Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood: their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction are in their paths. Isaiah 59:7
Heritage and NAFTA
The idea of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) originated with Heritage Fellow and CNP member, Richard Allen, and has long been advocated by Heritage policy analysts. The idea of creating a North American free trade zone from the Yukon to the Yucatan was first proposed by Heritage Distinguished Fellow Richard Allen in the late 1970s, refined by then Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, and further developed in a major 1986 Heritage Foundation study.
The Free Trade Agreement got the ball rolling for the development of skills standards by the newly formed National Skills Standards Board. It was endorsed by the U.S. Labor Department Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) study originated under Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole. This eventually led to the School-to-Work Opportunities Act and the dumbing down of American education curriculum for the global workforce training.
With all of this emphasis on “standards” it should be pointed out that NAFTA allows exchanges of all categories of professionals, with those coming from Mexico and Canada having met their own countries’ standards, not necessarily equal to those required in the United States. If this process evolves the way most of these exchange processes have in the past, that disparity will be addressed in one of two ways—by changing U.S. standards to match foreign standards, or by altering both NAFTA nations’ standards to align with international standards like ISO 9000 or ISO 1400 monitored by UNESCO. This should be of concern to professional organizations in the United States. See page 315 in The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America to see the impact on education in the US by the signing the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Heritage and National Healthcare
Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans is the Heritage Foundation plan, written by Republicans and endorsed by the so-called conservative right. You will notice that Stuart M. Butler wrote this Heritage monograph. Please pay particular attention to Item #2 on page 6 of this document wherein it states, “Mandate all households to obtain adequate insurance.”
James Taranto, who writes the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web” column, put forth a lengthy and informative discussion on the conservative origins of the individual mandate, whose inclusion in Obamacare is today its most controversial feature on the Right.
Taranto writes that he was there when the Heritage Foundation was promoting the mandate:
Heritage did put forward the idea of an individual mandate, though it predated Hillary Care by several years. We know this because we were there: In 1988-90, we were employed at Heritage as a public relations associate (a junior writer and editor), and we wrote at least one press release for a publication touting Heritage’s plan for comprehensive legislation to provide universal “quality, affordable health care.”
As a junior publicist, we weren’t being paid for our personal opinions. But we are now, so you will be the first to know that when we worked at Heritage, we hated the Heritage plan, especially the individual mandate. “Universal health care” was neither already established nor inevitable, and we thought the foundation had made a serious philosophical and strategic error in accepting rather than disputing the left-liberal notion that the provision of “quality, affordable health care” to everyone was a proper role of government. As to the mandate, we remember reading about it and thinking: “I thought we were supposed to be for freedom.”
The plan was introduced in a 1989 book, “A National Health System for America” by Stuart Butler and Edmund Haislmaier. We seem to have mislaid our copy, and we couldn’t find it online, but we did track down a 1990 Backgrounder and a 1991 lecture by Butler that outline the plan. One of its two major planks, the equalization of tax treatment for individually purchased and employer-provided health insurance, seemed sensible and unobjectionable, at least in principle.
But the other was the mandate, described as a “Health Care Social Contract” and fleshed out in the lecture. Link
Now, Stuart Butler claims we shouldn’t blame Heritage for the Obamacare mandate. He links to the Amicus brief filed in the 11th circuit court of appeals, dated May 11, 2011. If you read the Amicus brief, notice Edwin Meese’s name as well as Randy Barnett, of Georgetown University who has long been promoting a Constitutional Convention.
I find it interesting that the Affordable Health Care Act was signed into law by Barack Hussein Obama on March 23, 2010, but Heritage Foundation didn’t file their Amicus brief until over a year later.
Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership
In 1980, Heritage published their Mandate for Leadership to guide the incoming Reagan Administration and its transition team. Working the high-level inside track on these personnel hiring’s was Reagan’s “Kitchen Cabinet,” of which CNP member, Joe Coors was probably the best known member.
A Reagan loyalist since the 1968 GOP convention, Coors began spending a lot of time in Washington, D.C. and at the White House. The attempt at governance by the Kitchen Cabinet became so elaborate that they actually established an office in the Executive Office Building across from the White House.
Embarrassed by the image of a covey of millionaires seeming to run parallel and sometimes conflicting personnel recruitment operations, senior White House staff produced legal opinions saying that it was illegal for a private group to occupy government property, in this case a White House office.
Although Coors produced a legal opinion arguing there was no violation of law, Coors and friends were evicted. Heritage could hardly claim diminished relations with the Reagan Administration, however, as an estimated two-thirds of its Mandate recommendations were adopted in the first year of the Administration. Further, Heritage was using a letter of endorsement from White House Chief of Staff, Ed Meese, CNP charter member, in a December 1981 fundraising effort. In his letter of endorsement, Meese promised Heritage’s president, Edwin Feulner, that “this Administration will cooperate fully with your efforts.” The newly elected Ronald Reagan passed out copies of the Mandate at his first Cabinet meeting, and it quickly became his administration’s blueprint. By the end of Reagan’s first year in office, 60 percent of the Mandate’s 2,000 ideas were being implemented, and the Republican Party’s status as a hotbed of intellectual energy was ratified. After leaving the Reagan Administration, Meese joined the staff of the Heritage Foundation and is still there today.
Meese and his cronies were also involved in the theft of the Inslaw/Promis software that enabled the Justice Department to track criminal prosecutions. Link Meese had his intelligence buddies put a trap door in the software so the Bush’s could monitor everyone. The Justice Department started sharing the illegally obtained PROMIS software with other agencies, including agencies where PROMIS was modified for intelligence purposes and sold to foreign intelligence operations in Israel, Jordan, and other places. Michael Risconsciuto of the Wackenhut security firm had testified that he was contracted to install a “trap door” in the software to allow the CIA to tap into PROMIS software worldwide. It appears that the original petty crimes of the Justice Department have led to the exposure of a sensitive national security operation. Link
It also monitors all of us, and today there’s an even greater software program out there..but that’s another story.
Edwin J. Feulner, formerly the president of Heritage Foundation, had a yearly income including deferred compensation of $1,098,612. Former Attorney General, Edwin Meese, takes home half a million a year from Heritage. Feulner is also a charter member of the Council for National Policy.
The Rockefeller/Heritage Connection
From education researcher, Chey Simonton’s article on the Rockefeller/Heritage Connection, she states, “The top men of the Heritage Foundation, first Weyrich, then Ed Feulner, and now Jim DeMint, with the trust and cooperation of masses of sincerely committed conservatives have been in a position to further elitist Rockefeller goals. Along with radical World Government advocate, Walter Hoffman of the World Federalist Association, they participated on the 16 member U.S. Commission on Improving the Effectiveness of the United Nations. Working with the US Information Agency, Feulner also participated in facilitating the infamous 1985 US-Soviet Education Technology and Cultural Exchange Agreement. Soviet pedagogy, based on behavioral conditioning for a compliant collective labor force, is a dream come true for the dozens of multinational corporations funding all the think tanks promoting American education reform. The humanist Carnegie Foundation, a century-long collaborator with Rockefeller philanthropy, facilitated the Soviet side of this Exchange Agreement.”
Remember, in 1934, the Carnegie Corporation called for a shift from free enterprise to collectivism. They wanted the Soviet planned economy. Link
Thus, Heritage’s communist connections, were established rapidly after the historic meeting between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva Summit.
Feulner was appointed by Reagan as chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. The commission was responsible for expediting a signed Soviet-American Educational Exchange Agreement. The National American Legion was one of hundreds of conservative groups refusing to do anything about the US/Soviet Education Agreements. Charlotte Iserbyt’s Maine State Legion voted unanimously to go up against what Reagan had done.
In 1995, Charlotte Iserbyt identified conservative “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” who not only gave the Soviets access to American education, but whose act of treason “virtually merged the two educational systems.” Leading the pack for an educational exchange initiative was none other than:
“Edwin Feulner, former President of Heritage Foundation, who strongly supported the U.S.-Soviet education agreements, and who had an office in Moscow, supported Soviet-style magnet schools (i.e., tax supported choice/charter schools), and had state affiliate organizations across the nation writing charter school legislation that reads like it has been written by the U.S. Department of Education, the Carnegie Corporation and the National Education Association.”
“Paul Weyrich’s American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) gave an award to Oregon’s Department of Education for its education reform, especially the work force training component and its certificate of initial mastery (CIM) necessary to get a job. Same old Common Core folks! See the June, 2011, WSJ article, “Industry Puts Heat on Schools to Teach Skills Employees Need.”
We must remember, the 1955 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) book, MENTAL HEALTH IN EDUCATION, is the earliest reference to the need for “choice” in education. The Charter Schools concept, strongly marketed around the country by Heritage affiliates with the help of CNP members in every state, attempts to link patriotic free enterprise themes to a blatantly unconstitutional system of corporate fascism to business/government partnerships in the education of our children.
At the same time, note that Heritage founder, Paul Weyrich, once served as advisor to former Russian President, Boris Yeltsin of Chechnyan genocide fame. He wrote about it in an article in the Heritage affiliate, Townhall Magazine. Link In 1987, Weyrich also wrote an article in The Washington Post, A Conservative’s Lament, which virtually recommended a new Constitution and form of government for the U.S.”
Both Feulner and Weyrich were also involved with other powerful players and shadowy figures, some from the right and some from the left. They have been included in groups formed to reinvent the UN, supposedly to face the 21st century. It is becoming more and more evident that Weyrich and Feulner were in fact organizing a tight group that represented the merger of right and left, which we have seen over the past 65 years. The Council for National Policy members love Heritage…and their members have been Heritage’s presidents.
Remember folks, Heritage Foundation is inextricably tied to the CNP, and the CNP is nothing more than the right arm of the CFR. Over the past 25 years, Heritage has also been funded by private foundations such as Pew Charitable Trust which also funded many GOALS 2000 initiatives. Bill Clinton signed the Goals 2000 law on March 31, 1994, creating new education bureaucracies and facilitating federal control of local education institutions. William Greider’s bestseller, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy reveals other benefactors: “Notwithstanding, its role as ‘populist’ spokesman, Weyrich’s organization, for instance, has received grants from Amoco, General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank (David Rockefeller) and right-wing foundations like Olin and Bradley.” They’ve also received millions from wealthy donors which we’ll discuss in upcoming articles.
In Part 7, we’ll take a gander at Weyrich’s American Legislative Exchange Council, and his strong affiliation with the Society for the Protection of Tradition, Family and Property.
