Kenya? Anna Louise Strong???
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_334103.html
And the oil-for-food scandal has spread from the Turtle Bay compound to Canada, China, South Korea, Britain, Costa Rica, Texas and Colorado.
And then there’s Maurice Strong, 75, a Canadian socialist multimillionaire who lives on a 63,000 acre ranch on the edge of the mountains in southern Colorado.
Strong, who likes to be known as “Max” (as in “maximum leader”), also has a giant ranch in Costa Rica. Strong grew up in a poor family in Manitoba, left school at 14 and in 1958 went to Kenya to work for Cal Tex on oil exploitation. There he discovered the environment to be a wonderful issue to promote himself.
Strong returned to Canada in his late 30s to commence a James Bond-type of career as a future self-appointed chief diplomat for the world.
A near-compulsive talker, one item about which Strong is almost taciturn is his relations with China’s elite. Strong does not mention his late cousin Anna Louise Strong. The Marxist journalist was a member of the Comintern and spent two years with Chairman Mao. Her funeral in 1970 was organized personally by Chou En-lai, China’s prime minister.
Some claim that Strong arranged the Nixon-Kissinger initial meetings with the Chinese. However, Strong makes full use of Cousin Anna’s memories among Beijing’s elite and has had excellent relationships with the Chinese for 30 years.
Among Strong’s closest friends are Kofi Annan; Jim Wolfensohn, the outgoing World Bank leader who once worked for Strong; Malloch Brown, a Brit who is Annan’s Cabinet chief; Al Gore, to whom he donated $100,000; the sinister and corrupt Tongsun Park; Mikhail Gorbachev; Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway; Paul Martin, the embattled prime minister of Canada; and another Canadian power-lady at the U.N., Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette.
Ms. Frechette is not only a member of Paul Volcker’s team investigating the oil-for-food scandal but also a subject of its scrutiny. A longtime friend of Strong, both of them were close to the executives of the Paris-based banking conglomerate, Banque Nationale de Paris, BNP. This was the bank selected by Annan that made at least 400 suspect payments to Iraq that could have been used for weapons and the support of terrorism.
Last month, Strong resigned as Annan’s special representative in Korea. He gave as his reason a U.N. hiring mix-up that put his step-daughter on his U.N. payroll for the past two years.
Throughout his life, Strong has lived a “grace-and-favor” existence. His specialty is turning business moguls into friends of international bureaucrats to avoid the delays of democracy.
Recently, Strong was looking for an apartment in Beijing, where his Canadian interests are already enmeshed with the Chinese Red Army.
Maurice Strong is the fox that was invited into the henhouse — and given the tools to redesign it for his own interests.
(no link)
A STRONG VOICE IN THE CITY
Seattle Post-Intelligencer - Monday, November 1, 1999
Author: STORIES AND RESEARCH MIKE BARBER, P-I REPORTER
In 1910, the year that Anna Louise Strong arrived in Seattle, Washington women had just won the right to vote.
Strong seized the moment and, riding a tide of labor unrest, became one of the decade’s champions of the downtrodden and one of the city’s most colorful radicals.
Strong already was a nationally recognized child-welfare expert when she landed in the Emerald City. During her tumultuous 11 years here, she became the first woman elected to and dumped from the Seattle School Board; a radical writer credited with sparking the city’s 1919 general strike and a confirmed pacifist whose socialist beliefs would lead her to Russia and make her an intimate of Mao Tse-tung.
``She remains one of the notable radicals in the history of the United States,’’ says Mildred Andrews, author of ``Woman’s Place: A Guide to Seattle and King County History.’’
Like everyone in Seattle near the turn of the century, Strong came from somewhere else.
Born in 1885 in Friend, Neb., to missionary parents, Strong raced through school, studied languages in Europe, and at 19 graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio.
In 1906 she wrote her first book. In 1908, at 23, she became the youngest woman ever to earn a doctorate from the University of Chicago, then launched a career as an advocate for child welfare with the U.S. Education Office.
Drawn to Seattle by its progressive politics, Strong embraced her new home. She helped organize an international child-welfare exhibit that drew 6,000 people the day it opened in Seattle and 40,000 the day it closed in May 1914.
Two years later, convinced that capitalism was not solving the needs of children and working people, she easily won election to the Seattle School Board on the strength of labor, women’s groups and her expertise in child welfare.
While the rest of the board members focused on nuts-and-bolts issues, such as school plumbing, Strong argued for social services to help underprivileged children. She also advocated that schools serve as community centers.
Strong’s political ascent in Seattle paralleled the rising radicalism of organized labor. The day before voters elected her to the School Board, front pages were filled with news of the ``Everett Massacre,’’ a violent clash between 200 Industrial Workers of the World and the armed guards hired to keep them out of Snohomish County’s mills. Six people died in the clash.
In the months that followed the massacre, Strong was hired as a stringer by the New York Evening Post to cover the trial of the IWW members. She began as an impartial observer, but soon grew passionate about workers rights.
Six months later, when the United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917, Strong actively opposed the war and the draft. While she had supporters, the Seattle Minute Men and other veterans groups branded her ``unpatriotic.’’
While no one doubted her convictions, Strong was prickly to deal with, according to ``Witness to Revolution,’’ a 27-minute documentary about Strong made in 1984 by Seattle filmmaker Lucy Ostrander.
Strong’s outspoken manner and her political views won her few supporters on the School Board. A quick recall campaign ousted Strong, but she did not go quietly. She showed up at the next meeting, insisting that a woman replace her. The board compromised, insisting that it be a mainstream mother who had children in the schools. Evangeline Harper took her place. It wasn’t until 1949 that another woman was elected.
Strong turned to writing, focusing her energies on pro-labor stories.
Two days before the 1919 Seattle general labor strike, in which 60,000 workers walked off their jobs to support striking shipyard workers, Strong penned a now-famous article in the local Union Record:
``We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead - NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!’’
But the strike collapsed in four days and Strong grew disillusioned as the labor movement eroded with infighting.
When famous muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens visited Seattle in 1921, he urged her to visit Moscow. Strong took his advice and found love there. She married a Russian journalist and founded the Moscow Daily News, the first English-language paper in the Soviet Union.
Strong visited the United States over the years to give speeches. In the 1930s, she defended loyalist Spain and warned of impending dangers, attacking U.S. neutrality toward fascists. She visited Seattle, where she was often in the news for being denied speaking halls in Spokane and Tacoma.
Eventually, Strong was tossed out of Russia by Joseph Stalin, who had her deported on trumped-up charges of being a spy. Back in the United States, she was investigated by the FBI for her political leanings. She lived in Los Angeles until 1958, then moved, at age 72, to China.
Her writing there so impressed Mao Tse-tung that he played host to Strong’s 80th birthday party.
She died at 84, four months after telling readers of her ``Letters from China’’ column that her energy was dwindling after eight mercurial decades.
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