Feb 13, 2014 No Comments ›› Infidel Alie
Excerpted from FOX NEWS: John Podesta, the former Clinton Administration chief of staff who is spearheading President Barack Obama’s aggressive strategy of government-by-regulation, has also been helping United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with an even more ambitious job: setting the stage to radically transform the world’s economic, environmental and social agenda.
That effort—a colossal and sweeping form of global behavior modification–is supposed to get a new kick-start at a special U.N. summit of world leaders to be convened by Ban in New York City on September 25.
Its supporters hope that effort will end next year in a new international treaty that will bind all 193 U.N. members– including the U.S– to a still formless “universal sustainable development agenda” for the planet that will take effect in 2020.
“Developing a single, sustainable development agenda is critical,” says a report produced in May, 2013 by a 27-member “High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons” hand-picked by Ban to help focus the discussion and frame the effort required to make the huge and lengthy project a success.
The high-level panel report was chaired by British Prime Minister David Cameron and the presidents of Indonesia and Liberia. The sole American among the international luminaries, who spent nearly a year at their efforts and endorsed them through a process of consensus, was Podesta.
The question is, critical to what? And the answer, according to that panel, is pretty much everything, in what it called a series of “big, transformative shifts.”
Their report opens with the challenge to end “extreme poverty, in all its forms;” and declares, “We can be the first generation in human history to end hunger and ensure that every person achieves a basic standard of wellbeing. But it then adds: “ending extreme poverty is just the beginning, not the end.”
The new agenda is also intended to bring “a new sense of global partnership into national and international politics”; must cause the world to “act now to halt the alarming pace of climate change and environmental degradation;” and bring about a “rapid shift to sustainable patterns of consumption and production,” to name just a few things itemized in the document.
Moreover, it apparently also must spark a planetary psychological sea-change: “The new global partnership should encourage everyone to alter their worldview, profoundly and dramatically,” the report declares.
At the time he joined the high-level panel and helped to shape its radical and ambitious exhortations, Podesta was head of the Center for American Progress , a think tank that he founded in 2003.
The Center is closely supportive of the objectives of the Obama Administration and says its aim is to “provide long-term leadership and support to the progressive movement” and “shape the national debate” in the U.S. on a wide variety of issues, from energy to economic growth, national security and climate change.
In 2010, Podesta became one of the most high-profile exponents of the idea that the Administration could advance its agenda in the face of Congressional opposition from Republicans through executive action, when his staff authored a 54-page Center for American Progress paper on the topic.
“The ability of President Obama to accomplish important change through [executive] powers should not be underestimated,” he wrote in a forward to the document.
Podesta left the Center last month to take up his latest White House assignment.
The high-level panel, meantime, dissolved last fall, after delivering its report to U.N. Secretary-General Ban.
A so-called Open Working Group of the U.N. General Assembly is now currently hammering out specifics of the proposals that will be presented at the summit this upcoming September as a series of Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, successors to the U.N.’s much-touted but unevenly successful Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, which expire in 2015. Keep Reading
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