FPI / September 21, 2020

Corporate WATCH

By Joe Schaeffer

Megan O'Donnell is co-author of a radical "Feminist Foreign Policy" action paper released in May that was written with the direct help of members of an organization led by key figures in Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's foreign policy inner circle.

O'Donnell in turn is a staffer at a globalist think tank headed by a former director at the International Monetary Fund that has been lavishly funded by Microsoft multibillionaire Bill Gates. In other words, we are not dealing with just another fringe woke rant here. Extremely powerful figures helped create and shape this Cultural Marxist manifesto. It should not be laughed off.

O'Donnell is "Assistant Director, Gender Program and Senior Policy Analyst" at the Center for Global Development (CGD).

The Washington, D.C. and London-based group fully acknowledges the growing nexus of establishment internationalist power it is helping to incubate.

"We focus on the intersection of developing countries and the governments, institutions, and corporations that can help them deliver greater progress," CGD states on its website. Former IMF Middle East and Central Asia Department Director Masood Ahmed is President of the organization and ex-Bill Clinton administration Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers is Chair of its Board of Directors.

Board members include former top George W. Bush aide Tony Fratto and PBS media darling Judy Woodruff.

Before joining CGD, O'Donnell "worked at the ONE Campaign, an international advocacy organization focused on sub Saharan Africa, where she led the development of ONE’s gender and inclusive growth-focused policy recommendations to donors and country governments," her Center bio reads. The ONE Campaign was created by U2 rock star Bono. From its very beginning ONE has been a Bill Gates enterprise. "ONE originated in conversations between Bill Gates and Bono in the early 2000s about the need to better inform Americans about extreme poverty around the world,” the Gates Foundation website says of one of its top grant recipients.

CGD has likewise received eye-popping amounts of funding from Bill Gates in recent years. A "How We're Funded" page on the group's website shows a staggering $45 million-plus in listed donations from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation under the heading "Funding Agreements Active in 2020."

A slew of major corporations also support the think tank. Among those listed in CGD's 2019 Annual Report are the ExxonMobil Foundation, Google Foundation, IKEA Foundation, Nestle, NIKE Foundation, PepsiCo and UBS.

George Soros's Open Society Foundation is listed as a Foundation donor. As are usual globalist culprits the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Ted Turner's United Nations Foundation. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation is a donor as well, waving the flag for Big Tech globalism.

And just what are Gates, Soros and these corporate and foundation behemoths backing?

As we reported Sept. 6, a variety of leftist groups working together released an action paper in May titled “Toward a Feminist Foreign Policy in the United States.” This unhinged proclamation co-written by CGD expert O'Donnell was released in partnership with several pro-mass immigration and pro-abortion organizations, including NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood.

The paper is a bizarre stew of rabid leftist sloganeering. Among other things, it "seeks to disrupt colonial, racist, patriarchal and male-dominated power structures; and allocates significant resources, including research, to achieve that vision."

The document was produced with the help of "contributing" individuals from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Planned Parenthood, and the globalist Council on Foreign Relations.

A group known as Foreign Policy For America is among the listed "endorsing organizations" of the paper. Two members of Foreign Policy For America are also listed as contributors, including Rachel Vogelstein, who according to her Council on Foreign Relations bio, is "[p]roviding outside informal counsel to the Biden for President Campaign."

Foreign Policy For America is tightly connected with the Biden presidential campaign. Top Biden advisers associated with Foreign Policy For America include reported "inner circle" bigwigs Antony Blinken and Avril Haines and other Biden campaign personnel are actively involved with the group.

It should be further noted that Brian Deese, a former senior aide to Barack Obama who now works at global investment goliath BlackRock, has been widely reported to be one of Joe Biden's key advisers on climate change. Deese is a former research associate at the Center for Global Development who has now risen to the top levers of corporate and Democratic Party power.

It is no surprise that a CGD "expert" like O'Donnell would help write such a radical document. CGD explicitly states that "gender and equality" are key tenets of its foreign development work. Beyond expected shrill calls for global abortion expansion, O'Donnell and CGD also labor to frame refugee migration into the West as a feminist issue.

Migration is listed among the six "What We Do" items featured on the group's website. "Today's displacement crisis calls for more than closed-border policies or traditional short-term humanitarian aid: it requires far-sighted development solutions that create economic opportunities," the group declares. "CGD brings evidence to these contentious political issues and devises policy solutions so migrants, refugees, and their hosts can thrive together."

O'Donnell seems to see gender inequality as at the crux of all problems in the world today. Try and guess what current issue she is talking about here:

But for those of us who are in the position of privilege to continue thinking long term, it’s our responsibility to [push forward projects that focus on women’s economic empowerment]. Working towards structural changes that will take longer to come to fruition, especially those that relate to reducing global inequality, is the only way to radically decrease the extent of harm caused by moments of crisis, especially for vulnerable populations.

Answer: The coronavirus pandemic.

Translation of her remarks: Crisis will be used to advance a leftist cultural agenda.

A look at other experts reveals CGD to be firmly aligned in an internationalist axis. Charles Kenny, a Senior Fellow and one of the organization's self-described "experts," penned a July 22 screed for the organization bluntly titled "A Manifesto for Globalization."

Bold added to emphasize Kenny's belief that cultural concerns aren't valid at all when addressing the issue:

Perhaps most dangerously, we have allowed isolationists and nativists to portray global engagement as zero-sum and of benefit only to the few. We have allowed apologists to suggest their supporters are motivated by personal economic loss linked to globalization, rather than by cultural concerns. These are dangerous fictions, and it is time to confront them.

Kenny cannot even fathom that there is merit to opposing massive unchecked Third World immigration and the Disneyfication of the world for anything but economic reasons alone. The erosion of community cohesion and values, the destruction of cultural identity and the inherent stresses that come with living in a polyglot multicultural society are not fit subjects for discussion in his mind. They are GOTCHA points to mark nationalists as something sinister, if only we can take the economic argument away from them. So telling.

Then there is Michael Clemens, "Director of Migration, Displacement, and Humanitarian Policy and Senior Fellow" at CGD. In a Dec. 2019 anti-Border Wall article published by the far-left magazine Mother Jones, Clemens praises the catastrophic illegal influx of tens of millions of Mexicans into this country over the past 40 years as a wonderful phenomenon. Mexican migration "was still massively, massively beneficial for the U.S.," Clemens is quoted as saying. "There’s a whole generation of children who were taken care of, grandparents who were taken care of, buildings that were built, factories that were guarded at night, farms that could continue to exist only because of that Mexican migration."

And American jobs lost, wages depressed, communities gutted by crime and decay, etc. etc. None of this seems to matter to the globalists at CGD.

Bill Gates is showering millions of dollars onto an organization that wants to make radical feminist beliefs official U.S. foreign policy, inundate our nation with Third World refugees and crush America First populism. The more one observes where this man's money is going, the more clear it becomes just how disturbingly similar Gates is to his notorious globalist philanthropic peer George Soros.

Joe Schaeffer is the former Managing Editor of The Washington Times National Weekly Edition. His columns appear at WorldTribune.com, LibertyNation.com and FreePressInternational.org.

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