justice, particularly in Latin America,” she wrote. “The symbolism of a World Meeting of Popular Movements which brought a multitude of the poor right into [the] heart of the Vatican has not been lost on those looking for a resurgence of liberation theology.”

Liberation theology was manufactured by the old KGB to dupe Christians into supporting Marxism.

She also insisted that Francis “has arguably made the Papacy the most radical and consistent voice in pointing to the profanity of global inequality and exclusion. He has also repeatedly named the inordinate power of multinational corporations and finance capital as key factors in reproducing global poverty and destruction of the planet.”

She says Francis met with several Marxist activists from Latin America and even met privately with President Morales of Bolivia who “stressed how Mother Earth had become ill from capitalism,” and that “under the prevailing global economy, the planet would actually do better without humans—but humans need the planet.”

In a previous meeting Morales told the pope, “For me, you are brother Francis.” The pope responded, “As it should be, as it should be.”