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illustrate the fact that nowadays you don't have to be a household name to wield global power. Mr Bailey is a freelance journalist and television producer in Washingto n, DC He is the author of Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological A pocalypse (St. Martin's) and The True State of the Planet (Free Press). "THE survival of civilization in something like its present form might de pend significantly on the efforts of a single man," declared The New Yor ker. The New York Times hailed that man as the "Custodian of the Planet. " He is perpetually on the short list of candidates for Secretary Genera l of the United Nations. Militia members are famously worried that black helicopters are practicing maneuvers with blue-helme ted UN troops in a plot to take over America. A small cadre of obscure international bureaucrats are hard a t work devising a system of "global governance" that is slowly gaining c ontrol over ordinary Americans' lives. Maurice Strong, a 68-year-old Can adian, is the "indispensable man" at the center of this creeping UN powe r grab. He is a grey, short, soft-voiced man with a salt-and-pepper toothbrush mustache who wouldn't rate a second glance if you passed him on the street. Yet his remarkable career has led him fro m boyhood poverty in Manitoba to the highest councils of international g overnment. Among the hats he currently wears are: Senior Advisor to UN Secretary Gen eral Kofi Annan; Senior Advisor to World Bank President James Wolfensohn ; As advisor to Kofi Annan, he is ove rseeing the new UN reforms. Yet his most prominent and influential role to date was as Secretary Gene ral of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development --the so-ca lled Earth Summit -- held in Rio de Janeiro, which gave a significant pu sh to global economic and environmental regulation.
"I think he is a very dangerous ideologue, way over to the Left." "This guy is kind of the global Ira Magaziner," says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Insti tute. "If he is whispering in Kofi Annan's ear this is no good at all." Strong attracts such mystified suspicion because he is difficult to pin d own. He told Maclean's in 1976 that he was "a socialist in ideology, a c apitalist in methodology." And his career combines oil deals with the li kes of Adnan Khashoggi with links to the environmentalist Left. He is in fact one of a new political breed: the bi-sectoral entrepreneur who use s business success for leverage in politics, and vice versa. He took over and turned around some small ailing energy companies in the 1960s, and he was presi dent of a major holding company -- the Power Corporation of Canada -- by the age of 35. Yet on more than one o ccasion (including once in Who's Who), Strong has been caught exaggerati ng. He claimed, for instance, to have forfeited a $200,000 salary when h e left Power. Well, a CEO is just a CEO -- but a whiz-kid is a poten tial cabinet officer. And it is in politics that Strong's talents really shine. And he always seemed to know what the ne xt political trend would be -- foreign aid, Canadian economic nationalis m, environmentalism. In 1966, by now a Liberal favorite, Strong became head of the Canadian In ternational Development Agency and thus was launched internationally. Im pressed by his work at CIDA, UN Secretary General U Thant asked him to o rganize what became the first Earth Summit --the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. The next year, Strong became first direc tor of the new UN Environment Program, created as a result of Stockholm. And in 1975, he was invited back to Canada to run the semi-national Pet ro-Canada, created by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the wake of OPEC' s oil shocks. Petro-Canada was a sop to Canada's anti-American Left, then denouncing Am erican ownership of the country's oil companies. Strong talked a good ec onomic-nationalist game -- but he himself was a major reason why Canada' s oil companies were US-owned. Ten years before, while at Power Corpor ation, he had enabled Shell to take over the only remaining all-Canadian oil company by throwing a controlling block of shares in its direction. As Macleans wrote, he now returned "amid fanfares" to rectify this. After a couple of years, Strong left Petro-Canada for various business de als, including one with Adnan Khashoggi through which he ended up owning the 200,000-acre Baca ranch in Colorado, now a "New Age" center run by his wife, Hanne. And in 1989, he was appointed Secreta ry General of the Earth Summit -- shortly thereafter flying down to Rio. Strong's flexibility, however, must not be mistaken for open-mindedness. His friends, his allies among Canadian Liberals, his networks in the UN and the Third World, even his long-term business partners (like the late Paul Nathanson, wartime treasurer of the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Com mittee) all lean Left. He has said the Depression left him "frankly very radical." And given his ability to get things done, the consistency of his support for a world managed by bureaucrats is alarming. As Elaine De war wrote in Toronto's Saturday Night magazine: It is instructive to read Strong's 1972 Stockholm speech and compare it w ith the issues of Earth Summit 1992. Strong warned urgently about global warming, the devastation of forests, the loss of biodiversity, polluted oceans, the population time bomb.
Aft er Stockholm, environment issues became part of the administrative frame work in Canada, the US, Britain, and Europe. IN the meantime, Strong continued the international networking on which h is influence rests. He became a member of the World Commission on Enviro nment and Development (the Brundtland Commission). He found time to serv e as president of the World Federation of United Nations Associations, o n the executive committee of the Society for International Development, and as an advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Wildlife F und. Above all, he served on the Commission on Global Governance --which , as we shall see, plays a crucial part in the international power grab. Sometimes, indeed, it seems that Strong's network of contacts must rival the Internet. he even counts Republican Presidents among his fri ends. Elaine Dewar again: Strong blurted out that he'd almost been shut out of the Earth Summit by people at the State Department. They had been overruled by the White Hou se because George Bush knew him. I mean yes, he had done a great deal of business in the US, but how could he have managed such contributions? So Strong gave political contributions (of dubious legality) to both part ies; George Bush, now a friend, intervened to help him stay in charge of the Rio conference; he was thereby enabled to set a deep green agenda t here; An instructive tale -- if it is not part of Strong's mythmaking. Most of Strong's friends are more obviously compatible, which may explain why they tend to overlap in their institutional commitments. For exampl e, James Wolfensohn (whom Strong had hired out of Harvard in the early S ixties to run an Australian subsidiary of one of his companies) appointe d him as his senior advisor almost immediately upon being named chairman of the World Bank. Stockholm, which Maurice Strong arranged," says Wolfensohn, who, more recently, has been credite d with co-drafting (with Mikhail Gorbachev) the Earth Charter presented for consideration at the Rio + 5 meeting in Brazil earlier this year. As head of the Earth Council, Maurice Strong chaired that meeting. It's not a conspiracy, of course: just a group of like-minded people figh ting to save the world from less prescient and more selfish forces -- na mely, market forces. And though the crises change --World War II in the Forties, fear of the atom bomb in the Fifties, the "energy crisis" in th e Seventies -- the Left's remedy is always the same: a greater role for international agencies. Today an allegedly looming global environmental catastrophe is behind their efforts to increase the power of the UN. Str ong has warned memorably: "If we don't change, our species will not surv ive. Frankly, we may get to the point wher...
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