Rethinking Sovereignty / The Council on Foreign Relations

hailhailkc

I watched a YouTube movie on the Council of Foreign Relations someone posted earlier. Really scary. Here' an article the movie suggested reading. It's from the president of the CFR. Again, really scary.

These people are out to strip us of our freedom.

http://www.sangam.org/taraki/articles/2006/02-23_Rethinking_Sovereignty.php?uid=1539

DriftingByTheStorm

This article irks me on a profound level.

" This is not to argue that Microsoft, Amnesty International or Goldman Sachs be given seats in the United Nations General Assembly, but it does mean including representatives of such organisations in regional and global deliberations when they have the capacity to affect whether and how regional and global challenges are met. "

Bull shit.
That reads to me like "Hey man. Like Microsoft and Goldman Sachs should be able to discuss how to divide 'post war' Iraq too, man."

Why should we start allowing corporate interests to sit at the table any more than they currently do? and they currently do.

Beyond that instance of corporatist arrogance, what i find fundamentaly repugnant in this article is that it somehow disguises a baseline assault on "soverignty" by dressing it up as some sort of response to terror and humanitarian threats.

WHAT THE FUCK!?!

The article sites three specific crisis to bolster its claim that states, in general, need to rethink soverignty:

1. Afghanistan's support of the Taliban (and terrorism, by implication) and specificaly, the US response to this

2. "America's preventive war against an Iraq that ignored the UN and was thought to possess weapons of mass destruction"

3. "The Nato intervention in Kosovo was an example where a number of governments chose to violate the sovereignty of another government (Serbia) to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide"

AND THEN

it offers other examples of state sponsored genocide as examples of what happens when we allow soverignty to reign supreme:

"the mass killings in [1] Rwanda a decade ago and now in [2] Darfur, [3] Sudan, demonstrate the high price of judging sovereignty to be supreme and thus doing little to prevent the slaughter of innocents."


I want to believe this article to be benign, and truly humanitarian in its intent, just as the closing statement presumes:

"The basic idea of sovereignty, which still provides a useful constraint on violence between states, needs to be preserved. But the concept needs to be adapted to a world in which the main challenges to order come from what global forces do to states and what governments do to their citizens rather than from what states do to one another."

But i don't understand the practical significance of it in any such terms. The three initial examples provide real world proof that soverignty does NOT infact matter if substantial abuse is promoted by government. The first two instances of soverignty violation (afghanistan & iraq) i vehmenently disagree with, but they do stand as proof of the irrelevance of soverignty.

What i just don't get is what this article aims to achieve.
Is it simply to make us more complacent with such preemptive action and violations of soveignty or is it a call for us to actively concede soverign rights?

What IS the point of this article, in truth?

All it really does is serve to highlight a historical imbalance in the way with which the US involves itself in foreign affaris. Namely, the US does NOT involve itself unless some pressing matter of U.S interest is involved. How does illustrating that the US will violate another nation's soverignty if it so feels it is warranted serve to further the author's claim that "States would be wise to weaken sovereignty in order to protect themselves, because they cannot insulate themselves from what goes on elsewhere" ?

WHAT THE FUCK?

:(

RolandTD20Kdrummer

50% of their meetings are completely off the record i.e. (according to their website) "not for attribution" The reason they are off the record is so members can speak freely in order to develop "new ideas for the future" and not feel "criticized".

Off the public record. Heaven forbid members are criticized for coming up and developing radical new ideas the general public does not want.

Very high ranking public officials, presidents of various countries, heads of corporations, and prominent journalists all attend these meetings. Only the US citizens are members though.

Again...this is all taken directly from their site.

You can watch videos of some of the meetings they do have, you'll notice they make a point of reminding their members that the meeting is *cough* one of those "public ones" beforehand.

All things the media should be talking about, and people should be aware of.

secrecy is the name of the game.