Posted: October 01, 2011
7:50 pm Eastern
7:50 pm Eastern
By Aaron Klein
© 2011 WND
© 2011 WND
 Jonathan Greenblatt |
The newly appointed chief of President Obama's Social Innovation and Civic Participation Council is a member of a globalist organization whose activists can be found throughout the Obama administration.
Jonathan Greenblatt was appointed the new head of Obama's Social Innovation Unit earlier this month.
Greenblatt is the founder of a civic service company that works in partnership with Google and the Huffington Post. He has several ties to Google.
WND reported last week that until his appointment to the Obama administration, Greenblatt served as the director of a social justice group funded by George Soros.
The organization, the Aspen Institute, works closely with Soros and even was reportedly used by the billionaire in a failed attempt to engineer the defeat of President Bush in the 2004 elections.
Now it has emerged that Greenblatt is a member of the globalist group Pacific Council on International Policy, or PCIP. He previously chaired PCIP's energy and environment committee and served on its globalization committee.
The PCIP was founded in 1995 in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations.
The group says it is the "premier international affairs organization focused on policy issues of special resonance to the West Coast."
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Its goals include "building our network of globally oriented business, civic and government leaders." Also, the group aims to convene exchanges with global policy makers and opinion leaders while partnering with organizations around the world to "promote mutual understanding and coordinated action."
The group recently led a taskforce on so-called climate change adaption. Its recommendations include building government funds to support large-scale "climate adaption" projects.
PCIP last year released a major report on U.S.-Mexico border security that recommended the U.S. government crackdown on gun sellers.
The report says: "The United States should intensify efforts to curtail the smuggling of firearms, ammunition and bulk cash into Mexico by aggressively investigating gun sellers, regulating gun shows, reinstituting the Clinton-era ban on assault weapons, conducting targeted inspections of southbound traffic and providing leads to a more robust Mexican Customs authority."
The PCIP is funded by the Ford Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation.
In an online question-and-answer session with the PICP, Greenblatt told the group he believes the world "needs to pursue policies that blend a long-term commitment to sustainable development with opportunities for widespread economic prosperity in emerging markets."
Asked to list his favorite global resources online, Greenblatt says he follows the Twitter account of economist Jeffrey Sachs.
Sachs is a Soros-funded economist. He is a member of the Soros-funded Institute for New Economic Thinking, or INET, which holds yearly conferences in the mountains of Bretton Woods, N.H., that openly seek to restructure the world economy. Last year, Sachs keynoted the event.
Sachs also founded the Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization that says it is dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger.
Critics have called the Millennium group, which is funded by Soros to the tune of $50 million, a wealth-redistribution scheme.
Investor's Business Daily reported the Millennium goal called for a "currency transfer tax," a "tax on the rental value of land and natural resources," a "royalty on worldwide fossil energy projection – oil, natural gas, coal," "fees for the commercial use of the oceans, fees for airplane use of the skies, fees for use of the electromagnetic spectrum, fees on foreign exchange transactions, and a tax on the carbon content of fuels."
Global group abounds in Obama administration
Meanwhile, multiple Obama administration members are also activists in the PCIP.
Earlier this week, WND reported Obama's pick for Commerce secretary is a PICIP member.
Obama's ambassador to France, Charles Rivkin, is a member of the PCIP. Last October, he invited a 29-member delegation from the PCIP to a conference in France for the stated purpose of discussing Arab and Islamic relations in the country.
Rivkin was at the center of a scandal when WikiLeaks released a cable in which he proposed the U.S. Embassy in France initiate a multipronged effort to "engage" and help to "empower" France's Muslim minorities.
Rivkin called the effort a "Minority Engagement Strategy," which was largely directed at Muslims in France.
WND found other PCIP members inside the Obama administration.
James B. Steinberg, deputy secretary of state, serves on the PICP board of directors. He also serves on the science and security board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a journal that argued during the Cold War for the U.S. to hand its nuclear weapons to an international organization.
The Bulletin, as WND reported, was founded by scientists who were accused of spying for the Soviets and passing along vital nuclear secrets.
Vilma S. Martinez, U.S. ambassador to Argentina, is the chairman of the PCIP's Mexico Study Group.
Former Utah Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was appointed by Obama as ambassador to China in August 2009. He is a PCIP founding director.
Jeffrey L. Bleich, Obama's appointment for U.S. ambassador to Australia, is a PCIP member.
Diana Farrell, deputy director of the National Economic Council, is a member of the PCIP as well as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bretton Woods Committee. She is a frequent speaker on U.S. global engagement.
Byron Auguste, a member of Obama's White House Council for Community Solutions, serves on the PCIP board. He is also on the board of trustees of the Center for American Progress, which is funded by Soros and led by John Podesta, who served as co-chairman of Obama's transition team.
Last year, PCIP member Steven Myers joined the State Department's advisory committee on international economic policy.
John B. Emerson, appointee for Obama's advisory committee for trade policy and negotiations, is a member of both the PCIP and CFR.
In April, Obama nominated PCIP member Janet Yellen to serve as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve.
PCIP member Alan D. Bersin was appointed commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Last March, Obama appointed PCIP member Michael Camunez to the position of assistant secretary for market access and compliance in the Department of Commerce.
Ernest James Wilson, a member of the PCIP board, was elected chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in September 2009. He served as a policy advisor on Obama's presidential transition team on matters of communication technology and public diplomacy.
Organization accuses U.S. of 'structural racism'
Greenblatt, meanwhile, also serves as director of the Impact Economy Initiative at the Aspen Institute.
Aspen's mission statement says the nonprofit seeks "to foster values-based leadership, encourag[e] individuals to reflect on the ideals and ideas that define a good society, and ... provide a neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues."
The group leads a number of social justice global initiatives and espouses an ideology that government intervention is necessary to fix what it claims are various social and racial injustices that permeate U.S. society.
Aspen's website says the group is dedicated to repairing what it terms "structural racism."
The group contends that "public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity in every key opportunity area, from health, to education, to employment, to income and wealth."
A member of Aspen's board is Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor who sparked a national race controversy in July 2009 when Obama criticized local Cambridge police who had arrested Gates after a burglary had been reported on his property.
Aspen runs a program that provides training and seminars for federal judges.
'Clandestine' Soros summit
Soros has provided significant funding to the Aspen Institute. His Open Society Institute has provided more than $400,000 to the group since 2004.
The New Yorker magazine reported on a 2004 "clandestine summit meeting" that took place at the Aspen Institute.
"The participants, all Democrats, were sworn to secrecy," said the magazine, including Soros and four other billionaires who "shared a common goal: to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush in the 2004 election."
Soros himself spoke at numerous Aspen events, including a 2004 seminar entitled "America's Role in the Fight Against Global Poverty" that also featured Al Gore as a speaker.
Aspen hosted Soros in 2006 for a talk about his new book "The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror."
Discover the Networks notes that Jim Spiegelman, Aspen's director of communications, formerly worked as a "special assistant" to Soros.
Also, Arjun Gupta, who serves on Aspen's board of overseers, is a vice president at the Chatterjee Group, which advises the Soros Fund Management Group.
Meanwhile, Greenblatt is the founder and president of All for Good, an open source, Web-based initiative that says it seeks to engage more Americans in service. It has the largest database of volunteer listings ever compiled and provides content to a wide range of government, nonprofit and personal websites.
Greenblatt has stated he was inspired to found All for Good in December 2008 by Obama's call for more participatory civic service.
Greenblatt formerly served on the Technology and Innovation working group of the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition team.
All for Good was built by a group of volunteers from Google, the Craigslist Foundation and other organizations, reportedly with input from Arianna Huffington. The group currently maintains strategic partnerships with Google and the Huffington Post.
With additional research by Brenda J. Elliott
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