Category Archives: Government

DEFEATING THE ISLAMO-PROGRESSIVE AXIS

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By Matt Barber

There’s evidently a fine line between a “hate crime” and a BLT.

The Reuters headline screamed: “Bacon found at NY Muslim celebration probed as possible hate crime.” I was expecting the subtitle: “Cops bring lettuce & tomato, dispose of evidence,” but to no avail. (Pork, of course, is verboten in Islamic culture. Don’t knock it, I say.)

Condemnation was swift and judgment final: “It’s anti-Islamic sentiment – a sign they don’t want us to feel welcome,” charged Cyrus McGoldrick, spokesman for the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR.

Indeed, at the very least such a stupid, “Islamophobic” prank was, um, tasteless.

Except that it wasn’t.

A caller to a local newspaper took credit for the crime: “This is-I was reading the article about the horrible incident of bacon and Muslims in the park and I wanted to let you know that is not my intention. I had put the bacon there. It was going bad in my trunk and I put it out for the scavengers like the opossums and the raccoons and sea gulls, and I did not intend for that to cause anybody any problems.”

So, apparently, knee-jerk liberals and mainstream media have egg on their face once again. (Add toast and you get a Denny’s Grand Slam.)

Let’s put aside for a moment that we live in a hyper-sensitive, politically correct culture wherein hurting someone’s feelings is, quite literally, a federal offense. I’m more interested in the blaring double standard.

Bacon at a Muslim picnic? “Hate crime.” A crucifix with the image of Christ submerged in urine? “Art.”

I know, there was that time a group of tea-partiers stormed the mosque in Lansing, Mich, threw Oscar Mayer ham slices on the children, mocked the women for their hijabs and screamed: “Mohammed slept with a nightlight!” but …

No, actually, it was a group of homosexual activists who stormed a Christian church in Lansing, Mich, threw condoms at people, committed gross displays of public perversion in front of children and screamed, “Jesus was gay!”

“Hate crime, right?” Not a chance. Not even a ticket. In fact, law enforcement knew about the “protest” in advance and refused to send police. They sent a reporter instead.

You get the point.

Indeed, secular-”progressive” hostility toward Christianity is at an all-time high. But it’s not just “gay” activists and other “progressive” extremists. It’s systemic. It’s Democrat-tested and Obama-approved.

The Family Research Council, or FRC – no stranger to violent “hate crimes” that somehow aren’t “hate crimes” – has released a study cataloging a vast sampling of the left’s anti-Christian attacks. (The study can be found at ReligiousHostility.org. I highly recommend you review it before stepping into the voting booth this November.)

Yet the same “progressives” who find “homophobia” under every bed, and “Islamophobia” around each corner, have never imagined the cancerous “Christaphobia” that courses throughout their very own veins. Their narrow little minds won’t allow it. The poor sap with hateful halitosis is usually the last to know.

Still, what’s most remarkable is that secular-”progressives” and Islamists – such as the aforementioned CAIR and President Obama’s “Muslim Brotherhood” pals – have forged a bizarre and notably incongruous sociopolitical partnership.

Consider, for instance, that central to Muslim teaching is the mandate that homosexuals, when discovered, are to be summarily executed. Yet, homosexual activists and other liberals are usually the first to cry “Islamophobia” if anyone points out the bloody precepts central to mainstream Islamic dogma.

And how about women? Well, according to Islamic law – again, mainstream, not fringe – women are treated as chattel and can be beaten with impunity for any reason or no reason at all.

Yet liberal feminists – “tolerant” to a fault when it serves their agenda – will trip over themselves to ignore such “cultural diversity.”

The only explanation, as far as I can tell, is best illustrated by the maxim: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

But, who is this common enemy?

Well, it too is signified by an alliance. This alliance, however, is most simpatico. It consists of Christians and Jews worldwide. It too is built around a shared cause.

But unlike that of the Islamo-”progressive” axis, this cause intends freedom, not tyranny – representative democracy, not control. Most importantly, this Judeo-Christian cause is built upon the rock of truth given us by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The God of the living, not the dead. The great “I Am.”

I’m currently reading the two-part work, “Democracy in America,” written by Alexis De Tocqueville in 1835. The French statesman and historian immersed himself in American society and was left stunned by the indissoluble synthesis of Christianity and American culture.

He observed at the time that in America, “Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts – the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.”

“There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America, and there can be no greater proof of its utility and of its conformity to human nature than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.”

“The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds,” wrote De Tocqueville, “that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.”

Impossible so it must have seemed. Regrettably, however, De Tocqueville could never have foreseen today’s Islamo-”progressive” machine. It relentlessly endeavors to stifle Christianity’s profound influence on America.

Indeed, that influence will surly continue to fade lest Christians – both individually and corporately – again shine bright as the morning sun.

The historical record is indisputable. For almost two-and-a-half centuries, biblical Christianity has been America’s moral compass. It was Christians who, as wrote De Tocqueville, made America “the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.”

We’ve lost that moral compass and, today, wander aimlessly in the wilderness as a result. It’s up to Christian America to again find the way.

We must.

For if we don’t lead, who then will the world follow?

CHRISTIANS, SILENCE IS NOT AN OPTION by Matt Barber

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With the exception of one column previously penned, I pray this becomes my most widely read to date.

The secular left has mastered use of the Internet to further its extremist goals. In fact, President Obama’s web-based “Organizing for America” propaganda machine may have given him the 2008 election.

Let’s beat them at their own game.

To that end, I have a strange request. I’m asking each God-fearing, freedom-loving American who reads this column to forward it, post it, tweet it, print it out and give it to every pastor, priest or cleric you know. If you don’t know any, give it to someone who does.

Why? I agree with Barack Obama that November 2012 represents the most important election of our lifetimes – perhaps our history. Of course, that’s where my agreement with Mr. Obama both begins and abruptly ends.

Here’s the operable question: Do we want America “fundamentally transformed” to mirror the secular-socialist ideals of the radical leftist currently “occupying” the White House?

In Barack Obama’s America, individual freedom is trampled beneath jackboots as a matter of course. It’s already happening at an unprecedented rate.

One need only look to the HHS mandate forcing Christian groups – both Catholic and Protestant – to violate, under penalty of law, biblical prohibitions against abortion homicide.

Or consider recent attempts by multiple elected officials, all Democrats, to shutdown Chick-fil-A – a private, Christian-owned business – simply because its leadership holds the biblical view of marriage.

Is this George Washington’s America, or Joseph Stalin’s Russia?

It’s definitely not your father’s USA.

Instead, wouldn’t we prefer the America envisioned by our Founding Fathers? A constitutional republic wherein individual liberty – whether economic, First Amendment or Second Amendment-related – is sacrosanct and off limits?

Pastors, you’re it. You’re our front line of defense. It’s up to you to rally the troops. Now begins the second American Revolution and, as with the first, it’s on you – men of the cloth – to take the lead.

That is, if you hope to remain free to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Speaking of chicken: In recent years there’s been an epidemic of cultural inaction exhibited by far too many ministers of the gospel. It’s fear-based. “Oh, I don’t talk about political issues,” they say. “You know, ‘separation of Church and State’ and all that.”

Baloney.

If this is you – and only you and our Lord know for sure – you’ve been deceived by the enemies of God. You’ve chosen the easy way out – the path of least resistance. This is something Christ, whom all Christians are called to emulate, never did – not once.

So, respectfully, man-up, Padre! Be the “salt and light of the world,” as Christ so admonished.

But you don’t have to go it alone. There are detailed, easily digestible tools available. Civil-rights firm Liberty Counsel, for instance, is distributing more than 100,000 copies of “Silence is Not an Option,” a concise, though comprehensive, DVD and printed material collection informing pastors and churches about what is permissible regarding political activity (Please, get it for your church at LC.org or by calling 1-800-671-1776).

“The church must be empowered to confront the assaults on our culture, our faith, and our freedom,” said Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel. ”I don’t want any pastor, church leader or lay person to say, ‘What more could I have done to protect life and liberty?’”

“Silencing people of faith in the public square has always been the goal of those who realize the influence that pastors, churches and people of faith have on elections. I want pastors to remove the muzzle and replace it with a megaphone,” he said. “Pastors and churches have a lot of freedom to address biblical and moral issues, to educate people about the candidates, and to encourage people to vote. Not one church has ever lost its tax-exemption for endorsing or opposing candidates or for supporting or opposing local, state or federal laws.”

Did you get that? Despite hundreds of thousands of threatening letters sent by hard-left groups like the ACLU and Barry Lynn’s Americans United, not a single church has lost tax-exemption for socio-political activity – zip, zero, nada. Not even for endorsing candidates from the pulpit.

Indeed, if these anti-Christian bullies had been around two-and-a-half centuries ago, and our forefathers had paid them any mind, we may never have had the first American Revolution.

Don’t let them halt the second.

We’re on the precipice of the abyss, and, pastors, I think you know it. But know this too: There’s a whole lot relating to both culture and politics you can both say and do, and very little – if anything – you can’t.

Churches can educate about political, moral and biblical issues. These kinds of issues – whether abortion, marriage, feeding the poor or any community issue – are never off limits from the pastor’s pulpit, even if politicians are also talking about them. “Silence is Not an Option” systematically addresses the misrepresentations used to muzzle America’s pastors and Christian leaders.

Leading up to Ronald Reagan’s landslide presidential victory in 1980, Rev. Jerry Falwell captured the crux of the church’s apathy problem: “What is wrong in America today?” he asked. “We preachers – and there are 340,000 of us who pastor churches – we hold the nation in our hand. And I say this to every preacher: We are going to stand accountable before God if we do not stand up and be counted.”

Dr. Falwell’s words ring no less true today.

Imagine the benefit to our culture if thousands of churches across America registered millions of Christians to vote. How about pledge-drives wherein pastors ask tens-of-millions of Christians to simply commit to voting biblical values?

The possibilities are limitless.

Proverbs 4:18 reminds us: “The path of the righteous is like the morning sun, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.”

Shine bright, salt and light. Don’t be choked into dark silence.

Because silence is not an option.

It can’t be.

Christians, silence is not an option

Matt Barber (@jmattbarber on Twitter) is an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. He serves as Vice President of Liberty Counsel Action (LCA on Facebook) .

The Grasp of Socialist International (SI) by William F. Jasper

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Forcing Change, Volume 4, Issue 11

Editor’s Note: For years I have wanted to write an expose on the Socialist International, an umbrella organization that pulls together socialist, proto-communist, and various other Marxist-based political parties. Although most people in North America have never heard of the SI, it’s one of the largest political associations on the planet, and is a key driver in promoting global governance within the international community.

My first real taste of the Socialist International was in the late 1990s when Canada’s third largest political party – the New Democratic Party – openly promoted a world tax and world government in the House of Commons. Soon thereafter, the idea of a world tax came up for vote and it passed, officially making Canada the first nation to establish such a tax in law. Essentially, when the world adopts such a measure, Canada will be the first to step up as a global payer (see Forcing Change, Volume 1, Issue 8).

In the context of understanding the NDP world-tax agenda, I discovered that the party was a full member of the Socialist International. In fact, it was and is, the only Canadian member of the SI. For readers in my country, this may seem shocking – but it also explains the foreign policy and domestic welfare agenda of the NDP. From that point on, I have studied and monitored the SI and its role as a global governance trendsetter.

Therefore, when I came across this article by William F. Jasper, I jumped at the chance to share it with you. For this article does a remarkable job in bridging the Communist/Socialist platform of the SI with major developments taking place today. Read it, then re-read it. For in doing so, you will have a grasp of how the global political chess game is played. Furthermore, I have attached the complete list of member parties in the Socialist International at the back of this edition of Forcing Change. This list alone speaks volumes.

 

 

World government and world socialism. Those are the explicit goals of the Socialist International (SI), one of the planet’s most influential organizations, but one that is virtually unknown to the vast majority of Americans, since it is rarely mentioned in the major U.S. media.

For the last two weeks of December 2009 and throughout all of January 2010, the headline story at the top of the home page of the Socialist International’s website boasted of the organization’s prominent influence and clout at the recently concluded United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark.

However, the brief article, entitled “SI at COP15 in Copenhagen: reaffirming social democratic priorities,” does not begin to do justice to the Socialist International’s central role, not only in pushing the current alarmism over global warming, but also in building a global militant environmental lobby from 1970 to the present. [Editor’s Note: SI has been influential in the setting the agenda for the latest UN climate change talks in Mexico].

The SI was most notably represented in Copenhagen by its president, George Papandreou, who is also the current Prime Minister of Greece. “At this time, we are observing the birth of global governance,” Papandreou said while addressing the UN summit on December 18, 2009. “We must, however, agree to an obligation and be committed to carrying this out,” he stressed.

We know now, of course, that the Copenhagen palaver failed to produce a binding agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol or produce the structures the SI is hoping to establish within the United Nations to transform it into a genuine global government. That failure, however, is viewed by the SI as a temporary setback, which will be remedied at future annual climate confabs, such as the UN’s 2010 follow-up to Copenhagen in Mexico.

At its 1962 Congress in Oslo, Norway, the Socialist International plainly declared:

“The ultimate objective of the parties of the Socialist International is nothing less than world government…. Membership of the United Nations must be made universal.”

The SI has never wavered from that goal, though it has softened its rhetoric, adopting the mushier, less threatening term “global governance” to replace its earlier appeals to “world government.”

This is important to keep in mind, since current and former Prime Ministers and Presidents who are members of the SI comprise a large and influential contingent of world leaders who figure prominently at global and regional summits. Currently, the Socialist International boasts 170 political parties and organizations worldwide, including many that are currently in power running national governments.

Prominent SI member parties include:
• Britain’s Labour Party (Gordon Brown, Prime Minister),
• Australia’s Labour Party (Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister),
• South Africa’s African National Congress (Jacob Zuma, President),
• Spain’s Socialist Workers’ Party (Jose Zapatero, President),
• Nicaragua’s Sandinista Liberation Front (Daniel Ortega, President),
• Namibia’s South West Africa People’s Organization (Hifikepunye Lucas Pohamba, President),
• Chile’s Socialist Party (Michelle Bachelet, President), and
• Egypt’s National Democratic Party (Hosni Mubarak, President).

These and other SI member parties and their leaders have been fairly open in their calls for “global governance” to address what they claim are “global crises” that cannot be addressed (they say) in the current system of sovereign nation states. As The New American has reported, Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd have been especially outspoken, with hysterical pronouncements on the supposed need for UN governance to stave off supposed catastrophic global warming.

In a speech in November 2009, Prime Minister Rudd denounced global-warming skeptics— including respected scientists and politicians — as evil “climate-change deniers,” who are “dangerous” and are “holding the world to ransom.”

As Chancellor of the Exchequer under Prime Minister Tony Blair, and then as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has pushed for transforming the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and World Bank) into a full-blown United Nations Economic Council, to complement the UN Security Council. Brown is a member of the Fabian Society, the British socialist organization that served as the model for, and incubator of, the SI. Indeed, the SI world headquarters in London and the Fabian Society’s London office are but two hands on the same body.

On January 16, 2010, Brown delivered his “Causes to Fight For” speech to the Fabian Society New Year Conference. He has addressed the group many times. Although the Fabians are usually presented as “moderate” and “democratic” socialists, the Fabian Society has been a key ally of the communists from Lenin’s time to the present, including providing special assistance in covering up Josef Stalin’s unspeakable crimes.

The Socialist International Congresses, as well as the SI’s various committees and commissions, have issued a stream of reports and statements over the years reiterating its 1962 call for world government/global governance. “Governance in a Global Society – The Social Democratic Approach,” issued by the XXII Congress of the Socialist International in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2003 is a prime example. The declaration of SI’s 2006 Council Meeting in Santiago, Chile, which met under the banner of “Governance, energy, and climate change, new horizons for peace,” is another.

The Santiago meeting also provided the occasion for setting up the Socialist International Commission for a Sustainable World Society (SICSWS), which is now joined at the hip with the United Nations. SI’s Richard Lagos, the former president of Chile, co-chairs the CSWS with Goran Persson, the former Prime Minister of Sweden.

Lagos has also been appointed by Ban ki-Moon to serve simultaneously as Special Envoy of the United Nations Secretary-General on Climate Change.

“Global governance is no longer a concept but an urgent necessity,” declared the SI-CSWS at Santiago. It states further:

“Politics needs to be global to guarantee peace and stability; to safeguard the environment; to generate development and social cohesion; to ensure robust economies that can withstand speculative pressures and create fairness and opportunities for all.

“No other issue illustrates better the borderless and truly global nature of the challenges facing today’s world and the need to put forward common answers than global warming and climate change.”

Green, Pink, and Red

Ever since its inception in 1951, the Socialist International has made cosmetic efforts to distance itself from communist socialists. It continues to do so, sprinkling its calls for socialism and global governance with assurances of support for “democratic” principles. However, its democratic bona fides and its supposed opposition to totalitarian socialism are as threadbare today as they ever have been.

“During the Cold War, the SI aligned itself with communist terrorist Yasir Arafat and the PLO, the Soviet Union’s premier terror master. It was also comfortable maintaining close fraternal relations with the communist dictatorships of the Warsaw Pact, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Nicaragua’s Sandinista regimes became SI favorites.

When Gunther Guillaume, companion and closest aide to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, was exposed as a communist agent of the Soviet KGB/East German Stasi, Brandt was forced to resign as Chancellor. The Guillaume-KGB connection helped explain the incredible political positions Brandt had been taking vis-à-vis Moscow and the communist world. But Brandt’s KGB revelations didn’t phase the SI leadership, who allowed him to continue in office as the longest-serving president of the SI.

Not much has changed there; “reformed” communists and communist parties are welcomed with open arms and hold top posts in the SI. The aforementioned SI Commission for a Sustainable World Society is a case in point. Its members include Aleksander Kwasniewski, the former President of Poland, who was a die-hard Communist Party member until it became expedient to switch to the “reform” label. Likewise for CSWS member Sergei Mironov, who was an apparatchik in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and remains a stalwart supporter of Russia’s top KGB man, Prime Minister – Vladimir Putin.

Another SI poster boy is Sergei Stanishev, Prime Minister of Bulgaria and chairman of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (formerly called the Bulgarian Communist Party). Still another is Ayaz Mütallibov, the former communist dictator of Soviet Azerbaijan. And, of course, we should mention, once again, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, since his communist Sandinista regime has some special SI connections.

Perhaps one of the most important former members of the CSWS is Carol Browner, former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration, and currently Director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy in the Obama administration. For some reason, no “mainstream” journalist has thought it important to question Browner or President Obama about Browner’s membership in and activities with this SI commission.

One of the most important SI-Sandinista ties comes in the person of former Sandinista junta member Miguel D’Escoto, who now sits as President of the United Nations General Assembly. As we reported online in June 2009 (“UN’s Marxist Plan for Global Government”), D’Escoto’s UN Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System was chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, who is also simultaneously chairman of the SI’s Commission on Global Financial Issues.

Stiglitz’s 2003 book The Roaring Nineties was described by Bloomberg News as “a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s blueprint to reshape the U.S. economy.”

Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, “mentored several members of Obama’s economic team, including budget director Peter Orszag, 40, and Jason Furman, 38, deputy director of the National Economic Council,” according to Bloomberg.

In his autobiographic Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama writes of the “socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union” while a student at Columbia University in New York City. He has never explained what impact those conferences had on him, nor was he ever asked to do so during his interviews with the major media.

Joseph Stiglitz, the socialist economist and SI commission chairman, is now a professor at Obama’s alma mater, Columbia, and a mentor to the advisors who are devising Obama’s plans for socializing virtually all sectors of the American economy. And former Socialist International commissioner Carol Browner is leading the administration’s efforts to foist a regulatory control scheme on the American people that is more ambitious, intrusive, and potentially totalitarian than anything ever imagined by earlier socialist leaders such as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, or Mao Zedong: a global plan to control and regulate all energy production and consumption and all carbon dioxide emissions.

“Every breath you take, every move you make, I’ll be watching you.”

Those are lyrics to the 1983 hit by the British rock band The Police. If the Socialist International, the UN, and the Obama administration have their way, that may be the new theme song of the Global Green Police.

From Davos to Porto Allegre

The Socialist International serves as one of the most indispensable bridges by which the globalist elites transport their programs for world government to both the global business/financial leaders and the socialist/communist leaders of the world.

This important bridging function was on display during the last week of January 2010, as global leaders flocked to two competing – and, supposedly, opposing – world summits: the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, and the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Allegre, Brazil.

The Davos palaver is by far the more glamorous of the two events, usually featuring a roster of the super-rich (with names like Rockefeller, Rothschild, Gates, Buffet, Soros, and Branson), the politically connected (with names like Kissinger, Clinton, Greenspan, Bernanke, Summers, Sarkozy, and Blair), and the just-famous (with names like Pitt, Jolie, Bono, and Gere). Some 2,500-3,000 moguls and magnates, Presidents and potentates, network and confabulate in the planet’s most splendiferous four-day soiree.

The annual WEF event, it would seem, represents the ultimate gathering of the lords of capitalism. Meanwhile, the countering WSF in Porto Allegre is a radical congeries of some 30,000-50,000 socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists, Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, feminists, union activists, and environmentalists.

Decrying capitalist greed, corporate power, and globalization, the WSF leaders call for building a new global system based on “social and environmental justice.” Their heroes are Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and Brazil’s Lula da Silva.

Associated Press reporter Alan Clendenning reported on President Lula da Silva’s celebrity style at this year’s WSF. Wrote Clendenning:

“Former radical union leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva – known almost everywhere as Lula – was greeted like a rock star by activists in a sports stadium chanting ‘Lula, Lula, the warrior of the Brazilian people!’

“He got more cheers after promising to scold world leaders and bankers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and to tell them the free market policies they have espoused for decades were to blame for the worldwide financial crunch.”

Lula, a longtime activist leader of the communist Workers Party of Brazil, is not only a founder of the WSF, but also the key founder (with Fidel Castro) of the even more radical São Paulo Forum, which includes among its member organizations most of the official communist parties of Latin America, as well as notorious terrorist organizations. Among the São Paulo Forum members on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups are the Colombian FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombiana) and ELN (Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional), the Peruvian MRTA (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement), and the Chilean MIR (the Movement of the Revolutionary Left).

It must seem odd to some observers then, that President Lula, the radical socialist, is honored at both the WEF and the WSF. This year he was the first head of state to receive the World Economic Forum’s new “Global Statesmanship Award.”

Alas, due to high blood pressure and his doctor’s orders, he was forced to send a substitute to pick up his award and deliver his “scolding” speech to the Davos assembly. Like his communist comrades in Beijing, Lula is the frequent recipient of accolades from the leading lights of the business and financial worlds, for his supposedly pro-capitalist policies.

However, like the wily Chinese, Lula is merely following the program of patient gradualism advocated by the Fabian Socialists – and Lenin himself, who, in his New Economic Policy (NEP) gladly embraced partnerships with Western corporations with the aim of using capitalism to build communism to the point where it is strong enough to smash capitalism.

While Lula is not a formal member of the SI, he is a close ally. He hosted the SI’s 2003 Congress in Brazil, and was praised there by SI President George Papandreou. And SI leaders Papandreou, Zapatero, Zuma, Brown, and Rudd – to name a few – were at Davos to promote the Fabian globalist-socialist agenda.

Likewise, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not a formal SI member, but at this year’s Davos gathering, she was avidly pushing the socialist program of her British SI comrade, Gordon Brown. Calling for a global financial shake-up, she proposed the forging of a new charter that “may even lead to a UN Economic Council, just as the Security Council was created after World War II.”

Safeguarding the environment and reducing the poverty gap, Merkel told the WEF, are principles that “need to be enshrined in the form of a global economic order charter” that “could lead to the establishment of a UN economic council.

“Davos Man,” aka “Global Citizen”

While the WEF and WSF appear, at least on the surface, to be opposing each other on the issue of economic globalization, in reality they are both pushing for globalism, i.e., the development of the UN into an all-powerful world government.

The “Davos man,” says David Rothkopf, in Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, represents “the rise of a global power elite, a superclass” for the new “global era.” The Davos man represents, says Rothkopf, “the global citizen, the leader for whom borders [are] increasingly irrelevant.”

Rothkopf, who is himself a Davos man (president of a high-powered consulting firm, Garten Rothkopf; a former managing director of Kissinger Associates; and a veteran member of the Council on Foreign Relations) and regular WEF attendee, writes:

“These global elites have crystallized a tension between the almost 400-year-old idea of the nation-state as the defining unit of global governance, and the emerging reality of a world in which nations are not only diminishing in influence but also are being transcended both by transnational needs beyond their reach and transnational power centers advancing internationalist or supranationalist agendas.

“Internationalist vs. nationalist. Globalist vs. regionalist. A battle not over a redistribution of wealth but over the redistribution of sovereignty and power.”

Rothkopf is not exactly being honest in that last sentence above; the battle is indeed about redistribution of wealth – and sovereignty and power. But it is not about redistributing the wealth of the Davos globalists; it is about redistributing the wealth of the world’s productive middle classes in the developed nations to the political classes of the developing nations chosen by the globalists.

And the vehicles used to redistribute the wealth are the UN and its agencies, along with various national and regional “aid” agencies, as well as those NGOs favored with the imprimatur of the globalist power elite. FC

 

Forcing Change is a Canadian-based organization built on the research work of FC’s Chief Editor, Carl Teichrib.

 

http://www.forcingchange.org/

 

 

 

Civil Government: An Exposition of Romans 13:1-7, Part 4 by James Wilson

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Part 4

The design of the appointment of civil rulers, or of the institution of civil government.

“For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.” Verse 3.

This and the subsequent section furnish us with the key to the entire passage. Had the apostle merely enjoined subjection to civil authorities, as he does in the terms of the first and second, adding no explanations, giving no clue to the character of the power to which his injunction is designed to apply, it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, from the passage itself, to have shown any limitations — we might have been compelled to resort mainly to other Scriptures for light as to the duty really, after all, enjoined. We might, indeed, have obtained some light from the term ( ) and from the phrase ( ) we could have evaded the advocate of “passive obedience and non-resistance,” but we would almost have despaired of convincing him. But with the apostle’s own explanations all is clear. He enjoins obedience, but he adds a reason drawn from the character of the power, and so limits, most clearly and conclusively, his own injunction: “for rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.”

1. Paul here defines a government set up and engaged in attending to its appropriate functions: “Rulers are not a terror,” &c. Hitherto, the subject has been government — civil government as a divine institution. Here, for the first time, we meet with a direct reference to magistrates actually employed in administering the affairs of the commonwealth, including, of course, legislators, judges, and executive officers. This change of phraseology is not without design. It is clearly intended to establish a distinction — a distinction existing in the very nature of the case between the institution of government and governors themselves. The institution of government is to be studied, governors are to be tried, or if the expression be more correct, the entire character and operations of government, as it actually exists, urges its claim upon the citizen and the Christian.

2. The governors to whom the injunction of Paul applies “are not a terror to good works.” To what does Paul here refer? to what class of “works?” Does this phrase mean no more, as Tholuck explains it, than such works as are the opposite of resistance and rebellion? Most certainly not. Such an interpretation puts an entirely new meaning upon the phrase “good works,” and would, moreover, fix upon the apostle the charge of expressing himself with an unaccountable obscurity and meagerness. Does it mean such “works” as industry, honesty, and the orderly discharge of common, social, and relative duties? No doubt these are included in it. But even this is a very defective interpretation. There must be added, at least, such things as come under the head of common morality. But we go farther. Paul here speaks, not as a mere heathen philosopher, but as a Christian minister, and an apostle of Christ. What then are “good works?” The answer is clear. They are such as the law of Christ demands: they are all the external results and fruits of the operations of the Spirit of Christ. Among these, as already intimated, will be found all that is comprehended under the name of morals; but they include much more — Sabbath sanctification, the public profession of the name and truth of Christ — His worship, and efforts to advance his kingdom and interest. Thus Ephesians 2:10. “Created in Christ Jesus unto good works.” II Timothy 3:17. “That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.” I Timothy 3:1. “He that desireth the office of a bishop desireth a good work.” II Thessalonians 2:17. “Stablish you in every good work and work;” this good work being, in part, what is referred to elsewhere in addressing the Thessalonian church, that from them “the word of the Lord had sounded out.” Revelation 2:26. “And he that overcometh and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations;” and, finally, Revelation 14:13. “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord — that they may rest from their labors, and their works do follow them.”

It is not denied that, in most of these passages and similar ones, works of morality are meant; but in some, the immediate and only reference is to “works” peculiarly denominated religious, and in no instance can these be excluded. How can we imagine that Paul departed, in the passage before us, from the current meaning which every Christian attaches to this phrase.16 Now, to such “works” magistrates — those referred to by the apostle — will not be “a terror.” Against such as practice these, he will enact no laws. And does not the principle already taught, that magistracy is the “ordinance of God,” abundantly confirm this? It is, in fact, a most serious error, and one that has led to many others, that God has ordained any institution among men, or sanctions any, in which the promotion of his glory as the Supreme Law-giver, and the alone object of worship and religious homage, is not a chief end. “The Lord hath made all things for himself,” Job 16:27. And of every people, in a certain sense, does God say, as He said with a peculiar emphasis of ancient Israel, and says of the Church, “This people have I formed for myself, to show forth my praise.” This is expressly asserted of the family relation, Malachi 2:15. And as to government, who questions that among the patriarchs, all authority, including what we now term civil, was to be so employed? We cannot conceive of an intelligent and devout patriarch, or subject of patriarchal government, who would not regard the patriarchal authority as given for the glory of God, in the patronage of “good works” of a religious, as well as of a common moral character. And finally, God himself gave a government to his own chosen Israel, and in defining its powers and functions, leaves no doubt that all the “good works” to which this government was not to be “a terror,” were works such as have been specified above as those, in part, intended by Paul. In short, there is every reason — the phrase itself—  the ends of the institution of government —  its history and the direct teachings of the Most High in the institutes given to Israel —  to believe that among the works here meant are those that come under the head of religion — religion in its exterior manifestations.

Now, to such, “rulers are not a terror.” Such rulers as Paul refers to will so legislate, so judge, so apply law, as that not only the upright and peaceable, but the fearers of God and the servants of Christ, will be subject to no hindrance, exposed to no danger from the civil arm, in their Christian profession and efforts: such rulers will so act as that Christ may be preached, his law defended, his authority maintained, his church propagated, without fear of offending “the powers that be.”

3. These rulers use their powers for the restraint of evil — “but a ‘terror to the evil.’” To ascertain the import of the term “evil,” we have only to institute a contrast between this clause and the preceding. “Good works” as such works as are appropriate to the honest, peaceable and moral. Of course, “evil works” are such as dishonesty, turbulence, theft, and all gross departures from morality.

“Good works” are such as honor Christ, the Sabbath, the Scriptures, and the name and supreme dignity of a Three-one God. “Evil” works are such as are adverse to all these — blasphemy, profanity, idolatry, and Sabbath violation. Can it be possible that an inspired apostle could use this term in any narrower sense, particularly in defining a divine ordinance?

To all these the rulers here meant are for a “terror.” They enact such laws, and so administer these enactments, as that all disorder, vice, and open disregard to God and religion may be discountenanced, and, when circumstances demand this, restrained.

Here, again, we may appeal to collateral sources of argument, to the uniform testimony of the Word of God, and to the examples of all enlightened nations. To the former we need only refer. From the patriarchal ages onward until the cannon of Old Testament revelation — none can doubt that divinely approved civil governments, and acts of civil rulers, are of this character — a “terror to evil works;” and in the New, so far as this aspect of national institutions is referred to, we have but the continuation of the same teachings. “The law,” says Paul — meaning, in part, at least, the law of God as established among the Jews—  “is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners,” &c.; and “if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine.” (Timothy 1:9, 10) Nor has any Christian nation found itself able fully to reduce to practice any other theory. In words, many do, indeed, deny that acts injurious to morality even, and more, that acts hurtful to religion, can rightfully become subjects of cognizance by the magistrate; but just so far as Christian principle has made itself felt, either directly or by tradition, among any people, have they been obliged to conform to the apostle’s definition; very defectively it is true, in most instances, but still sufficiently to show that Christian sense and a regard for the general welfare of society, will not be satisfied without some acknowledgement of the principle. Hence, the laws by which the Sabbath is guarded — laws against shameful vices — laws against blasphemy and profanity —  or to present the same fact in a more general and more striking form, where is the government that would think itself justifiable in guarding against the spread of acknowledged moral good, as they do of moral evil?

Nor does it weaken the force of our argument, drawn from the practice of nations, that the legislation to which we have referred is affirmed to be only an indirect way of answering what some call the only end of civil rule — the preservation of peace and of property. At all events, it is admitted to be necessary: and if necessary, there can be no question whatever that this sort of governmental action was contemplated in the institution itself. So far as our present purpose is concerned, this is enough; for Paul, certainly, did not intend to omit, in his definition of the function of rulers, a class of acts without which they cannot carry on a permanently wholesome administration of affairs.

On every ground, then, we maintain that Paul designs, in these phrases, to furnish us with a summary, but very comprehensive, view of the official character of such rulers as may lawfully claim our conscientious allegiance and subjection. They are such as render themselves “a terror” not to “good works,” in any sound sense, but “to the evil” in every sense in which outward acts are so. Such are the “powers” whom “God has ordained;” such he owns as his “ministers;” the resistance offered to these offends him. All this we will find amply confirmed by the Apostle himself when he proceeds, immediately, to apply the general statement to the different classes of citizens in the State, to the good and the bad.17

16 “For temporal princes — not to punish men for any works that are good in themselves (like those which the Christian religion enjoin towards God and man,”) & c. Guyse in loco.

17 Inferences will be deduced from this section, in connection with those of the subsequent section.