by Judi McLeod
Saturday, April 23, 2005
Canadian businessman and UN envoy Maurice Strong is one weird dude.
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Weird in his handpicked protégés. Try Canada’s Prime Minister Paul Martin, the career politician whose one and only trip to the election polls as Canadian PM reduced the powerful Liberal Party to minority status. This, after assuming the mantle left by the departure of Jean Chrétien in pomp and splendour Indian smudging ceremonies, addressed by Irish rock star, Bono. Martin’s surrealistic ascension to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) had such an emotional impact on Strong that he wept.
Strong actually teared up at the mention of Martin in the PMO on Canada’s state-controlled television network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which ran a special, called the Life and Times of Maurice Strong just three months after Martin’s December 12, 2003 swearing-in ceremony. In the special, CBC reporter Ann-Marie McDonald gushed about how Strong was a special guest in the still Gorbachev controlled Kremlin and how he came away with a saber-shaped bottle of brandy from Joseph Stalin’s special stock.
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You can call it weird from whence Strong came in the world of business. He was spawned by the Montreal-based Power Corporation, whose CEO Paul Desmarais is a key figure in BNP Paribas, Saddam Hussein’s favourite bank and part of the oil-for-food investigation.
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Strong is weird in the kind of advisors from whom he says he takes his counsel. For example, "Koreagate Man" Tongsun Park, with whom he admits he has continued to maintain a relationship, and who Strong said in a written statement, advised him on "North Korean issues in my role as a U.N. envoy." In other words, Strong was taking advice from a man the U.S. Attorney’s Office is looking to arrest for allegedly accepting millions of dollars from the Iraqi government while operating in the U.S. as an unregistered agent for Baghdad.
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It is weird that Strong advocates for world depopulation schemes; tells the unwashed masses that both refrigeration and air conditioning are going to wipe out Mother Earth. It’s weird that as a practicing New Ager, Strong dabbles in the occult. Weird is that he didn’t know one of the largest American aquifers was sitting right under the 100,000-acre Baca Ranch in Colorado, he ran as a New Age Mecca with his wife Hanne, and that he came to acquire the property through Saudi arms dealer Adnan Koshoggi.
Weirdest of all is the spin that comes with the Maurice Strong package. The kind of spin about Strong that comes from Nicholas Sonntag, a Canadian who heads up the Beijing office of CH2M Hill, one of the world’s leading environment companies. Sonntag has said of Strong’s business in China: "They (China) are taking a big risk. They’re determined to be the economic engine of the world. This is why Maurice is here--to help them think things through."
more
http://www.torontofreepress.com/2005/edesk042305.htm
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