San Francisco gathering draws all the big names from the world of politics, media, business and entertainment
A few months ago in late September 1995 a group of stellar performers from the world stage got together in San Francisco to discuss the future of the planet.
The “State of the World Forum” was convened by Mikhail Gorbachev, along with co-chairs President Askar Akaev of Kyrgystan, former President of Costa Rica Oscar Arias, former U.S, Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Prime Minister Tansu Ciller of Turkey, former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers and Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu.
Over 400 of the rich and famous attended the gala affair which lasted 5 days and cost a whopping $5,000.00 per person. Political notaries included former U.S Secretary of State George Shultz, former U.S, President George Bush, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, South African Vice President Thabo Mbeki, and even our own former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
The media representatives included such big names as newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch, anchorman Ted Koppel and cable-TV billionaire Ted Turner.
Big names in big business also attended the affair including Men’s Wearhouse CEO George Zimmer, Archer Daniels Midland CEO Dwayne Andreas, Microsoft wizard Bill Gates, and computer tycoon David Packard.
The main theme of the forum was “sustainable development,” understood by many to be a long-standing euphemism for population control.
The obtrusive promotion of the culture of death began the conference as former
“Humanist of the Year” Ted Turner addressed the audience. Given only five minutes for his opening address, Turner couldn’t refrain from blurting out population control slogans in his outspoken style: “But by ending the cold war, and reducing dramatically the threat of nuclear annihilation, we now have the chance to starve to death in a desert. We have given ourselves that opportunity, and it seems that is more difficult to deal with because it requires more forethought, and the benefits of ending the cold war were perfectly clear to everybody. The population problem and the environmental destruction that is going in the world, and will eventually lead to our demise, if it is not reversed, is much harder to see because it happens over a longer period of time.”
When Gorbachev spoke, after being lauded by former Secretary of state George Shultz, he candidly revealed the purpose of the conference: “We have, I believe, to gear consumption to people’s cultural and spiritual needs also through culture and education and within the framework of laws, we shall have to address the problem of controlling he world’s population.
Amid other topics such as global governance, global security, and the information highway, the theme of population control continued. However, no where was the theme more evident than in the discussions around religion. Not surprisingly a conglomeration of Buddhists, Wiccans, dissident “Catholic” theologians, and New Age Spiritualist permeated the conference.
These included Fritjof Capra, Jeremy Rifkin, Willis Harman, Deepak Chopra, Robert Muller, Matthew Fox, Carl Sagan, and Shirley MacLaine. These types had mainly Christianity to blame for the so-called world population dilemma.
In the closing plenary session of the forum, philosopher/author Sam Keen provided a summary and conclusive remarks on the conference. Among the conference participants, said Keen, “there was very strong agreement that religious institutions have to take primary responsibility for the population explosion. We must speak far more clearly about sexuality, about contraception, about abortion , about the values that control the population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis.
“Cut the population by 90 percent and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”
The Forum will reconvene in San Francisco from October 2-6, 1996.