By Mark Anderson / The TRUTH HOUND
Stop the Presses News & Commentary
CHICAGO – The “Disruptive Forces Changing Cities,” program, conducted by the Chicago Council of Global Affairs (CCGA) Sept. 15, was a textbook case of an elite organization pursuing a tightly planned, dictatorial society—while sounding like it’s seeking a pristine vision of fairness, democracy and prosperity for all.
It’s all being spearheaded in accordance with the growing “global cities” movement that challenges the authority of the very nation-states that the world’s primary cities inhabit.
This approach, according to several CCGA-aligned think tanks, journalists and others supporting the Global Parliament of Mayors, is actually a direct challenge to national authority, in order to usurp some of the key powers delegated to national governments by their charters and constitutions.
Since this involves chiseling away at the constitutional foundations of nations, it risks undermining them in a way that would redraw the lines of governance, in a highly unpredictable and possibly radical manner. The policy areas over which cities want to assume much more influence and control include battling climate change, regulating immigration, providing sanctuary cities, sparking job growth and several other areas, even foreign policy.
The CCGA’s latest morning program, announced as being “on-the-record” at the organization’s conference center in the Prudential Building on Randolph Street, was a continuation of many of the themes covered in early June 2016 at the CCGA’s annual, all-day Forum on Global Cities. This writer covered both last year’s program and the recent one on Sept. 15.
The Sept. 15 meeting’s keynote speaker was Amy Liu, who’s Vice President and Director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Washington D.C.’s Brookings Institution.
She’s considered “a national expert on cities and metropolitan areas adept at translating research and insights into action on the ground. As director of Brookings Metro, which Liu co-founded in 1996, she pioneered the program’s signature approach to policy and practice, which uses rigorous research to inform strategies for economic growth and opportunity,” a CCGA representative said while introducing Liu in Chicago.
Prior to her Brookings work, Liu was Special Assistant to [U.S. Housing and Urban Development] Secretary Henry Cisneros and staffed the U.S. Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs. Liu holds a Northwestern University degree in social policy and urban studies. In 2015, she completed Columbia Business School’s High Impact Leadership Program.
Her remarks were promoted via the CCGA website with statements like, “Cities are increasingly driving the global economy” but “numerous disruptive forces . . . threaten to deepen inequality and economic exclusion, unless cities adapt and evolve.”
And while Liu spoke of the choices that municipal leaders will need to make, in order to give their work-forces access to basic things like skills, (and to “foster innovation and entrepreneurship,” while “deepening regional connections”) the key to understanding her message is discerning what she and the CCGA mean by “global forces of disruption.”
To address such matters, Liu spoke solo and then collaborated with CCGA moderator Niamh King, who, prior to joining the CCGA, worked for the European Commission and the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, among several other posts.
Liu began by saying she wants cities to be vibrant places to work and live, but due to America’s current national discourse under President Trump, “we are turning our backs on climate change, on the poor and the working class” and “on our values as a nation of immigrants.” Moreover, “people of all races and religions” are being neglected under this national discourse, she said.
“So rather than take us backwards, the nation needs our cities to move us forward,” Liu carefully stated, presenting a thinly-veiled claim that the nation-state, especially a more nationalist one, represents a barrier to what the cities can do for nations and the world.
In response, she inferred that the world’s cities, in essence, need to run their home nations in key areas. Accordingly, she called for a future that’s “hyper-global, more digital, more urban, more multi-racial and multi-ethnic,” which accents June 2016 comments at the Chicago Global Cities Forum that characterized future life as highly urbanized as more people are stacked and packed into “smart cities” that are hardwired with dense broadband infrastructure, both for more benign reasons and for widespread heavy-surveillance purposes.
But she professed a concern that “these very same forces of progress can also be great sources of division.” Technology, for example, creates opportunities for some “but destroys it for others,” favoring the highly-skilled and abandoning those who cannot keep pace.
To combat such things, local leaders need to build “inclusive” local and regional economies “that radically adapt to disruption and future-proof our cities.” Citing her Brookings work, she said cities therefore should pursue three goals: “Growth, prosperity and inclusion.”
That means “quality growth of good jobs” to seek better prosperity, but to achieve the inclusion part, the benefits in terms of better incomes must accrue to all members of the community, “closing disparities by race and by place.”
She added that 63 metro areas out of 100 experienced growth and jobs between 2010 and 2015, according to Brookings research. But while several cities saw growth in lesser-quality jobs, only eight made significant economic progress in inclusion “for whites and people of color.”
Liu stressed, “The nation’s economic growth is not felt by most people . . . as a whole the bottom 50% of income-earners, the middle class, the working class, the poor, have made no ground. So the bulk of the nation’s income gains have accrued to the top earners.”
From this, she concluded that it’s up to the cities to bridge these gaps and solve the problems.
Liu then cited “the historic policies and attitudes” that she claimed have “held us back” in terms of tackling such inequities. Accordingly, at this point, she delved into “the disruptive forces facing cities” and “how city leaders can adapt to disruption.” She called such disruption “major headwinds.”
Ironically, Liu named these disruptive forces, which are mainly macroeconomic in nature, like they’re akin to the four horsemen of the apocalypse—“globalization, urbanization, technology and demographic change.” She warned that such things are “upending existing systems.”
She went on to say that while globalization in general has supposedly slowed down, free trade is going strong, accounting “for 40% of world economic value.”
Trade, she deduced from this, has “tremendous economic value” because firms that export their wares hire more people and pay better wages than non-exporting firms, yet she admitted that U.S. voters in the last election made it clear (by voting for Trump) that globalization has left many without jobs for extended time periods.
I would say that the problem isn’t so much globalization, but the failure of our public policies to help people and to help communities adjust to the new world order.”– Amy Liu, Brookings Institution, at this Sept. 15 CCGA program.
She then added, “The question is, have we learned our lesson, as we face a bigger disruption called the digital revolution?” That revolution is another thing that she welcomes on the one hand, and warns about with the other, using a slick form of Orwellian doublespeak that this writer calls “Globalese.”
This is done to mask the CCGA-led movement to undercut nation states in favor of world government, under the guise of a phony “local control” mantra.
If this weren’t the case, these one-worlders wouldn’t be so historically and still-deeply hostile toward the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which does reserve certain powers to the states and the people, apart from the powers constitutionally delegated to the national government.
In other words, if the CCGA and its partner groups really want genuine localized control for the common good, why are they by and large hostile to such power-sharing federalism under the U.S. Constitution? And why do they support the Global Parliament of Mayors, which is meeting this year in Norway?
Indeed, amid Liu’s hour-long presentation, the glaring contradiction that nobody seemed to catch is that the very disrupting factors cited by Liu and those of her ilk in the CCGA, Brookings and related globalist outfits—which help comprise a private-government network fueled by central banks, think tanks and big media, among other internationalist entities—are heavily promoted by these same groups without dissent.
And the world’s cities, as she explained with a delicacy than can only be decrypted through a careful perusal of her words, are to be enlisted as the new vanguard to adapt cities and nations to the demands of the new world order—rather than pulling back from globalization and related free-trade policies that have largely caused the economic and social damage that Liu claims to abhor.
A quote, which she showed the audience of about 100 architects and others via Powerpoint, written by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, is rather candid about the global-cities credo: “The national government is way too big to keep up with the pace of change; meanwhile states and localities have grown more flexible and more capable.”