WELCOME TO THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Transcript
Welcome to the "new world order" Pt.1
GORDON BROWN, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER: A new world order is emerging, and with it the foundations of a new and progressive era of international cooperation.
PEPE ESCOBAR, SENIOR ANALYST, TRNN: After a tsunami of hype, it's time to really put in perspective all these minds behind the new world order announced at the G20 in London. Professor Michael Hudson of the University of Missouri, he could not be more explicit: neoliberal logic still rules. And if you don't accept the IMF's kiss of death, he writes, "The alternative is for debtor countries to suffer the same kind of economic sanctions as Iran, Cuba and pre-invasion Iraq." So maybe this is a better reflection of the new world order, a world where it's our gain, your pain. And a leading story tells us capitalism isn't really democracy. Yes, this is a Financial Times spoof distributed [inaudible] in London during the G20. What kind of new world order is this when countries of the mostly poor south are net creditors of the rich north? The US foreign debt at over $6 trillion is twice the total foreign debt of all the countries of the south. These countries, they should be fleeing the IMF, or at least auditing the debts they'll be asked to repay. Before the G20 in London, the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin, the GEAB, in other words, European elites [inaudible] circulating among diplomats, politicians, investors, they were alerting that either we create the conditions for a new global system, and then the crisis would not last more than five years, or if we stick to the current system, the crisis will turn, in 2010s, into a lost decade. So imagine what will happen to this chart illustrating the prevailing sense of doom in the US? In a letter published in The Financial Times, this European think tank had a few crucial suggestions. Number one, create a new global reserve currency based on a basket of currencies. Well, China and other emerging markets, they couldn't even get the US to discuss this possibility, even though the US economy and the dollar are fragile. Number two, get the IMF to examine the US, the UK, and the Swiss banking systems. That one was a no-go during the G20. And number three, write a simple and short statement. Well, the communique had ten pages. While the G20 sounded like an Obama credit boom with fake money, the global depression rolls on, as this policy analysis website shows. Even though—.
BROWN: The old Washington consensus is over. Today we have reached a new consensus.
ESCOBAR: The London consensus may not fare much better. Already before the G20, the GEAB, that European thinks tank we mentioned, they were projecting what may happen next: the system may disintegrate and global political dislocation (in other words, chaos) may be just around the corner. This amazing story details the crusade led by former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, former Goldman Sachs CEO Robert Rubin (that's Obama's Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's mentor, we should remember), and Larry Summers in the late 1990s, during the Clinton administration, to prevent any regulation whatsoever of the derivatives market. And that's the key source of the global financial crisis. They all said the financial industry was against it. Today we all know the crisis mostly derives from a certain derivative, the famous credit default swap (CDS). Here's what William Black, the man who cracked down on banks during the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s and who wrote this book [The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One] told Bill Moyers:
Courtesy: PBS.org
WILLIAM BLACK, AUTHOR, FORMER BANK REGULATOR: We passed a law because there was a very good regulator, Brooksley Born, that everybody should know about [but] probably doesn't. She tried to do the right thing, to regulate one of these exotic derivatives which you were talking about—we call them CDS. And Summers, Ruben, and Phil Graham came together to say not only will we block this particular regulation; we will pass a law that says you can't regulate. And it's this type of derivative that is most involved in the AIG scandal. And AIG all by itself cost the same as the entire Savings and Loan debacle.
BILL MOYERS, HOST, BILL MOYERS JOURNAL: [snip] —cover-up?
BLACK: Sure, it's a cover-up.
MOYERS: That's a serious charge.
BLACK: Of course.
MOYERS: Who's covering up?
BLACK: Geithner is changing—is covering up, just like he did before. Geithner is publicly saying that it's going to take 2 trillion—a trillion is 1,000 billion, right?—2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they're allowing all the banks to report that they're not only solvent but fully capitalized. Both statements can't be true; it can't be that they need $2 trillion because they have massive losses and that they're fine. These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed. Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not because they had succeeded.
MOYERS: What do you mean?
BLACK: Well, Geithner was one of our nation's top regulators during the entire subprime scandal that I just described. He took absolutely no effective action. He gave no warning. He did nothing in response to the FBI warning that there was an epidemic of fraud. All this pig-in-the-poke stuff happened under him. So, in his phrase about legacy assets, well, he's a failed legacy regulator.
ESCOBAR: So President Lula of Brazil's metaphor was, after all, more than correct. But nobody ever thought about the scale of it all, something like $1 quadrillion of derivatives—yes, a pyramid of 1,000 trillion dollars. So make no mistake: fear struck the US ruling elites, and this led to the US government and the Fed giving $10 trillion to big banks. No wonder George Soros, who knows one or two things about money, is now scared of zombie banks sucking the lifeblood out of the economy. This whole thing also led to a new, over half a trillion dollars-strong Pentagon budget, four percent higher than the last Pentagon budget under George W. Bush. And this also led to the new chapter of the Pentagon's long war, the Af-Pak war.
Courtesy: guardian.co.uk
BARACK OBAMA, US PRESIDENT: I also want to be clear that America's relationship with the Muslim community, the Muslim world, cannot and will not just be based upon opposition to terrorism.
ESCOBAR: Excellent. But the fact remains: the Af-Pak war is a guaranteed stimulus package for the industrial-military complex. The rest of the world sees it all very differently. Beyond the G20, this is what developing countries are worried about. Number one, a tsunami of surplus dollars traveling the world in financial speculation overdrive. Number two, the fact that central banks have recycled these dollars to buy US Treasury bonds, and thus financed a huge US budget deficit, now 13 percent of the US GDP. And number three, the military character of the US deficits. The new world order can be glimpsed in developing countries. They are trying some other very, very serious options. Example: the petro-currency discussed at the recent meeting between the leaders of South America and the Arab League. The GEAD, that European thinks tank I mentioned, they call it the Khaleeji. It could be out in circulation by January 2010. In a new world order, it is visible in things like China lending in yuan to Argentina. That's a swap deal. This means that China is lending some of its huge reserves in foreign currency directly to its trade partners. And what about some practical consequences of the new world order? Stay tuned for the second part of this report.
April 15, 2009
Welcome to the new “New World Order” Pt.2
Pepe Escobar: There will be class war, there will be blood
Transcript
Welcome to the "new world order"
Part 2 - There will be blood
Courtesy: CNN
GORDON BROWN, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER: A new world order is emerging, and with it the foundations of a new and progressive era of international cooperation.
PEPE ESCOBAR, SENIOR ANALYST, TRNN: As far as the US homeland is concerned, this is how former assistant secretary to the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts sees the new world order. He writes, and I quote, "Obama is attacking the only income class that has any independence—the upper middle class professionals." And it gets much worse: "What the Obama administration is really doing is taxing ordinary people in order to bail out the super rich. The 95 percent of Americans who will get the tax cut will find that it's offset many times by the depreciation in the dollar and the raging inflation that will result from monetizing the multi-trillion dollar budget deficits made necessary by the bailouts of the banksters." In other words, what Craig is saying is that class struggle is alive and kicking in the US. The ruling class, they've got everything. Most of America's in what Gore Vidal calls "the United States of Amnesia." They may have forgotten that the Democratic Party, they used to be supported by the unions. So the unions had progressive policies. Globalization destroyed unions. For the Democrats what matters now is Wall Street. And to top it all, Obama's not likely to push for legislation that makes it easier to organize unions in the US. So is this the way a new world order shapes up? The great Immanuel Wallerstein, in one of his recent commentaries for the Fernand Braudel Institute, he has stressed how the reports from the European think tank GEAB [GlobalEurope Anticipation Bulletin] we mentioned in Part 1 of this report, they have pointed out this is the last chance for audacity. The London consensus reached at the G20 is not audacity, not to mention the stimulus and bailout plans which are popularly perceived to be about saving them, the banksters. The possibility of no less than civil war in United States and in Europe is very, very real. Wallerstein stresses, and I quote, "These analyses are not coming from left intellectuals or radical social movements. They are the openly expressed fears of serious analysts who are part of the existing Establishment in United States and Europe." And what about this fearful establishment insider?
Courtesy: MSNBC
JOE SCARBOROUGH, MORNING TALK SHOW HOST: We were been talking about the disappearance of the middle class, something you've been concerned about. But you also talk about the possibility of class conflict.
ESCOBAR: The G20 in London was just a preview, with street protesters corralled and treated as terrorists, while the world elites barricade themselves in ultrasecure gated communities. Last January, this bill, the HR 645, was introduced in the US Congress. It calls for six sprawling national emergency centers located on military bases. Their purpose, I quote, is "temporary housing, medical, and humanitarian assistance to individuals and families dislocated due to an emergency or major disaster." But they can also be used to, I quote, "meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security." (HR 645: National Emergency Centers Establishment Act) In fact, these are FEMA gulags. Corporate media, of course, has totally ignored HR 645. This is another glimpse of the new world order inside the US. And not many people may remember this:
BARACK OBAMA, US PRESIDENT: We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.
ESCOBAR: And where does that leave the US moral authority?
Courtesy: CNN
OBAMA: Our moral authority is derived from the fact that generations of our citizens have fought and bled to uphold these values in our nations and others. And that's why we can never sacrifice them for expedience's sake.
ESCOBAR: Ten years ago, NATO already had studies about operation in urban areas with high collateral damage. It's all here in this report [RTO TECHNICAL REPORT 71, Urban Operations in the Year 2020], published—irony of history—six years ago, when George Bush thought he had won the war in Iraq. This report tacitly advises the gradual use of the army for crowd control in urban centers ahead of a global crisis they thought then would start around 2020. Well, 2020 is now. Proto-fascists, from loudmouthed right-wing Christians to the sexy Sarah "Barracuda" Palins of the world, they will have no trouble finding disciples, and any pretext is good enough for further militarization of territory and of consciousness. The Pentagon's long war will go on. And on. New world order? More like Newspeak. There will be depression; there will be anger; there will be blood.
THE TOWER OF BASEL:
SECRETIVE PLANS FOR THE ISSUING OF A GLOBAL CURRENCY
Do we really want the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) issuing our global currency
Ellen Brown
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13239
In an April 7 article in The London Telegraph titled “The G20 Moves the World a Step Closer to a Global Currency,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote: “A single clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders amounts to revolution in the global financial order.
“‘We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,’ it said. SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century.
“In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global ‘quantitative easing’. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.”
Indeed they will. The article is subtitled, “The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity.” Which naturally raises the question, who or what will serve as this global central bank, cloaked with the power to issue the global currency and police monetary policy for all humanity? When the world’s central bankers met in Washington last September, they discussed what body might be in a position to serve in that awesome and fearful role. A former governor of the Bank of England stated:
“[T]he answer might already be staring us in the face, in the form of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). . . . The IMF tends to couch its warnings about economic problems in very diplomatic language, but the BIS is more independent and much better placed to deal with this if it is given the power to do so.”1
And if the vision of a global currency outside government control does not set off conspiracy theorists, putting the BIS in charge of it surely will. The BIS has been scandal-ridden ever since it was branded with pro-Nazi leanings in the 1930s. Founded in Basel, Switzerland, in 1930, the BIS has been called “the most exclusive, secretive, and powerful supranational club in the world.” Charles Higham wrote in his book Trading with the Enemy that by the late 1930s, the BIS had assumed an openly pro-Nazi bias, a theme that was expanded on in a BBC Timewatch film titled “Banking with Hitler” broadcast in 1998.2 In 1944, the American government backed a resolution at the Bretton-Woods Conference calling for the liquidation of the BIS, following Czech accusations that it was laundering gold stolen by the Nazis from occupied Europe; but the central bankers succeeded in quietly snuffing out the American resolution.3
Modest beginnings, BIS Office, Hotel Savoy-Univers, Basel
First Annual General Meeting, 1931
In Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), Dr. Carroll Quigley revealed the key role played in global finance by the BIS behind the scenes. Dr. Quigley was Professor of History at Georgetown University, where he was President Bill Clinton’s mentor. He was also an insider, groomed by the powerful clique he called “the international bankers.” His credibility is heightened by the fact that he actually espoused their goals. He wrote:
“I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. . . . [I]n general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”
Quigley wrote of this international banking network:
“[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.”
The key to their success, said Quigley, was that the international bankers would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government. The statement echoed one made in the eighteenth century by the patriarch of what would become the most powerful banking dynasty in the world. Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild famously said in 1791:
"Allow me to issue and control a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.”
Mayer’s five sons were sent to the major capitals of Europe – London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Naples – with the mission of establishing a banking system that would be outside government control. The economic and political systems of nations would be controlled not by citizens but by bankers, for the benefit of bankers. Eventually, a privately-owned “central bank” was established in nearly every country; and this central banking system has now gained control over the economies of the world. Central banks have the authority to print money in their respective countries, and it is from these banks that governments must borrow money to pay their debts and fund their operations. The result is a global economy in which not only industry but government itself runs on “credit” (or debt) created by a banking monopoly headed by a network of private central banks; and at the top of this network is the BIS, the “central bank of central banks” in Basel.
Behind the Curtain
For many years the BIS kept a very low profile, operating behind the scenes in an abandoned hotel. It was here that decisions were reached to devalue or defend currencies, fix the price of gold, regulate offshore banking, and raise or lower short-term interest rates. In 1977, however, the BIS gave up its anonymity in exchange for more efficient headquarters. The new building has been described as “an eighteen story-high circular skyscraper that rises above the medieval city like some misplaced nuclear reactor.” It quickly became known as the “Tower of Basel.” Today the BIS has governmental immunity, pays no taxes, and has its own private police force.4 It is, as Mayer Rothschild envisioned, above the law.
The BIS is now composed of 55 member nations, but the club that meets regularly in Basel is a much smaller group; and even within it, there is a hierarchy. In a 1983 article in Harper’s Magazine called “Ruling the World of Money,” Edward Jay Epstein wrote that where the real business gets done is in “a sort of inner club made up of the half dozen or so powerful central bankers who find themselves more or less in the same monetary boat” – those from Germany, the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Japan and England. Epstein said:
“The prime value, which also seems to demarcate the inner club from the rest of the BIS members, is the firm belief that central banks should act independently of their home governments. . . . A second and closely related belief of the inner club is that politicians should not be trusted to decide the fate of the international monetary system.”
In 1974, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision was created by the central bank Governors of the Group of Ten nations (now expanded to twenty). The BIS provides the twelve-member Secretariat for the Committee. The Committee, in turn, sets the rules for banking globally, including capital requirements and reserve controls. In a 2003 article titled “The Bank for International Settlements Calls for Global Currency,” Joan Veon wrote:
“The BIS is where all of the world’s central banks meet to analyze the global economy and determine what course of action they will take next to put more money in their pockets, since they control the amount of money in circulation and how much interest they are going to charge governments and banks for borrowing from them. . . .
“When you understand that the BIS pulls the strings of the world’s monetary system, you then understand that they have the ability to create a financial boom or bust in a country. If that country is not doing what the money lenders want, then all they have to do is sell its currency.”5
The Controversial Basel Accords
The power of the BIS to make or break economies was demonstrated in 1988, when it issued a Basel Accord raising bank capital requirements from 6% to 8%. By then, Japan had emerged as the world’s largest creditor; but Japan’s banks were less well capitalized than other major international banks. Raising the capital requirement forced them to cut back on lending, creating a recession in Japan like that suffered in the U.S. today. Property prices fell and loans went into default as the security for them shriveled up. A downward spiral followed, ending with the total bankruptcy of the banks. The banks had to be nationalized, although that word was not used in order to avoid criticism.6
Among other collateral damage produced by the Basel Accords was a spate of suicides among Indian farmers unable to get loans. The BIS capital adequacy standards required loans to private borrowers to be “risk-weighted,” with the degree of risk determined by private rating agencies; and farmers and small business owners could not afford the agencies’ fees. Banks therefore assigned 100 percent risk to the loans, and then resisted extending credit to these “high-risk” borrowers because more capital was required to cover the loans. When the conscience of the nation was aroused by the Indian suicides, the government, lamenting the neglect of farmers by commercial banks, established a policy of ending the “financial exclusion” of the weak; but this step had little real effect on lending practices, due largely to the strictures imposed by the BIS from abroad.7
Similar complaints have come from Korea. An article in the December 12, 2008 Korea Times titled “BIS Calls Trigger Vicious Cycle” described how Korean entrepreneurs with good collateral cannot get operational loans from Korean banks, at a time when the economic downturn requires increased investment and easier credit:
“‘The Bank of Korea has provided more than 35 trillion won to banks since September when the global financial crisis went full throttle,’ said a Seoul analyst, who declined to be named. ‘But the effect is not seen at all with the banks keeping the liquidity in their safes. They simply don’t lend and one of the biggest reasons is to keep the BIS ratio high enough to survive,’ he said. . . .
“Chang Ha-joon, an economics professor at Cambridge University, concurs with the analyst. ‘What banks do for their own interests, or to improve the BIS ratio, is against the interests of the whole society. This is a bad idea,’ Chang said in a recent telephone interview with Korea Times.”
In a May 2002 article in The Asia Times titled “Global Economy: The BIS vs. National Banks,” economist Henry C K Liu observed that the Basel Accords have forced national banking systems “to march to the same tune, designed to serve the needs of highly sophisticated global financial markets, regardless of the developmental needs of their national economies.” He wrote:
“[N]ational banking systems are suddenly thrown into the rigid arms of the Basel Capital Accord sponsored by the Bank of International Settlement (BIS), or to face the penalty of usurious risk premium in securing international interbank loans. . . . National policies suddenly are subjected to profit incentives of private financial institutions, all members of a hierarchical system controlled and directed from the money center banks in New York. The result is to force national banking systems to privatize . . . .
“BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. . . . The IMF and the international banks regulated by the BIS are a team: the international banks lend recklessly to borrowers in emerging economies to create a foreign currency debt crisis, the IMF arrives as a carrier of monetary virus in the name of sound monetary policy, then the international banks come as vulture investors in the name of financial rescue to acquire national banks deemed capital inadequate and insolvent by the BIS.”
Ironically, noted Liu, developing countries with their own natural resources did not actually need the foreign investment that trapped them in debt to outsiders:
“Applying the State Theory of Money [which assumes that a sovereign nation has the power to issue its own money], any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation.”
When governments fall into the trap of accepting loans in foreign currencies, however, they become “debtor nations” subject to IMF and BIS regulation. They are forced to divert their production to exports, just to earn the foreign currency necessary to pay the interest on their loans. National banks deemed “capital inadequate” have to deal with strictures comparable to the “conditionalities” imposed by the IMF on debtor nations: “escalating capital requirement, loan writeoffs and liquidation, and restructuring through selloffs, layoffs, downsizing, cost-cutting and freeze on capital spending.” Liu wrote:
“Reversing the logic that a sound banking system should lead to full employment and developmental growth, BIS regulations demand high unemployment and developmental degradation in national economies as the fair price for a sound global private banking system.”
The Last Domino to Fall
While banks in developing nations were being penalized for falling short of the BIS capital requirements, large international banks managed to escape the rules, although they actually carried enormous risk because of their derivative exposure. The mega-banks succeeded in avoiding the Basel rules by separating the “risk” of default out from the loans and selling it off to investors, using a form of derivative known as “credit default swaps.”
BIS Tower Building, Basel
Botta 1 Building, Basel
However, it was not in the game plan that U.S. banks should escape the BIS net. When they managed to sidestep the first Basel Accord, a second set of rules was imposed known as Basel II. The new rules were established in 2004, but they were not levied on U.S. banks until November 2007, the month after the Dow passed 14,000 to reach its all-time high. It has been all downhill from there. Basel II had the same effect on U.S. banks that Basel I had on Japanese banks: they have been struggling ever since to survive.8
Basel II requires banks to adjust the value of their marketable securities to the “market price” of the security, a rule called “mark to market.”9 The rule has theoretical merit, but the problem is timing: it was imposed ex post facto, after the banks already had the hard-to-market assets on their books. Lenders that had been considered sufficiently well capitalized to make new loans suddenly found they were insolvent. At least, they would have been insolvent if they had tried to sell their assets, an assumption required by the new rule. Financial analyst John Berlau complained:
“The crisis is often called a ‘market failure,’ and the term ‘mark-to-market’ seems to reinforce that. But the mark-to-market rules are profoundly anti-market and hinder the free-market function of price discovery. . . . In this case, the accounting rules fail to allow the market players to hold on to an asset if they don’t like what the market is currently fetching, an important market action that affects price discovery in areas from agriculture to antiques.”10
Imposing the mark-to-market rule on U.S. banks caused an instant credit freeze, which proceeded to take down the economies not only of the U.S. but of countries worldwide. In early April 2009, the mark-to-market rule was finally softened by the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB); but critics said the modification did not go far enough, and it was done in response to pressure from politicians and bankers, not out of any fundamental change of heart or policies by the BIS.
And that is where the conspiracy theorists come in. Why did the BIS not retract or at least modify Basel II after seeing the devastation it had caused? Why did it sit idly by as the global economy came crashing down? Was the goal to create so much economic havoc that the world would rush with relief into the waiting arms of the BIS with its privately-created global currency? The plot thickens . . . .
Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her earlier books focused on the pharmaceutical cartel that gets its power from “the money trust.” Her eleven books include Forbidden Medicine, Nature’s Pharmacy (co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker), and The Key to Ultimate Health (co-authored with Dr. Richard Hansen). Her websites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com.
NOTES
1. Andrew Marshall, “The Financial New World Order: Towards a Global Currency and World Government,” Global Research (April 6, 2009).
2 Alfred Mendez, “The Network,” The World Central Bank: The Bank for International Settlements, http://copy_bilderberg.tripod.com/bis.htm.
3 “BIS – Bank of International Settlement: The Mother of All Central Banks,” hubpages.com (2009).
4 Ibid.
5 Joan Veon, “The Bank for International Settlements Calls for Global Currency,” News with Views (August 26, 2003).
6 Peter Myers, “The 1988 Basle Accord – Destroyer of Japan’s Finance System,” http://www.mailstar.net/basle.html (updated September 9, 2008).
7 Nirmal Chandra, “Is Inclusive Growth Feasible in Neoliberal India?”, www.networkideas.org (September 2008).
8 Bruce Wiseman, “The Financial Crisis: A look Behind the Wizard’s Curtain,” Canada Free Press (March 19, 2009).
9 See Ellen Brown, “Credit Where Credit Is Due,” www.webofdebt.com/articles/creditcrunch.php (January 11, 2009).
10 John Berlau, “The International Mark-to-market Contagion,” OpenMarket.org (October 10, 2008).
Renewed Calls for a Global Currency
On March 16, 2009, Russia suggested that, “the G20 summit in London in April should start establishing a system of managing the process of globalization and consider the possibility of creating a supra-national reserve currency or a ‘super-reserve currency’.” Russia called for “the creation of a supra-national reserve currency that will be issued by international financial institutions,” and that, “It looks expedient to reconsider the role of the IMF in that process and also to determine the possibility and need for taking measures that would allow for the SDRs (Special Drawing Rights) to become a super-reserve currency recognized by the world community.”[40]
On March 23, 2009, it was reported that China’s central bank “proposed replacing the US dollar as the international reserve currency with a new global system controlled by the International Monetary Fund.” The goal would be for the world reserve currency that is “disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies.” The chief China economist for HSBC stated that, “This is a clear sign that China, as the largest holder of US dollar financial assets, is concerned about the potential inflationary risk of the US Federal Reserve printing money.” The Governor of the People’s Bank of China, the central bank, “suggested expanding the role of special drawing rights, which were introduced by the IMF in 1969 to support the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate regime but became less relevant once that collapsed in the 1970s.” Currently, “the value of SDRs is based on a basket of four currencies – the US dollar, yen, euro and sterling – and they are used largely as a unit of account by the IMF and some other international organizations.”
However, “China’s proposal would expand the basket of currencies forming the basis of SDR valuation to all major economies and set up a settlement system between SDRs and other currencies so they could be used in international trade and financial transactions. Countries would entrust a portion of their SDR reserves to the IMF to manage collectively on their behalf and SDRs would gradually replace existing reserve currencies.”[41]
On March 25, Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary and former President of the New York Federal Reserve, spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations, when asked a question about his thoughts on the Chinese proposal for the global reserve currency, Geithner replied that, “I haven't read the governor's proposal. He's a remarkably -- a very thoughtful, very careful, distinguished central banker. Generally find him sensible on every issue. But as I understand his proposal, it's a proposal designed to increase the use of the IMF's special drawing rights. And we're actually quite open to that suggestion. But you should think of it as rather evolutionary, building on the current architectures, than -- rather than -- rather than moving us to global monetary union [Emphasis added].”[42]
In late March, it was reported that, “A United Nations panel of economists has proposed a new global currency reserve that would take over the US dollar-based system used for decades by international banks,” and that, “An independently administered reserve currency could operate without conflicts posed by the US dollar and keep commodity prices more stable.”[43]
A recent article in the Economic Times stated that, “The world is not yet ready for an international reserve currency, but is ready to begin the process of shifting to such a currency. Otherwise, it would remain too vulnerable to the hegemonic nation,” as in, the United States.[44] Another article in the Economic Times started by proclaiming that, “the world certainly needs an international currency.” Further, the article stated that, “With an unwillingness to accept dollars and the absence of an alternative, international payments system can go into a freeze beyond the control of monetary authorities leading the world economy into a Great Depression,” and that, “In order to avoid such a calamity, the international community should immediately revive the idea of the Substitution Account mooted in 1971, under which official holders of dollars can deposit their unwanted dollars in a special account in the IMF with the values of deposits denominated in an international currency such as the SDR of the IMF.”[45]
Amidst fears of a falling dollar as a result of the increased open discussion of a new global currency, it was reported that, “The dollar’s role as a reserve currency won’t be threatened by a nine-fold expansion in the International Monetary Fund’s unit of account, according to UBS AG, ING Groep NV and Citigroup Inc.” This was reported following the recent G20 meeting, at which, “Group of 20 leaders yesterday gave approval for the agency to raise $250 billion by issuing Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs, the artificial currency that the IMF uses to settle accounts among its member nations. It also agreed to put another $500 billion into the IMF’s war chest.”[46] In other words, the large global financial institutions came to the rhetorical rescue of the dollar, so as not to precipitate a crisis in its current standing, so that they can continue with quietly forming a new global currency.
Creating a World Central Bank
In 1998, Jeffrey Garten wrote an article for the New York Times advocating a “global Fed.” Garten was former Dean of the Yale School of Management, former Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade in the Clinton administration, previously served on the White House Council on International Economic Policy under the Nixon administration and on the policy planning staffs of Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance of the Ford and Carter administrations, former Managing Director at Lehman Brothers, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In his article written in 1998, he stated that, “over time the United States set up crucial central institutions -- the Securities and Exchange Commission (1933), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (1934) and, most important, the Federal Reserve (1913). In so doing, America became a managed national economy. These organizations were created to make capitalism work, to prevent destructive business cycles and to moderate the harsh, invisible hand of Adam Smith.”
He then explained that, “This is what now must occur on a global scale. The world needs an institution that has a hand on the economic rudder when the seas become stormy. It needs a global central bank.” He explains that, “Simply trying to coordinate the world's powerful central banks -- the Fed and the new European Central Bank, for instance -- wouldn't work,” and that, “Effective collaboration among finance ministries and treasuries is also unlikely to materialize. These agencies are responsible to elected legislatures, and politics in the industrial countries is more preoccupied with internal events than with international stability.”
He then postulates that, “An independent central bank with responsibility for maintaining global financial stability is the only way out. No one else can do what is needed: inject more money into the system to spur growth, reduce the sky-high debts of emerging markets, and oversee the operations of shaky financial institutions. A global central bank could provide more money to the world economy when it is rapidly losing steam.” Further, “Such a bank would play an oversight role for banks and other financial institutions everywhere, providing some uniform standards for prudent lending in places like China and Mexico. [However, t]he regulation need not be heavy-handed.” Garten continues, “There are two ways a global central bank could be financed. It could have lines of credit from all central banks, drawing on them in bad times and repaying when the markets turn up. Alternately -- and admittedly more difficult to carry out -- it could be financed by a very modest tariff on all trade, collected at the point of importation, or by a tax on certain global financial transactions.”
Interestingly, Garten states that, “One thing that would not be acceptable would be for the bank to be at the mercy of short-term-oriented legislatures.” In essence, it is not to be accountable to the people of the world. So, he asks the question, “To whom would a global central bank be accountable? It would have too much power to be governed only by technocrats, although it must be led by the best of them. One possibility would be to link the new bank to an enlarged Group of Seven -- perhaps a ''G-15'' [or in today’s context, the G20] that would include the G-7 plus rotating members like Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Poland, India, China and South Korea.” He further states that, “There would have to be very close collaboration” between the global bank and the Fed, and that, “The global bank would not operate within the United States, and it would not be able to override the decisions of our central bank. But it could supply the missing international ingredient -- emergency financing for cash-starved emerging markets. It wouldn't affect American mortgage rates, but it could help the profitability of American multinational companies by creating a healthier global environment for their businesses.”[47]
In September of 2008, Jeffrey Garten wrote an article for the Financial Times in which he stated that, “Even if the US’s massive financial rescue operation succeeds, it should be followed by something even more far-reaching – the establishment of a Global Monetary Authority to oversee markets that have become borderless.” He emphasized the “need for a new Global Monetary Authority. It would set the tone for capital markets in a way that would not be viscerally opposed to a strong public oversight function with rules for intervention, and would return to capital formation the goal of economic growth and development rather than trading for its own sake.”
Further, the “GMA would be a reinsurer or discounter for certain obligations held by central banks. It would scrutinise the regulatory activities of national authorities with more teeth than the IMF has and oversee the implementation of a limited number of global regulations. It would monitor global risks and establish an effective early warning system with more clout to sound alarms than the BIS has.” Moreover, “The biggest global financial companies would have to register with the GMA and be subject to its monitoring, or be blacklisted. That includes commercial companies and banks, but also sovereign wealth funds, gigantic hedge funds and private equity firms.” He recommends that its board “include central bankers not just from the US, UK, the eurozone and Japan, but also China, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. It would be financed by mandatory contributions from every capable country and from insurance-type premiums from global financial companies – publicly listed, government owned, and privately held alike.”[48]
In October of 2008, it was reported that Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack stated that, “it may take continued international coordination to fully unlock the credit markets and resolve the financial crisis, perhaps even by forming a new global body to oversee the process.”[49]
In late October of 2008, Jeffrey Garten wrote an article for Newsweek in which he stated that, “leaders should begin laying the groundwork for establishing a global central bank.” He explained that, “There was a time when the U.S. Federal Reserve played this role [as governing financial authority of the world], as the prime financial institution of the world's most powerful economy, overseeing the one global currency. But with the growth of capital markets, the rise of currencies like the euro and the emergence of powerful players such as China, the shift of wealth to Asia and the Persian Gulf and, of course, the deep-seated problems in the American economy itself, the Fed no longer has the capability to lead single-handedly.”
He explains the criteria and operations of a world central bank, saying that, “It could be the lead regulator of big global financial institutions, such as Citigroup or Deutsche Bank, whose activities spill across borders,” as well as “act as a bankruptcy court when big global banks that operate in multiple countries need to be restructured. It could oversee not just the big commercial banks, such as Mitsubishi UFJ, but also the "alternative" financial system that has developed in recent years, consisting of hedge funds, private-equity groups and sovereign wealth funds—all of which are now substantially unregulated.” Further, it “could have influence over key exchange rates, and might lead a new monetary conference to realign the dollar and the yuan, for example, for one of its first missions would be to deal with the great financial imbalances that hang like a sword over the world economy.”
He further postulates that, “A global central bank would not eliminate the need for the Federal Reserve or other national central banks, which will still have frontline responsibility for sound regulatory policies and monetary stability in their respective countries. But it would have heavy influence over them when it comes to following policies that are compatible with global growth and financial stability. For example, it would work with key countries to better coordinate national stimulus programs when the world enters a recession, as is happening now, so that the cumulative impact of the various national efforts do not so dramatically overshoot that they plant the seeds for a crisis of global inflation. This is a big threat as government spending everywhere goes into overdrive.”[50]
In January of 2009, it was reported that, “one clear solution to avoid a repeat of the problems would be the establishment of a "global central bank" – with the IMF and World Bank being unable to prevent the financial meltdown.” Dr. William Overholt, senior research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School, formerly with the Rand Institute, gave a speech in Dubai in which he said that, “To avoid another crisis, we need an ability to manage global liquidity. Theoretically that could be achieved through some kind of global central bank, or through the creation of a global currency, or through global acceptance of a set of rules with sanctions and a dispute settlement mechanism.”[51]
Guillermo Calvo, Professor of Economics, International and Public Affairs at Columbia University wrote an article for VOX in late March of 2009. Calvo is the former Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, and is currently a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and President of the International Economic Association and the former Senior Advisor in the Research Department of the IMF.
He wrote that, “Credit availability is not ensured by stricter financial regulation. In fact, it can be counterproductive unless it is accompanied by the establishment of a lender of last resort (LOLR) that radically softens the severity of financial crisis by providing timely credit lines. With that aim in mind, the 20th century saw the creation of national or regional central banks in charge of a subset of the capital market. It has now become apparent that the realm of existing central banks is very limited and the world has no institution that fulfils the necessary global role. The IMF is moving in that direction, but it is still too small and too limited to adequately do so.”
He advocates that, “the first proposal that I would like to make is that the topic of financial regulation should be discussed together with the issue of a global lender of last resort.” Further, he proposed that, “international financial institutions must be quickly endowed with considerably more firepower to help emerging economies through the deleveraging period.”[52]
A “New World Order” in Banking
In March of 2008, following the collapse of Bear Stearns, Reuters reported on a document released by research firm CreditSights, which said that, “Financial firms face a ‘new world order’,” and that, “More industry consolidation and acquisitions may follow after JPMorgan Chase & Co.” Further, “In the event of future consolidation, potential acquirers identified by CreditSights include JPMorganChase, Wells Fargo, US Bancorp, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.”[53]
In June of 2008, before he was Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration, Timothy Geithner, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, wrote an article for the Financial Times following his attendance at the 2008 Bilderberg conference, in which he wrote that, “Banks and investment banks whose health is crucial to the global financial system should operate under a unified regulatory framework,” and he said that, “the US Federal Reserve should play a "central role" in the new regulatory framework, working closely with supervisors in the US and around the world.”[54]
In November of 2008, The National, a prominent United Arab Emirate newspaper, reported on Baron David de Rothschild accompanying Prime Minister Gordon Brown on a visit to the Middle East, although not as a “part of the official party” accompanying Brown. Following an interview with the Baron, it was reported that, “Rothschild shares most people’s view that there is a new world order. In his opinion, banks will deleverage and there will be a new form of global governance.”[55]
In February of 2009, the Times Online reported that a “New world order in banking [is] necessary,” and that, “It is increasingly evident that the world needs a new banking system and that it should not bear much resemblance to the one that has failed so spectacularly.”[56] But of course, the ones that are shaping this new banking system are the champions of the previous banking system. The solutions that will follow are simply the extensions of the current system, only sped up through the necessity posed by the current crisis.
An Emerging Global Government
A recent article in the Financial Post stated that, “The danger in the present course is that if the world moves to a “super sovereign” reserve currency engineered by experts, such as the “UN Commission of Experts” led by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, we would give up the possibility of a spontaneous money order and financial harmony for a centrally planned order and the politicization of money. Such a regime change would endanger not only the future value of money but, more importantly, our freedom and prosperity.”[57]
Further, “An uncomfortable characteristic of the new world order may well turn out to be that global income gaps will widen because the rising powers, such as China, India and Brazil, regard those below them on the ladder as potential rivals.” The author further states that, “The new world order thus won't necessarily be any better than the old one,” and that, “What is certain, though, is that global affairs are going to be considerably different from now on.”[58]
\
In April of 2009, Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, said that, “If leaders are serious about creating new global responsibilities or governance, let them start by modernising multilateralism to empower the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank Group to monitor national policies.”[59]
David Rothkopf, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade in the Clinton administration, and former managing director of Kissinger and Associates, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote a book titled, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making, of which he is certainly a member. When discussing the role and agenda of the global “superclass”, he states that, “In a world of global movements and threats that don’t present their passports at national borders, it is no longer possible for a nation-state acting alone to fulfill its portion of the social contract.”[60]
He writes that, “even the international organizations and alliances we have today, flawed as they are, would have seemed impossible until recently, notably the success of the European Union – a unitary democratic state the size of India. The evolution and achievements of such entities against all odds suggest not isolated instances but an overall trend in the direction of what Tennyson called “the Parliament of Man,” or ‘universal law’.” He states that he is “optimistic that progress will continue to be made,” but it will be difficult, because it “undercuts many national and local power structures and cultural concepts that have foundations deep in the bedrock of human civilization, namely the notion of sovereignty.”[61]
He further writes that, “Mechanisms of global governance are more achievable in today’s environment,” and that these mechanisms “are often creative with temporary solutions to urgent problems that cannot wait for the world to embrace a bigger and more controversial idea like real global government.”[62]
In December of 2008, the Financial Times ran an article written by Gideon Rachman, a past Bilderberg attendee, who wrote that, “for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible,” and that, “A ‘world government’ would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the ability to deploy military force.”
He then asks if the European model could “go global,” and states that there are three reasons for thinking that may be the case. First, he states, “it is increasingly clear that the most difficult issues facing national governments are international in nature: there is global warming, a global financial crisis and a ‘global war on terror’.” Secondly, he states that, “It could be done,” largely as a result of the transport and communications revolutions having “shrunk the world.” Thirdly, this is made possible through an awakening “change in the political atmosphere,” as “The financial crisis and climate change are pushing national governments towards global solutions, even in countries such as China and the US that are traditionally fierce guardians of national sovereignty.”
He quoted an adviser to French President Nicolas Sarkozy as saying, “Global governance is just a euphemism for global government,” and that the “core of the international financial crisis is that we have global financial markets and no global rule of law.” However, Rachman states that any push towards a global government “will be a painful, slow process.” He then states that a key problem in this push can be explained with an example from the EU, which “has suffered a series of humiliating defeats in referendums, when plans for “ever closer union” have been referred to the voters. In general, the Union has progressed fastest when far-reaching deals have been agreed by technocrats and politicians – and then pushed through without direct reference to the voters. International governance tends to be effective, only when it is anti-democratic. [Emphasis added]”[63]
In November of 2008, the United States National Intelligence Council (NIC), the US intelligence community’s “center for midterm and long-term strategic thinking,” released a report that it produced in collaboration with numerous think tanks, consulting firms, academic institutions and hundreds of other experts, among them are the Atlantic Council of the United States, the Wilson Center, RAND Corporation, the Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute, Texas A&M University, the Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House in London.[64]
The report, titled, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, outlines the current global political and economic trends that the world may be going through by the year 2025. In terms of the financial crisis, it states that solving this “will require long-term efforts to establish a new international system.”[65] It suggests that as the “China-model” for development becomes increasingly attractive, there may be a “decline in democratization” for emerging economies, authoritarian regimes, and “weak democracies frustrated by years of economic underperformance.” Further, the dollar will cease to be the global reserve currency, as there would likely be a “move away from the dollar.”[66]
It states that the dollar will become “something of a first among equals in a basket of currencies by 2025. This could occur suddenly in the wake of a crisis, or gradually with global rebalancing.”[67] The report elaborates on the construction of a new international system, stating that, “By 2025, nation-states will no longer be the only – and often not the most important – actors on the world stage and the ‘international system’ will have morphed to accommodate the new reality. But the transformation will be incomplete and uneven.” Further, it would be “unlikely to see an overarching, comprehensive, unitary approach to global governance. Current trends suggest that global governance in 2025 will be a patchwork of overlapping, often ad hoc and fragmented efforts, with shifting coalitions of member nations, international organizations, social movements, NGOs, philanthropic foundations, and companies.” It also notes that, “Most of the pressing transnational problems – including climate change, regulation of globalized financial markets, migration, failing states, crime networks, etc. – are unlikely to be effectively resolved by the actions of individual nation-states. The need for effective global governance will increase faster than existing mechanisms can respond.”[68]
The report discusses the topic of regionalism, stating that, “Greater Asian integration, if it occurs, could fill the vacuum left by a weakening multilaterally based international order but could also further undermine that order. In the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, a remarkable series of pan-Asian ventures—the most significant being ASEAN + 3—began to take root. Although few would argue that an Asian counterpart to the EU is a likely outcome even by 2025, if 1997 is taken as a starting point, Asia arguably has evolved more rapidly over the last decade than the European integration did in its first decade(s).” It further states that, “movement over the next 15 years toward an Asian basket of currencies—if not an Asian currency unit as a third reserve—is more than a theoretical possibility.”
It elaborates that, “Asian regionalism would have global implications, possibly sparking or reinforcing a trend toward three trade and financial clusters that could become quasi-blocs (North America, Europe, and East Asia).” These blocs “would have implications for the ability to achieve future global World Trade Organization agreements and regional clusters could compete in the setting of trans-regional product standards for IT, biotech, nanotech, intellectual property rights, and other ‘new economy’ products.”[69]
Of great importance to address, and reflecting similar assumptions made by Rachman in his article advocating for a world government, is the topic of democratization, saying that, “advances are likely to slow and globalization will subject many recently democratized countries to increasing social and economic pressures that could undermine liberal institutions.” This is largely because “the better economic performance of many authoritarian governments could sow doubts among some about democracy as the best form of government. The surveys we consulted indicated that many East Asians put greater emphasis on good management, including increasing standards of livings, than democracy.” Further, “even in many well-established democracies, surveys show growing frustration with the current workings of democratic government and questioning among elites over the ability of democratic governments to take the bold actions necessary to deal rapidly and effectively with the growing number of transnational challenges.”[70]
Conclusion
Ultimately, what this implies is that the future of the global political economy is one of increasing moves toward a global system of governance, or a world government, with a world central bank and global currency; and that, concurrently, these developments are likely to materialize in the face of and as a result ...
LEAKED AGENDA: BILDERBERG GROUP PLANS ECONOMIC DEPRESSION
Paul Joseph Watson
http://www.prisonplanet.com/leaked-agend...ssion.html
Elitists divided on whether to quickly sink economy and replace it with new world order, or set in motion long, agonizing depression
On the eve of the 2009 Bilderberg Group conference, which is due to be held May 14-17 at the 5 star Nafsika Astir Palace Hotel in Vouliagmeni, Greece, investigative reporter Daniel Estulin has uncovered shocking details of what the elitists plan to do with the economy over the course of the next year.
The Bilderberg Group meeting is an annual confab of around 150 of the world’ s most influential powerbrokers in government, industry, banking, media, academia and the military-industrial complex. The secretive group operates under “Chatham House rules,” meaning that no details of what is discussed can ever be leaked to the media, despite editors of the world’s biggest newspapers, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Financial Times, being present at the meeting.
According to Estulin’s sources, which have been proven highly accurate in the past, Bilderberg is divided on whether to put into motion, “Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty … or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”
The information takes on added weight when one considers the fact that Estulin’s previous economic forecasts, which were based on leaks from the same sources, have proven deadly accurate. Estulin correctly predicted the
housing crash and the 2008 financial meltdown as a result of what his sources inside Bilderberg told him the elite were planning based on what was said at their 2006 meeting in Canada and the 2007 conference in Turkey.
Details of the economic agenda were contained in a pre-meeting booklet being handed out to Bilderberg members. On a more specific note, Estulin warns that Bilderberg are fostering a false picture of economic recovery, suckering investors into ploughing their money back into the stock market again only to later unleash another massive downturn which will create “massive losses and searing financial pain in the months ahead,” according to a Canada Free Press report.
According to Estulin, Bilderberg is assuming that U.S. unemployment figures will reach around 14% by the end of the year, almost doubling the current official figure of 8.1 per cent.
Estulin’s sources also tell him that Bilderberg will again attempt to push for the enactment of the Lisbon Treaty, a key centerpiece of the agenda to fully entrench a federal EU superstate, by forcing the Irish to vote again
on the document in September/October despite having rejected it already, along with other European nations, in national referendums.
“One of their concerns is addressing and neutralizing the anti-Lisbon treaty movement called “Libertas” led by Declan Ganley. One of the Bilderberger planned moves is to use a whispering campaign in the US media suggested that Ganley is being funded by arms dealers in the US linked to the US military,”reports CFP.
Daniel Estulin, Jim Tucker, and other sources who have infiltrated Bilderberg meetings in the past have routinely provided information about the Bilderberg agenda that later plays out on the world stage, proving that
the organization is not merely a “talking shop” as debunkers claim, but an integral planning forum for the new world order agenda.
Indeed, just last month Belgian viscount and current Bilderberg-chairman Étienne Davignon bragged that Bilderberg helped create the Euro by first introducing the policy agenda for a single currency in the early 1990’s. Bilderberg’s agenda for a European federal superstate and a single currency likely goes back even further. A BBC investigation uncovered documents from the early Bilderberg meetings which confirmed that the European Union was a brainchild of Bilderberg.
In spring 2002, when war hawks in the Bush administration were pushing for a summer invasion of Iraq, Bilderbergers expressed their desire for a delay and the attack was not launched until March the following year.
In 2006, Estulin predicted that the U.S. housing market would be allowed to soar before the bubble was cruelly popped, which is exactly what transpired.
In 2008, Estulin predicted that Bilderberg were creating the conditions for a financial calamity, which is exactly what began a few months later with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Bilderberg has routinely flexed its muscles in establishing its role as kingmaker. The organization routinely selects presidential candidates as well as running mates and prime ministers.
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were both groomed by the secretive organization in the early 1990’s before rising to prominence.
Barack Obama’s running mate Joe Biden was selected by Bilderberg luminary James A. Johnson, and John Kerry’s 2004 running mate John Edwards was also anointed by the group after he gave a glowing speech at the conference in 2004. Bilderberg attendees even broke house rules to applaud Edwards at the end of a speech he gave to the elitists about American politics. The choice of Edwards was shocking to media pundits who had fully expected Dick Gephardt to secure the position. The New York Post even reported that Gephardt had been chosen and “Kerry-Gephardt” stickers were being placed on campaign vehicles before being removed when Edwards was announced as Kerry’s number two.
A 2008 Portuguese newspaper report highlighted the fact that Pedro Santana Lopes and Jose Socrates attended the 2004 meeting in Stresa, Italy before both going on to become Prime Minster of Portugal.
Several key geopolitical decisions were made at last year’s Bilderberg meeting in Washington DC, again emphasizing the fact that the confab is far more than an informal get-together.
As we reported at the time, Bilderberg were concerned that the price of oil was accelerating too fast after it hit $150 a barrel and wanted to ensure that “oil prices would probably begin to decline”. This is exactly what
happened in the latter half of 2008 as oil again sunk below $50 a barrel. We were initially able to predict the rapid rise in oil prices in 2005 when oil was at $40, because Bilderberg had called for prices to rise during that
year’s meeting in Munich. During the conference in Germany, Henry Kissinger told his fellow attendees that the elite had resolved to ensure that oil prices would double over the course of the next 12-24 months, which is
exactly what happened.
Also at last year’s meeting, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice formalized plans to sign a treaty on installing a U.S. radar base in the Czech Republic with Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.
Rice was joined at the meeting by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who reportedly encouraged EU globalists to get behind an attack on Iran. Low and behold, days later the EU threatened Iran with sanctions if it did not suspend its nuclear enrichment program.
There was also widespread speculation that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s “secret meeting,” which was accomplished with the aid of cloak and dagger tactics like locking journalists on an airplane to keep them from tracking the two down, took place at the Bilderberg meeting in DC.
It remains to be seen what kind of mainstream media press coverage Bilderberg 2009 will be afforded because, despite the proven track record of Bilderberg having a central role in influencing subsequent geopolitical and financial world events, and despite last year’s meeting being held in Washington DC, the U.S. corporate media oversaw an almost universal blackout of reporting on the conference, its attendees, and what was discussed.
Once again, it will be left to the alternative media to fill the vacuum and educate the people on exactly what the globalists have planned for us over the coming year.
THE BILDERBERG PLAN FOR 2009: REMAKING THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
Andrew G. Marshall
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13738
From May 14-17, the global elite met in secret in Greece for the yearly Bilderberg conference, amid scattered and limited global media attention. Roughly 130 of the world’s most powerful individuals came together to discuss the pressing issues of today, and to chart a course for the next year. The main topic of discussion at this years meeting was the global financial crisis, which is no surprise, considering the list of conference attendees includes many of the primary architects of the crisis, as well as those poised to “solve” it.
The Agenda: The Restructuring of the Global Political Economy
Before the meeting began, Bilderberg investigative journalist Daniel Estulin reported on the main item of the agenda, which was leaked to him by his sources inside. Though such reports cannot be verified, his sources, along with those of veteran Bilderberg tracker, Jim Tucker, have proven to be shockingly accurate in the past. Apparently, the main topic of discussion at this year's meeting was to address the economic crisis, in terms of undertaking, “Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty ... or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.” Other items on the agenda included a plan to “continue to deceive millions of savers and investors who believe the hype about the supposed up-turn in the economy. They are about to be set up for massive losses and searing financial pain in the months ahead,” and “There will be a final push for the enactment of Lisbon Treaty, pending on Irish voting YES on the treaty in Sept or October,”[1] which would give the European Union massive powers over its member nations, essentially making it a supranational regional government, with each country relegated to more of a provincial status.
Shortly after the meetings began, Bilderberg tracker Jim Tucker reported that his inside sources revealed that the group has on its agenda, “the plan for a global department of health, a global treasury and a shortened depression rather than a longer economic downturn.” Tucker reported that Swedish Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister, Carl Bildt, “Made a speech advocating turning the World Health Organization into a world department of health, advocating turning the IMF into a world department of treasury, both of course under the auspices of the United Nations.” Further, Tucker reported that, “Treasury Secretary Geithner and Carl Bildt touted a shorter recession not a 10-year recession ... partly because a 10 year recession would damage Bilderberg industrialists themselves, as much as they want to have a global department of labor and a global department of treasury, they still like making money and such a long recession would cost them big bucks industrially because nobody is buying their toys.....the tilt is towards keeping it short.”[2]
After the meetings finished, Daniel Estulin reported that, “One of Bilderberg’s primary concerns according to Estulin is the danger that their zeal to reshape the world by engineering chaos in order to implement their long term agenda could cause the situation to spiral out of control and eventually lead to a scenario where Bilderberg and the global elite in general are overwhelmed by events and end up losing their control over the planet.”[3]
On May 21, the Macedonian International News Agency reported that, “A new Kremlin report on the shadowy Bilderberg Group, who this past week held their annual meeting in Greece, states that the West’s financial, political and corporate elite emerged from their conclave after coming to an agreement that in order to continue their drive towards a New World Order dominated by the Western Powers, the US Dollar has to be ‘totally’ destroyed.” Further, this same unconfirmed Kremlin report, stated that, “most of the West’s wealthiest elite convened at an unprecedented secret meeting in New York called for and led by” David Rockefeller, “to plot the demise of the US Dollar.”[4] This report, which was not acknowledged by other media sources, requires verification.
The Secret Meeting of Billionaires
The meeting being referred to was a secret meeting where, “A dozen of the richest people in the world met for an unprecedented private gathering at the invitation of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to talk about giving away money,” held at Rockefeller University, and included notable philanthropists such as Gates, Buffett, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Eli Broad, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller Sr. and Ted Turner. One attendee stated that, “It wasn’t secret,” but that, “It was meant to be a gathering among friends and colleagues. It was something folks have been discussing for a long time. Bill and Warren hoped to do this occasionally. They sent out an invite and people came.” Chronicle of Philanthropy editor Stacy Palmer said, “Given how serious these economic times are, I don't think it's surprising these philanthropists came together,” and that, “They don't typically get together and ask each other for advice.” The three hosts of the meeting were Buffet, Gates and David Rockefeller.[5] [See: Appendix 2: Bilderberg Connections to the Billionaire’s Meeting].
Bilderberg founding member David Rockefeller, Honourary Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations,
Honourary Chairman and Founder of the Trilateral Commission,
Chairman of the Council of the Americas and the Americas Society,
former Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan.
At the meeting, “participants steadfastly refused to reveal the content of the discussion. Some cited an agreement to keep the meeting confidential. Spokesmen for Mr. Buffett, Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Gates, Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Soros and Ms. Winfrey and others dutifully declined comment, though some confirmed attendance.”[6] Reports indicate that, “They discussed how to address the global slump and expand their charitable activities in the downturn.”[7]
The UK newspaper The Times reported that these “leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population,” and that they “discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.” Interestingly, “The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires’ aides were told they were at ‘security briefings’.” Further, “The billionaires were each given 15 minutes to present their favourite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an ‘umbrella cause’ that could harness their interests,” and what was decided upon was that, “they agreed that overpopulation was a priority.” Ultimately, “a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat,” and that, “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.” One guest at the meeting said that, “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government.”[8]
The Leaked Report
Bilderberg investigative reporter Daniel Estulin reportedly received from his inside sources a 73-page Bilderberg Group meeting wrap-up for participants, which revealed that there were some serious disagreements among the participants. “The hardliners are for dramatic decline and a severe, short-term depression, but there are those who think that things have gone too far and that the fallout from the global economic cataclysm cannot be accurately calculated if Henry Kissinger's model is chosen. Among them is Richard Holbrooke. What is unknown at this point: if Holbrooke's point of view is, in fact, Obama's.” The consensus view was that the recession would get worse, and that recovery would be “relatively slow and protracted,” and to look for these terms in the press over the next weeks and months.
Estulin reported, “that some leading European bankers faced with the specter of their own financial mortality are extremely concerned, calling this high wire act "unsustainable," and saying that US budget and trade deficits could result in the demise of the dollar.” One Bilderberger said that, “the banks themselves don't know the answer to when (the bottom will be hit).” Everyone appeared to agree, “that the level of capital needed for the American banks may be considerably higher than the US government suggested through their recent stress tests.” Further, “someone from the IMF pointed out that its own study on historical recessions suggests that the US is only a third of the way through this current one; therefore economies expecting to recover with resurgence in demand from the US will have a long wait.” One attendee stated that, “Equity losses in 2008 were worse than those of 1929,” and that, “The next phase of the economic decline will also be worse than the '30s, mostly because the US economy carries about $20 trillion of excess debt. Until that debt is eliminated, the idea of a healthy boom is a mirage.”[9]
According to Jim Tucker, Bilderberg is working on setting up a summit in Israel from June 8-11, where “the world’s leading regulatory experts” can “address the current economic situation in one forum.” In regards to the proposals put forward by Carl Bildt to create a world treasury department and world department of health under the United Nations, the IMF is said to become the World Treasury, while the World Health Organization is to become the world department of health. Bildt also reaffirmed using “climate change” as a key challenge to pursue Bilderberg goals, referring to the economic crisis as a “once-in-a-generation crisis while global warming is a once-in-a-millennium challenge.” Bildt also advocated expanding NAFTA through the Western hemisphere to create an American Union, using the EU as a “model of integration.”
The IMF reportedly sent a report to Bilderberg advocating its rise to becoming the World Treasury Department, and “U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner enthusiastically endorsed the plan for a World Treasury Department, although he received no assurance that he would become its leader.” Geithner further said, “Our hope is that we can work with Europe on a global framework, a global infrastructure which has appropriate global oversight.”[10]
Bilderberg’s Plan in Action?
Reorganizing the Federal Reserve
Following the Bilderberg meeting, there were several interesting announcements made by key participants, specifically in regards to reorganizing the Federal Reserve. On May 21, it was reported that US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner “is believed to be leaning heavily towards giving the Federal Reserve a central role in future regulation,” and “it is understood that the Fed would take on some of the work currently undertaken by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.”[11]
On Wednesday, May 20, Geithner spoke before the Senate Banking Committee, at which he stated that, “there are important indications that our financial system is starting to heal.” In regards to regulating the financial system, Geithner stated that, “we must ensure that international rules for financial regulation are consistent with the high standards we will be implementing in the United States.”[12]
US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Bloomberg reported that, “The Obama administration may call for stripping the Securities and Exchange Commission of some of its powers under a regulatory reorganization,” and that, “The proposal, still being drafted, is likely to give the Federal Reserve more authority to supervise financial firms deemed too big to fail. The Fed may inherit some SEC functions, with others going to other agencies.” Interestingly, “SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro’s agency has been mostly absent from negotiations within the administration on the regulatory overhaul, and she has expressed frustration about not being consulted.”
It was reported that “Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was set to discuss proposals to change financial regulations last night at a dinner with National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers [who was also present at Bilderberg], former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker [also at Bilderberg], ex-SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt and Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard University law professor who heads the congressional watchdog group for the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.”[13] The Federal Reserve is a privately owned central bank, owned by its shareholders, consisting of the major banks the make up each regional Fed bank (the largest of which is JP Morgan Chase and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York). This plan would essentially give a privately owned bank, which has governmental authority, the ability to regulate the banks that own it. It’s the equivalent of getting a Colonel to guard a General to whom he is directly answerable. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house. It is literally granting ownership over the financial regulator to the banks being regulated.
As Market Watch, an online publication of the Wall Street Journal, reported, “The Federal Reserve, created nearly 100 years ago in the aftermath of a financial panic, could be transformed into a different agency as the Obama administration reinvents the way government interacts with the financial system.” Referring to Geithner’s Senate appearance, it was reported that, “Geithner was also grilled on the cozy relationships that exist between the big banks and the regional Federal Reserve banks. Before Geithner joined the administration, he was president of the New York Fed, which is a strange public-private hybrid institution that is actually owned and run by the banks.” In response, “Geithner insisted that the private banks have no say over the policies of the New York Fed, but he acknowledged that the banks do have a say in hiring the president, who does make policy. The chairman of the New York Fed, Stephen Friedman, was forced to resign earlier this month because of perceived conflicts of interest due to his large holdings in Goldman Sachs.”[14]
The IMF as a Global Treasury
The Bilderberg agenda of creating a global treasury has already been started prior to the Bilderberg meeting, with decisions made during the G20 financial summit in April. Although the G20 seemed to frame it more in context of being formed into a global central bank, although it is likely the IMF could fill both roles.
Following the G20 meeting at the beginning of April, 2009, it was reported that, “The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity,” as the Communiqué released by the G20 leaders stated that, “We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,” and that, “SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century.” Essentially, “they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body.”[15] [See Appendix 2: Creating a Central Bank of the World]
Following the Bilderberg meeting, “President Obama has asked Congress to authorize $100 billion in loans to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help create a $500 billion global bailout fund,” which would give the IMF the essential prerogative of a global treasury, providing bailouts for countries in need around the world. Further, “the bill would allow the IMF to borrow up to $100 billion from the U.S. and increase the U.S. fiscal contribution to the IMF by $8 billion.” Elaborating on the program, it was reported that, “World leaders began on the global bailout initiative, called the New Arrangement for Borrowing (NAB), at the G-20 summit in early April. The president agreed at that time to make the additional funds available.” Obama wrote that, “Treasury Secretary Geithner concluded that the size of the NAB is woefully inadequate to deal with the type of severe economic and financial crisis we are experiencing, and I agree with him.”[16]
With the G20 decision to increase the usage of IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), forming a de facto world currency, it was recently reported that, “Sub-Saharan Africa will receive around $10 billion from the IMF in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to help its economies weather the global financial crisis,” and that, “As part of a $1.1 trillion deal to combat the world economic downturn agreed at April's G20 summit, the IMF will issue $250 billion worth of SDRs, which can be used to boost foreign currency reserves.”[17]
Recent reports have also indicated that the IMF’s role in issuing SDRs goes hand in hand with the Bilderberg discussion on the potential collapse of the US dollar, and, “Transforming the dollar standard into an SDR-based system would be a major break with a policy that has lasted more than 60 years.” It was reported that, “There are two ways in which the dollar’s role in the international monetary system can be reduced. One possibility is a gradual, market-determined erosion of the dollar as a reserve currency in favor of the euro. But, while the euro’s international role – especially its use in financial markets – has increased since its inception, it is hard to envisage it overtaking the dollar as the dominant reserve currency in the foreseeable future.” However, “With the dollar’s hegemony unlikely to be seriously undermined by market forces, at least in the short and medium-term, the only way to bring about a major reduction in its role as a reserve currency is by international agreement.” This is where the SDRs come into play, as “One way to make the SDR the major reserve currency relatively soon would be to create and allocate a massive amount of new SDRs to the IMF’s members.”[18] This is, interestingly, exactly what is happening with Africa and the IMF now.
Former IMF Managing Director Jacques de Larosière recently stated that the current financial crisis, “given its scope, presents a unique opening to improve institutions, and there is already a danger that the chance might be missed if the different actors cannot agree to changes by the time economic growth resumes.” He is now an adviser with BNP Paribas, a corporation highly represented at Bilderberg meetings, and he was head of the Treasury of France when Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was President of France, who is a regular of the Bilderberg Group.[19]
The Guardian Covers Bilderberg
The British paper, the Guardian, was the only major mainstream news publication to provide ongoing coverage of the Bilderberg meeting over the weekend. His first columns were satirical and slightly mocking, referring to it as, “A long weekend at a luxury hotel, where the world's elite get to shake hands, clink glasses, fine-tune their global agenda and squabble over who gets the best sun loungers. I'm guessing that Henry Kissinger brings his own, has it helicoptered in and guarded 24/7 by a CIA special ops team.”[20] However, as the weekend dragged on, his reporting took a change of tone. He reported on the Saturday that, “I know that I'm being followed. I know because I've just been chatting to the plainclothes policemen I caught following me,” and he was arrested twice in the first day of the meetings for attempting to take photographs as the limousines entered the hotel.[21]
He later reported that he wasn’t sure what they were discussing inside the hotel, but that he has “a sense of something rotten in the state of Greece,” and he further stated, “Three days and I've been turned into a suspect, a troublemaker, unwanted, ill at ease, tired and a bit afraid.” He then went on to write that, “Bilderberg is all about control. It's about "what shall we do next?" We run lots of stuff already, how about we run some more? How about we make it easier to run stuff? More efficient. Efficiency is good. It would be so much easier with a single bank, a single currency, a single market, a single government. How about a single army? That would be pretty cool. We wouldn't have any wars then. This prawn cocktail is GOOD. How about a single way of thinking? How about a controlled internet?,” and then, “How about not.”
He makes a very astute point, countering the often postulated argument that Bilderberg is simply a forum where people can speak freely, writing: “I am so unbelievably backteeth sick of power being flexed by the few. I've had it flexed in my face for three days, and it's up my nose like a wasp. I don't care whether the Bilderberg Group is planning to save the world or shove it in a blender and drink the juice, I don't think politics should be done like this,” and the author, Charlie Skelton, eloquently stated, “If they were trying to cure cancer they could do it with the lights on.” He further explained that, “Bilderberg is about positions of control. I get within half a mile of it, and suddenly I'm one of the controlled. I'm followed, watched, logged, detained, detained again. I'd been put in that position by the "power" that was up the road.”[22]
On Sunday, May 17, Skelton reported that when he asked the police chief why he was being followed, the chief responded asking, “Why you here?” to which Skelton said he was there to cover the Bilderberg conference, after which the chief stated, “Well, that is the reason! That is why! We are finished!”[23] Do reporters get followed around and stalked by police officers when they cover the World Economic Forum? No. So why does it happen with Bilderberg if all it is, is a conference to discuss ideas freely?
On the Monday following the conference, Skelton wrote that, “It isn't just me who's been hauled into police custody for daring to hang around half a mile from the hotel gates. The few journalists who've made the trip to Vouliagmeni this year have all been harassed and harried and felt the business end of a Greek walkie-talkie. Many have been arrested. Bernie, from the American Free Press, and Gerhard the documentarian (sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons character) chartered a boat from a nearby marina to try to get photos from the sea. They were stopped three miles from the resort. By the Greek navy.” As Skelton said himself, “My dispatches on the 2009 conference, if they mean anything at all, represent nothing more acutely than the absence of thorough mainstream reporting.”[24]
Skelton’s final report on Bilderberg from May 19, showed how far he had gone in his several days of reporting on the meeting. From writing jokingly about the meeting, to discovering that he was followed by the Greek State Security force. Skelton mused, “So who is the paranoid one? Me, hiding in stairwells, watching the pavement behind me in shop windows, staying in the open for safety? Or Bilderberg, with its two F-16s, circling helicopters, machine guns, navy commandos and policy of repeatedly detaining and harassing a handful of journalists? Who's the nutter? Me or Baron Mandelson? Me or Paul Volker, the head of Obama's economic advisory board? Me or the president of Coca-Cola?”
Skelton stated that, “Publicity is pure salt to the giant slug of Bilderberg. So I suggest next year we turn up with a few more tubs. If the mainstream press refuses to give proper coverage to this massive annual event, then interested citizens will have to: a people's media.”
Amazingly, Skelton made the pronouncement that what he learned after the Bilderberg conference, was that, “we must fight, fight, fight, now – right now, this second, with every cubic inch of our souls – to stop identity cards,” as, “It's all about the power to ask, the obligation to show, the justification of one's existence, the power of the asker over the subservience of the asked.” He stated that he “learned this from the random searches, detentions, angry security goon proddings and thumped police desks without number that I've had to suffer on account of Bilderberg: I have spent the week living in a nightmare possible future and many different terrible pasts. I have had the very tiniest glimpse into a world of spot checks and unchecked security powers. And it has left me shaken. It has left me, literally, bruised.” Pointedly, he explains that, “The identity card turns you from a free citizen into a suspect.”[25]
Who was there?
Royalty
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, the largest shareholder in Royal Dutch Shell
Among the members of the Bilderberg Group are various European monarchs. At this years meeting, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands was present, who happens to be the largest single shareholder in Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s largest corporations. She was joined by one of her three sons, Prince Constantijn, who also attended the meeting. Prince Constantijn has worked with the Dutch European Commissioner for the EU, as well as having been a strategic policy consultant with Booz Allen & Hamilton in London, a major strategy and technology consulting firm with expertise in Economic and Business Analysis, Intelligence and Operations Analysis and Information Technology, among many others. Prince Constantijn has also been a policy researcher for RAND Corporation in Europe. RAND was initially founded as a global policy think tank that was formed to offer research and analysis to the US Armed Forces, however, it now works with governments, foundations, international organizations and commercial organizations.[26] Also present among European Royalty was Prince Philippe of Belgium, and Queen Sofia of Spain.
Private Bankers
As usual, the list of attendees was also replete with names representing the largest banks in the world. Among them, David Rockefeller, former CEO and Chairman of Chase Manhattan, now JP Morgan Chase, of which he was, until recently, Chairman of the International Advisory Board; and still sits as Honourary Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, Chairman of the Board of the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, Honourary Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, which he founded alongside Zbigniew Brzezinski; also a founding member of the Bilderberg Group, prominent philanthropist and is the current patriarch of one of the world’s richest and most powerful banking dynasties.
Also present was Josef Ackermann, a Swiss banker who is CEO of Deutsche Bank, also a non-executive director of Royal Dutch Shell; Deputy Chairman of Siemens AG, Europe’s largest engineering corporation; he is also a member of the International Advisory Council of Zurich Financial Services Group; Chairman of the Board of the Institute International of Finance, the world’s only global association of financial institutions; and Vice Chairman of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum.[27]
Roger Altman was also present at the Bilderberg meeting, an investment banker, private equity investor and former Deputy Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration. Other bankers at this years meeting include Ana Patricia Botin, Chairman of the Spanish bank, Banco Español de Crédito, formerly having worked with JP Morgan; Frederic Oudea, CEO and newly appointed Chairman of the Board of French bank Societe Generale; Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, an Italian banker and economist, formerly Italy’s Minister of Economy and Finance; Jacob Wallenberg, Chairman of Investor AB; Marcus Wallenberg, CEO of Investor AB; and George David, CEO of United Technologies Corporation, who also sits on the board of Citigroup, member of the Business Council, the Business Roundtable, and is Vice Chairman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. [For more on the Peterson Institute, see: Appendix 1]
Canadian bankers include W. Edmund Clark, President and CEO of TD Bank Financial Group, also a member of the board of directors of the C.D. Howe Institute, a prominent Canadian think tank; Frank McKenna, Deputy Chairman of TD Bank Financial Group, former Canadian Ambassador to the United States, former Premier of New Brunswick; and Indira Samarasekera, President of the University of Alberta, who is also on the board of Scotiabank, one of Canada’s largest banks.
Central Bankers
Of course, among the notable members of the Bilderberg Group, are the world’s major central bankers. Among this years members are the Governor of the National Bank of Greece, Governor of the Bank of Italy, President of the European Investment Bank, James Wolfensohn, former President of the World Bank, and Nout Wellink, on the board of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).[28] Jean-Claude Trichet, the President of the European Central Bank was also present.[29] There is no indication that the Governor of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke was present, which would be an odd turn of events, considering that the Federal Reserve Governor is always present at Bilderberg meetings, alongside the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William C. Dudley. I have contacted the New York Fed inquiring if Dudley visited Greece or went to any meetings in Greece between May 14-17, or if another senior representative from the New York Fed went in his stead. I have yet to get a response.
The Obama Administration at Bilderberg
National Security Adviser General James Jones
The Obama administration was heavily represented at this years Bilderberg meeting. Among the attendees were Keith B. Alexander, a Lieutenant General of U.S. Army and Director of the National Security Agency, the massive spying agency of the United States; Timothy Geithner, US Treasury Secretary and former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan; General James Jones, United States National Security Advisor; Henry Kissinger, Obama’s special envoy to Russia, longtime Bilderberg member and former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor; Dennis Ross, special advisor for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; David Patraeus, Commander of CENTCOM, (U.S. Central Command, in the Middle East), Lawrence Summers, Director of the White House's National Economic Council, former Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration, former President of Harvard University, former Chief Economist of the World Bank; Paul Volcker, former Governor of the Federal Reserve System and Chair of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board; Robert Zoellick, former Chairman of Goldman Sachs and current President of the World Bank;[30] and Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg.[31]
Other Notable Names
Among many others present at the meeting are Viscount Étienne Davignon, former Vice President of the European Commission, and Honourary Chairman of the Bilderberg Group; Francisco Pinto Balsemão, former Prime Minister of Portugal; Franco Bernabè, CEO of Telecom Italia and Vice Chairman of Rothschild Europe; Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister of Sweden; Kenneth Clarke, Shadow Business Secretary in the UK; Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Services (MI6); Donald Graham, CEO of the Washington Post Company; Jaap De Hoop Scheffer, Secretary-General of NATO; John Kerr, member of the British House of Lords and Deputy Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell; Jessica Matthews, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute; Romano Prodi, former Italian Prime Minister; J. Robert S. Prichard, CEO of Torstar Corporation and President Emeritus of the University of Toronto; Peter Sutherland, former Director General of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), first Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and is currently Chairman of British Petroleum (BP) and Goldman Sachs International as well as being a board member of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, Vice Chairman of the European Roundtable of Industrialists, and longtime Bilderberg member; Peter Thiel, on the board of directors of Facebook; Jeroen van der Veer, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell; Martin Wolf, Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator of the Financial Times newspaper; and Fareed Zakaria, US journalist and board member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[32] There were also some reports that this years meeting would include Google CEO Eric Schmidt, as well as Wall Street Journal Editor Paul Gigot,[33] both of whom attended last years meeting.[34]
Conclusion
Clearly, it was the prerogative of this year’s Bilderberg meeting to exploit the global financial crisis as much as possible to reach goals they have been striving toward for many years. These include the creation of a Global Treasury Department, likely in conjunction with or embodied in the same institution as a Global Central Bank, both of which seem to be in the process of being incorporated into the IMF.
Naturally, Bilderberg meetings serve the interests of the people and organizations that are represented there. Due to the large amount of representatives from the Obama administration that were present, US policies revolving around the financial crisis are likely to have emerged from and serve the interests of the Bilderberg Group. Given the heavy representation of Obama’s foreign policy establishment at the Bilderberg meeting, it seemed surprising to not have received any more information regarding US foreign policy from this year’s meeting, perhaps having to do with Pakistan and Afghanistan.
However, the US recently decided to fire the general who oversaw the Afghan war, being replaced with “Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a former Green Beret who recently commanded the military's secretive special operations forces in Iraq.”[35] From 2003 to 2008, McChrystal “led the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which oversees the military's most sensitive forces, including the Army's Delta Force,” and who Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh singled out as the head of VP Cheney’s “executive assassination wing.”[36]
So, given these recent changes, as well as the high degree of representation Obama’s foreign policy establishment held at Bildebrerg this year, there were likely to have been some decisions or at least discussion of the escalation of the Afghan war and expansion into Pakistan. However, it is not surprising that the main item on the agenda was the global financial crisis. Without a doubt, the next year will be an interesting one, and the elite are surely hoping to make it a productive one.
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A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ROUND TABLE
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OBAMA: TRILATERAL COMMISSION ENDGAME
Patrick Wood
http://www.augustreview.com/news_comment...090127110/
As previously noted in Pawns of the Global Elite, Barack Obama was groomed for the presidency by key members of the Trilateral Commission. Most notably, it was Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller in 1973, who was Obama's principal foreign policy advisor.
The pre-election attention is reminiscent of Brzezinski's tutoring of Jimmy Carter prior to Carter's landslide election in 1976.
For anyone who doubts the Commission's continuing influence on Obama, consider that he has already appointed no less than eleven members of the Commission to top-level and key positions in his Administration.
According to official Trilateral Commission membership lists, there are only 87 members from the United States (the other 337 members are from other regions). Thus, in less than two weeks since his inauguration, Obama's appointments encompass more than 12% of Commission's entire U.S. membership.
Is this a mere coincidence or is it a continuation of dominance over the Executive Branch since 1976? (For important background, read The Trilateral Commission: Usurping Sovereignty.)
Secretary of Treasury, Tim Geithner
Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice
National Security Advisor, Gen. James L. Jones
Deputy National Security Advisor, Thomas Donilon
Chairman, Economic Recovery Committee, Paul Volker
Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis C. Blair
Assistant Secretary of State, Asia & Pacific, Kurt M. Campbell
Deputy Secretary of State, James Steinberg
State Department, Special Envoy, Richard Haass
State Department, Special Envoy, Dennis Ross
State Department, Special Envoy, Richard Holbrooke
There are many other incidental links to the Trilateral Commission, for instance,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is married to Commission member William Jefferson Clinton.
Geithner's informal group of advisors include E. Gerald Corrigan, Paul Volker, Alan Greenspan and Peter G. Peterson, among others. His first job after college was with Henry Kissinger at Kissinger Associates.
Brent Scowcroft has been an unofficial advisor to Obama and was mentor to Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Robert Zoelick is currently president of the World Bank
Laurence Summers, White House Economic Advisor, was mentored by former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin during the Clinton administration.
There are many other such links, but these are enough for you to get the idea of what's going on here.
Analyze the positions
Notice that five of the Trilateral appointees involve the State Department, where foreign policy is created and implemented. Hillary Clinton is certainly in line with these policies because her husband, Bill Clinton, is also a member.
What is more important than economic recovery? Paul Volker is the answer.
What is more important than national intelligence? Gen. James Jones, Thomas Donilon and Adm. Dennis Blair hold the top three positions.
What is more important than the Treasury and the saving of our financial system? Timothy Geithner says he has the answers.
The State Department is virtually dominated by Trilaterals: Kurt Campbell, James Steinberg, Richard Haass, Dennis Ross and Richard Holbrooke.
This leaves Susan Rice, Ambassador to the United Nations. The U.N. is the chosen instrument for ultimate global governance. Rice will help to subvert the U.S. into the U.N. umbrella of vassal states.
Conflict of interest
Since 1973, the Commission has met regularly in plenary sessions to discuss policy position papers developed by its members. Policies are debated in order to achieve consensuses. Respective members return to their own countries to implement policies consistent with those consensuses.
The original stated purpose of the Trilateral Commission was to create a "New International Economic Order." Its current statement has morphed into fostering a "closer cooperation among these core democratic industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system." (See The Trilateral Commission web site)
U.S. Trilateral members implement policies determined by a majority of non-Americans that most often work against the best interests of the country.
"How," you say?
Since the administration of Jimmy Carter, Trilaterals held these massively influential positions:
Six out of eight World Bank presidents, including the current appointee, Robert Zoelick
Eight out of ten U.S. Trade Representatives
President and/or Vice-President of every elected administration (except for Obama/Biden)
Seven out of twelve Secretaries of State
Nine out of twelve Secretaries of Defense
Is this sinking in? Are you grasping the enormity of it?
Endgame is at hand
For the Trilateral crowd, the game is about over. The recent reemergence of original members Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and Paul Volker serves to reinforce the conclusion that the New International Economic Order is near.
The Trilateral Commission and its members have engineered the global economic, trade and financial system that is currently in a state of total chaos.
Does that mean that they have lost? Hardly.
As I recently wrote in Chorus call for New World Order, they are using the crisis to destroy what remains of national Sovereignty, so that a New World Order can finally and permanently be put into place.
Conclusion
The Obama presidency is a disingenuous fraud. He was elected by promising to bring change, yet from the start change was never envisioned. He was carefully groomed and financed by the Trilateral Commission and their friends.
In short, Obama is merely the continuation of disastrous, non-American policies that have brought economic ruin upon us and the rest of the world. The Obama experience rivals that of Jimmy Carter, whose campaign slogan was "I will never lie to you."
When the Democrat base finally realizes that it has been conned again (Bill Clinton and Al Gore were members), perhaps it will unleash a real political revolution that will oust Trilateral politicians, operatives and policies from the shores of our country.
If the reader is a Democrat, be aware that many Republicans and conservatives are still licking their wounds after finally realizing that George Bush and Dick Cheney worked the same con on them for a disastrous eight years of the same policies!
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APPENDIX 1: Bilderberg Connections to the Billionaire’s Meeting
Peter G. Peterson, one of the guests in attendance at the secret billionaires meeting, was the former United States Secretary of Commerce in the Nixon administration, Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb Inc., from 1977 to 1984, he co-founded the prominent private equity and investment management firm, the Blackstone Group, of which he is currently Senior Chairman, and in 1985, he became Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, taking over when David Rockefeller stepped down from that position. He founded the Peterson Institute for International Economics and was Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank from 2000-2004. The Peterson Institute for International Economics is a major world economic think tank, which seeks to “inform and shape public debate,” from which, “Institute studies have helped provide the intellectual foundation for many of the major international financial initiatives of the past two decades: reform of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), adoption of international banking standards, exchange rate systems in the G-7 and emerging-market economies, policies toward the dollar, the euro, and other important currencies, and responses to debt and currency crises (including the current crisis of 2008–09).” It has also “made important contributions to key trade policy decisions” such as the development of the World Trade Organization, NAFTA, APEC, and East Asian regionalism.[37]
It has a prominent list of names on its board of directors. Peter G. Peterson is Chairman of the board; George David, Chairman of United Technologies is Vice Chairman, as well as being a board member of Citigroup, and was a guest at this year’s Bilderberg meeting; Chen Yuan, Governor of the China Development Bank and former Deputy Governor of the People’s Bank of China (China’s central bank); Jessica Einhorn, Dean of Washington's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University, former Visiting Fellow of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), former Managing Director of the World Bank, and currently on the board of Time Warner and the Council on Foreign Relations; Stanley Fischer, Governor of the Central Bank of Israel, former Vice President at the World Bank, former Managing Director at the IMF, former Vice Chairman of Citigroup, and has also been a regular participant in Bilderberg meetings; Carla A. Hills, former US Trade Representative, and was the prime negotiator of NAFTA, she sits on the International Advisory Boards of American International Group, the Coca-Cola Company, Gilead Sciences, J.P. Morgan Chase, member of the Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission, Co-Chair of the Council on Foreign Relations, and played a key part in the CFR document, “Building a North American Community,” which seeks to remodel North America following along the lines of the European Union, and she has also been a prominent Bilderberg member; David Rockefeller also sits on the Peterson Institute’s board, as well as Lynn Forester de Rothschild; Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the European Central Bank, who is at every Bilderberg meeting; Paul A. Volcker, former Governor of the Federal Reserve System, regular participant of Bilderberg meetings, and current Chair of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
Honourary Directors of the Peterson Institute include Bilderbergers Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, a prime architect of the current crisis; Frank E. Loy, former Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, and is on the boards of Environmental Defense, the Pew Center for Global Climate Change, Resources for the Future, and Population Services International; George P. Shultz, former US Secretary of State in the Reagan administration, President and Director of Bechtel Group and former Secretary of the Treasury.[38]
APPENDIX 2: Creating a Central Bank of the World
Jeffrey Garten, Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade in the Clinton administration, former Dean of the Yale School of Management, previously served on the White House Council on International Economic Policy under the Nixon administration and on the policy planning staffs of Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance of the Ford and Carter administrations. He also was a managing director of Lehman Brothers and the Blackstone Group, is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. As early as 1998, Garten wrote an article for the New York Times in which he advocated the creation of a global central bank.[39]
Amid the current financial crisis, Garten wrote an article for the Financial Times in which he advocated for “the establishment of a Global Monetary Authority to oversee markets that have become borderless,” acting as a global central bank.[40] In late October, Garten wrote an article for Newsweek in which he said that world “leaders should begin laying the groundwork for establishing a global central bank.”[41]
Three days after the publication of Garten’s Newsweek article, it was reported that, “The International Monetary Fund may soon lack the money to bail out an ever growing list of countries crumbling across Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia, raising concerns that it will have to tap taxpayers in Western countries for a capital infusion or resort to the nuclear option of printing its own money.” Further, “The nuclear option is to print money by issuing Special Drawing Rights, in effect acting as if it were the world's central bank.”[42]
[For a detailed look at the moves to create a global central bank, regional currencies, a global reserve currency and a world governing body, see: Andrew G. Marshall, The Financial New World Order: Towards a Global Currency and World Government: Global Research, April 6, 2009]
Endnotes
[1] CFP, Annual Elite Conclave, 58th Bilderberg Meeting to be held in Greece, May 14-17. Canadian Free Press: May 5, 2009:
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/10854
[2] Paul Joseph Watson, Bilderberg Wants Global Department Of Health, Global Treasury. Prison Planet: May 16, 2009:
http://www.infowars.com/bilderberg-wants...-treasury/
[3] Paul Joseph Watson, Bilderberg Fears Losing Control In Chaos-Plagued World. Prison Planet: May 18, 2009:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/bilderberg-f...world.html
[4] Sorcha Faal, Bilderberg Group orders destruction of US Dollar? MINA: May 21, 2009:
http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/6807/53/
[5] Kristi Heim, What really happened at the billionaires' private confab. The Seattle Times: May 20, 2009:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/th...he_bi.html
[6] A. G. Sulzberger, The Rich Get … Together (Shhh, It Was a Secret). The New York Times: May 20, 2009:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0...-a-secret/
[7] Chosun, American Billionaires Gather to Discuss Slump. The Chosun Ilbo: May 22, 2009:
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html...00772.html
[8] John Harlow, Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation. The Sunday Times: May 24, 2009:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/wo...350303.ece
[9] Press Release, Investigative Author, Daniel Estulin Exposes Bilderberg Group Plans. PRWeb: May 22, 2009:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/Bilderberg...453144.htm
[10] James P. Tucker Jr., BILDERBERG AGENDA EXPOSED. American Free Press: June 1, 2009:
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/bi...9_179.html
[11] James Quinn, Tim Geithner to reform US financial regulation. The Telegraph: May 21, 2009:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsb...andfinance
/5359527/Tim-Geithner-to-reform-US-financial-regulation.html
[12] Greg Menges, U. S. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy F. Geithner speech before the Senate Banking Committee. Examiner: May 20, 2009:
http://www.examiner.com/x-8184-Boston-In...ner~y2009m
5d20-U-S-Secretary-of-the-Treasury-Timothy-F-Geithner-speech-before-the-Senate-Banking-Committee
[13] Robert Schmidt and Jesse Westbrook, U.S. May Strip SEC of Powers in Regulatory Overhaul. Bloomberg: May 20: 2009:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a18ctNv3FDcw
[14] Rex Nutting, Fed could be completely retooled, Geithner says. Market Watch: May 20, 2009:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fed-cou...thner-says
[15] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The G20 moves the world a step closer to a global currency. The Telegraph: April 3, 2009:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comme...rency.html
[16] Marie Magleby, Obama Wants U.S. to Loan $100 Billion to Global Bailout Fund. CNS News: May 20, 2009:
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/ar...rcID=48329
[17] Joe Bavier, Sub-Saharan Africa to receive $10 bln in SDRs-IMF. Reuters: May 25, 2009:
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCri...USLP336909
[18] Onno Wijnholds, The Dollar’s Last Days? International Business Times: May 18, 2009:
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/20090518...t-days.htm
[19] MATTHEW SALTMARSH, Former I.M.F. Chief Sees Opportunity in Crisis. The New York Times: May 22, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/busine...ref=global
[20] Charlie Skelton, Our man at Bilderberg: in pursuit of the world's most powerful cabal. The Guardian: May 13, 2009:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may...bilderberg
[21] Charlie Skelton, Our man at Bilderberg: They're watching and following me, I tell you. The Guardian: May 15, 2009:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may...n-dispatch
[22] Charlie Skelton, Our man at Bilderberg: I'm ready to lose control, but they're not. The Guardian: May 15, 2009:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may...-dispatch1
[23] Charlie Skelton, Our man at Bilderberg: 'You are not allowed to take pictures of policemen!' The Guardian: May 17, 2009:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may...bilderberg
[24] Charlie Skelton, Our man at Bilderberg: Fear my pen. The Guardian: May 18, 2009:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may...n-dispatch
[25] Charlie Skelton, Our man at Bilderberg: Let's salt the slug in 2010. The Guardian: May 19, 2009:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2009...ton-greece
[26] Dutch Royal House, Work and official duties. Prince Constantijn:
http://www.koninklijkhuis.nl/english/con...ctid=18215
[27] Deutsche Bank, Management Board. Our Company:
http://www.db.com/en/content/company/man..._board.htm
[28] InfoWars, Bilderberg 2009 Attendee List (revised). May 18, 2009:
http://www.infowars.com/bilderberg-2009-attendee-list/
[29] Demetris Nellas, Greek nationalists protest Bilderberg Club meeting. AP: May 14, 2009:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/arti...QD987H3200
[30] InfoWars, Bilderberg 2009 Attendee List (revised). May 18, 2009:
http://www.infowars.com/bilderberg-2009-attendee-list/
[31] MRT, Top US official arrives in Greece. Macedonian Radio and Television: May 15, 2009:
http://www.mrt.com.mk/en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6112&Itemid=28
[32] InfoWars, Bilderberg 2009 Attendee List (revised). May 18, 2009:
http://www.infowars.com/bilderberg-2009-attendee-list/
[33] WND, Google joins Bilderberg cabal. World Net Daily: May 17, 2009:
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=98469
[34] Adam Abrams, Are the people who 'really run the world' meeting this weekend? Haaretz: May 14, 2009:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1085589.html
[35] YOCHI J. DREAZEN and PETER SPIEGEL, U.S. Fires Afghan War Chief. The Wall Street Journal: May 12, 2009:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124206036635107351.html
[36] M.J. Stephey, Stan McChrystal: The New U.S. Commander in Afghanistan. Time Magazine: May 12, 2009:
http://www.time.com/time/politics/articl...42,00.html
[37] PIIE, About the Institute. Peterson Institute for International Economics:
http://www.petersoninstitute.org/institute/aboutiie.cfm
[38] PIIE, Board of Directors. Peterson Institute for International Economics:
http://www.petersoninstitute.org/institute/board.cfm#52
[39] Jeffrey E. Garten, Needed: A Fed for the World. The New York Times: September 23, 1998:
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/23/opinio...world.html
[40] Jeffrey Garten, Global authority can fill financial vacuum. The Financial Times: September 25, 2008:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/7caf543e-8b13-11...e.html?_i_
location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F7caf543e-8b13-11dd-b634-000077
9fd18c.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwilliamnotes.wordpress.com%2F2008%2F09%2F30%2Fgarten-on-a-global-monetary-authority%2F
[41] Jeffrey Garten, We Need a Bank Of the World. Newsweek: October 25, 2009: http://www.newsweek.com/id/165772
[42] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, IMF may need to "print money" as crisis spreads. The Telegraph: October 28, 2009:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans
_pritchard/3269669/IMF-may-need-to-print-money-as-crisis-spreads.html
OBAMA ADMINISTRATION REJECTS LIMITS ON BANKERS’ PAY
Patrick Martin
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13941
The Obama administration announced Wednesday that it opposed any government-imposed limits on the salary and bonuses of the CEOs and other top officials of major banks that have received trillions of dollars in federal handouts and guarantees over the past eight months.
Coming only nine days after the White House forced bankruptcy on General Motors and major cuts in auto workers’ pay and benefits, the green light for CEOs to continue to award themselves eight-digit compensation packages is further evidence of the grotesque double standard of American capitalism. Workers, retirees, young people and small businessmen will all see their living standards and future prospects devastated, but nothing can be allowed to interfere with the pursuit of personal wealth by the financial aristocracy.
“We do not believe it’s appropriate for the government to set caps in compensation,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in announcing the administration’s policy for companies which have received federal bailouts through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). “We’re not going to prescribe detailed prescriptive rules for compensation,” he continued. “All those things would be ineffective, could be counterproductive in some ways.”
Neither Geithner nor any other Obama administration official has explained why it is wrong and “counterproductive” to limit the multi-million-dollar salary and bonus packages awarded to bank executives, but absolutely necessary to slash the wages, pensions and health benefits of workers at General Motors, Chrysler and their supplier plants.
Well aware of the popular resentment against stratospheric salaries and bonuses for the financiers whose speculative practices precipitated a worldwide economic crisis, the Obama administration has offered a fig leaf of restraint on compensation. Geithner said the administration would ask Congress to give shareholders a consultative voice on executive pay and authorize the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to require corporate compensation committees to be more independent of company management. (Most CEOs have their pay and bonuses set by their cronies on the board of directors, often appointed by the CEOs themselves).
To call these measures toothless would be to exaggerate their significance. The shareholder votes would be non-binding. The compensation committees would still be selected by the corporate board and the CEO. There would be no outside regulatory supervision or control. And, of course, the workers would have no say whatsoever in the decision to award their bosses compensation packages hundreds if not thousands of times their own pay.
In his statement, Geithner made a pro forma acknowledgment that CEO pay played a role in the crisis. “This financial crisis had many significant causes,” he said, “but executive compensation practices were a contributing factor. Incentives for short-term gains overwhelmed the checks and balances meant to mitigate against the risk of excess leverage.”
Geithner declared that the first principle of his “reform” was that “compensation plans should properly measure and reward performance.” This is a sham. The CEOs of the major banks and investment houses do not create any real wealth. Their “labor” consists of the manipulation of financial assets. This activity is entirely parasitic, and in the recent period catastrophically destructive. To “properly measure and reward” the performance of these gentlemen would require criminal investigations and public trials, not multi-million-dollar payoffs.
There are some differences between the measures proposed by Geithner Wednesday and those originally proposed by the Obama administration on February 4, as part of its initial reformulation of the TARP program. Other limited restraints were introduced into the stimulus package enacted by Congress in February, in an amendment drafted by Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. But no version provides any serious obstacle to the bankers and CEOs resuming their mania for self-enrichment.
The only semblance of pay restraint will be applied to the seven companies that have borrowed more than once under the TARP program: Bank of America, Citibank, American International Group, General Motors, Chrysler, GMAC and Chrysler Financial. These seven companies must have the pay and bonuses of their top 25 executives approved by a “special master” appointed by Geithner, who named prominent Washington lawyer Kenneth Feinberg to the post. Feinberg will also review compensation practices at the other 80 firms that have drawn TARP money, but will not have any decision-making authority over them.
While Feinberg was immediately dubbed the “czar” of executive pay by the press, there is a revealing contrast between his background and record and that of the individual who functions as the Treasury’s automobile “czar,” hedge fund billionaire Steven Rattner.
Feinberg was most recently the head of the fund established to compensate the families of those killed and maimed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington DC. His task was to distribute several billion dollars to the families with a display of fairness and sensitivity. A critical purpose of these charitable payments was to forestall any lawsuits that could bring to light facts about the events leading up to September 11, 2001, above all the role of US intelligence agencies, which the government would prefer to keep hidden.
Rattner is a capitalist speculator. He has a great deal of experience in dismembering troubled companies and disposing of their assets, extracting the maximum profit from a process that involves the destruction of jobs, pensions and working class communities, a task which he is undertaking with great zeal against the auto workers.
The class divisions in American society are thus demonstrated even in the contrasting personal styles of the two “czars.” The CEOs of giant companies are to be treated with tact and discretion. The auto workers, on the other hand, are getting the treatment dished out by a corporate raider.
The pretense of restraint on executive pay comes only a week after a report, by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, that more than half of American companies are cutting or freezing pay for their employees in response to the financial crisis. Some 52.4 percent of human resource executives surveyed in May said their companies had cut compensation, up from 27.2 percent in a similar survey in January.
The proportion of companies taking cost-cutting measures of all kinds declined slightly from January (92 percent) to May (86 percent), with most companies enacting a combination of job cuts, hiring freezes, furloughs, pay cuts and benefit cuts. It is undoubtedly the case that those CEOs who proceed most aggressively to cut workers’ pay, benefits and jobs will reap the reward personally, in the form of large bonuses. And according to Geithner and the Obama administration, they will have earned it by their superior “performance.”
The Obama administration is a right-wing capitalist government pursuing a deliberate and sweeping attack on the American working class. Its social program finds its clearest class expression in this dichotomy: foreswearing any limits on CEO and executive compensation, while demanding sacrifices by workers and an across-the-board cut in “consumption”—i.e., in the living standards of working people.
A TALE OF TWO DIVERGING ECONOMIC WORLDS
F. William Engdahl
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13926
Increasingly a deep divide within the world of globalization is emerging which will have the most profound significance for the future of G7 nations’ economic and political stability. The divide is between those nations which are still embedded within the dollar system, including countries in the Eurozone, versus those emerging economies—especially the BRIC—Brazil, Russia, India, China—where new economic markets and regions are rapidly replacing their over-dependence on the United States as prime export market and prime source for investment finance. The long-term consequences will be an aggravation of the trend of the United States as a political and economic superpower in terminal decline, while dynamic new economic zones, initially mainly of regional importance, will arise.
The one great asset which nations like China, Indonesia, India and Brazil bring to the emerging divide is the one greatest long-term economic deficit or liability of the older industrialized world, USA, UK, Germany and the EU generally. That is their demographic advantage.
With the exception of Russia, all the growth economies possess young, dynamic and growing populations. Interesting to recall is that the hidden story of the pre-1914 German ‘economic miracle’ was based on a similar ‘secret’—rapid and dynamic young and growing population, while that of Great Britain and France was stagnant or in decline after the British Great Depression of 1873 which led to huge emigration of population to the USA.
It’s no accident that the leading political elites of the G7 argue that the greatest threat globally is the rapid birth rate in developing countries. Translated from their euphemism, they really mean the greatest threat to their continued dominance of world affairs is population expansion in emerging economies, as new contenders inevitably rise.
New growth regions emerging
Almost naturally in the past eighteen months, once the initial shock of the worst financial and economic shock since the 1930’s began to subside, China and its immediate trading partners along with the other high-growth emerging economies, began looking for new alternatives to the dying dollar system.
The present crisis is no short-term epiphenomenon as Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner or Barack Obama would wish us to believe. It is the reflection of more than 65 years of defective US economic policy, a defect which reached epidemic proportions after the decision to abandon the gold exchange standard in 1971. Let’s be clear , that gold standard as well as its predecessors was no magic economic panacea. But the break by Nixon in August 1971 allowed Washington to embark on a de facto financial imperialist policy which ruined much of the world economy in its ravages of the past thirty eight years.
Today the contrast between declining G7 economies and emerging dynamic high-population growth economies could not be clearer. The G7 nations from USA to Germany to Italy are choking in public debt, ranging from 80% of GDP in the United States to well over 100% in Italy and a staggering 199% in Japan. Only Zimbabwe with 218% debt to GDP tops that. Germany has a ratio of 77%.
By contrast, of the emerging dynamic high-growth countries, only India has significant public debt, a legacy of the British colonial era, of 58% GDP. Brazil, despite a severe debt crisis in the 1980’s, today has a public debt to GDP level of a very manageable 45%, while Indonesia, one of the fast-growing newly emerging economies, has 34%. South Korea with a high domestic savings culture has a mere 28% debt ratio and China a mere 18% debt to GDP level. Russia, which used the recent boom in oil and gas revenues to pay down its foreign and IMF debts, while the country has severe demographic problems, has a public debt to GDP as of 2008 data of 6%. It has also slowly rebuilt foreign exchange reserves after the crisis last year to a level of $404 billion this month, making its reserves the third largest in the world.
So, with the economies of the USA and EU caught in the jaws of a twin scissors-like crises between growing public debt and declining population growth rates to service that debt long-term, the emerging economies of Asia and Eurasia as well as Brazil in South America are booming, precisely because they enjoy the twin assets of low public debt to GDP ratios combined with dynamic growing populations.
In China, India, Indonesia, Brazil economic growth continues to advance significantly. Governments are not buried under a mountain of debt and citizens remain optimistic about their future. This divergence, between the once rich and the once poor, will mark a geopolitical shift in the pivot of world history when viewed retrospectively by future economic historians.
Caught in the blades of a twin crisis
The most notable aspect of the crisis is the thorough discrediting of western academic economists, including every single winner of the Economics Nobel Prize. Their grandiose theories justifying their laissez faire ‘free market’ economic model of globalization has been proven fatally wrong, in effect a transparent promotion gimmick to justify the process of one-sided globalization, little more. They have been exposed, to use the terms of one of my favourite children’s stories by the Danish writer H.C. Andersen, like the Emperor with no clothes.
The dollar system their world had been based on since Bretton Woods in 1944, is undergoing a death agony. Every measure advocated to date by two US Administrations—Bush and now Obama—as well as the other G7 governments has amounted to giving heavy and even heavier doses of financial chemotherapy to a dying patient. The ever higher doses of taxpayer bailout to maintain a failed financial and banking model on artificial life support is merely worsening the underlying health of the US economy.
The record US financial bailouts since September 2008, a span of a mere ten months, have brought the US Federal debt from some 60% to a whopping 80% of GDP. Private US household debt is now above a record 100% of GDP, significantly worse than in the bad recession year 1974 when it was a mere 40%.
More alarming, for any prospect of growing out of the US economic downturn, the long-awaited phenomenon of demographics has slowly begun to impact. In the coming 1-3 years the impact of Baby Boom generation retirees in record numbers will hit. They will be forced to draw down their public Social Security retirement from the Government as well as selling their private 401k and similar stock and bond investments in order to live in retirement. In economic terms they will become a net drain on the US pubic finances whereas rising unemployment among younger workers whose taxed earnings are needed to pay into the Social Security fund, will aggravate the US public debt level rapidly to Italy or even Japan or Zimbabwe levels in coming years. Unemployed workers do not pay taxes. They draw on state benefits instead.
In April, India's car sales were 4.2 percent higher than they were a year prior. Retail sales rose 15 percent in China in the first quarter of 2009. China is likely to grow at 7 or 8 percent this year, India at 6 percent and Indonesia at 4 percent.
By contrast, even using badly flawed official data, the US economy contracted at an annual rate of 6.1 percent last quarter, Europe by 9.6 percent and Japan by a frightening 15 percent, something that rivals the 1930s.
In the West, plus G7 member Japan, banks are overleveraged and thus dysfunctional, governments paralyzed with debt, and consumers are rebuilding their huge debt burdens. America is having trouble selling its public debt at attractive prices. The last three Treasury auctions have gone badly. Its largest state, California, is veering toward total fiscal collapse. The current fiscal year US budget deficit is going to surpass 13 percent of GDP, a level last seen during World War II.
By contrast emerging-market banks are largely healthy and profitable. Every Indian bank, government and private, posted profits in the last quarter of 2008. The governments are in good fiscal shape. China has the world’s largest foreign currency reserves, $2 trillion in reserves, and a budget deficit less than 3 percent of GDP. Brazil is now posting a current account surplus. Indonesia has reduced its debt from 100 percent of GDP nine years ago to 34 percent today.
Unlike in the West - where governments have run out of money or creative new ideas and are now praying that their medicine will work - these countries still have options. Only a year ago, their chief concern was an overheated economy and inflation. Brazil has cut its interest rate substantially, but only to 10.25 percent, which means it can drop it further if things deteriorate even more.
The mood in many of these countries remains surprisingly upbeat. Their currencies are appreciating against the dollar because the markets see them as having better fiscal discipline as well as better long-term growth prospects than the United States. Their bonds are rising. This combination of indicators, all pointing in the same direction, is unprecedented.
The United States remains the richest and most powerful country in the world. Its military spans the globe. Even if its leaders prefer not to call it such it represents the most powerful informal empire in history to date. But just as previous global hegemons went into irreversible decline--the Spanish Empire of the 16th century to the British Empire in the 20th century--great global powers sink into terminal decline once they become overburdened with debt and stuck in slow growth.
F. William Engdahl, author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press), may be reached via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
G-20 OR G-192 :WHICH IS MORE GLOBAL?
http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3959
Nine months since the United States began pumping billions of dollars into its troubled banks and the consequences of the crisis continue to spread across the globe. While the leaders of the G-20 came to some agreements in London in early April, many world leaders are not comfortable being spoken for by the world's largest economies. Enter the UN General Assembly's Conference on the Economic Crisis. "I believe the rationale for this conference is the democratization of the discussion," says Martin Khor, Executive Director of The South Centre. Proponents of the conference have referred to it as the G-192, in reference to the refusal to exclude any UN members from the event, in contrast to the G-20. But with both groups trying to claim ownership over the term 'global' Western leaders have sought to sabotage the G-192.
Bio
Martin Khor is the Executive Director of The South Centre, an intergovernmental organization that provides research and policy advice to 50 governments of the Global South. Prior to this, he was the Director of the Third World Network, a developing-country organization carrying out research in trade, environment and development issues. He has served as Editor of the South-North Development Monitor and is a member of the United Nations Committee on Development Policy. He sat on a wide array of commissions and boards, serving on the Board of the South Centre (1996-2002), the Helsinki Group on Globalisation and Democracy, the International Task Force on Climate Change (2003-2005), the Expert Group on Democracy and Development, Commonwealth Secretariat (2002-2003), the United Nations Secretary-General's Task Force on Environment and Human Settlements (1998), and the Working Group of Experts on the Right to Development, the UN Commission on Human Rights. He was educated in Economics in Cambridge University (U.K.) and the Universiti Sains Malaysia, and has authored many books and papers on trade, sustainable development, intellectual property rights, and development.
Byron Blake is an Ambassador to the UN from his home of Jamaica, and serves as a Special Adviser to the current President of the UN General Assembly, Miguel D'Escoto-Brockmann. Blake served at CARICOM (Caribbean Community Secretariat) for almost 30 years, before leaving his position as Assistant Secretary-General, in charge of trade and economic integration. He has also served as an Ambassador to the UN for the government of Antigua and Barbuda, at which time he served as a spokesperson for the G-77 + China, a diverse group of developing countries making up the UN's largest voting bloc
GLOBAL POWER AND GLOBAL GOVERNMENT : EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION OF THE CENTRAL BANKING SYSTEM
Andrew Gavin Marshall
Global Research, July 21, 2009
Introduction
Humanity is on the verge of entering into the most tumultuous period in our history. The prospects of a global depression, the likes of which have never been seen before; a truly global war, on a scale never before imagined; and societal collapse, for which nations of the world are building totalitarian police states to control populations; are increasing by the day. The major global trend forecasters are sounding the alarms on economic depression, war, a return to fascism and a total reorganization of society. Through crisis, we are seeing the reorganization of the global political economy, and the transformation of capitalism into a totalitarian capitalist world government. Capitalism has never stayed the same through its history; it has always changed and will continue to do so. Its changes are explained and analyzed through political-economic theory, both mainstream theory and critical. The changes are undertaken over years, decades and centuries. The next phase of capitalism is one in which the world moves to a state-controlled economic system, much like China, of totalitarian capitalism.
The global political economy itself is being reorganized into a world government body, consisting of one center of global power where the socio-political-economic power of the world is centralized in one institution. This is not a conspiracy theory; it is a reality. Nor is this a subject confined to the realm of “internet conspiracy theorists,” but in fact, the concept of world government originates and evolves throughout the history of capitalism and the global political economy. Mainstream and critical political-economic theory has addressed the concept of world government for centuries.
The notion of a world government has such a long history, as the forces driving the world into such a structure intertwine with the history of the modern global political economy itself. The purpose of this report is to examine the history of the global political economy in taking steps toward forming a world government, in both theory and practice.
How did we get here and where are we going?
Why Study Theory?
Within the academic realm of Political Science, specifically the field of Global Political Economy (GPE), it is essential to understand the various theoretical perspectives of political economy so as to understand the actions and directions taken within the global political economy, and how capitalism has been and continues to be reorganized and altered. Theory provides the foundation upon which actors are understandable and actions are undertaken. As the political economist Robert Cox once stated, “Theory is always for someone and for some purpose.” It is important to understand and analyze the theoretical leanings of those making changes in the global political economy, in order to understand the changes being made, specifically the theoretical foundations of a world government. As well as this, it is important to examine critical theory in how it interprets both how and why a world government is being constructed.
Mercantilism
The history of political economic theory shows a continued fascination with the concept of constructing such a cosmopolitan or global community. The earliest forms of western Global Political Economy theorists lie in the early mercantilist period, and with the emergence of Liberal theory, following Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, mercantilist writers such as Friedrich List and Alexander Hamilton wrote critiques of the underlying Liberal concepts. List wrote in Political and Cosmopolitical Economy that Smith dispersed with the idea of a “national economy” in which nation’s determined economic conditions, and instead advocated replacing the “national” economy with a “cosmopolitical or world-wide economy.” List discusses the perspective of Jean-Baptiste Say (J.B. Say), a French liberal economist, saying that Say “openly demands that we should imagine the existence of a universal republic in order to comprehend the idea of general free trade.”[1]
List states that, “If, as the prevailing school [of political-economic thought] requires, we assume a universal union or confederation of nations as the guarantee for an everlasting peace, the principle of international free trade seems to be perfectly justified,” however, this prevailing thought “assumes the existence of a universal union and a state of perpetual peace, and deduces therefrom the great benefits of free trade. In this manner it confounds effects with causes.” List elaborates in explaining that, “Among the provinces and states which are already politically united, there exists a state of perpetual peace; from this political union originates their commercial union.” Further, “All examples which history can show are those in which the political union has led the way, and the commercial union has followed. Not a single instance can be adduced in which the latter has taken the lead, and the former has grown up from it.”[2]
It must be addressed that List is a mercantilist theorist. This means that he views the realm of the political and economic as an interacting realm in which they are intertwined and merged, however, the political realm remains above the economic, which is subject to the dictates of the political element. Liberal theorists believe that the political and economic realms are separate, and that they should be separated, so that political elements interact separately and without influence over the economic realm, which itself acts independently and separately of the political. This is the foundation for the ideas of the “free market” and the oft-quoted Adam Smith phrase, “the invisible hand of the free market,” which was only mentioned once in his entire volume of the Wealth of Nations. The ascension of liberal theorists marked a separation in the academic and theoretical studies, in which Political Economy was separated as a field, and saw the emergence of Political Science and Economics as separate studies.
As political economist Robert Cox stated, “Theory is always for someone and for some purpose.” The purpose of this separation was to compartmentalize academic thought and separate the realms of politics and economy, so as to better control both – as the banking interests, which dominated both the realms of politics and economics since the late 1600s, continued to view the world in terms of political-economic theory. It was a strategy of “divide and conquer,” in which theory and academia was divided in order to conquer and control thought on both sides. This separation continues to this day, as even the field of Political Economy is placed underneath and subjective to Political Science, whereas it would make more sense that Political Science and Economics would be under the umbrella of Political Economy. Again, compartmentalize thought and then the control of discussion and debate becomes much easier.
What List was arguing in his essay was a critique of the liberal concept of a cosmopolitical society, in which all nations are united in a world federation. Naturally, this was not the case in that era, it was an incorrect and dubious assumption on the part of liberal theorists. List explained that never before had economic or commercial interdependence and union led to a political union. List postulated that history showed that political union had to precede an economic union. However, List was writing in the first half of the 19th century, and history has changed the course of events and Political Economic theory. I would argue that the major banking interests, essentially made up of a dynasty of banking families (the Rothschilds, Warburgs, and later the Morgans and Rockefellers, among many others), decided to chart a different course, in which they would pursue a strategy in which economic union would be incrementally undertaken with the aim of constructing a political union to follow in its footsteps.
Central Banking
Thus, liberal economic theory came to the forefront, championed by the global hegemonic power of the day, Great Britain, which was firmly under the control of the banking dynasties. In 1694, the Bank of England was formed as a private central bank, which would issue the currency of the nation, lending it to the government and industry at interest, which would be paid back to the Bank of England’s shareholders, made up of these private banking dynasties.[3] The 16th to the 19th centuries was the period in which both the nation-state and capitalism emerged, soon followed by central banking in the late 1600s. This is when the origins of what was known as a “world economy” took place. Mercantilist economic theory dominated this period, in which the economy was secondary and submissive to the political structure of nations.
Liberal theorists rose in opposition to this. Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations in 1776, the same year that the American colonies revolted against the British imperial forces in the country, and ultimately gained independence from the British Empire. Among many of the primary motivating factors for the Revolution were the British military presence in the American colonies, acting above the law; a heavy imposition of colonial taxes, particularly on tea and other imports from foreign nations such as France, in an effort to promote the mercantilist assumptions that the colony should only survive and trade with the metropole (imperial hegemon) – which extracts the resources of the nation in trade for material goods to that nation, creating a dependence upon the colonial power. Arguably one of the primary motivations for the Revolution was the control of currency by a foreign imperial power, with the ability to control inflation and devaluation, essentially controlling the entire economic conditions of the colony from abroad. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood the necessity of controlling one’s own currency if one was to preserve sovereignty and independence.
Following Britain’s humiliating defeat, which was aided by the French who supported the American revolt, European banking interests suffered a significant blow against their mercantilist expansion. Capitalism functions in that it constantly needs to expand and consume more. Central banking functions in a very similar, although much more dubious manner, in which it needs to expand its control over industry, nations and people through the expansion of debt, continually needing to bring more individuals, nations and industries under debt bondage. Debt is the source of all power and wealth for the central banking system – as they do not actually produce any tradable good, such as industry; nor do they provide any necessary service, such as government. Interest on debt is the source of income and authority for the central banking system, and thus, it needs to continually advance credit and expand debt. Thus, the loss of the American colonies as a source of expansionary credit and debt was a massive blow to their entrenched interests.
The European banking interests quickly learned their lesson regarding not falling under the imperial hubris of believing people of a given region or nation could never defeat imperial might and armies. Revolution had become a great threat to the entrenched capitalist, and particularly, banking interests.
Within a decade of the American Revolutionary War, which ended in 1783, another nation was going down the road of revolutionary zeal, in part inspired by the American example. However, this nation was no colony, but rather a mercantilist imperial power, and thus, its loss would be too great a loss to allow. In 1788, the French Monarchy was bankrupt, and as tensions grew between the increasingly desperate people of France and the aristocratic and particularly monarchic establishment, European bankers decided to pre-empt and co-opt the revolution. In 1788, prominent French bankers refused “to extend necessary short-term credit to the government,”[4] and they arranged to have shipments of grain and food to Paris “delayed” which triggered the hunger riots of the Parisians.[5] This sparked the Revolution, in which a new ruling class emerged, driven by violent oppression and political and actual terrorism. However, its violence grew, and with that, so too did discontentment with the Revolutionary Regime, and its stability and sustainability was in question. Thus, the bankers threw their weight behind a general in the Revolutionary Army named Napoleon, whom they entrusted to restore order. Napoleon then gave the bankers his support, and in 1800, created the Bank of France, the privately owned central bank of France, and gave the bankers authority over the Bank. The bankers owned its shares, and even Napoleon himself bought shares in the bank.[6]
The bankers thus sought to control commerce and government and restore order to their newly acquired and privately owned and operated empire. However, Napoleon continued with his war policies beyond the patience of the bankers, which had a negative impact upon commercial activities,[7] and Napoleon himself was interfering in the operations of the Bank of France and even declared that the Bank “belongs more to the Emperor than to the shareholders.”[8] With that, the bankers again shifted their influence, and remained through regime change.[9]
The Rothschilds ascended to the throne of international banking with the Battle of Waterloo. After having established banking houses in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna and Naples, they profited off of all sides in the Napoleonic wars.[10] The British patriarch, Nathan Rothschild, was known for being the first with news in London, ahead of even the monarchy and the Parliament, and so everyone watched his moves on the stock market during the Battle of Waterloo. Following the battle, Nathan got the news that the British won over 24 hours before the government itself had news, and he quietly went into the London Stock Exchange and sold everything he had, implying to those watching that the British lost. A panic selling ensued, in which everyone sold stock, stock prices crumbled, and the market crashed. What resulted was that Rothschild then bought up the near-entire British stock market for pennies on the dollar, as when news arrived of the British victory at Waterloo, Rothschild’s newly acquired stocks soared in value, as did his fortune, and his rise as the pre-eminent economic figure in Britain.[11]
As Goergetown University History professor, Carroll Quigley wrote in his monumental Tragedy and Hope, “The merchant bankers of London had already at hand in 1810-1850 the Stock Exchange, the Bank of England, and the London money market,” and that:
In time they brought into their financial network the provincial banking centers, organized as commercial banks and savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to form all of these into a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other.[12]
The period from 1815 to 1914 was known as the British Imperial Century, in which they adopted the liberal economic concepts of Adam Smith, and manipulated and distorted them for their own imperial ambitions. Mercantilism was still strong in practice, but rode under the banner of a liberal economic order, “free markets” and the “invisible hand.” The “invisible hand” was in fact, connected to a body made up of government and industry, molding the “free market” according to its designs, and the body was controlled by the brain, the central bank, the Bank of England. Markets were hardly “free” and the hand was visible to those who could see the rest of the body.
The Liberal Revolution
It was during this British imperial century that other nations, such as Germany and the United States, were pursuing mercantilist economic practices in order to protect their own nations from the British free-trade imperialism. It was in this context that mercantilist theorists such as Alexander Hamilton in the United States, and Friedrich List in Germany were writing in criticism of liberal economic theory.
Mercantilism was dominant in political-economic theory until the mid 19th century when the ‘liberal revolution’ manifested, largely in critical opposition to mercantilism. In liberal economic theory, the economic realm is autonomous and separate from the political realm, and functions according to its own logic. Within this theory, politics and economics, though separate spheres, are still connected, but remain independent of one another. Whereas mercantilists see the state as the primary actor in the global political economy, liberals see the individual (both producer and consumer) as being the major actor.
Mercantilists see the international arena as inherently conflictual, justifying their policies of colonialism and empire building in an international arena in which if one state does not colonize foreign lands and extract resources, another state will, and thus, will deprive the state that does not create an empire of resources and economic growth. In this sense, mercantilists view the world in terms of a zero-sum gain, in which the progress of one state requires the regression of another. Liberal theorists argue that the international arena, made up of individuals, constitutes a positive-sum gain, in which all individuals act according to self-interest, and in doing so, benefit everyone, and foster cooperation and interdependence. In this sense, the international arena is not inherently conflictual, but rather a cooperative and interdependent sphere in which order and stability is upheld by international regimes – such as the British liberal imperial order and the gold standard it instituted.
Where mercantilists view history as an amalgamation of conflicts and decisions made by states, liberal theorists view history as the sum of the unintended consequences of actions made by private individuals and activities. This implies almost an inherently natural progression of history – that it is not shaped by powerful forces in any designed or intended way, but is merely a natural response and reaction to the actions of individuals. This ties into the liberal concept of the natural state of a liberal economic order, bringing in the idea of the “invisible hand of the free market” which will determine economic activities.
Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand” has been used to advance the idea that private individuals who seek personal wealth and gain through self-interest will unintentionally aid the interests of all of society. However, the “invisible hand” was mentioned merely once in Smith’s monumental Wealth of Nations, and was taken out of context. Smith was discussing how “Every individual naturally inclines to employ his capital in the manner in which it is likely to afford the greatest support to domestic industry, and to give revenue and employment to the greatest number of people of his own country.” In addition to employing “his capital in the support of domestic industry,” the private individual would “direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value.” Therefore, the individual “neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.” Smith explains that:
"By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."[13]
Smith had conceptualized the “invisible hand” as the “natural inclination” of an individual to promote domestic interests, yet the phrase has been manipulated to promote the concept of a “self regulating market” in which the less regulation and restrictions there are, the better all society will be, because industry will naturally benefit all people. The manipulation of this phrase has taken the notion of the “invisible hand” away from the actions of individuals and transferred it to promoting non-regulation of economic activities. That is a far cry from Smith’s contention.
Smith even stated in the Wealth of Nations that, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.”[14]
In discussing regulation regarding wages for workers and resolving equity issues between the employers, or “masters” and the labour class of “workers,” Smith explained that, “Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counselors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.” Further, “When masters combine together in order to reduce the wages of their workmen, they commonly enter into a private bond or agreement, not to give more than a certain wage under a certain penalty. Were the workmen to enter into a contrary combination of the same kind, not to accept a certain wage under a certain penalty [such as a union], the law would punish them very severely; and if it dealt impartially, it would treat the masters in the same manner.”[15]
These quotes by Adam Smith tend to fly in the face of the common perceptions and usage of Smith’s ideas, proving that liberal economy in practice is a far cry from the intent of its original theorist.
In the 1870s, the notion of a “liberal economic order” was challenged as the major European empires undertook an incredible extension of their imperial presence across the globe, itself a mercantilist practice – the idea of obtaining colonies in order to extract its resources, create a captive market for the imperial nations manufactured goods, and deprive its economic competitors of access to that market. Between 1878 and 1913, European empires extended their control over much of the world, specifically with the Scramble for Africa, in which all of Africa, save Ethiopia, was colonized by European powers.
This “new imperialism,” as it was known, proliferated throughout Europe following the rapid expansion of banking throughout the continent, and the pre-eminence of international financiers over governments.[16] The growth of the continent-wide banking networks “fed the growth of colonial empires” as it stimulated a system in which “creating debt that then had to be serviced by the purchase of more infrastructure,” and expansion of territory.[17] This led European nations to undertake a massive imperial effort across much of the globe, to find and control foreign markets and expand their capital.
The Emergence of Marxism
In the 19th century, the rise of critical IPE (International/Global Political Economy) theories emerged in opposition to the growing dominance of Liberal IPE. The most profound of these criticisms arose from Karl Marx. Marxism, as Marx’s critical theory came to be known, put an extensive focus on the relations of classes within society, as the class that owns the means of production is the central and most powerful class, subverting the other classes to a submissive position. Marxists also view capitalism as being inherently exploitative. Within this theory, the political and economic realms are not seen as separate spheres of action, but are seen as intertwined and internally related. Within this theory, the purpose of the state is not to serve the interests of the broader population that inhabits it, but to secure, maintain and advance the interests of the capitalist class. Marxist theorists also put emphasis on the nature of war and conflict as being intrinsically related to the expansionary nature of capitalism, which is one of the primary roles of states in advancing the interests of the capitalist ruling class.
Marx defines what he perceives as capitalism: a system which is governed by capital, which is money that has been invested in order to generate more money; production, which is dominant within capitalist society, is designed for sale, not use – in that, it moves beyond subsistence and into what we refer to today as materialism and consumption; labour is commodified, thus people, through their labour, themselves become a tradable commodity; exchange occurs with money; ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the capitalist class; and competition between various capitalist forces is the logic of interaction.
Marx places a large focus on the circuit of capital, in how money transforms into capital. Money (M), is invested in purchasing a Commodity ©, and then into Labour Power (LP) and the Mean of Production (MP), which make up the Production circuit (P), which produces a new Commodity (C1), which is then sold, creating expanding money (M1), or earned profits. Capital, thus, is money that is invested into production. Marx postulates that the inherent exploitative nature of capitalism is most apparent in the Production circuit, specifically with Labour Power.
Diverging From Marx
However, with the exploration and understanding of the central banking system, some of the circuit of capital must be called into question. Central banking functions not on “investment” of capital, but on the expansion and creation of money and debt, which is lent at interest, thus serving as the source of income for the central banking system. This cannot be called productive capital, for its purpose and intent is not to produce a new commodity, there is no labour power or means of production involved, and new money is not produced from the sale of such a new commodity, but rather profit is extracted from interest on the original money. This, for the sake of argument, can be called the Circuit of Debt:
M --> L --> I --> M1 --> LID --> DB
M = Money
L = Loan
I = Interest
M1 = New Money
LID = new money Loaned to debtor to pay Interest on Debt
DB = debtor falls into Debt Bondage; owned by creditor
Through the Marxist perspective of exploitation, there is no labour to exploit within the Circuit of Debt, so where does exploitation come into play? Exploitation comes into the process in that the debt (or loan) issued, is designed to exploit whoever the debtor is, be it an individual, a nation, or a corporation. Within this paradigm, class structure, although playing a significant part of the process of overall exploitation and exercise of power within the capitalist system is not the only, or arguably, even primary target of control and oppression within capitalism, as we know it. The target is the individual, the nation, and industry to the submission of the predatory nature of the central banking system.
The central banking system has, from its inception, acted in ways which monopolize industry (thus negating Adam Smith’s concept of a “free market” and “competition”); militarize nations (financing wars and conquest, imperialism); merging the interests of both the economic and political realms into a holistic ruling class (modeled upon the dual nature of a central bank itself – holding the authority and power of a government body, but representing the interests and submitting to the ownership of private individuals). Thus, the ruling class itself is a social construct which this tiny elite formed, hardly capable of the numbers to be termed a class, especially since class is most often defined in national terms, whereas this elite is international in nature.
The central bank of a nation finances monopoly industry and imperial states, both of which are created out of debt bondage to the central bank. Both the commercial/industrial elites and political elites merge their interests – the state will pursue imperial policies that have the effect of benefiting industry, while industry will support the building of a strong, powerful state (and provide a cozy job for the political elite upon leaving the public sector). This makes up the ruling class of a nation, the capitalists, or owners of the means of production, merging with the political rulers of the nation. One does not represent or overpower the other, but rather, both serve the interests and are owned through interest, by a tiny international elite.
One must ask: What would capitalism look like if it were not for the advent of the central banking system?
Accumulation by Dispossession
In discussing Marxist theory, I am not advocating a total support of its theoretical discussion and perspective. However, it is vital to address, as historically and presently, it has served as a very powerful source of criticism against the capitalist system and its importance cannot be underestimated. Having said that, it is also important to address in that it does, as a theory, identify many accurate and important aspects of how the capitalist system functions. For that reason, many of the critiques have been and are currently prescient and justified.
In Marxist theory, the nature of accumulation plays a very important part, in that it holds a dual character. One is known as accumulation as expanded reproduction, which is concerned with commodity markets and production (the circuit of capital), where money is made through the labour process. The other nature of accumulation is accumulation by dispossession, which is usually framed in terms of relations between capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production. This is accumulation derived from dispossessing someone of something. The Atlantic slave trade was an example of accumulation by dispossession, as Africans were dispossessed of their lives and freedom. Colonialism is another example, where resources are extracted, dispossessing the nation of its own resources.
Perhaps it would be helpful to expand upon Marx’s ideas of accumulation by dispossession in regards to the central banking system. Central banking, not falling into the circuit of capital, and thus, accumulation as expanded reproduction, better represents an example of accumulation by dispossession. Money is given in loans at interest, to which the debtor is never meant to fully repay, and is dispossessed of its freedom and wealth through interest payments and debt bondage. Debt is just another word for slavery, therefore, the central banking system itself, functions through a system of accumulation by dispossession.
However, conventional understanding of accumulation by dispossession describes it as an interaction between capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production, where the capitalist mode will dispossess the non-capitalist mode of production. Central banking, however, is the pinnacle of the capitalist system, and ultimately, the primary source and avenue of its power, so it can hardly be said to be an interaction between capitalist and non-capitalist modes, as it is an interaction between central banks and ALL modes of production which need money – including the entirety of the capitalist system. Thus, industry/commerce, governments/nations, and individuals/people, are dispossessed of their freedom through debt bondage. This cannot simply be predicated in terms of class warfare or class-centric theory, but rather, an assault against all individuals, individuality, and freedom, in any and all forms. It is within this context that class structures are created, so as to play off one against the other – to compartmentalize people into classes, and thus, better control and manipulate the masses. It is a strategy of dividing and conquering people. Class, including the upper capitalist class, is constructed in an effort to conform thought within each class, and thus direct collective action of that class accordingly. The freethinking individual is the target in all cases. Individuality is to be removed from commerce, government, and society as a whole.
The Communist Manifesto
In the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, Marx proclaims in the opening subtitle that, “The history of all society hitherto is the history of class struggles.” However, if class itself is a construct of powerful individuals, albeit throughout human history, can it not be argued instead that the history of all society is the history of the struggle of the individual against collectivity and control? Class itself is a collective grouping designed to control a mass of people, whether it is upper class or lower class. Individuals are stifled within all classes, and thus, the history of class struggles itself, is a history of the struggle between the free thinking individual and the collective form of control.
Within the Communist Manifesto, Marx (and Engels) outlined an initial program for an “advanced” nation to undertake in order to create a Communist system, with ten major points. (1) Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes; (2) A heavy progressive or graduated income tax; (3) Abolition of all right of inheritance; (4) Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels; (5) Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly; (6) Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state; (7) Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state – the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan; (8) Equal liability of all to labour – Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture; (9) Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries – gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country; and (10) Free education for all children in public schools – Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form [and] Combination of education with industrial production.[18]
Of particular importance is number 5, in which a central bank is advocated. If nations have the ability to create and issue a currency through a Treasury department or even on a more regional or local level, why centralize and monopolize creation of a currency to a central bank? It should be noted that the recommendation was to have it centralized “in the hands of the state,” however, central banks are today, still widely perceived as being within the purview of governmental authority, while acting and functioning totally outside of it and above it. Imposing a tax on one’s income (2), also seems to promote the commodification of labour, in that instead of industry exploiting one’s labour and extracting a profit from it, that becomes the job of the state. All property would be owned by the state (1), and virtually the entire economy is subject to the control of the state. Even education, while free, is directed by the state. With the “Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels,” what room is there for dissenting thought in such a society? Dissent would not be encouraged within the “free education” system. In fact, conformity would be enshrined. Is this not a form of “accumulation by dispossession” in which the individual is dispossessed of free thought and action and submitted to the will of and restricted thinking allowed by the state? Within this paradigm the state accumulates power and authority by dispossessing people of individuality in thought and expression.
The Communist Manifesto ends with the declaration of, “Workers of all countries, Unite!” This, in and of itself, promotes class divisions within society, placing focus on the need for an international mobilization of the global working class to rise up against the capitalist class. Marx outlines that any successful workers’ revolution must be international.[19] Thus, this promotes the cosmopolitical notion of an international community, at least in initial terms of a transnational class system. Essentially, Marx argues that as capitalism expands, what we will later term “Globalizes,” so too must the working class of the world “globalize” and “internationalize.” In a sense, this makes Marx, himself, an early globalist theorist, in promoting the concept of an international class uprising against the capitalist class. Ultimately, would this not simply replace the tyranny of one class for the tyranny of another? Throw out the capitalists and bring in the communists! Substituting one form of oppression for another is hardly a change in the right direction. In both systems, the individual suffers and free thought is stifled.
Though much Marxist criticism is extremely pointed in analyzing the functions and structure of the capitalist system, such theory itself, even though critical, must be critically examined.
Retaking America
The history of the United States from its founding through the 19th century to the early 20th century, was marked by a continual political battle revolving around the creation of a central bank of the United States. Mercantilists such as Alexander Hamilton, who was the first Treasury Secretary, were in favour of such a bank, and his advice won over George Washington, much to the dismay of Thomas Jefferson, who was a strong opponent to central banking. However, “[Alexander] Hamilton, believing that government must ally itself with the richest elements of society to make itself strong, proposed to Congress a series of laws, which it enacted, expressing this philosophy,” and that, “A Bank of the United States was set up as a partnership between the government and certain banking interests,”[20] which lasted until the charter expired in 1811.
Again, during the tenure of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), the primary political struggle was with the entrenched financial interests both domestic and from abroad (namely Western Europe), on the issue of creating a central bank of the US. Andrew Jackson stood in firm opposition to such a bank, saying that, “the bank threatened the emerging order, hoarding too much economic power in too few hands,” and referred to it as “The Monster.”[21] Congress passed the bill allowing for the creation of a Second Bank of the United States, however, Andrew Jackson vetoed the bill, much to the dismay of the banking interests.
It was in the later half of the 1800s that “European financiers were in favor of an American Civil War that would return the United States to its colonial status, they admitted privately that they were not necessarily interested in preserving slavery,” as it had become unprofitable.[22] The Civil War was not based upon the liberation of slaves, it was, as Howard Zinn described it, a clash “of elites,” with the northern elite wanting “economic expansion – free land, free labor, a free market, a high protective tariff for manufacturers, [and] a bank of the United States. [Whereas] The slave interests opposed all that.”[23] The Civil War, which lasted from 1861 until 1865, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, during which, “Congress also set up a national bank, putting the government into partnership with the banking interests, guaranteeing their profits.”[24]
As Lincoln himself stated:
The money powers prey on the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. The banking powers are more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. They denounce as public enemies all who question their methods or throw light upon their crimes.
I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me, and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe. As a most undesirable consequence of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow. The money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed.[25]
Throughout much of the 1800s and into the 1900s, the United States suffered several economic crises, one of the most significant of which was the Great Depression of 1873. As Howard Zinn explained:
The crisis was built into a system which was chaotic in its nature, in which only the very rich were secure. It was a system of periodic crises – 1837, 1857, 1873 (and later: 1893, 1907, 1919, 1929) – that wiped out small businesses and brought cold, hunger, and death to working people while the fortunes of the Astors, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Morgans, kept growing through war and peace, crisis and recovery. During the 1873 crisis, Carnegie was capturing the steel market, Rockefeller was wiping out his competitors in oil.[26]
Massive industrial consolidation by a few oligarchic elites was the rule of the day, as J.P. Morgan expanded total control over railroad and banking interests, and John D. Rockefeller took control of the oil market, and expanded into banking. Zinn explained that, “The imperial leader of the new oligarchy was the House of Morgan. In its operations it was ably assisted by the First National Bank of New York (directed by George F. Baker) and the National City Bank of New York (presided over by James Stillman, agent of the Rockefeller interests). Among them, these three men and their financial associates occupied 341 directorships in 112 corporations. The total resources of these corporations in 1912 was $22,245,000,000, more than the assessed value of all property in the twenty-two states and territories west of the Mississippi River.”[27]
These banking interests, particularly those of Morgan, were very much allied with European banking interests. On the European side, specifically in Britain, the elite were largely involved in the Scramble for Africa at this time. Infamous among them was Cecil Rhodes, who made his fortune in the diamond and gold mining in Africa, as “With financial support from Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit, he was able to monopolize the diamond mines of South Africa as De Beers Consolidated Mines and to build up a great gold mining enterprise as Consolidated Gold Fields.”[28] Interestingly, “Rhodes could not have won his near-monopoly over South African diamond production without the assistance of his friends in the City of London: in particular, the Rothschild bank, at that time the biggest concentration of financial capital in the world.”[29] As historian Niall Ferguson explained, “It is usually assumed that Rhodes owned De Beers, but this was not the case. Nathaniel de Rothschild was a bigger shareholder than Rhodes himself; indeed, by 1899 the Rothschilds’ stake was twice that of Rhodes.”[30]
Cecil Rhodes was also known for his radical views regarding America, particularly in that he would “talk with total seriousness of ‘the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire’.”[31] Rhodes saw himself not simply as a money maker, but primarily as an “empire builder.” As historian Carroll Quigley explained, in 1891, three British elites met with the intent to create a secret society. The three men were Cecil Rhodes, William T. Stead, a prominent journalist of the day, and Reginald Baliol Brett, a “friend and confidant of Queen Victoria, and later to be the most influential adviser of King Edward VII and King George V.” Within this secret society, “real power was to be exercised by the leader, and a ‘Junta of Three.’ The leader was to be Rhodes, and the Junta was to be Stead, Brett, and Alfred Milner.”[32]
In 1901, Rhodes chose Milner as his successor within the society, of which the purpose was, “The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonization by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise . . . [with] the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire, the consolidation of the whole Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial Representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire, and finally the foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.”[33] Essentially, it outlined a British-led cosmopolitical world order, one global system of governance under British hegemony. Among key players within this group were the Rothschilds and other banking interests.[34]
In the early 20th century, European and American banking interests achieved what they had desired for over a century within America, the creation of a privately owned central bank. It was created through collaboration of American and European bankers, primarily the Morgans, Rockefellers, Kuhn, Loebs and Warburgs.[35] After the 1907 banking panic in the US, instigated by JP Morgan, pressure was placed upon the American political establishment to create a “stable” banking system. In 1910, a secret meeting of financiers was held on Jekyll Island, where they planned for the “creation of a National Reserve Association with fifteen major regions, controlled by a board of commercial bankers but empowered by the federal government to act like a central bank – creating money and lending reserves to private banks.”[36] President Woodrow Wilson followed the plan almost exactly as outlined by the Wall Street financiers, and added to it the creation of a Federal Reserve Board in Washington, which the President would appoint.[37] The Federal Reserve, or Fed, “raised its own revenue, drafted its own operating budget and submitted neither to Congress,” while “the seven governors shared power with the presidents of the twelve Reserve Banks, each serving the private banks in its region,” and “the commercial banks held stock shares in each of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks.”[38]
The retaking of the United States by international banking interests was achieved with barely a whimper of opposition. Where the British Empire failed in taking the United States militarily, international bankers succeeded covertly through the banking system. The Federal Reserve also had the effect of cementing an alliance between New York and London bankers.[39]
Notes
[1] George T. Crane, Abla Amawi, The Theoretical evolution of international political economy. Oxford University Press US, 1997: pages 48-49
[2] George T. Crane, Abla Amawi, The Theoretical evolution of international political economy. Oxford University Press US, 1997: pages 50-51
[3] John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975), 31
[4] Donald Kagan, et. al., The Western Heritage. Volume C: Since 1789: Ninth edition: (Pearson Prentice Hall: 2007), 596
[5] Curtis B. Dall, F.D.R. : My Exploited Father-in-Law. (Institute for Historical Review: 1982), 172
[6] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), 515
Robert Elgie and Helen Thompson, ed., The Politics of Central Banks (New York: Routledge, 1998), 97-98
[7] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), 516
[8] Robert Elgie and Helen Thompson, ed., The Politics of Central Banks (New York: Routledge, 1998), 98-99
[9] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), 516
[10] Sylvia Nasar, Masters of the Universe. The New York Times: January 23, 2000: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.ht...A9669C8B63
BBC News. The Family That Bankrolled Europe. BBC News: July 9, 1999
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/389053.stm
[11] New Scientist. Waterloo Windfall. New Scientist Magazine: Issue 2091, July 19, 1997
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15...dfall.html
BBC News. The Making of a Dynasty: The Rothschilds. BBC News: January 28, 1998
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/50997.stm
[12] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), 51
[13] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations. U. of Chicago Edition, 1976: Vol. IV, ch. 2: 477
[14] Adam Smith, An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Regnery Gateway, 1998: page 152
[15] Adam Smith, An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Regnery Gateway, 1998: pages 166-167
[16] Patricia Goldstone, Aaronsohn's Maps: The Untold Story of the Man who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East. (Harcourt Trade, 2007), 29-30
[17] Patricia Goldstone, Aaronsohn's Maps: The Untold Story of the Man who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East. (Harcourt Trade, 2007), 31
[18] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Philip Gasper (ed.), The Communist manifesto: a road map to history's most important political document. Haymarket Books, 2005: pages 70-71
[19] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Philip Gasper (ed.), The Communist manifesto: a road map to history's most important political document. Haymarket Books, 2005: page 67
[20] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. Harper Perennial: New York, 2003: page 101
[21] Michael Waldman, My Fellow Americans: The Most Important Speeches of America's Presidents, from George Washington to George W. Bush. Longman Publishing Group: 2004: page 25
[22] Dr. Ellen Brown, Today We're All Irish: Debt Serfdom Comes to America. Global Research: March 15, 2008: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...iewArticle&code=BRO20080315&articleId=8349
[23] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. Harper Perennial: New York, 2003: page 189
[24] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. Harper Perennial: New York, 2003: page 238
[25] Steve Bachman, Unheralded Warnings from the Founding Fathers to You. Gather: June 19, 2007: http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?ar...4977031677
[26] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. Harper Perennial: New York, 2003: page 242
[27] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. Harper Perennial: New York, 2003: page 323
[28] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), 130
[29] Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 186
[30] Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 186-187
[31] Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 190
[32] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment. GSG & Associates, 1981: page 3
[33] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment. GSG & Associates, 1981: page 33
[34] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment. GSG & Associates, 1981: page 34
[35] Murray N. Rothbard, Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy. World Market Perspective: 1984: http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard66.html
[36] William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 276
[37] William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 277
[38] William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 50
[39] William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 51
ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE:
REVOLUTION, WORLD WARS AND WORLD ORDER
Andrew Gavin Marshall
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14552
Russia, Oil and Revolution
By the 1870s, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Empire had a virtual monopoly over the United States, and even many foreign countries. In 1890, the King of Holland gave his blessing for the creation of an international oil company called Royal Dutch Oil Company, which was mainly founded to refine and sell kerosene from Indonesia, a Dutch colony. Also in 1890, a British company was founded with the intended purpose of shipping oil, the Shell Transport and Trading Company, and it “began transporting Royal Dutch oil from Sumatra to destinations everywhere,” and eventually, “the two companies merged to become Royal Dutch Shell.”[1]
Russia entered into the Industrial Revolution later than any other large country and empire of its time. By the 1870s, “Russia’s oil fields, including those in Baku, were challenging Standard Oil’s supremacy in Europe. Russia’s ascendancy in natural resources disrupted the strategic balance of power in Europe and troubled Britain.” Britain thus attempted to begin oil explorations in the Middle East, specifically in Persia (Iran), first through Baron Julius de Reuter, the founder of Reuters News Service, who gained exploration rights from the Shah of Iran.[2] Reuter’s attempt at uncovering vast quantities of oil failed, and a man named William Knox D’Arcy took the lead in Persia.
By the middle of the 19th century, “the Rothschilds were the richest family in the world, perhaps in all of history. Their five international banking houses comprised one of the first multinational corporations.” Alfonse de Rothschild was “heavily invested in Russian oil at least forty years before William Knox D’Arcy began tying up Persian oil concessions for the British. Russian oil, which in the 1860s was already emerging as the European rival to the American monopoly Standard Oil, was the Baron [Rothschild]’s pet project.” In the early 1880s, “almost two hundred Rothschild refineries were at work in Baku,” Russia’s oil rich region.[3]
By the mid-1880s, “the Rothschilds were poised to become the chief oil supplier, not only to Europe but to the Far East,” however, “the Baku-Batum railroad was already proving inadequate to transport the volume of oil being produced. Another route was needed, and came in the form of the recently opened Suez Canal, which shortened the journey to the Far East by four thousand miles. Palestine was suddenly of interest to the Rothschilds as it provided access to the Suez.”[4] When the Egyptian government was bankrupt in 1874, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli turned to his close friends, the Rothschilds, “for the colossal cash advance necessary” to buy shares in the Suez Canal Company.[5] By this time, the Rothschilds were already principle shareholders in the Bank of France,[6] and the Bank of England, sitting alongside other notable shareholders such as Baring Brothers, Morgan Grenfell and Lazard Brothers.[7]
The Rothschilds “had long been involved in developing Czarist Russia’s nascent industry and banking system, while that country’s growing network of railroads was largely financed by Rothschild-managed loans.”[8] When the Czar died, he was succeeded by his son, Czar Nicholas II, who instituted anti-Semitic pogroms, discriminating against Jews, which had the effect of stimulating a massive emigration of Jews out of Russia and Eastern Europe and into Western Europe. However, these East European and Russian Jewish émigrés grew up in a newly industrializing nation in which the tyranny of the government and collusion between it and powerful financial and industrial interests left the great majority of people dispossessed and incited more socialist tendencies in thought and action.
The English Rothschilds were very alarmed “when the socialist tendencies of the émigrés contributed to a massively disruptive tailors’ strike in the East End of London in 1888. A young Georgian communist who would become known to the world as Joseph Stalin was already organizing laborers to strike at the Rothschild oil interests in Batum.” The British Rothschilds were very concerned with this wave of Jewish immigrants into Western Europe and Britain, as they were intensely anti-Czarist and progressively socialist, and the Rothschilds were known for their heavy collaboration with the Czarist regimes of Russia. One potential solution considered to the problem of increased socialist-leaning Jewish immigrants in Britain was to institute restrictions on immigration. However, this would likely backlash, in the sense that it would be viewed as comparable to expulsion. So, Edmond Rothschild began his personal campaign to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine in order to create a release valve for Jewish émigrés to put their political action behind a new cause, and to promote them emigrating to Palestine, and out of Western Europe.[9]
On top of this, as the pre-eminent Zionist in Britain, his proposal for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine served major economic interests of the Rothschilds and of the British Empire, in that several years prior, Rothschild bought the Suez Canal for the British, and it was the primary transport route for Russian oil. Palestine, thus, would be a vital landmass as a protectorate for British and Rothschild imperial-economic interests.
The Rothschilds, despite their overtly pro-Zionist and pro-Jewish rhetoric, did not stop their support of the Russian regime and economic activities within anti-Semitic Russia. In 1895, the Rothschilds, then one of the world’s leading producers and distributors of oil, “had gone so far as to co-sign an agreement with rival producers – including America’s Standard Oil [of Rockefeller interests] – to divide up world markets. It never took effect, presumably because of the opposition of the Russian government.” In 1902, the Rothschilds “entered into a partnership with Royal Dutch and Shell (soon to become a single global company) to form the Asiatic Petroleum Company for exploiting the fields of Southern Russia.”[10]
In the early 1900s, the Rothchilds were the primary oil interests in Russia, second in the world only to the Rockefellers. As industrialization was under way, conditions worsened for the great majority of Russian people. This spurred protests and riots, and a “young Stalin himself led the agitation against the Caucasian oil industry in general, [and] the Rothschilds in particular. Mass action by oil workers in Baku [the major oil fields in Russia] in 1903 was the spark that set off the first general strike across the Russian landmass.” Then with the Russian loss in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, and further protests, came the Revolution of 1905. In the following years, the Rothschilds sold their Russian oil interests to Royal Dutch Shell, gaining significant shares in the international oil company.[11]
The specter of political and social instability within Russia was high and did not go without notice from international banking, oil, and industrial interests. Naturally, the international banking houses were keeping a close eye on developments within Russia. The Rothschilds had to lessen their overt involvement with Russia, as they could not maintain such a relationship with the most anti-Jewish nation in the world at the time, while also claiming to be the primary advocates of Jewish aspirations for a homeland. This is why they sold their Russian oil interests to Royal Dutch Shell, but then gained significant shares in the company itself. So while publicly cutting their ties with Russia, they still held massive interests in its industrial capacity. Following the Russo-Japanese War, the Rothschilds “refused to participate in underwriting a major loan, this at a time when Russia desperately needed funds to stabilize the regime.”[12]
So, in 1906, John D. Rockefeller stepped in to aid Czarist Russia, and offered $200,000,000, or “400,000,000 rubles for a concession for railroads from Tashkend to Tomsk and from Tehita to Polamoshna and a grant of land on both sides of the prospective lines.”[13] These international financiers were still clearly intent upon maintaining their interests within Russia.
However, the Russian governments refusal to allow the deal between the Rockefellers and Rothschilds and other major oil monopolies to divide up the world’s oil reserves, may well have spurred discontent among these powerful interests. If Russia refused to allow them to control all the oil and have a right to all oil, did this mean that Russia was planning on building a domestic oil industry? If this were the case, it could pose a threat to all the entrenched economic and financial interests, particularly those of the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, as Russia’s significant oil reserves and resources would allow it to possibly even surpass the United States in industrialization. Further, Czarist Russia became an increasingly unstable investment environment, controlled by an increasingly unpredictable monarchy.
The 1917 October Revolution “inspired workers’ uprisings in the oil fields against low wages and harsh working conditions. In 1919, Azerbaijan took advantage of the political unrest to declare sovereignty over the Baku fields. That same year SONJ [Standard Oil of New Jersey] made an agreement with the Azerbaijani government to purchase undeveloped land for exploration in the Baku region. Amidst the chaos, foreign oil companies rushed into Russia hoping to collect concessions at reduced rates. The Nobel brothers sold much of their operations to SONJ (today ExxonMobil) to build an alliance in 1920.”[14]
Antony C. Sutton, economist, historian and author, as well as research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote in Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, that both fascist and communist systems are “based on naked, unfettered political power and individual coercion. Both systems require monopoly control of society. While monopoly control of industries was once the objective of J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth century the inner sanctums of Wall Street understood that the most efficient way to gain an unchallenged monopoly was to ‘go political’ and make society go to work for the monopolists,” and that, “the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly capitalists, if an alliance can be made with the socialist powerbrokers.”[15] Thus, the major money powers of the west decided to put their money behind the creation of a totalitarian communist state in Russia, in order to create a captive economy, which they could exploit and remove from competititon.
When the Revolution began, Trotsky was in New York, and was immediately granted an American passport by President Wilson, and then given a Russian entry permit and a British transit visa, in order to return to Russia and “carry forward” the revolution.[16] Trotsky, while traveling, was arrested in Canada, but was released as a result of British intervention.[17]
Trotsky traveled on board a ship in 1917, leaving New York, along with an interesting cast of fellow passengers, including “other Trotskyite revolutionaries, Wall Street financiers, American Communists, and a man named Charles Crane. Charles Richard Crane, former chairman of the Democratic Party’s finance committee, whose son, Richard Crane, was an assistant to U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, played a significant part in what occurred in Russia. Former U.S. Ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, said that Crane, “did much to bring on the [Alexander] Kerensky revolution which gave way to Communism.” Kerensky was the second Prime Minister in the Russian Provisional Government, which followed the collapse of the Czarist government, and preceded the Bolshevik. Crane also thought that the Kerensky government “is the revolution in its first phase only.”[18]
The Revolution occurred in the midst of World War I, which broke out in 1914, and had all the major European powers at war. Morgan and Rockefeller interests, organized in Wall Street and centralized in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the most powerful of all the regional Federal Reserve Banks, used “the Red Cross Mission as its operational vehicle” in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Red Cross Mission in Russia got its endowment from wealthy people such as J.P. Morgan, Mrs. E. H. Harriman, Cleveland H. Dodge, and Mrs. Russell Sage, and “in World War I the Red Cross depended heavily on Wall Street, and specifically the Morgan firm.” When the American Red Cross set up a mission to Russia, “William Boyce Thompson, director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, had ‘offered to pay the entire expense of the commission’.”[19] All expenses were paid for by William Boyce Thompson, who was a major stockholder in Chase National Bank, whose President had Thompson appointed head of the New York Fed.[20]
The Mission was primarily made up of lawyers, financiers, their assistants, people affiliated with Standard Oil and the Rockefeller’s National City Bank.[21] The Mission supported through a loan, the Provisional government of Alexander Kerensky, yet, William B. Thompson of the New York Fed “made a personal contribution of $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviki for the purpose of spreading their doctrine in Germany and Austria.” Interestingly, when the Bolsheviks took control, “The National City Bank branch in Petrograd had been exempted from the Bolshevik nationalization decree – the only foreign or domestic Russian bank to have been so exempted.”[22] Ultimately, the Red Cross mission in Russia “was in fact a mission of Wall Street financiers to influence and pave the way for control, through either Kerensky or the Bolshevik revolutionaries, of the Russian market and resources.”[23]
The American International Corporation (AIC), was “created in 1915 to develop domestic and foreign enterprises, to extend American activities abroad, and to promote the interests of American and foreign bankers, business and engineering.” It was created and controlled by Morgan, Stillman and Rockefeller interests, and its directors were affiliated with National City Bank (Rockefeller), the Carnegie Foundation, General Electric, the DuPont family, New York Life Insurance, American Bankers Association and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Members of its board financially supported the Bolsheviks and urged the US State Department to recognize the Bolshevik government.[24]
In 1920, Russian gold was being siphoned through Sweden, where it was melted down and stamped with the Swedish mint, funneled through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and into Kuhn, Loeb & Company and Guaranty Trust Company (Morgan), two of the primary banking interests behind the creation of the Federal Reserve System. [25] During the civil war in Russia between the Reds and the Whites, while Wall Street financiers were aiding the Bolsheviks quietly, they also began to finance Aleksandr Kolchak (of the Whites) with millions of dollars, in order to ensure that whoever emerged victorious in the war, Wall Street would win.[26]
As Antony Sutton wrote, “Russia, then and now, constituted the greatest potential competitive threat to American industrial and financial supremacy,” and that, “The gigantic Russian market was to be converted into a captive market and a technical colony to be exploited by a few high-powered American financiers and the corporations under their control.”[27]
Eventually, the Bolsheviks emerged victorious, and Wall Street won. Under Stalin’s Five-Year Plans in the early 1930s, Soviet industrialization “required Western technology and expertise,” and in a “frequently overlooked contribution” that came “from abroad,” American firms aided in the industrialization of the USSR, including Ford, General Electric and DuPont,[28] with Standard Oil, General Electric, Austin Co., General Motors, International Harvester, and Caterpillar Tractor trading heavily with the Soviet Union.[29]
Standard Oil bought “gargantuan quantities of Red Oil,” General Electric received a $100,000,000 contract from the Soviet Union to build “the four largest hydroelectric generators in the world,” Austin Co., got a $50,000,000 contract to erect the City of Austingrad, “complete with tractor and automobile factories involving an additional $30,000,000 contract for parts and technical assistance with Ford Motor Corp.” On top of this, “Other [Soviet] business friends are General Motors, DuPont de Nemours, International Harvester, John Deere Co., Caterpillar Tractor, Radio Corp. and the U. S. Shipping Board, which sold the Reds a fleet of 25 cargo steamers.” Banks with close ties to the Russian economy included Chase National, National City Bank and Equitable Trust, all of which are either Rockefeller or Morgan interests.[30]
World War Restructures World Order
In the midst of World War I, a group of American scholars were tasked with briefing “Woodrow Wilson about options for the postwar world once the kaiser and imperial Germany fell to defeat.” This group was called, “The Inquiry.” The group advised Wilson mostly through his trusted aide, Col. Edward M. House, who was Wilson’s “unofficial envoy to Europe during the period between the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the intervention by the United States in 1917,” and was the prime driving force in the Wilson administration behind the establishment of the Federal Reserve System.[31]
“The Inquiry” laid the foundations for the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the most powerful think tank in the US, and “The scholars of the Inquiry helped draw the borders of post World War I central Europe.” On May 30, 1919, a group of scholars and diplomats from Britain and the US met at the Hotel Majestic, where they “proposed a permanent Anglo-American Institute of International Affairs, with one branch in London, the other in New York.” When the scholars returned from Paris, they were met with open arms by New York lawyers and financiers, and together they formed the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921. The “British diplomats returning from Paris had made great headway in founding their Royal Institute of International Affairs.” The Anglo-American Institute envisioned in Paris, with two branches and combined membership was not feasible, so both the British and American branches retained national membership, however, they would cooperate closely with one another.[32] They were referred to, and still are, as “Sister Institutes.”[33]
The Milner Group, the secret society formed by Cecil Rhodes, “dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it.”[34] There were other groups founded in many countries representing the same interests of the secret Milner Group, and they came to be known as the Round Table Groups, preeminent among them were the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States, and parallel groups were set up in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India.[35]
World War I had marked a monumental period in history in what can be understood as “transitional imperialism.” What I mean by this is that historically, periods of imperial decline and transition (that is, the rise or fall of an empire or empires), are often marked by increased international violence and war.
World War I was the result of the culmination of imperial ambitions by various powers. This was the natural result of the wave of “New Imperialism” that swept the industrialized world in the 1870s. In 1879, the German Empire and Austria-Hungary created the Dual Alliance to combat growing Russian influence in the Balkans with the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Italy joined in 1882, making it the Triple Alliance. In 1892, the Franco-Russia Alliance was made, which was a military alliance between France and the Russian Empire to counteract the German Empire’s supremacy over Europe. In 1904, the Entente Cordiale, a series of agreements between France and Britain, was agreed upon in order to maintain a balance of power in Europe. In 1907, the Anglo-Russia Entente was formed in an effort to end their long-running Great Game by setting the boundaries of their imperial control over Afghanistan, Persia and Tibet. It also acted as a balance to the growing German Empire’s might and influence in Europe. After the signing of the Anglo-Russian Entente, the Triple Entente was cemented between Britain, Russia and France as a significant counter to the Triple Alliance.
The decline of the Ottoman Empire had been a long and slow process. The Ottoman Empire dated back to 1299, and lasted until 1923. “From 1517 until the end of World War I, a period of 400 years, the Ottoman Empire was the ruling power in the central Middle East. Ottoman administrative institutions and practices shaped the peoples of the modern Middle East and left a legacy that endured after the empire’s disappearance.”[36]
In the late 16th century, “Ottoman raw materials, normally channeled into internal consumption and industry, were increasingly exchanged for European manufactured products. This trade benefited Ottoman merchants but led to a decline in state revenues and a shortage of raw materials for domestic consumption. As the costs of scarce materials rose, the empire suffered from inflation, and the state was unable to procure sufficient revenues to meet its expenses. Without these revenues, the institutions that supported the Ottoman system, especially the armed forces, were undermined.” This was largely done through commercial treaties known as Capitulations. The first Capitulation “was negotiated with France in 1536; it allowed French merchants to trade freely in Ottoman ports, to be exempt from Ottoman taxes, and to import and export goods at low tariff rates. In addition, the treaty granted extraterritorial privileges to French merchants by permitting them to come under the legal jurisdiction of the French consul in Istanbul, thus making them subject to French rather than Ottoman-Islamic law. This first treaty was the model for subsequent agreements signed with other European states.”[37]
The Ottoman state had been sufficiently weakened by the early 20th century, which happened to be the same time period that Europeans, particularly the British, were looking at Middle East oil to fuel their empires. The major European alliances sought to take advantage of this weakened Ottoman position. In 1909, Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, inciting the anger of the Russia Empire. The First Balkan War was fought between 1912 and 1913, in which Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria fought the Ottoman Empire. The settlement that followed angered Bulgaria, which then began to engage in territorial disputes with Serbia and Romania. Bulgaria then attacked Greece and Serbia in 1913, followed by Romania and the Ottoman Empire declaring war against Bulgaria, which was the Second Balkan War.
This further destabilized the region, and Austria-Hungary grew wary of the growing influence of Serbia. When Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, Austria delivered an ultimatum to Serbia, where the assassin was from, and then declared war. The Russian Empire mobilized for war the next day, with German mobilization following behind, and France behind it. Germany then declared war on Russia, and World War I was under way.
The end of the Great War saw the disillusion of the Ottoman Empire, breaking up its territory, which was carved up between France and Britain at the Paris Peace Conference. The German Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empires also officially ended as a result of the war, for which Germany was given the sole blame for the war and punished through the Versailles reparations. The Russian Empire ended with the Bolshevik Revolution, which resulted in Russia pulling out of the war in 1917, the same year the United States entered the war. The Great War turned the United States into a powerful nation in the world, becoming a leading creditor nation with significant international influence. The British and French maintained their empires, though they were in decline. However, they attempted to maintain significant control over the Middle East.
World War I was thus the culmination of a massive build-up of imperial nations seeking expanded influence and markets for their capital. Entering the War, there were many empires, leaving it, there were two dominant European Empires (France and Britain) and an emerging new force in the world, the United States.
The Great Depression
The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin . . . Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again . . . Take this great power away from them, and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. . . . But, if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.[38]
- Sir Josiah Stamp, Director of the Bank of England, 1927
Benjamin Strong, Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, who worked closely together throughout the 1920s, decided to “use the financial power of Britain and the United States to force all the major countries of the world to go on the gold standard and to operate it through central banks free from all political control, with all questions of international finance to be settled by agreements by such central banks without interference from governments.” These men were not working for the governments and nations of whom they purportedly represented, but “were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down.”[39]
In the 1920s, the United States experienced a stock market boom, which was a result of the commercial banks providing “funds for the purchase of stock and took the latter as collateral,” creating a massive wave of underwriting and purchasing of securities. The stock market speculation that followed was the result of the banks “borrowing substantially from the Federal Reserve. Thus the Federal Reserve System was helping to finance the great stock market boom.”[40]
In 1927, a meeting took place in New York City between Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank, the German central bank of the Weimar Republic; Charles Rist, Deputy Governor of the Bank of France and Benjamin Strong of the New York Fed. The topic of the meeting was the “persistently weak reserve position of the Bank of England. This, the bankers thought, could be helped if the Federal Reserve System would ease interest rates to encourage lending. Holders of gold would then seek the higher returns from keeping their metal in London.” The Fed obliged.[41]
The Bank of England had a weak reserve position because of Britain’s position as champion of the gold standard. Foreign central banks, including the Bank of France, were transferring their exchange holdings into gold, of which the Bank of England did not have enough to supply. So the Fed lowered its discount rate, and began buying securities to equal French gold purchases. Money in the US, then, “was going increasingly into stock-market speculation rather than into production of real wealth.”[42]
In early 1929, the Federal Reserve board of governors “called upon the member banks to reduce their loans on stock-exchange collateral,” and took other actions with the publicly pronounced aim of reducing “the amount of credit available for speculation.” Yet, it had the reverse effect, as “the available credit went more and more to speculation and decreasingly to productive business.” On September 26, 1929, London was hit with a financial panic, and the Bank of England raised its bank rate, causing British money to leave Wall Street, “and the over inflated market commenced to sag,” leading to a panic by mid-October.[43]
The longest-serving Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, wrote that the Fed triggered the speculative boom through its pumping excess credit into the economy (sound familiar?), and eventually this resulted in the American and British economies collapsing due to the massive imbalances produced. Britain then “abandoned the gold standard completely in 1931, tearing asunder what remained of the fabric of confidence and inducing a world-wide series of bank failures. The world economies plunged into the Great Depression of the 1930's.”[44]
The Bank for International Settlements
In 1929, the Young Committee was formed to create a program for the settlement of German reparations payments that emerged out of the Versailles Treaty, written at the Paris Peace talks in 1919. The Committee was headed by Owen D. Young, founder of Radio Corporation of America (RCA), as a subsidiary of General Electric. He was also President and CEO of GE from 1922 until 1939, co-author of the 1924 Dawes Plan, was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1928, and was also, in 1929, deputy chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. When Young was sent to Europe in 1929 to form the program for German reparations payments he was accompanied by J.P Morgan, Jr.[45]
What emerged from the Committee was the creation of the Young Plan, which “was assertedly a device to occupy Germany with American capital and pledge German real assets for a gigantic mortgage held in the United States.” Further, the Young Plan “increased unemployment more and more,” allowing Hitler to say he would “do away with unemployment,” which, “really was the reason of the enormous success Hitler had in the election.”[46]
The Plan went into effect in 1930, following the stock market crash. Part of the Plan entailed the creation of an international settlement organization, which was formed in 1930, and known as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). It was purportedly designed to facilitate and coordinate the reparations payments of Weimar Germany to the Allied powers. However, its secondary function, which is much more secretive, and much more important, was to act as “a coordinator of the operations of central banks around the world.” Described as “a bank for central banks,” the BIS “is a private institution with shareholders but it does operations for public agencies. Such operations are kept strictly confidential so that the public is usually unaware of most of the BIS operations.”[47]
The BIS was established “to remedy the decline of London as the world’s financial center by providing a mechanism by which a world with three chief financial centers in London, New York, and Paris could still operate as one.”[48] As Carroll Quigley explained:
[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.[49]
The BIS was founded by “the central banks of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, and the United Kingdom along with three leading commercial banks from the United States, including J.P. Morgan & Company, First National Bank of New York, and First National Bank of Chicago. Each central bank subscribed to 16,000 shares and the three U.S. banks also subscribed to this same number of shares.” However, “Only central banks have voting power.”[50]
In a letter dated November 21, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt told Edward M. House, “The real truth .. is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson - and I am not wholly excepting the administration of W[oodrow]. W[ilson]. The country is going through a repetition of Jackson's fight with the Bank of the United States - only on a far bigger and broader basis.”[51]
Banking on Hitler
Throughout the 1930s, with the loans provided through the Dawes and Young Plans, Germany was able to create a few dominant industrial cartels, which were all financed by Wall Street bankers and industrialists.[52] These cartels provided the basis for and main financial backing of the Nazi regime. Collaboration between the German Nazi industry and American industry and finance continued, specifically with Morgan and Rockefeller interests, as well as Ford and DuPont. The Morgan-Rockefeller international banks and companies associated with them “were intimately related to the growth of Nazi industry.”[53] Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Empire “was of critical assistance in helping Nazi Germany prepare for World War II.”[54] On top of this, the Rockefeller Foundation was also pivotal in not only funding the racist and elitist eugenics movement in the United States, but played a pivotal part in bringing the eugenics ideology to Nazi Germany, facilitating the beliefs that brought about the Holocaust.[55]
Hjalmar Schacht, the President of the Reichsbank throughout Weimar Germany, stayed on as President of the German central bank from 1933 until 1939, and was thus a central figure in Nazi Germany, being a major driver being the German plans for reindustrialization, redevelopment and rearmament. Hitler, in 1934, made Schacht his Minister of Economics.
Central banks across Europe began to purchase Nazi gold, which was smuggled and melted down and re-stamped in Switzerland, (much like was done with Soviet gold). Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Turkey, France, Great Britain, Poland, Hungary, and the United States all “traded with the Nazis with gold transferred by the BIS.” This was done as a collaborative effort among central banks, as “the BIS did enter into gold and currency transactions with Nazi Germany through its participation with the Reichsbank.” Schacht wielded his significant influence and “had become instrumental in placing high-ranking Nazi officials and foreign collaborators on the BIS Board of Directors.”[56]
Empire, War and the Rise of the New Global Hegemon
World War Two also marked a period of massive imperial transition. The build-up of the Third Reich led to Nazi imperialism throughout Europe and North Africa and the Japanese Empire expanded into China. At the end of the War, the British and French Empires were all but vanished, holding onto remaining colonies in Africa and Asia. The Soviet Union was devastated and Germany, with much of Europe, was in ruins. What emerged from this war that was most significant was the rise of a new empire, the American Empire. America’s intervention into the war and expansion into Europe as a liberating force allowed it to set up bases throughout Europe as well as in Japan on the Pacific. The Soviet Union, having taken Europe from the East, expanded its influence and dominance across Eastern Europe. Following Churchill’s speech that an “Iron Curtain” had fallen across Europe, the Cold War was underway. Thus, World War II ended the age of many European empires, even of those in decline, and created a bi-polar world, which was divided between the USSR and the USA.
Following World War II, the US, as the only major nation in the world whose industrial base survived the devastation of the war, assumed the position of global hegemon. It began to set up the infrastructure, both national and international, to assume the position of global superpower, exerting its hegemony across the globe. The crown had been passed from the British Empire to the American Empire. Ultimately, both were and are owned and controlled by the same interests, primarily represented through the central banks and the private banking interests that make up the dominant shareholders.
Before America had even entered the war in late 1941, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the American branch of the round table groups Carroll Quigley discussed as having originated from the secret society of Cecil Rhodes, was planning on America entering the war. The CFR had essentially captured US foreign policy firmly in the grips of the banking elite. The establishment of the Federal Reserve (1913) ensured that the United States would become indebted to and owned by international banking interests, and thus, act in their interest. The Fed financed the US role in World War I, provided the credit for speculation, which led to the Great Depression, and massive consolidation for the interests that own the Federal Reserve System. It then financed US entry into World War II.
The CFR, established six years after the Federal Reserve was created, worked to promote an internationalist agenda on behalf of the international banking elite. It was to alter America’s conceptualization of its place within the world – from isolationist industrial nation to an engine of empire working for international banking and corporate American interests. Where the Fed took control of money and debt, the CFR took control of the ideological foundations of such an empire – encompassing the corporate, banking, political, foreign policy, military, media, and academic elite of the nation into a generally cohesive overall world view. By altering one’s ideology to that of promoting such an internationalist agenda, the big money that was behind it would ensure one’s rise through government, industry, academia and media. The other major think tanks and policy institutions in the United States are also represented at the CFR. They are constitutive of divisions within the elite, however, such divisions are predicated on the basis of how to use American imperial power, where to use it, on what basis to justify it, and other various methodological differences. The divide amongst elites was never on the questions of: should we use American imperial power, why has America become an Empire, or should there even be an empire? If one takes such considerations to heart and questions these concepts, be it within the foreign policy establishment, intelligence, military, academia, finance, corporate world, or media; chances are, such a person is not a member of the CFR.
The CFR effectively undertook a policy coup d’état over American foreign policy with the Second World War. When war broke out, the Council began a “strictly confidential” project called the War and Peace Studies, in which top CFR members collaborated with the US State Department in determining US policy, and the project was entirely financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.[57] The post-War world was already being designed by members of the Council, who would go into government in order to enact these designs.
The policy of “containment” towards the Soviet Union that would define American foreign policy for nearly half a century was envisaged in a 1947 edition of Foreign Affairs, the academic journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. So too were the ideological foundations for the Marshall Plan and NATO envisaged at the Council on Foreign Relations, with members of the Council recruited to enact, implement and lead these institutions.[58] The Council also played a role in the establishment and promotion of the United Nations,[59] which was subsequently built on land bought from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.[60]
The Rise of the American Empire and Keynesian Political Economy
Within liberal political economy, a prominent individual and British economist, John Maynard Keynes, undertook the process of evolving liberal theory into what later became known as Keynesian economics. Following in the footsteps of the dominance of the liberal order, in which the economic and political realms were viewed as separate, and necessarily so, Keynes sought to re-imagine the political-economic relationship. His work was largely influenced by the events leading up to and following the Great Depression, which was largely seen as a failure of the liberal economic order. Keynes wanted to combine state and market forces, not rejecting the liberal notion of the “invisible hand,” however, relegated that to a more distinct area, and imagined a broader role for the state in the economy.
Keynes advocated for the state to act, or invest, when private individuals would not, in an effort to stave off financial or economic crises. Thus, Keynes would argue, the state strengthens the market. A Marxist theorist would likely point to this as an example of how the state, within a capitalist society, functions as an institutional organ which protects the interests of the capitalist class. Keynes advocated a liberal international order composed of free markets, however he recommended state intervention domestically, particularly to protect jobs and control inflation.
Keynesian political economic theory served in large part as a basis for the creation of the Bretton-Woods System, established in 1944, and his concept of embedded liberalism (promotion of liberal international economy, and state intervention in domestic economy), reigned supreme until the 1970s.
In 1944, representatives of the 44 Allied nations met for the Bretton Woods conference (the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference) in New Hampshire, in an effort to reorganize and regulate the international financial and monetary order following the war. The UK was represented by John Maynard Keynes; with the American contingent represented by Harry Dexter White, an American economist and senior US Treasury department official. It was out of this conference that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), now part of the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), now institutionalized in the World Trade Organization (WTO), originated. They were designed to be the institutionalized economic foundations of exerting American hegemony across the globe; they were, in essence, engines of economic empire.
In 1947, President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act, which created the position of Secretary of Defense overseeing the entire military establishment, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff; as well as created the CIA modeled on its war time incarnation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS); and the Act also created the National Security Council, headed by a National Security Adviser, and designed to give the President further advice on foreign affairs issues separate from the State Department. Essentially, the Act created the basis for the national security state apparatus for empire building.
The founding of the CIA was urged by the War and Peace Studies Project of the Council on Foreign Relations in the early 1940s, and the architects of the CIA, designing the shape and organization of the Agency, as well as its functions; were all Wall Street lawyers, largely made up of members of the Council on Foreign Relations. The Deputy Directors of the CIA for the first two decades were all “from the same New York legal and financial circles.”[61]
Notes
[1] Edwin Black, Banking on Baghdad: Inside Iraq’s 7,000-Year History of War, Profit, and Conflict. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: 2004: page 105
[2] Edwin Black, Banking on Baghdad: Inside Iraq’s 7,000-Year History of War, Profit, and Conflict. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: 2004: page 107
[3] Patricia Goldstone, Aaronsohn's Maps: The Untold Story of the Man who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East. Harcourt Trade, 2007: pages 21-22
[4] Patricia Goldstone, Aaronsohn's Maps: The Untold Story of the Man who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East. Harcourt Trade, 2007: page 22
[5] Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. Perseus, 2002: pages 193-194
[6] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. The MacMillan Company: 1966: page 56
[7] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. The MacMillan Company: 1966: pages 499-500
[8] Herbert R. Lottman, Return of the Rothschilds: The Great Banking Dynasty Through Two Turbulent Centuries. I.B. Tauris, 1995: page 81
[9] Patricia Goldstone, Aaronsohn's Maps: The Untold Story of the Man who Might Have Created Peace in the Middle East. Harcourt Trade, 2007: pages 22-23
[10] Herbert R. Lottman, Return of the Rothschilds: The Great Banking Dynasty Through Two Turbulent Centuries. I.B. Tauris, 1995: pages 141-142
[11] Herbert R. Lottman, Return of the Rothschilds: The Great Banking Dynasty Through Two Turbulent Centuries. I.B. Tauris, 1995: pages 143-144
[12] Herbert R. Lottman, Return of the Rothschilds: The Great Banking Dynasty Through Two Turbulent Centuries. I.B. Tauris, 1995: pages 141-142
[13] NYT, Rockefeller To Aid Czar? New York Times: March 6, 1906
[14] Toyin Falola and Ann Genova, The Politics of the Global Oil Industry. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005: page 215
[15] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Buccaneer Books, New York, 1974: pages 16-17
[16] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Buccaneer Books, New York, 1974: page 25
[17] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Buccaneer Books, New York, 1974: page 34
[18] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Buccaneer Books, New York, 1974: pages 25-26
[19] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Buccaneer Books, New York, 1974: pages 71-73
[20] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Buccaneer Books, New York, 1974: pages 89-90
[21] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Buccaneer Books, New York, 1974: pages 73-77
[22] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Buccaneer Books, New York, 1974: pages 82-83
[23] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Buccaneer Books, New York, 1974: page 87
[24] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Buccaneer Books, New York, 1974: pages 127-135
[25] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Buccaneer Books, New York, 1974: pages 159-161
[26] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Buccaneer Books, New York, 1974: pages 166-167
[27] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Buccaneer Books, New York, 1974: pages 172-173
[28] Michael Kort, The Soviet Colossus: History and Aftermath. M.E. Sharpe, 2001: page 202
[29] Time, Russia & Recognition. Time Magazine: August 18, 1930: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articl...03,00.html
[30] Time, Everybody's Red Business. Time Magazine: June 9, 1930: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articl...-5,00.html
[31] H.W. Brands, "He Is My Independent Self". The Washington Post: June 11, 2006: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...01104.html
[32] CFR, Continuing the Inquiry. History of CFR: http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/inquiry.html
[33] Chatham House, CHATHAM HOUSE (The Royal Institute of International Affairs): Background. Chatham House History: http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/about/history/
[34] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment. GSG & Associates, 1981: page 5
[35] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. The MacMillan Company: 1966: pages 132-133
[36] William L. Cleaveland, A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder: Westview Press, 2004), 37-38
[37] William L. Cleaveland, A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder: Westview Press, 2004), 49-50
[38] Ellen Hodgson Brown, Web of Debt. Third Millennium Press: 2007: Page 2
[39] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. The MacMillan Company: 1966: pages 326-327
[40] John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975), 173
[41] John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975), 174-175
[42] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. The MacMillan Company: 1966: page 342
[43] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. The MacMillan Company: 1966: page 344
[44] Alan Greenspan, “Gold and Economic Freedom” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. (New York: Signet, 1967), 99-100
[45] Time, HEROES: Man-of-the-Year. Time Magazine: Jan 6, 1930: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articl...-1,00.html
[46] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. G S G & Associates Pub, 1976: pages 15-16
[47] James Calvin Baker, The Bank for International Settlements: evolution and evaluation. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002: page 2
[48] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), 324-325
[49] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), 324
[50] James Calvin Baker, The Bank for International Settlements: evolution and evaluation. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002: page 6
[51] Melvin Urofsky and Paul Finkelman, A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States Volume II From 1877 to the Present 2nd Edition. Oxford University Press, 2002: pp. 674
[52] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. G S G & Associates Pub, 1976: pages 17-19
[53] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. G S G & Associates Pub, 1976: pages 19-20
[54] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler. G S G & Associates Pub, 1976: page 51
[55] Edwin Black, Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection. The San Francisco Chronicle: November 9, 2003: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...2QSKB1.DTL
[56] James Calvin Baker, The Bank for International Settlements: evolution and evaluation. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002: page 202
[57] CFR, War and Peace. CFR History: http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/war_peace.html
[58] William P. Bundy, The History of Foreign Affairs. The Council on Foreign Relations, 1994: http://www.cfr.org/about/history/foreign_affairs.html
[59] CFR, War and Peace. CFR History: http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/war_peace.html
[60] UN, 1945-1949. Sixty Years: A Pictorial History of the United Nations: http://www.un.org/issues/gallery/history/1940s.htm
[61] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 12
FORGING A “NEW WORLD ORDER” UNDER A ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT
GLOBAL POWER AND GLOBAL GOVERNMENT
Andrew Gavin Marshall
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14712
Globalization and the New World Order
The 1990s saw the emergence of what was called the New World Order. This was a term that emerged in the early 1990s to describe a more unipolar world, addressing the collapse of the Soviet Union and the newfound role of the United States as the sole and unchallenged global power. The New World Order was meant to represent a new phase in the global political economy in which world authority rested in one place, and for the time, that place was to be the United States.
This era saw the continual expansion and formation of regional blocs, with the formation of the European Union, the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the creation of the WTO. The World Trade Organization was officially formed in 1995, as the successor to the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was formed in 1944 at the Bretton-Woods Conference. The WTO manages the international liberal trading order.
The first Director-General of the WTO was Peter D. Sutherland, who was previously the director general of GATT, former Attorney General of Ireland, and currently is Chairman of British Petroleum and Goldman Sachs International, as well as being special representative of the United Nations secretary-general for migrations. He is also a member of the board of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum, goodwill ambassador to the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, is a member of the Bilderberg Group, and is European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, and he was presented with the Robert Schuman Medal for his work on European Integration and the David Rockefeller Award of the Trilateral Commission.[1] Clearly, the WTO was an organ of the western banking elite to be used as a tool in expanding and institutionalizing their control over world trade.
The European Superstate
In 1992, the Maastricht Treaty was signed, which officially formed the European Union in 1993. In 1994, the European Monetary Institute (EMI) was formed, with the European Central Bank (ECB) being formed in 1998, and the single European currency, the Euro, debuting in 1999. In 2004, the European Constitution was to be signed by all 25-member states of the EU, which was a treaty to establish a constitution for the entire European Union.
The Constitution was a move towards creating a European superstate, creating an EU foreign minister, and with it, coordinated foreign policy, with the EU taking over the seat of Britain on the UN Security Council, representing all EU member states, forcing the nations to “actively and unreservedly” follow an EU foreign policy; set out the framework to create an EU defence policy, as an appendage to or separate from NATO; the creation of a European Justice system, with the EU defining “minimum standards in defining offences and setting sentences,” and creates common asylum and immigration policy; and it would also hand over to the EU the power to “ensure co-ordination of economic and employment policies”; and EU law would supercede all law of the member states, thus making the member nations relative to mere provinces within a centralized federal government system.[2]
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, had stated that he feared that the concept of a stronger and more centralized European Union, as “the developments in the E.U. are really dangerous with regard to moving out of a free society and moving more and more toward masterminding control and regulation,” and that, “We [the Czech Republic] spent a half-century under communist eyes. We are more sensitive than some other West Europeans. We feel things, we see things, we touch things that we don't like. For us, the European Union reminds us of COMECON [Moscow's organization for economic control of the Soviet bloc].” He elaborated saying that the similarity with COMECON is not ideologically based, but in its structure, “The decisions are made not in your own country. For us who lived through the communist era, this is an issue.”[3]
The Constitution was largely written up by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, former President of the French Republic from 1974 to 1981. Giscard d’Estaing also happens to be a member of the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and is also a close friend of Henry Kissinger, having co-authored papers with him. In 2005, French and Dutch voters answered the referendums in their countries, in which they rejected the EU Constitution, which required total unanimity in order to pass.
In 2007, a move was undertaken to introduce what was called the Lisbon Treaty, to be approved by all member-states. Giscard d’Estaing wrote an article for the Independent in which he stated that, “The difference between the original Constitution and the present Lisbon Treaty is one of approach, rather than content.” He described the process of creating the Lisbon Treaty: “It was the legal experts for the European Council who were charged with drafting the new text. They have not made any new suggestions. They have taken the original draft constitution, blown it apart into separate elements, and have then attached them, one by one, to existing treaties. The Treaty of Lisbon is thus a catalogue of amendments. It is unpenetrable for the public.” The main difference was that the word “constitution” was removed and banished from the text.[4]
The Telegraph reported that though the Treaty dropped the word “constitution,” it remained the same in “giving the EU the trappings of a global power and cutting national sovereignty.” It contained plans to create an EU President, who “will serve a two and half year term but unlike democratic heads of state he or she will be chosen by Europe's leaders not by voters” and “will take over key international negotiations from national heads of government.” The Constitution’s “Foreign Minister” becomes the “High Representative,” who “will run a powerful EU diplomatic service and will be more important on the global and European stage than national foreign ministers.” It sets out to create an “Interior Ministry” which will “centralise databases holding fingerprints and DNA,” and “make EU legislation on new police and surveillance powers.” The ability for EU nations to use vetoes will end, and the Treaty “includes a clause hardwiring an EU "legal personality" and ascendancy over national courts.”[5]
One country in Europe has it written into its constitution that it requires a referendum on treaties, and that country is Ireland. In June of 2008, the Irish went to vote on the Treaty of Lisbon, after weeks and months of being badgered by EU politicians and Eurocrats explaining that the Irish “owe” Europe a “Yes” vote because of the benefits the EU had bestowed upon Ireland. History will show, however, that the Irish don’t take kindly to being bossed around and patronized, so when they went to the polls, “No” was on their lips and on their ballots. The Irish thus rejected the Lisbon Treaty.
North American Integration
The Canada-US Free Trade Agreement of 1989, was signed by President George HW Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. The FTA had devastating consequences for the people of Canada and the United States, while enriching the corporate and political elite. For example, GDP growth decreased, unemployment increased the most since the Great Depression,[6] and meanwhile, Brian Mulroney entered the corporate world, of which he now sits as a board member of Barrick Gold Corporation, as well as sitting on the International Advisory Board of the Council on Foreign Relations,[7] of which David Rockefeller remains on as Honorary Chairman.
In 1990, the private sector lobbying groups and think tanks began the promotion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to expand the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement to include Mexico. NAFTA was signed by then Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, US President George H.W. Bush and Mexican President Carlos Salinas, in 1993, and went into effect in 1994. It was negotiated during a time in which Mexico was undergoing liberal economic reforms, so NAFTA had the effect of cementing those reforms in an “economic constitution for North America.”[8]
David Rockefeller played a role in the push for NAFTA. In 1965, he had founded the Council for Latin America (CLA), which, as he wrote in a 1966 article in Foreign Affairs, was to mobilize private enterprise throughout the hemisphere “to stimulate and support economic integration.” The CLA, David wrote, “provides an effective channel of cooperation between businessmen in the United States and their counterparts in the countries to the south. It also offers a means of continuing communication and consultation with the White House, the State Department and other agencies of our government.”[9]
The CLA later changed its name to the Council of the Americas (CoA) and maintains a very close relationship with the Americas Society, founded at the same time as the CLA, of which David Rockefeller remains to this day as Chairman of both organizations. As David wrote in his autobiography, Memoirs, in the lead up to NAFTA, the Council of the Americas sponsored a Forum of the Americas, which was attended by President George H.W. Bush, which resulted in the call for a “Western Hemisphere free trade area.”[10]
In 1993, David Rockefeller wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal, in the run up to NAFTA, in which he advocated for the signing of NAFTA as essential, describing it as a vital step on the road to fulfilling his life long work, and that, “Everything is in place -- after 500 years -- to build a true "new world" in the Western Hemisphere,” and further, that “I truly don't think that "criminal" would be too strong a word to describe an action on our part, such as rejecting Nafta, that would so seriously jeopardize all the good that has been done -- and remains to be done.”[11]
In 1994, Mexico entered into a financial crisis, often referred to as the Mexican peso crisis. The 1980s debt crisis, instigated by the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes on international loans, caused Mexico to default on its loans. The IMF had to enter the scene with its newly created Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and reform Mexico’s economy along neoliberal economic policies.
In the late 1980s, “the United States accounted for 73 percent of Mexico’s foreign trade,”[12] and when NAFTA came into effect in 1994, it “immediately opened US and Canadian markets to 84 percent of Mexican exports.”[13] Mexico even became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The peso crisis, which began at the end of 1994, with the ascension of Mexican President Zedillo, went into 1995, and the US organized a bailout worth $52 billion.[14] The bailout did not help the Mexican economy, as it was simply funneled into paying back loans to banks, primarily American banks, and the “crisis in 1995 was declared [by the IMF to be] over as soon as the banks and international lenders started to get repaid; but five years after the crisis, workers were just getting back to where they were beforehand.”[15]
In 2002, Robert Pastor, Director of the Center for North American Studies at the American University in Washington, D.C., prepared a report that he presented to the Trilateral Commission meeting of that same year. The report, A North American Community: A Modest Proposal to the Trilateral Commission, advocated a continuation of the policy of “deep integration” in North America, recommending, “a continental plan for infrastructure and transportation, a plan for harmonizing regulatory policies, a customs union, [and] a common currency.”[16] The report advocated the formation of a North American Community and Pastor wrote that, “a majority of the public in all three countries is prepared to join a larger North American country.”[17]
In 2003, prior to Paul Martin becoming Prime Minister of Canada, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), formerly the BCNI, published on their website, a press release in which they, “urged Paul Martin to take the lead in forging a new vision for North America.” Thomas d’Aquino, CEO of the Council, “urged that Mr. Martin champion the idea of a yearly summit of the leaders of Canada, Mexico and the United States in order to give common economic, social and security issues the priority they deserve in a continental, hemispheric and global context.” Among the signatories to this statement were all the Vice Chairmen of the CCCE, including David Emerson, who would go on to join Martin’s Cabinet.[18]
The CCCE then launched the North American Security and Prosperity Initiative, advocating “redefining borders, maximizing regulatory efficiencies, negotiation of a comprehensive resource security pact, reinvigorating the North American defence alliance, and creating a new institutional framework.”[19]
The Independent Task Force on the Future of North America was then launched in 2005, composed of an alliance and joint project between the CCCE in Canada, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in the United States, and the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations in Mexico. A press release was given on March 14, 2005, in which it said, “The chairs and vice-chairs of the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America today issued a statement calling for a North American economic and security community by 2010.”[20]
On March 23, 2005, a mere nine days following the Task Force press release, the leaders of Canada, the US, and Mexico, (Paul Martin, George W. Bush, and Vicente Fox, respectively), announced “the establishment of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,” which constituted a course of “action into a North American framework to confront security and economic challenges.”[21]
Within two months, the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America released their final report, Building a North American Community, proposing the continuation of “deep integration” into the formation of a North American Community, that “applauds the announced ‘Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,’ but proposes a more ambitious vision of a new community by 2010 and specific recommendations on how to achieve it.”[22]
At the 2006 meeting of the SPP, the creation of a new group was announced, called the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC), made up of corporate leaders from all three countries who produce an annual report and advise the three governments on how to implement the SPP process of “deep integration”. The Secretariat in Canada is the CCCE, and the Secretariat of the group in the US is made up of the US Chamber of Commerce and the Council of the Americas.[23] The Council of the Americas was founded by David Rockefeller, of which he is still Honourary Chairman, and other board members include individuals from J.P. Morgan, Merck, McDonald’s, Ford, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, General Electric, Chevron, Shell, IBM, ConocoPhillips, Citigroup, Microsoft, Pfizer, Wal-Mart, Exxon, General Motors, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse and the US Department of Treasury.[24]
The process of integration is still underway, and the formation of a North American Community is not far off, only to be followed by a North American Union, modeled on the structure of the European Union, with talk of a North American currency being formed in the future,[25] which was even proposed by Canada’s former Governor of the Bank of Canada.[26]
The New World Order in Theory
In a 1997 article of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, Anne-Marie Slaughter discussed the theoretical foundations of the New World Order. Building on George HW Bush’s proclamation of a New World Order in 1991, Slaughter wrote that many saw this as “the promise of 1945 fulfilled, a world in which international institutions, led by the United Nations, guaranteed international peace and security with the active support of the world's major powers.” However, this concept, she explained, was largely infeasible, as “It requires a centralized rule-making authority, a hierarchy of institutions, and universal membership.” Instead, she explains the emergence of what she called a “new medievalism” as opposed to liberal internationalism. “Where liberal internationalists see a need for international rules and institutions to solve states' problems, the new medievalists proclaim the end of the nation-state,” where “The result is not world government, but global governance. If government denotes the formal exercise of power by established institutions, governance denotes cooperative problem- solving by a changing and often uncertain cast.”[27]
However, Slaughter challenges the assumptions of both the liberal internationalists and the new medievalists, and states that, “The state is not disappearing, it is disaggregating into its separate, functionally distinct parts. These parts—courts, regulatory agencies, executives, and even legislatures—are networking with their counterparts abroad, creating a dense web of relations that constitutes a new, transgovernmental order,” and that, “transgovernmentalism is rapidly becoming the most widespread and effective mode of international governance.”[28] Slaughter was Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University from 2002-2009, is currently Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State, and has previously served on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Reconstructing Class Structure Under a World Government
Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, a former executive with Goldman Sachs, stated in his speech at the International Economic Forum of the Americas, that, “Globalized product, capital, and labour markets lie at the heart of the New World Order to which we should aspire. However, the next wave of globalization needs to be more firmly grounded and its participants more responsible,” and that, “Within our economies, major stock adjustments in inventories, labour, and capital will be required.” It is worth quoting him at length in saying:
Although global demand and trade levels appear to be approaching bottom, and inventory and labour adjustments have already been substantial, there is still more to come. Unemployment will likely rise further across the G-7, with the sharpest increases still to come in those economies with the least-flexible labour markets. Uncertainty over the employment outlook will weigh on consumption in most major economies for some time. The capital stock adjustment process will take longer, and global investment growth is likely to remain negative well into 2010. This will serve as a significant drag on global growth and can be expected to reduce potential growth in most major economies.[29] [Emphasis added]
In terms of labour adjustments within the New World Order, there are some important and vital factors to take into account. Primary among these concerns is the notion of transnational classes. Capitalism largely functions through class divides, with the ruling class owning the means of production, which, as a class, is subject to its own hierarchy over which those that control and issue currencies preside.
In Western, industrialized nations, there has been a large middle class which thrives on consumption, enriching the upper class bourgeoisie, while the lower class, (or proletariat in Marxist terms), consists of the labour class. In non-western, industrialized nations, generally referred to as the “Third World”, “developing world” or the “Global South” (consisting of Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia), there is a greater divide in terms in class lines, where there is a ruling class, and a labour class, largely remaining vacant of a vast, educated middle class. Class structures vary from country to country and region to region.
However, in the past several decades, the reality of class structures has been undergoing drastic changes, and with this, the structure of labour has changed. In the past few decades, a concurrent class restructuring has been taking place, in which the middle classes of the world descend into debt bondage while the upper classes of the world have began a process of transnationalizing. What we have witnessed and are witnessing with recent events, is the transnationalization of class structures, and with that, labour forces.
Social Constructivism
A fascinating theoretical school of thought within the field of Global Political Economy is that of Social Constructivism. Social Constructivists argue that, “The social and political world, including the world of international relations, is not a physical entity or material object that is outside human consciousness. Consequently, the study of international relations must focus on the ideas and beliefs that inform the actors on the international scene as well as the shared understandings between them.” Expanding upon this idea:
The international system is not something ‘out there’ like the solar system. It does not exist on its own. It exists only as an intersubjective awareness among people; in that sense the system is constituted by ideas, not by material forces. It is a human invention or creation not of a physical or material kind but of a purely intellectual and ideational kind. It is a set of ideas, a body of thought, a system of norms, which has been arranged by certain people at a particular time and place.
Examples of socially constructed structures within the global political economy are national borders, as they have no physical line, but are rather formed by a shared understanding between various actors as to where the border is. The nation itself is a social construct, as it has no physical, over-arching form, but is made up of a litany of shared values, ideas, concepts, institutions, beliefs and symbols. Thus, “If the thoughts and ideas that enter into the existence of international relations change, then the system itself will change as well, because the system consists in thoughts and ideas. That is the insight behind the oft-repeated phrase by constructivist Alexander Wendt: ‘anarchy is what states make of it’.”[30]
Class Structure and Social Constructivism
William I. Robinson and Jerry Harris write in Science & Society Journal, that, “One process central to capitalist globalization is transnational class formation, which has proceeded in step with the internationalization of capital and the global integration of national productive structures. Given the transnational integration of national economies, the mobility of capital and the global fragmentation and decentralization of accumulation circuits, class formation is progressively less tied to territoriality.”[31] They argued that a Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) has emerged, “and that this TCC is a global ruling class. It is a ruling class because it controls the levers of an emergent transnational state apparatus and of global decision making.”[32] This class has no borders, and is composed of the technocratic, media, corporate, banking, social and political elite of the world.
As Jackson and Sorenson point out in relation to social constructivist theory, “If ‘anarchy is what states make of it’ there is nothing inevitable or unchangeable about world politics,” and that, “The existing system is a creation of states and if states change their conceptions of who they are, what their interests are, what they want, etc. then the situation will change accordingly.” As an example, they stated that states could decide “to reduce their sovereignty or even to give up their sovereignty. If that happened there would no longer be an international anarchy as we know it. Instead, there would be a brave new, non-anarchical world – perhaps one in which states were subordinate to a world government.”[33]
As Robinson and Harris explain in their essay, with the rise of the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), there is also a rise in the apparatus of a Transnational State (TNS), which is “an emerging network that comprises transformed and externally integrated national states, together with the supranational economic and political forums; it has not yet acquired any centralized institutional form.”[34] Among the economic apparatus of the TNS we see the IMF, World Bank, WTO and regional banks. On the political side we see the Group of 7, Group of 22, United Nations, OECD, and the European Union. This was further accelerated with the Trilateral Commission, “which brought together transnationalized fractions of the business, political, and intellectual elite in North America, Europe, and Japan.” Further, the World Economic Forum has made up an important part of this class, and, I might add, the Bilderberg Group. Robinson and Harris point out that, “Studies on building a global economy and transnational management structures flowed out of think tanks, university centers, and policy planning institutes in core countries.”[35]
The TNS apparatus has been a vital principle of organization and socialization for the transnational class, “as have world class universities, transnationally oriented think tanks, the leading bourgeois foundations, such as Harvard’s School of International Business, the Ford [and Rockefeller] and the Carnegie Foundations, [and] policy planning groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations.” These “elite planning groups are important forums for integrating class groups, developing new initiatives, collective strategies, policies and projects of class rule, and forging consensus and a political culture around these projects.”[36]
Robinson and Harris identify the World Economic Forum as “the most comprehensive transnational planning body of the TCC and the quintessential example of a truly global network binding together the TCC in a transnational civil society.”[37] I would take issue with this, and instead propose the Bilderberg Group, of which they make no mention in their article, as THE quintessential transnational planning body of the TCC, as it is composed of the elite of the elite, totally removed from public scrutiny, and acts as “a secretive global think-tank” of the world’s 130 most powerful individuals.[38]
Many Bilderberg critics will claim that the group acts as a “secret world government” or as the organization “that makes all the key decisions for the world.” However, this is not the case. Bilderberg is simply the most influential planning body, sitting atop a grand hierarchy of various planning bodies and institutions, and is itself a key part of the apparatus of the formation of a Transnational State, but is not, in and of itself, a “world government.” It is a global think tank, which holds the concept of a “world government” in high regard and often works to achieve these ends, but it should not be confused with being the end it seeks.
The economic crisis is perhaps the greatest “opportunity” ever given to the TCC in re-shaping the world order according to their designs, ideals and goals. Through destruction, comes creation; and for these high-placed individuals within the TCC, destruction is itself a form of creation.
In terms of reshaping labour and class structures, the economic crisis provides the ground on which a new global class structure will be built. A major problem for the Transnational Capitalist Class and the formation of a Transnational State, or world government, is the lack of continuity in class structures and labour markets throughout the world. A transnational ruling class, or “Superclass” as David Rothkopf referred to it in his book of the same name (and is, himself, a member of the Superclass), has emerged. It has no borders, yet has built a general continuity and consensus of goals among its members, albeit there are differences and conflicts within the class, but they are based upon the means of achieving the stated ends, rather than on the ends itself. There is not dissent within the ruling class on the aims of achieving a world governing body; the dissent is in how to achieve this, and in terms of what kind of structure, theoretical and philosophical leanings, and political orientation such a government would have.
To achieve these ends, however, all classes must be transnationalized, not simply the ruling class. The ruling class is the first class to be transnationalized, because transnationalization was the goal of the ruling classes based in the powerful Western European nations, (and later in the United States), that started the process of transnationalization or internationalization. Now that there is an established “Superclass” of a transnational composition, the other classes must follow suit. The middle class is targeted for elimination in this sense, because most of the world has no middle class, and to fully integrate and internationalize a middle class, this would require industrialization and development in places such as Africa, and certain places in Asia and Latin America, and would represent a massive threat to the Superclass, as it would be a valve through which much of their wealth and power would escape them. Their goal is not to lose their wealth and power to a transnational middle class, but rather to extinguish the notion of a middle class, and transnationalize a lower, uneducated, labour oriented class, through which they will secure ultimate wealth and power.
The economic crisis serves these ends, as whatever remaining wealth the middle class holds is in the process of being eliminated, and as the crisis progresses, or rather, regresses, and accelerates, the middle classes of the world will suffer, while a great percentage of lower classes of the world, poverty-stricken even prior to the crisis, will suffer the greatest, most probably leading to a massive reduction in population levels, particularly in the “developed” or “Third World” states.
Many would take issue with such a thesis as being an objective of the Transnational Capitalist Class, as capitalism needs a large population, specifically a middle class population, in order to have a market of consumers for their products. Though this is true with how we presently understand the capitalist system and structure, we must also take note that capitalism, itself, is always changing and redefining itself. Through a social constructivist perspective, which I would argue, is very apt in this analysis, such a notion is not inconceivable, as if the capitalist class were to redefine capitalism itself, capitalism itself would change.
It must be addressed that there would be a great many individuals within the TCC or Superclass (Rothkopf estimates the number at 6,000 individuals within the ruling class), who would take issue with eliminating their base for profit making, however, as a total restructuring of the capitalist system and global political economy as a whole is undertaken, the TCC itself is not immune to such drastic and rapid changes itself. In fact, it would be unimaginable to think that it would remain as it currently is.
Rothkopf explains that with 6,000 members of the Superclass, that equals roughly one member of the superclass for every 1 million people in the world. As the composition, class structures, and numbers of the world population drastically alter over the next years and decades, so too will the superclass itself. It too, will be subject to a “cleansing” so to speak, in which the big players will collapse and consolidate many of the smaller players.
The Monetary Structure of a Global Government
A Global Currency
Following the April 2009 G20 Summit, leaders issued a communiqué which set the groundwork for the creation of a global currency to replace the US dollar as the world reserve currency. The communiqué stated that, “We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity.” SDRs, or Special Drawing Rights, are “a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund.” As the Telegraph reported, “the G20 leaders have activated the IMF's power to create money and begin global "quantitative easing". In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.”[39]
In 1988, the Economist featured an article called “Get Ready for the Phoenix,” which said, “THIRTY years from now, Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same currency. Prices will be quoted not in dollars, yen or D-marks but in, let's say, the phoenix. The phoenix will be favoured by companies and shoppers because it will be more convenient than today's national currencies, which by then will seem a quaint cause of much disruption to economic life in the late twentieth century.” The article, written in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash, stated that, “Several more big exchange-rate upsets, a few more stockmarket crashes and probably a slump or two will be needed before politicians are willing to face squarely up to that choice. This points to a muddled sequence of emergency followed by patch-up followed by emergency, stretching out far beyond 2018-except for two things. As time passes, the damage caused by currency instability is gradually going to mount; and the very trends that will make it mount are making the utopia of monetary union feasible.”[emphasis added][40]
Paul Volcker, former Governor of the Federal Reserve System, said in 2000, that, “If we are to have a truly global economy, a single world currency makes sense,” and a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank reaffirmed Volcker’s comment, stating that, “we might one day have a single world currency. Maybe European integration, in the same way as any other regional integration, could be seen as a step towards the ideal situation of a fully integrated world. If and when this world will see the light of day is impossible to say. However, what I can say is that this vision seems as impossible now to most of us as a European monetary union seemed 50 years ago, when the process of European integration started.”[41]
A Central Bank of the World
Jeffrey Garten has written several articles calling for the creation of a global central bank, or a “global fed.” Garten was former Dean of the Yale School of Management, former Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade in the Clinton administration, previously served on the White House Council on International Economic Policy under the Nixon administration and on the policy planning staffs of Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance of the Ford and Carter administrations, former Managing Director at Lehman Brothers, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In 1998, he wrote an article for the New York Times stating that the world “needs a global central bank,” and that, “An independent central bank with responsibility for maintaining global financial stability is the only way out. No one else can do what is needed: inject more money into the system to spur growth, reduce the sky-high debts of emerging markets, and oversee the operations of shaky financial institutions. A global central bank could provide more money to the world economy when it is rapidly losing steam.”[42]
Following the outbreak of the current financial crisis, Garten wrote an article for the Financial Times in which he called for the “establishment of a Global Monetary Authority to oversee markets that have become borderless.”[43] In October of 2008, he wrote an article for Newsweek stating that, “leaders should begin laying the groundwork for establishing a global central bank.” He explained that, “There was a time when the U.S. Federal Reserve played this role [as governing financial authority of the world], as the prime financial institution of the world's most powerful economy, overseeing the one global currency. But with the growth of capital markets, the rise of currencies like the euro and the emergence of powerful players such as China, the shift of wealth to Asia and the Persian Gulf and, of course, the deep-seated problems in the American economy itself, the Fed no longer has the capability to lead single-handedly.”[44]
Regionalism
Building upon the model of the European Union, the world is being divided into large continental regional blocs, with regional monetary systems and governments. This will make up the managed blocs of a global government, and mark a significant process in the “hard road to world order,” as Richard N. Gardner called it, in which national sovereignty is eroded piece by piece. Regionalism marks the current phase of the move to the formation of a global government. Friedrich List critiqued liberal cosmopolitanism, stating that economic integration had never preceded political integration, however the elites have and are successfully challenging this notion. In the New World Order, economic integration is preceding political integration into a world governance structure.
The European Union began as a series of free trade agreements, became a monetary union, and is in the process of being formed into a single continental superstate. North American integration began with a series of free trade agreements, defense and security agreements, and is in the process of moving towards monetary and bureaucratic integration into a North American Community. A Union and North American superstate are not far in the distance. A North American currency is openly discussed and proposed by leading think tanks, billionaire investors, as well as the Governor of the Bank of Canada. The likely name of such a currency is the Amero.[45]
Meanwhile, globally, markets are heavily integrating. In 2007, it was reported that the European Union and the United States were beginning the process of transatlantic economic integration.[46] In 2008, it was announced that, “Canadian and European officials say they plan to begin negotiating a massive agreement to integrate Canada’s economy with the 27 nations of the European Union,” under “deep economic integration negotiations,” and “The proposed pact would far exceed the scope of older agreements such as NAFTA.”[47] This, essentially, is a means of integrating with the North American Community before the Community is officially formed; an act of pre-emptive integration.
In 2007, the Council on Foreign Relations journal, Foreign Affairs, ran an article titled, “The End of National Currency.” Discussing the volatility of national currencies, the article stated that, “The right course is not to return to a mythical past of monetary sovereignty, with governments controlling local interest and exchange rates in blissful ignorance of the rest of the world. Governments must let go of the fatal notion that nationhood requires them to make and control the money used in their territory. National currencies and global markets simply do not mix; together they make a deadly brew of currency crises and geopolitical tension and create ready pretexts for damaging protectionism. In order to globalize safely, countries should abandon monetary nationalism and abolish unwanted currencies, the source of much of today's instability.”
Further, “Monetary nationalism is simply incompatible with globalization. It has always been, even if this has only become apparent since the 1970s, when all the world's governments rendered their currencies intrinsically worthless.” The author states that, “Since economic development outside the process of globalization is no longer possible, countries should abandon monetary nationalism. Governments should replace national currencies with the dollar or the euro or, in the case of Asia, collaborate to produce a new multinational currency over a comparably large and economically diversified area.”[48]
In 2008, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) was formed, “a regional body aimed at boosting economic and political integration in the region,”[49] which will “seek a common currency as part of the region's integration efforts,” as well as a common central bank.[50]
The Gulf Cooperation Council, a regional bloc of Arab Middle Eastern governments, is pursuing economic integration in the form of a common central bank and a common currency.[51] Similarly, there has been much discussion of an Asian Monetary Union and East Asian economic integration, specifically being touted as a solution to the prevention of future economic crises in East Asia like that which hit it in 1997.[52] Integration would be modeled upon the East Asian regional block of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), and in 2008, “ASEAN bank deputy governors and financial deputy ministers have met in Vietnam's central Da Nang city, discussing issues on the financial and monetary integration and cooperation in the region.”[53] Further, Africa is being organized as a regional bloc under the African Union, and is also pursuing regional economic integration, and has even set the agenda for the creation of a continental African central bank and the formation of a single African currency.[54]
In 2006, the Bank for International Settlements “suggested ditching many national currencies in favour of a small number of formal currency blocks based on the dollar, euro and renminbi or yen.”[55]
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