In an important pre-Christmas action that received scant media attention, President Obama announced appointments to a number of key administrative posts, including nine members of the President’s Global Development Council, an organization he created by executive order one year ago, on February 9, 2012. The appointments will turn out to be very important as they pertain to the dispersal of billions of dollars in foreign aid, particularly when it comes to promoting programs and policies of the United Nations on abortion, population control, homosexual practices, condom distribution, Agenda 21, “sustainable development,” “green energy,” wealth redistribution, and other controversial issues.
Pro-life/pro-family organizations are understandably alarmed at the overwhelmingly pro-abortion tilt of the president’s appointments, including the billionaire husband of Senator Dianne Feinstein and the former president of global development for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, now one of the largest funders of global population-control programs.
The Obama executive order states:
To help protect national security and further American economic, humanitarian, and strategic interests in the world, it is the policy of the Federal Government to promote and elevate development as a core pillar of American power and chart a course for development, diplomacy, and defense to reinforce and complement one another….
There is established the President’s Global Development Council (Council). The Council shall be established for administrative purposes within the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) subject to the foreign policy and budgetary guidance of the Secretary of State.
In addition to the “Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the USAID Administrator, and the Chief Executive Officer of the Millennium Challenge Corporation,” the executive order specifies that the Council shall be composed of “not more than 12 individuals from outside the Federal Government appointed by the President. Appointed members of the Council may serve as representatives of a variety of sectors, including, among others, institutions of higher education, non-profit and philanthropic organizations, civil society, and private industry.”
The individuals named in December to the President’s Global Development Council are:
Mohamed A. El-Erian (Chair)
Richard C. Blum
Sylvia Mathews Burwell
Esther Duflo
Sarah Beardsley Degnan Kambou
James M. Manyika
William K. Reilly
Steven Schwager
Smita Singh
In a February 7 press statement, the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) charged that “President Obama’s appointments last month to his Global Development Council signal his intent to prioritize abortion over necessary life-saving health issues.”
The C-FAM press statement notes:
A recent global health study assessing deaths related to disease found that 1.4 million people, mainly children, died from diarrhea in 2010 compared to 37,100 from abortion related deaths. Yet well-funded foundations, rich individuals, and wealthy countries relentlessly drive the global public health debate toward lowering the fertility of poor women in developing countries and advancing abortion where it is restricted.
Funding for overseas reproductive health and family planning (RH/FP) programs has increased some 40% under President Obama. The USAID 2013 budget for RH/FP is $530 million. This is more than the budgets for tuberculosis, public health threats, pandemic influenza, vulnerable children, and nutrition combined.
Who’s Who? Obama’s Appointees
Mohamed A. El-Erian, named to chair the Council, is a celebrity economist and Establishment financial guru who co-chairs the huge Pacific Investment Management Company, LLC (commonly called PIMCO), which has nearly $2 trillion in assets under management. After serving 15 years on the staff of the International Monetary Fund, El-Erian, like many others at the IMF and World Bank, parlayed his political contacts into a top position on Wall Street (Cititbank) before launching PIMCO. C-FAM notes that “El-Erian served as a board member for the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), which advocates for legalized and unrestricted access to abortion. The PIMCO Foundation issues grants to groups that advance sexual and reproductive rights in developing countries.”
Richard C. Blum, the billionaire president of Blum Capital, is best known as “Mr. Feinstein,” the other half of the “Feinstein Machine” headed by his wife, Senator Dianne Feinstein. As California’s premier “Power Couple,” Blum and Feinstein combine her political connections with his financial networks to push the left-wing Democratic Party agenda while reaping huge personal monetary rewards. He is a major donor to and fundraiser for the Democratic Party. C-FAM notes that “Senator Feinstein is a staunch supporter of abortion rights with a long anti-life voting record.” It should also be noted that both Blum and Feinstein are members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), one of the premier Establishment think tanks leading the push for population control and global government under the United Nations. Sen. Feinstein is also a longtime member of the Trilateral Commission, an even more secretive globalist group that functions as an international, elite big sister to the CFR.
Sylvia Mathews Burwell, observes C-FAM, is “president of Walmart Foundation and former president of the Global Development program for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was also appointed. The Gates Foundation is a large supporter of abortion-related groups, with Melinda Gates securing commitments of $4.6 billion last summer at the London Family Planning Summit.”
Esther Duflo, a French economist and MIT professor of “poverty alleviation and development economics,” is, reportedly, a believer in “redistribution” politics. She and several of her MIT disciples reportedly played significant roles as advisors for France’s Socialist Party, helping Francois Hollande win the presidency in the 2012 national elections. Duflo is a founder and director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. “The Poverty Action Lab,” says C-FAM, “partners with groups working in developing countries to achieve sexual and reproductive health and rights.”
Sarah Beardsley Degnan Kambou is president of the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), which we noted above “advocates for legalized and unrestricted access to abortion.” She was appointed in 2010 by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to represent ICRW on the U.S. National Commission for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
James M. Manyika is a director and senior partner at McKinsey & Company, the global consulting firm that has been tainted with many scandals (Enron, Galleon, GE Capital, as well as failing to see the global financial crisis until very late in the game — and several years after The New American foretold the coming housing bubble pop). He is a senior fellow at the left-wing Brookings Institute and a member of the board of trustees of the Aspen Institute, a major haunt of one-world Insiders.
William K. Reilly has parlayed his post as President George H.W. Bush’s EPA administrator into a very lucrative career, first as president of the environmental giant World Wildlife Fund, then as founder of Aqua International Partners, L.P., a private equity fund. He is also an advisor to TPG Capital and sits on the board of directors of such major corporations as DuPont and Conoco-Phillips and the Packard Foundation. He is also a longtime member of the CFR.
Steven Schwager is past CEO of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Smita Singh is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group of the Aspen Institute and was the founding director of the Global Development Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a major funder of population control and globalist UN ventures.
The federal officials serving on the President’s Global Development Council add to the CFR’s globalist influence in pushing the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, a program for global central planning and the socialist redistribution of the planet’s resources.
Heading up the President’s Council, as we’ve noted, is the secretary of state. Hillary Clinton, who just stepped down from that post, and who helped create the President’s Council, is not officially a member of the CFR, but her husband, Bill Clinton, and daughter, Chelsea Clinton, are members. Hillary has been a fairly regular speaker at the CFR and has infamously stated publicly that she looks to the CFR to be told what to think and what to do. When congratulating the CFR on its new Washington, D.C. headquarters in 2009, Mrs. Clinton said:
We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.
She also fondly referred to the CFR’s headquarters in New York City as “the mothership,” noting that she had visited it often. The new secretary of state, John Kerry, is a longtime CFR member, and a committed globalist.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, of course, is also a longtime member of the CFR. The current CEO of the federal Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), Daniel W. Yohannes, is not a CFR member, but the MCC’s board of directors is totally dominated (seven out of nine directors) by CFR members: John Kerry (chairman of the board), Timothy Geithner (vice Chariman of the Board), Lorne Craner, Mark Green, Morton Halperin, Neal Wolin, and Rajiv Shah. To top it off, the man in charge of day-to-day administration of the President’s Global Development Council is the Administrator of USAID Rajiv Shah, who we’ve already noted is a member of the CFR and sits on the board of the Millennium Challenge Corporation.
The MCC high-level connection to the President’s Global Development Council should dispel any doubts about either the CFR dominance of the Council or the certainty that the new federal creation will be used to promote the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG). On October 8, 2010, the CFR sponsored a speaker conference at its New York headquarters entitled, “Evaluating Progress on the UN Millennium Development Goals.” One of the principal speakers at that CFR confab was T. Charles Cooper (CFR), vice president for congressional and public affairs for the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Cooper told his CFR confreres:
Well, two weeks ago at the MDG summit, President Obama used the occasion to announce the first comprehensive U.S. government development policy in over 50 years.
And we in the administration are very excited about the fact that the policy is focused and embraces the Millennium Development Goals….
One is the fact that it’s a moral imperative, it’s a national-security imperative. And it’s an economic imperative. And so what the president has said is that we’re going to raise development to be one of the three real important pillars of national security, with foreign policy, diplomacy — with diplomacy and defense. So it’s really an announcement by the president that the United States government embraces the Millennium Development Goals.
Thus, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which was proposed and supported by President George W. Bush and many Republicans in Congress — supposedly as a more “conservative” alternative to typical USAID grants and the UN’s radical Millennium Development Goals — has become the handmaiden to President Obama’s even more expansive and radical Global Development Council.
Related articles:
United Nations Millennium Development Conference Set for September 20
UN Millennium Development Goals Conference Issues Report
Obama’s Bill Would Commit the United States to UN Poverty Goals
