"Baron Black"? Nope, too plain.
"Baron Black of Bilderberg"? Er...perhaps a little too pretentious...
"Count Conrad"? Sounds good, but (sigh) unfortunately doesn't fit in the British noble hierarchy....
"Lord Black of Trafalgar and Waterloo"? Now that's it! Majestic, victorious, with just a touch of invincibility - and sure to look great on cheques...!
The Globe and Mail [Toronto]
Tuesday, June 8, 1999
BLACK AIMS FOR SEAT IN HOUSE OF LORDS
Press baron will be appointed a life peer this month, sources say
London -- Conrad Black, the Canadian media tycoon who has embraced Britain as a spiritual home and a place to do business, is in negotiations with authorities in the British and Canadian governments to allow him to take a seat in the House of Lords.
Sources in both countries say that Mr. Black, who heads the Hollinger Inc. newspaper group, will be appointed a life peer on June 17. That would make the press baron a real baron.
Following in the footsteps of other great Canadian press barons past -- Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Thomson of Fleet -- Mr. Black is expected to take his seat in Britain's august upper chamber.
One hurdle remains. According to convention, Canadians do not accept titles from the Queen.
But sources told The Globe and Mail that the problem may be on the point of being solved.
Mr. Black apparently is set to become a British citizen while keeping his Canadian citizenship.
As long as the British agree to bestow citizenship on Mr. Black, Canada has no objection to a dual-citizenship arrangement.
Richard Codrington, Britain's deputy high commissioner in Ottawa, said yesterday that when a Canadian or someone with dual citizenship from Canada and another country is to be honoured by the Queen, a formal request is made to the Department of Foreign Affairs for permission.
"You need to ask Canadian permission, the same way as if the Canadian government wanted to honour a British subject they would need to ask the British government's permission do so," he said.
Mr. Codrington said the Queen bestows honours twice a year, on New Year's and her official birthday in June. "All of these things are handled extremely confidentially," he added. "We wouldn't comment on any honours. We just never comment on them."
He said that if someone is honoured with a life peerage he can use the title baron and sit in the House of Lords.
The question of Canadians accepting such honours from the Queen has been controversial almost since Confederation. The appointment of New Brunswick-born Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, to the House of Lords during the prime ministership of Robert Borden hardened Canadian public opinion against titled Canadians.
In 1919, the House of Commons adopted the so-called Nickle Resolution putting an end to the practice of granting titular honours on Canadians.
When Roy Thomson was elevated to the peerage in 1963, he was granted British citizenship at the same time. But the laws at that time did not permit dual citizenship and so he ceased to be a Canadian citizen. The Canadian government also blocked him from referring to himself as Lord Thomson of Toronto. He settled instead for Lord Thomson of Fleet.
Lord Thomson was one of the last hereditary peers to be appointed; his peerage passed automaticaly upon his death in 1976 to his son, Kenneth Thomson, controlling shareholder of the company that owns The Globe and Mail. Mr. Thomson has never taken up his seat because he lives in Toronto.
Mr. Black's Hollinger controls the Southam newspaper chain in Canada and The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers in Britain.
Considered an anglophile who splits his time between London and Toronto, Mr. Black is a major booster of several political causes, notably closer economic ties between Britain and North America.
Mr. Black has expressed interest in the past in obtaining a peerage. In a 1993 interview with The Globe and Mail, he said: "Every chairman of The Daily Telegraph in the history of that paper has been a peer, so I don't think it's that hard to envision achieving that status."
He allowed that he could conceivably give up his Canadian citizenship depending upon how his career unfolded.
Although such appointments are made by the Queen on the advice of Prime Minister Tony Blair, that does not mean Mr. Black would sit as a Labour Party peer. In fact, he is expected to be a cross-bencher, the Lords equivalent of an independent.
Before he fell from bilderberg favour, however, this is what the 'New World Order Intelligence Update' 1996 Bilderberg Conference Press Releases reported concerning his evidently highly-valued association with the Bilderbergers:
In his 1993 biography, 'A LIFE IN PROGRESS', Conrad Black had this to say about the Bilderberg, which he first attended in May, 1981:"This group was set up in the mid-fifties by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and was designed to strengthen understanding between prominent people in the North Atlantic community. It met at the Dutch resort hotel that gave the group its name. About 120 or so people meet from every full-fledged traditionally non-communist European country, as well as Canada and the United States. They normally include senior officials of the governments of all the countries represented, with a wide swath of enlightened business, academic, media and military leaders. There was always a group of international officials, led by the NATO Secretary- General and military commander and the head of the OECD [Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development]The key to the unique success of the Bilderberg meetings has been to hold them in remote places almost entirely without spouses or aides, to discourage prepared texts, and to confine discussion as much as possible to English.
Although I had first met Henry Kissinger in Palm Beach in 1979, and then at a luncheon in Toronto, jointly hosted by the ECONOMIST magazine and our company in 1980, and later socially in New York, it was at Bilderberg that I got to know him and a number of our other, future, directors and advisory board members. These included Gianni Agnelli of Fiat, Dwayne Andreas [controlling shareholder of the giant agri-business Archer-Daniels, Midland], Zbigniew Brzezinski [former national security advisor in the Carter administration], Lord Carrington [former British foreign and defence secretary and secretary-general of NATO], Andrew Knight [editor of the ECONOMIST], Richard Perle [former U.S. assistant secretary of National Defence and one of the champions of the Strategic Defence Initiative ("Star Wars") and Euro-missile deployment], Paul Volker [former Federal Reserve chairman], and George Will [U.S. conservative columnist and commentator], as well as many other interesting people.
Not having very satisfactory recollections of schooldays, nor being a very enthusiastic or obsevant university alumnus, Bilderberg has been the closest I have known to that sort of comaraderie. The animated social sessions, as much as the cut and thrust on the principal strategic and economic issues faced by the Atlantic community, have given me, and many other regular participants, a powerful and entirely agreeable sense of community with some very talented and prominent people. After 1986, I became the co-leader of the Canadian group and effectively chose most of the Canadian participants.
Providentially, the world became more accessible for me as Canada became less commodious. It was from Bilderberg that our company's eventual vocation as an international newspaper organization arose."
As Convicted Felon, Conrad Black No Longer Welcome In Canada
by Joan Bryden,
The Canadian Press,
Metro News, Halifax, 14 July, 2007.OTTAWA (CP) - Conrad Black, once one of Canada's wealthiest and most influential citizens, is no longer welcome in this country.
His criminal conviction Friday on four charges of fraud and obstruction renders him inadmissible to Canada.
And it renders all but impossible his hope of one day regaining his Canadian citizenship, which he renounced in 2001 in order to accept a peerage to the British House of Lords, although his lead lawyer doesn't concede anything.
"Everything remains to be seen. Everything is under appeal. So I don't think we can make those kinds of final statements now," Black's lawyer Edward Greenspan said in an interview Friday with CBC Radio's As It Happens.
Citizenship and Immigration Canada declined to comment specifically on Black's application to resume his citizenship.
But department spokesperson Karen Shadd-Evelyn said that "in general, a person convicted of a serious crime is inadmissible to Canada." That means "in essence" that a convicted felon can't even visit for a day.
Black said last fall that he was going through "normal channels" to regain his citizenship. He described his status at that point as a "temporary resident" of Canada.
To be eligible to resume citizenship, a person must live in Canada as a permanent resident for at least one year immediately prior to applying for citizenship. But a convicted felon couldn't enter the country, making it impossible to become a permanent resident and therefore impossible to become a citizen.
"That's how it would work, yes," Shadd-Evelyn said.
Immigration Minister Diane Finley has discretionary power to grant Black permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. Her spokesman, Timothy Vail, refused Friday to speculate on what the minister might do.
But even if Finley did allow Black to live in Canada again, his criminal conviction would stand in the way of regaining his citizenship.
"Under the Citizenship Act, the minister can issue a permit for permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. However, Canadian citizenship can't be granted to those who are criminally inadmissible and neither the minister nor the governor in council (cabinet) can override that," Shadd-Evelyn said.
Black renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2001 following a protracted battle with then-prime minister Jean Chretien, who nixed the newspaper baron's nomination to the House of Lords.
Citing the obscure 1919 Nickle Resolution, Chretien advised his British counterpart, Tony Blair, that such foreign honours could not be bestowed on a Canadian citizen. Black went to court, alleging that Chretien had abused his power, but the court upheld the prime minister's right to give whatever advice he liked to a foreign government.
Furious, Black gave up his citizenship, declaring it "an impediment to my progress in another more amenable jurisdiction."
Friday's conviction, however, not only proves an impediment to reclaiming citizenship - it also denies Black the opportunity to serve his American sentence in Canada's more amenable prison facilities.
"It is kind of an irony that he would want to abandon citizenship for the (British) House of Lords and want to regain it for prison," observed immigration lawyer David Matas. "When you're moving up, you get out. When you're moving down, you get in."
As a Canadian citizen, Matas noted, Black would have been eligible to serve his sentence in Canada, likely in a minimum-security facility from which he could have gained parole earlier than in the United States.
As a foreigner, U.S. legal experts have said Black is not eligible to be placed in an American minimum security prison, sometimes dubbed "Club Fed" for their relaxed, college-dorm approach to incarceration.
He is more likely to be sent to a low-security facility, with a more controlled environment.
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"Do you really believe the corporate media tell you all of the truth all of the time? Or do you suspect that some stories are just not dealt with, while others are subtly slanted and edited so as to tell you what to believe concerning an issue, person or movement?In our own experience, we've been astounded to see the difference between individual wire services [the primary source of news for many newspapers and other media outlets] in the way they treat particular stories; between the British and North American press in which major stories are covered and which are just suppressed by lack of media exposure; and by the all-too-revealing stories which were consistently ignored because they simply proved too embarrassing or inconvenient to those in power.
Fortunately, at least one highly-respected journalist has publicly confessed that this is indeed the case. Asked to give a toast before the prestigious New York Press Club in 1953, John Swinton, the former Chief of Staff at The New York Times, made this candid confession [it's worth noting that Swinton was called "The Dean of His Profession" by other newsmen, who admired him greatly]:
There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
In the intervening period, things have got even worse! Media concentration and the virtual disappearance of independent newspapers and fearless investigative reporting often means that the only things you can really trust the media on are the sports results, the classified ads and the weather - and, not infrequently, they're even wrong about the weather! Add the biases and liberal preconceptions of the typical journalist to the political correctness strictures which now prevail and is it any wonder that somewhere and somehow the truth gets lost in the process of reporting it? Consciously or not, most journalists function as paid propagandists and newspapers present the viewpoints which the controlling elite wish us to hear and be influenced by." - 'New World Order Intelligence Update'
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You'll Find These Related Books And Videos Intriguing, Too...
"En Route To Global Occupation" - Gary Kah
"One World" - Tal Brooke
"Our Global Neighborhood: The Report of the Commission on Global Governance" - Commission on Global Governance [see the article on Maurice Strong, who was a key figure on this elite Commission which blueprinted the UN's future role as a global super-government. This book is essential reading!]
"Tragedy And Hope: A History of the World in Our Time" - Carroll Quigley [read the huge and astonishing array of quotes concerning the New World Order on that page! Also absolutely essential reading]
"New World Order: Ancient Plan Of Secret Societies" - William Still
"The Unseen Hand" - Ralph Epperson
"The New World Order" - Ralph Epperson [read Jim Quinn's fascinating interview with John Whitley on the New World Order!]
"The Keys Of This Blood: Pope John Paul II Versus Russia And The West For Control Of The New World Order" - Malachi Martin
"Wall Street And The Bolshevik Revolution" - Antony C. Sutton
"The Best Enemy Money Can Buy" - Antony C. Sutton
"America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones" - Antony C. Sutton
"Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power" - Alexandra Robbins
"Secret Societies of America's Elite: From the Knights Templar to Skull and Bones" - Steven Sora
"Secret Societies and Subversive Movements" - Nesta H. Webster
"Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare" - Michael A. Hoffman II
"The Naked Capitalist" - W. Cleon Skousen
"None Dare Call It Conspiracy" - Gary Allen
"None Dare Call It Treason" - John A. Stormer
"Who's Who of the Elite: Members of the Bilderbergs, Council on Foreign Relations, & Trilateral Commission" - Robert Gaylon Ross Sr.
"The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline" - James Perloff
"Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management" - edited by Holly Sklar
"The Anglo-American Establishment" - Carroll Quigley
"Pawns in the Game" - William G. Carr
"Now Is The Coming Of The New Age New World Order" - Dr. Dennis Cuddy
"Secret Records Revealed: The Men, the Money, and the Methods Behind the New World Order " - Dr. Dennis Cuddy
"The Globalists" - Dennis L. Cuddy
"September 11 Prior Knowledge" - Dennis Laurence Cuddy
"Circle Of Intrigue" - Texe Marrs
"Descent Into Slavery" - Des Griffin
"Conspirator's Hierarchy: The Committee of 300" - John Coleman