During the second week of January, while the White House and Congress were locked in combat over major issues in the proposed nationalized healthcare legislation — abortion coverage, rationing, end-of-life counseling, costs — the administration declared its intention to push forward with a $63 billion global ObamaCare plan.
With little media fanfare or coverage, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced on January 8 that the Obama administration had recently succeeded in supplying “more than $648 million in foreign assistance to family planning and reproductive health programs worldwide.” And, said she, another $63 billion is on the way, courtesy of Obama’s Global Health Initiative (GHI).
Secretary Clinton’s remarks came at a State Department celebration of the “15th Anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development” (ICPD), the 1994 United Nations summit in Cairo, where abortion policies were the major flashpoint. Addressing supporters in the State Department’s Benjamin Franklin Room, Secretary Clinton proclaimed:
This year, the United States renewed funding of reproductive healthcare through the United Nations Population Fund, and more funding is on the way. The U.S. Congress recently appropriated more than $648 million in foreign assistance to family planning and reproductive health programs worldwide. That’s the largest allocation in more than a decade….
In addition to new funding, we’ve launched a new program that will be the centerpiece of our foreign policy, the Global Health Initiative, which commits us to spending $63 billion over six years to improve global health.
Clinton, who has always been a staunch supporter of the right to abortion, played a key emissary role at that Cairo ICPD summit, as First Lady of the Clinton White House. “The year 2015 is the target year,” Secretary Clinton said in her January 8 remarks. “Remember what was expected of us. All governments will make access to reproductive healthcare and family planning services a basic right.”
Clinton is revising history to suit her purposes. During the wrangling over text at Cairo, “reproductive health” and other similar code words were employed in attempts to camouflage policies that promoted abortion. However, in response to resolute opposition from representatives of Catholic and Muslim countries and the Vatican, the final Cairo document, known as the Cairo Program of Action, specifically denied support for abortion. “The Cairo document,” notes Samantha Singsen of Lifenews.com, “explicitly states in two places that abortion should in no case ‘be promoted as a method of family planning.’” Even so, many countries were so unnerved by the persistent attempts of militant feminists to insert furtive pro-abortion language into the Cairo texts that they adopted formal reservations explicitly ensuring their understanding that references to “reproductive” rights and health did not include support for abortion. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama clearly intend to undo those Cairo restrictions, which Bill and Hillary Clinton, in order to conclude an agreement, grudgingly acceded to in 1994.
During congressional hearings in April of 2009, Secretary Clinton was specifically pinned down on this issue by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.Y.), who wanted to know if the phrases “reproductive health,” “reproductive services,” and “reproductive rights” include abortion. Secretary Clinton responded: “We [the Obama administration] happen to think that family planning is an important part of women’s health and reproductive health includes access to abortion that I believe should be safe, legal and rare.”*
The “safe, legal, and rare” statement is a verbatim response that Clinton has used many times over the years, whenever she is forced to acknowledge the reality of “reproductive” policies.
Abortion, of course, is never safe for the aborted baby, whose life is ended, and the policies Clinton has championed for many years — as First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State — certainly have not made abortion rare. Nor can anyone credibly suggest the new Obama-Clinton policies will make abortion any more rare. As a State Senator, U.S. Senator, and now as President, Barack Obama has established one of the most pro-abortion records of any U.S. politician. One of his first acts as President was to rescind the U.S. “Mexico City Policy,” which prohibited federal funding of international agencies or NGOs that provide or promote abortion as a method of family planning.
One of the principal targets of that policy was the United Nations Fund for Population Assistance. The UNFPA became notorious for supporting Communist China’s horrific one-child policy, which included forced abortion, infanticide, and hunting down women who got pregnant without the State’s permission. UNFPA and its defenders have been trying to rehabilitate the UN agency’s image, claiming those abuses are now a thing of the past. In fact, they say, China has largely abandoned the one-child policy, and UNFPA’s programs in China do not support the repressive one-child initiatives. Not so, say critics.
“It’s very clear that the U.N. Population Fund is a cheerleader for the Chinese family planning program, is funding the program, and turns a blind eye to forced abortion and forced sterilization,” Dr. Stephen Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute (PRI), said in a February 2009 interview.
The local UNFPA officials conducted their operations out of the China Office of Family Planning, where these abhorrent practices were taking place, said Mosher, who first exposed the brutal practices in 1983. “It is inconceivable that the U.N. population official who worked in the same office did not know what was going on,” he said.
The Secret “Good Club”
What Clinton and Obama do not mention is that the Obama Global Health Initiative is not Obama’s initiative at all, but merely his continuation and expansion of the UN’s global population-control program, which is a priority concern for some of the world’s wealthiest elites who want to see the planet’s human population drastically reduced. The real initiators of Obama’s GHI are Bill Gates, George Soros, Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller, the World Economic Forum, and similar population-control elitists.
The Gates connection to the GHI is so extensive that it is probably not an exaggeration to say that the Obama Global Health Initiative represents the successful transfer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s global health policies into official U.S. policy, with the costs also being transferred — to the U.S. taxpayers. At the conclusion of her January 8 remarks on the ICPD and GHI, Secretary Clinton introduced Dr. Rajiv Shah, the new Administrator of USAID, the State Department agency that administers U.S. foreign aid programs and that will oversee the GHI. Immediately prior to joining the Obama administration, Dr. Shah worked for seven years for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, serving as a director of the foundation’s Global Health Program and its Global Development Program.
On May 24 of last year, the Times of London reported in an online article that a secret meeting of the world’s leading billionaires had struck on a plan for curtailing world population. Entitled “Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation,” it told of a gathering in Manhattan that included some of the planet’s richest titans. The Times reported:
Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population….
The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.
Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.
The covert palaver took place, revealed the Times story, “at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University.” To what purpose? Patricia Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, attended the confab. She told the Times the billionaires met to “discuss how to increase giving.” But, apparently, they were not simply interested in coordinating their own giving; they want to draft you and me into financially supporting their pet programs as well.
The Times reported that, according to an attendee, “a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.”
“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” said the guest. “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.” Bill Gates, it seems, exerted a major influence on their decision. “Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority,” reported the Times.
“Global Cabal,” ?“Alternative World Government”?
“Why all the secrecy?” the Times asked. Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, told the Times the furtiveness might be “because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal.” An attendee reportedly gave the Times this explanation: “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government.”
But, are those descriptions — global cabal and alternative world government — unreasonable depictions of what the “Good Club” billionaires are up to? As private citizens, they should be free to shower their billions on whatever charities they deem worthy. But, clearly, in this particular area (and in others as well), they have hi-jacked our government to fund and implement their agenda. According to their anonymous apologist quoted by the Times, they meet secretly because “they need to be independent of government agencies.” All well and good — if they truly were “independent of government agencies.” But just the opposite is true; they are completely intertwined with government agencies, and with the UN agencies that are intertwined with and funded by our government agencies.
The so-called Good Club elite that convened at Sir Paul Nurse’s domicile — Rockefeller, Soros, Gates, et al. — are a top subset of a larger circle of key movers and shakers who do indeed call the shots on global political and economic affairs. And many of them are indeed pushing to transform their various global agendas into eventual formal world government. President Obama’s Global Health Initiative is virtually indistinguishable from the identically named GHI launched by the World Economic Forum in 2002.
The Malthusian fanatics of the Good Club and their fellow billionaire population-control elitists may claim to want “independence” from government, but what they really want is independence from public scrutiny, accountability, and oversight, while at the same time enjoying public financing and government implementation of their programs.
It is precisely because this “global health” agenda is being implemented under the authority of the U.S. government and paid for by the American taxpayers that Congress must be held accountable. Members of Congress must be forced by public pressure — for fiscal, moral, and constitutional reasons — to investigate and expose this public-private “global cabal,” which does indeed pose a very real danger of becoming an “alternative world government.” Proper investigation and exposure would result in a cut-off of taxpayer funding to GHI projects, especially the most egregious, such as UNFPA, which not only continues to support and fund China’s brutal population control, but also engages in forced sterilization, coercion, bribery, and eugenics throughout the developing world.
The administration’s Global Health Initiative, the new global ObamaCare, is in reality a major effort to launch a new wave of planetary eugenics and population control under the guise of mitigating human suffering and poverty, promoting “global health,” and saving the environment.
*A video of the Smith-Clinton exchange can be viewed online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH9rC0MaBJc
— Photo: AP Images