Burnham renounced his allegiance to Trotsky and Marxism, in all its forms in 1940, but he would take the tactics and strategies for infiltration and subversion, (learned as a member of Leon Trotsky’s inner circle) with him, and would elevate the Trotskyist management of ‘identity politics’ to become the fragmentation ‘device’ primed to explode national culture onto a new stage, in the Western sphere. His 1941 book, “The Managerial Revolution,” caught the attention of Frank Wisner, subsequently, a legendary CIA figure, who saw in the works of Burnham and his colleague a fellow Trotskyite, Sidney Hook, the prospect of mounting an effective alliance of former Trotskyites against Stalinism.

But, additionally, Wisner perceived its merits as the blueprint for a CIA-led, pseudo-liberal, US-led global order. (‘Pseudo’, because, as Burnham articulated clearly, in The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom, his version of freedom meant anything but intellectual freedom or those freedoms defined by America’s Constitution. “What it really meant was conformity and submission”).

In short, (as Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould have noted), “by 1947, James Burnham’s transformation from Communist radical, to New World Order American conservative was complete. His Struggle for the World, [converted into a memo for the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of CIA)], had done a ‘French Turn’ on Trotsky’s permanent Communist revolution, and turned it into a permanent battle plan for a global American empire. All that was needed to complete Burnham’s dialectic was a permanent enemy, and that would require a sophisticated psychological campaign to keep the hatred of Russia alive, "for generations".

What has this to do with us today? A ‘Burnham Landscape’ of apparently, ‘centrist’ European political parties, apparently independent think-tanks, institutions, and NATO structures, was seeded by CIA – in the post war era of anti-Sovietism – across Europe, and the Middle East – as part of Burnham’s ‘battle plan’ for a US-led, global ‘order’. It is precisely this élite: i.e. Burnham’s oligarchic technocracy, that is facing political push-back today to the point at which the Liberal Order feels that it is struggling for its very survival against “the enemy in the White House”, as the editor of Spiegel Online has termed President Trump.

What has caused this? Well, like him or hate him, President Trump has played a major part, if only by saying the unsayable. The rationality or not inherent in these Eckhart-style ‘unsayings’, or apophasis, is beside the point: Trump’s intuitive ‘discourse of saying the unsayable’ has taken most of the bolts out of the former Burnham-type, ideological structure. 

But in Europe, two main flaws to the Burnham blueprint have contributed, possibly fatally, to the blueprint crisis: Firstly, the policy of populating Europe with immigrants, as a remedy for Europe’s adverse demographics (and to dilute to the point of erasure, its national cultures): "Far from leading to fusion”, writes British historian, Niall Ferguson, "Europe’s migration crisis is leading to fission. The play might be called The Meltdown Pot … Increasingly … the issue of migration will be seen by future historians as the fatal solvent of the EU. In their accounts Brexit will appear as merely an early symptom of the crisis". And secondly, the bi-furcation of the economy into two unrelated, and dis-equal economies, as a result of the élite’s mismanagement of the global economy, (i.e. the obvious the absence of ‘prosperity for all’).

Trump evidently has heard the two key messages from his constituency: that they neither accept to have (white) American culture, and its way-of-life, diluted through immigration; and, neither do they wish – stoically – to accommodate to America’s eclipse by China.

The issue of how to arrest China’s rise is primordial (for Team Trump), and in a certain sense, has led to an American ‘retrospective’: America now may only account for 14% of global output (PPP – Purchasing Power Parity basis), or 22%, on a nominal basis (as opposed to near half of global output, for which the US was responsible, at the close of WW2), but American corporations, thanks to the dollar global hegemony, enjoy a type of monopoly status (i.e. Microsoft, Google and Facebook, amongst others), either through regulatory privilege, or by marketplace dominance. Trump wants to halt this asset from decaying further and to leverage it again as a potent bargaining chip in the present tariff wars. This is clearly a political ‘winner’ in terms of US domestic grass-roots, politics, and the upcoming November mid-term elections.

The second strand seems to be something of a Middle East ‘retrospective’: to restore the Middle East to the era of The Shah, when ‘Persia’ policed the Middle East; when Israel was a regional ‘power’ implementing the American interest; and when the major sources of energy were under US control. And, further, when Russian influence was being attenuated, by leveraging radical Sunni Islam against Arab socialism, and nationalism.

Of course, Trump is savvy enough to know that it is not possible to revert wholly to that Kissinger-esque world. The region has changed too much for that. But Kissinger remains an influential adviser to the President (together with PM Netanyahu). And it is easy to forget that US dominance of the Middle East brought America not just control of energy, but the re-cycling of petrodollars into Wall Street, and the necklace of US military bases in the Gulf that both surround Iran, and give to the US its military muscle, reaching into Asia.

We have therefore Trump’s hugging of MBS, MBZ and Netanyahu, and a supporting narrative of Iran as a ‘malign actor’ in the region, and a facilitator of terrorism.

But, it is just a ‘narrative’, and it is nonsense, when put into a broader understanding of the regional context. The history of Islam has never been free from violent conflict (going back to earliest days: i.e. the Wars of the Ridda, or apostasy 632-3 etc.). But – lest we forget – this present era of Sunni radicalization (such as has given birth to ISIS) reaches back, at least, to the 17^th and 18^th Centuries, with the Ottoman disaster at the Gates of Vienna (1683); the consequent onset of the Caliphate dissolution; growing Ottoman permissiveness and sensuality, provoking Abd-el Wahhab’s radical zealotism (on which basis Saudi Arabia was founded); and finally the aggressive westernizing secularism in Turkey and Persia, which triggered what is called ‘political Islam’ (both Sunni and Shi’a that initially, were united, in a single movement).

The MBS narrative that Saudi Arabia’s ‘fundamentalism’ was a reaction to the Iranian Revolution is yet another ‘meme’ that may serve Trump and Netanyahu’s interests, but is just as false. The reality is that the modern Arab (Sunni) system, a holdover from the Ottoman era, has been in a long term channel of decline since WW1 – whereas Shi’i Islam is enjoying a strong revival across the northern tier of the Middle East, and beyond. Put rather bluntly: the Iranians are on the upside of history – it’s as simple as that.

And what Trump is trying to do is Iranian capitulation, in the face of the American-Israeli-Saudi siege, the key to undoing Obama (again), by trying to reassert US Middle East dominance, energy dominance and an Israeli resurgence of regional power. Subjugating Iran thus has emerged as the supreme litmus for re-establishing the unipolar global order.

It is so iconic precisely because, just as much as Trump would like to see Iran, Iraq and Iranian allies everywhere, fall to the unipolar hegemony, Iran is as central to the multipolar vision of Xi and Putin as it is iconic to Trump’s putative Middle East ‘makeover’. And it is not just symbolic: Iran is as pivotal to both Russian and Chinese geo-political strategies. In a word, Iran has more leverage to ensure survival than Trump may have anticipated.

America will leverage its dominance of the financial system to the limit to strangle Iran, and China and Russia will do what is necessary financially, and in terms of trade, to see that Iran does not implode economically – and remains a pillar of the multipolar alternative world order.

And it is here that the paradigm shifts in Europe come into play. It is not, I repeat not because Europe can be expected to show leadership or to ‘do’ much, but rather because the apophatic discourse of ‘saying the unsayable’ is spreading to Europe. It has not, so far, changed the paradigm of power, but may soon (i.e. with Merkel’s possible political demise). Germany may be more staid in its politics than Italy, but the voice of Italy’s new Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, saying ‘no’ to the ‘Burnham’ proxies in Berlin is echoing across Europe, and beyond. It acts like a slap in the face.

Let us be absolutely clear: We are not suggesting that Europe will expend political capital in defending the JCPOA. That is not likely. We are saying that America’s dollar hegemony has proved toxic to the rest of the world in very many ways, and Trump – in leveraging that hegemony so gangsterishly: “We’re America, Bitch”, as one official described America’s approach – is fueling antagonism towards dollar hegemony (if not yet towards America per se). It is pushing all of non-America into a common stance of rebellion against America’s unipolar financial dominance.

This ‘revolt’ is already giving leverage to Kim Jong Un, as the Washington Post reports:

“With U.S.-China trade ties on the rocks, Kim is well-positioned to play both powers, talking sweet to Trump while pursuing a closer relationship with Xi…Kim understands the hierarchy. He knows that Xi is the Asian Godfather,” said Yanmei Xie, a China policy analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, an economic research firm in Beijing. “He is making a pragmatic calculation that China can provide economic assistance to integrate North Korea diplomatically and economically into Northeast Asia …

“There is a regional effort, a sort of Northeast Asia coalition of make-believe, to maintain the fiction that the North Korea will de-nuke as long as Americans keep talking to it,” Xie said.

China is less focused on getting Kim to give away his weapons than on getting him to fall into line. It may eventually use trade and investment to keep him onside, experts said.

“With North Korea still struggling under U.N. sanctions, “China’s political and economic support is still highly important,” said Zhao Tong, a North Korea expert at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing. Zhao said the question now is: “How can China help North Korea develop its economy?”

“China can also help Kim normalize North Korea’s diplomatic status. That starts with treating him less like a rogue dictator and more like a visiting statesman.”

The same goes for Iran — in spades. China and Russia know how to play this game of ‘chicken’.

Some of the usual Masters of the Universe – but mostly their selected paperboys – did hit Bilderberg in a jolly Goldman Sachs-meets-Google mix. Feel free to enjoy drawing the possible connections among the official participants, all of them lavishly welcomed by organizer Airbus.

What really matters at Bilderberg is what is discussed only by selected masters and messengers behind closed doors – not those steering committee «sessions» with invited guests (and that includes media reps from The Economist, Bloomberg, the FT or the Wall Street Journal). Bilderberg is like a redux, ultra-selected version of Davos, more akin to the meetings of the Trilateral Commission.

Bilderberg follows an extremely strict «Chatham House Rule»; if you are a participant you may use any information you receive from your fellow gatherers, as long as you don’t reveal your source. That’s pretty much how the Beltway/Wall Street axis operates.

So what do these up to 150 exponents of what Zygmunt Bauman would define as the cream of the crop of (transatlantic) liquid modernity elites – two thirds from Western Europe, the rest from North America – talk about?

Predictably, what finance ministers and mega-corporate CEOs talk about; the preservation of what Immanuel Wallerstein describes as the «world system», as in turbo-financial capitalism; and the necessity to change a few things so nothing substantial changes at all. Think of it as seven-star groupthink.

As my (European diplomat) mole told me, this year some key items in the New World Order (NWO) agenda were imperatively discussed, such as how to block both Donald Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK by all means necessary, as well as how to shove the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) over European public opinion’s throats, also by all means necessary. 

But other globalist imperatives were as relevant, such as the creation of a virtual online passport – an Internet ID – without which no one will be able to say, or buy, anything. The excuse for it is to promote «cybersecurity». The idea, not surprisingly, came out of the Orwellian European Commission (EC).

Plutocracy X precariat

It’s been a long and winding road since the inaugural 1954 meeting at the Hotel De Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands. Yes, the NWO does conduct business at Bilderberg, as much as it did in the Trilateral. Even the official spin – we discuss megatrends and «major» global issues – applies. So conspiracy theorizing is idle. The point is to infer how and for what purpose this politico-economic Valhalla will implement items in the agenda – from progress in artificial intelligence (AI) to cybersecurity’s new frontier.

But it’s not only about deals. A key theme this year was the precariat – as in British economist Guy Standing’s definition of «alienated, anomic, anxious and angry» masses who are terrified of losing their jobs and plunging into an even more miserable life.

If we go by their general description – «…the perpetual part-timers, the minimum-wagers, the temporary foreign workers, the grey-market domestics paid in cash… the techno-impoverished whose piecemeal work has no office and no end, the seniors who struggle with dwindling benefits, the indigenous people who are kept outside, the single mothers without support, the cash laborers who have no savings, the generation for whom a pension and a retirement is neither available nor desired» – that accounts for the overwhelming majority of the global urban proletariat/lower-middle class. 

Across the industrial West, that ties in with the swelling electoral mass supporting Trump in the US and assorted right-wingers in Europe. No wonder the 0.00001% is alarmed. Not that their high-speed liquid modernity routine allows them to know anything substantial about the precariat’s ordeals – even as the defining battle of the times is how the plutocracy will contain those rising proletarian masses.    

Anyway, some Bilderberg attendees at least offered a delicious glimpse of revolving door interpolations. Picture disgraced former CIA director and Iraqi surge superstar David Petraeus now shining as an employee of billionaire Henry Kravis of KKR, who is linked to senior fellow from the Hudson Institute Marie-Josée Kravis, actually a board member of massive French advertising and PR company Publicis and a director of LVMH. CIA-KKR-LVMH; what’s not to like? How subversive-chic.   

Picture academic cheap shot imperial cheerleader Niall Ferguson, a quaint «professor of history, Harvard University», but mostly a board member of boutique investment outfit AMG (managing $642 billion in assets), his jaw dropped to sub-oceanic depths at the prospect of spending four days locked up with his idol, nonagenarian war criminal Henry Kissinger; Ferguson is of course Kissinger’s self-anointed biographer. 

Picture a nice, little, cozy, hardcore weaponizing session grouping Italy’s arms giant Finmeccanica, defense giant Honeywell (engine builders for Reaper drones), Saab (via major stakeholder Jacob Wallenberg) and with Alex Karp of data giant Palantir, backed by the CIA, serving the martinis.

Do you accept PayPal?

Bilderberg of course has traditionally been a prime lobby for Big Oil and Too Big To Fail (TBTF) Banking. So it goes without saying that Bilderberg’s official candidate in the US presidential election is Hillary Clinton.   

But Bilderberg is now also about Silicon Valley majors. Here’s PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel – also a board member of Facebook and chairman of Palantir – engaging in a post-modern definition of transparency: «I think we have a lot of problems in our society … We need to find ways to talk to people where not everything is completely transparent. Libertarianism is not synonymous with radical transparency. That’s often an argument the Stasi would make, in East Germany, where everything had to be monitored by society. And I think often you have the best conversations in smaller groups, where not everything is being monitored; that’s how you get very honest conversations and how you can think better about the future».

So there it is. Transparency is all about shades of grey, and who controls the shades. Which brings us to some things that were not – transparently – discussed at Bilderberg, and still affect us all.

Few Atlanticists – but certainly not serious movers and shakers – noticed what happened to JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon’s plan to create a code of best practice for US boardrooms, as in implementing real corporate governance.

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. The idea was essentially scotched by $2.2 trillion asset management firm Fidelity. It’s always essential to remember that Fidelity (CEO: Abigail Johnson), BlackRock (CEO: Larry Fink), Capital Group (CEO: Tim Armour) and Vanguard (CEO: Bill McNabb) have tremendously serious holdings on all major banks that compose the Federal Reserve, not to mention a who’s who of massive US corporations.

In a nutshell; these Big Four ultimately control the US Fed, as they ultimately control major US banks and substantial chunks of Western corporations. These indeed are among the prime Masters of the Universe – or what Adam Smith, way back in 1776, called «the masters of mankind». Transparency? They are even less transparent than Bilderberg. They don’t even need to go to Bilderberg. They want it all to remain this way.

And they don’t accept PayPal.

On 12 November 2015, the European Commission resumed negotiations with the United States over the crucial ISDS, or Investor State Dispute Settlement, provisions Obama’s proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership treaty with the EU. (It will be the largest ‘trade’ treaty — and about far more than merely ‘trade’ — in history, if it ultimately becomes law.)

Those negotiations between the U.S. and EU had been suspended for over a year, back in March 2014, because of the huge public opposition by Europeans against ISDS and consequently against TTIP itself. Those demonstrations continued to rise; and, so, in October 2014, the American commentator Paul Craig Roberts headlined «The Lie Machine» about not only the proposed treaty but the Establishment’s response to the huge public demonstrations in Europe against that «Lie Machine.» However, now, over a year later, the European Commission evidently feels that things have quieted down enough for them to resume these negotiations.

A week earlier, on November 5th, the preliminary public text of the equivalent Obama-proposed treaty with U.S.-allied Asian countries, the Trans Pacific Partnership or TPP, was issued; and, if it becomes passed into law in all 12 of those countries, then no matter what future scientific research might turn out to show about global warming, product-toxicity, or health-effects from specific toxins, the existing regulations will be essentially locked-in forever: those regulations will be able to be reduced but not to be increased, in any of the participating countries. And, as far as worker-protections are concerned, even a country where labor-union organizers routinely get murdered and where those crimes are never prosecuted, will not be able to be restricted from access to each and every other participating nation’s markets. Whether or not labor unions will even be possible then is doubtful, because the race-to-the-bottom will be on in full force, with little if anything to stop it.

These sorts of mega-historical changes don’t just come from out of nowhere. There is a substantial history behind them.

In 1954, Western-nation aristocracies began an assault against democracy, and it’s coming to culmination right now. It’s the biggest anti-democracy assault ever launched; it is global, and it is conceptually brilliant. The very real danger therefore now exists that democracy’s fundamental principle (which still remains only the ideal, and not the reality in most if not all countries) of one-person-one-vote, will be irrevocably replaced throughout the world by one-dollar-one-vote. The danger is now imminent, that rule by wealth (individual dollars), instead of rule by persons (individual human beings), will soar and become actually locked-in for the future. (To a large extent, it’s the system that already exists, but we’re at the tipping-point now of its becoming far more so, and locked-in forever, throughout not only the United States but all nations which are allied with the United States: and that’s what this article will be about, so that the information here regarding this may become publicly known as widely as possible, as fast as possible.)

The only extent to which an individual human being, in this billionaires’-dream governmental system, will be able to have a significant say in his or her government, is via how many dollars that particular individual person happens to own, and via the effectiveness with which the individual deploys those dollars so as to control the government to his particular favor. This will be a government via property, instead of via persons. (Already, the wealthiest 80 individuals own at least as much as do the poor half of Mankind, and the wealthiest 0.7% own at least 13.67 times as much as do the world’s poorest 68.7%. The billionaires’-dream system will, if it finally becomes instituted — which will certainly happen if U.S. President Barack Obama’s three proposed international ‘trade’ treaties the TTIP, TPP, and TISA, become implemented — sharply increase those ratios, the world’s inequalities of wealth. They’ll own an even bigger percentage of the world’s wealth than they do now.) 

The billionaires’-dream system, which has now come to be referred to as «Investor State Dispute Resolution», or «ISDS», actually had its origin at the first meeting of the Bilderberg group, in 1954, at which the need for this system was first put forth, by certain members of that group, to the others. (Many participants at that meeting were actually representatives whom a billionaire had selected to be there on his or her behalf; others were principals: the billionaires themselves. Even for a meeting like this, it’s common for a billionaire to send a trusted representative, not attend personally.)

The Bilderberg group were first called together by the profoundly corrupt aristocrat (and no one can reasonably object to anything that is linked to here unless the given link is first  examined, which supplies the supporting evidence for what’s being linked there) Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, he a ‘former’ Nazi who had then married the Netherlands’ Queen Juliana, which placed him now into a perfect position for calling together such a private gathering in 1954, which was specifically of top European and American aristocrats and their most-trusted agents. 

He had been born Bernhard Leopold Friedrich Eberhard Julius Kurt Karl Gottfried Peter Graf von Biesterfeld in Jena, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, of the German Empire, on 29 June 1911, as the first son of Prince Bernhard of Lippe (younger brother of Leopold IV, Prince of Lippe, the reigning Prince of Lippe) and his wife, Armgard von Cramm. Queen Beatrix was the daughter of his marriage to the Queen. Wikipedia observes of Bernhard, that, “While at university [which was in Switzerland, at the University of Lausanne — not  at a German university; and, so, this was entirely a reflection of his free will], Bernhard joined the Nazi Party. He also enrolled in the Sturmabteilung (SA), which he left in 1934 when he graduated. The Prince later denied that he had belonged to SA, to the Reiter-SS (SS Cavalry Corps), and to the NSKK [Nazi paramilitary organization], but these are well-documented memberships.» Wikipedia goes on to note that, “The Prince eventually went to work for the German chemical giant IG Farben, then the world’s fourth-largest company (which survives today as BASF, AGFA, and Bayer). He lodged with the exiled Russian nobleman Count Pavel Kotzbue and his wife the American-born Allene Tew. After training, Bernhard became secretary to the board of directors at the Paris office in 1935.»

IG Farben was at the core of the group of international corporations that financed Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and that benefited from his rule. It is simply inconceivable that Prince Bernhard disagreed with the international-corporate agenda of the Nazi Party. Adolf Hitler had said, in a speech at the Industrial Club of Dusseldorf on 27 January 1932, to Germany’s assembled aristocrats:

Let no one say that the image which is conveyed as the first impression of the culture of mankind is the impression of its overall achievement. This entire structure of culture, down to its foundations and in each of its building blocks, is nothing other than the result of creative talent, the achievement of intelligence, and the industriousness of individuals. The greatest results are the great crowning achievement of individual geniuses endowed by God [he often invoked God]; the average results are the achievement of men of average ability; and the total result is undoubtedly a product of the application of human working power towards the exploitation of the creations of geniuses and talented men. But this naturally means that, when the capable minds of a nation – who are always in the minority – are given a value equal with all the others, this must result in subjugating the genius to the majority, in subjecting the ability and the value of the individual to the majority, a process which is mistakenly called the rule of the people. This is not the rule of the people, but in fact the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-measures, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy. The rule of the people is rather when a people allows itself to be governed and led in all areas of life by its most capable individuals who are born for the task.

Hitler then said:

You, Gentlemen, are of the opinion that the construction of the German economy must be based upon the concept of private property. Then again, you can only maintain the idea of private property if it appears to be somehow founded in logic. This concept must draw its ethical justification from the insight that it is a necessity dictated by nature… Men are not equally valuable, not equally significant in every area from the onset.

This is the fundamental aristocratic principle: The superior are worth more than the inferior and should therefore rule over them — and an individual’s wealth is a reflection of the person’s degree of superiority-inferiority. The rich should reign. Hitler said that he and his Party represented this principle.

When Hitler said this in private to Germany’s corporate chieftains assembled in Dusseldorf at the start of 1932, many of them already knew it by then; and any who didn’t, certainly were able to get word of it afterward from their friends who attended, if they themselves had not attended. Consequently, at the top level in German society, this was Hitler, these were his views, before he rose to power.

The new system is a placing-into-practice of Hitler’s worldview that he expressed there. However, Hitler did not consider Jews to be humans at all, but instead as being descended from the snake that caused original sin in Genesis 3; so, any wealth that they owned, was, in his outlook, entirely illegitimate. Other than that, the aristocratic principle applied throughout Hitler’s thinking. And no Jews were at the meeting. It was entirely a Christian aristocratic group.

An account of Bernhard’s sponsorship of the international Christian far-right, including Washington’s Prayer Breakfasts for congressmen, mentions, regarding his marriage in to the Dutch Queen, that:

traveling to the Reich’s Chancellery, he met personally with Adolf Hitler who had publicly insinuated that the marriage of the German Prince to the future Queen of the Netherlands was a sign of an alliance between the two nations. Then, for several days leading up to his marriage to Princess Juliana on January 7, 1937, Prince Bernhard entertained SS officer Langenheim in the Dutch royal palace. The Prince provided the SS representative with an assessment of the political situation in the Netherlands and the role of the Dutch Nazi Party, all of which was reported back in detail to the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Once Hitler invaded Holland, Prince Bernhard joined the war against Germany; he was now Dutch royalty, no longer merely a Christian German aristocrat, and the aristocratic tradition has always been military loyalty to the land one rules. Furthermore, on no grounds could the Prince condone invasion of his own (adopted) country. He had married up, and he was determined to stay up, and on top.

AFTER WW II

After World War II, when the conservative U.S. President Dwight David Eisenhower came into power and appointed to top posts two Wall Street lawyers whose careers had been devoted to the U.S. aristocracy that had assisted in Hitler’s rise to power, John Foster Dulles as the U.S. Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles as the Director of the CIA, a movement was started on both sides of the Atlantic to institute the fascist vision (Nazism without the anti-Semitic obsession that Hitler had had), and this was the vision as Benito Mussolini had conceived of it, and which he had gotten from his teacher, Vilfredo Pareto, who wrote extensively about the natural aristocracy and even about the ruthlessness that is essential in order to rise within the aristocracy.

Democratic U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt repeatedly condemned such people. In his 1936 renomination acceptance speech, he had said: «Economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution». But now, after the war, they were determined to win their goals, though in a different way than through merely fascist militarizing and propaganda. 

The European side of this program entailed as a prerequisite the establishment of the European Union, so that Europe’s aristocrats collectively could become powerful enough as a group to constitute a sufficiently united partner with America’s aristocracy. In fact, this was, to a large extent, what the Bilderberg group was initially intended to establish: a United States of Europe.

On the European side, one major figure toward specifically the establishment of ISDS, was Hermann Abs, who ran Deutsch Bank, from 1957 on. He started attending the annual Bilderberg meetings in 1958. The next time he’s publicly known to have attended was 1966. Of course, Prince Bernhard himself was the leader at each meeting.

On the American side, David Rockefeller and his friend George W. Ball were regular attendees, right from the very first meeting of the group.

The key American  prerequisite to the establishment of ISDS was to overcome the provision in the U.S. Constitution that says, «The President… shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.» Whereas America was, even then, sufficiently corrupt so as to be able to muster the regular 50%+1 votes that’s required for a Senate win for any normal law, the likelihood that 67% of Senators would vote to pass a treaty that has ISDS in it, was recognized to be almost zero. America’s aristocrats therefore knew that some way would need to be found to circumvent the U.S. Constitution, because any attempt to amend  it so as to enable an ISDS treaty to pass Congress, would certainly fail. 

The solution they came up with was a provision they buried within the Trade Act of 1974, which Act was surreptitiously written so as to employ the term «treaty» only once (concerning a particular type of circumstance when «there is a treaty or trade agreement in force» and which thus entirely ambiguously handled the key question of whether the «or» meant either one, or else meant both of them as being synononyms meaning the same thing (which latter was the way that the laws had previously always assumed: a «treaty» is any  type of international agreement, and a «trade agreement» is merely a particular type of that) and then so as to employ the key phrase «trade agreement» 88 times — thence to handle such an entity («trade agreement») in an entirely different way from what the Constitution set forth as pertaining to a «treaty», under the there-implicit and never-stated assumption that a «trade agreement» between countries does not  consitute a particular type  of «treaty» between them: that it’s to be handled essentially like any regular law is. By this artificial device, sulphuric acid has become poured over, ultimately, the entire U.S. Constitution, bit by bit. All of this was done so that the U.S. can initiate ISDS treaties (and in other countries, they are always called  «treaties», because those countries don’t have any Constitutional safeguards against passing such monstrous treaties into force — other countries can just do  it).

The reason why America’s Founding Fathers had included the stringent requirement of two-thirds of U.S. Senators voting in favor of a treaty in order for it to become binding law in the U.S. is that they recognized that a treaty can almost never be abandoned by merely an individual country; it’s an agreement a core portion of which is its very membership; and any change in that membership is as difficult as is a successful secession of one part of a country from the rest of it — extremely  difficult. In other words, there is something about any treaty (or ‘international agreement’) that is potentially far more dangerous than a mere law within any single nation. So: the drafters of the U.S. Constitution required a two-thirds majority, instead of the usual simple majority, whenever a «treaty’ is being passed in the U.S. Senate.

In order to understand why the Republican President Richard Nixon was able in 1974 to obtain the support of both of the then-solidly Democratic two houses of Congress to pass into law the unConstitutional Fast-Track-initiating «Trade Act of 1974»,  notwithstanding the then-ongoing investigations by Democrats regarding Nixon’s Watergate scandal, one must go back actually to the first meeting of the extremely secretive elite fascistic international Bilderberg group, in 1954. Here from wikileaks is a 1955 status report from Bilderbergs, on their early-stage results; and the man who wrote that report and hypocritically praised in it «the quintessence of democratic life», was none other than the ‘former’ Nazi, Prince Bernhard, who went all the way to his grave in 2004 as a champion of global rule by the American and European aristocracies. (The group was subsequently expanded by Bilderbergers David Rockefeller and the born Polish nobleman Zbigniew Brzezinski to include Japan in their Trilateral Commission, many members of which are also Bilderbergers; but Brzezinski is no longer in the group, nor even mentioned on their website). Within just three years, the 1957 membership of the Bilderberg organization became far more American, far less European, but David Rockefeller and his Wall Street friend George W. Ball (the Ball family intermarried with the DuPont family) were, as I mentioned, two of the leading Bilderbergers from the very start.

THE ARISTOCRACY’S RADICAL REJECTION OF DEMOCRACY

The Bilderberg group turned away from the former Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s international goal for the post-WW II world (conceived in conjunction with Rexford Guy Tugwell, FDR’s chief policy-advisor), which international goal, building upon an already-existing grassroots movement, and entirely alien to the artificial concept of top-down aristocratic global control that the Bilderbergs promote, had been instead the gradual natural evolution, bottom-up, toward a democratic  world government: a global confederation of free and independent states, not corporate at all but instead a United States of the World, in which the types of imperial international aggressions that the fascist powers had perpetrated and which produced WW II would be outright banned, and this aggression-ban would be backed up by an international military force which would have the participation of each one of the world’s states.

In other words: FDR’s co-conception, and his enduring goal, was of a democratic federal world government, not of a fascist or any other dictatorial and non-federal world government. It envisioned an international democracy, consisting of the world’s nations as its federal units, even if some of those nations might still be dictatorships, in which case the democracy at the federal level (and the pressure from the democratic nations of the world) would then encourage any dictatorial nations to change or evolve in the direction of democracy. This was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s hope. It was a reasonable one. And it was rooted not only in an existing grassroots American movement but in a conception of how future history could evolve toward peace as naturally as possible, and with a minimum of command-and-control from the top — no aristocracy in control. This was a vision that was fully in keeping with the goals of America’s Founders. But it sought to extend  that vision to the international  sphere, in the modern age. The concept of a United States of the World was based on that. And the U.N. was to be the first step towards it.

(tto be continued)

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

But some attendees of Bilderberg Club meetings represent organizations whose names mean little to the public. But that’s not because those organizations are less influential than Goldman Sachs, HSBC, or Royal Dutch Shell. On the contrary, their impact is often even greater, although they avoid the limelight. And that’s true, not only during meetings of the club, but also in everyday life. Organizations like this are rightly known for working «behind the scenes».

In particular, Philipp Hildebrand, a vice chairman at BlackRock, made his appearance as one of the 140 participants at the meeting in Austria. Philipp Hildebrand is a man «widely known in narrow circles». A glance at his track record shows that in the past he has held positions such as IMF director for Switzerland, chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank (SNB), director of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and so on. And now he is a vice chairman at this little-known organization called BlackRock. But I would suggest that Blackrock’s influence is every bit as significant as JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley put together. In the past I have written that BlackRock is one of the Big Four – a group of huge financial holding companies that control many sectors of the economy in the US and abroad. Other members of the Big Four also include: the Vanguard Group; State Street Corporation; and FMR Corporation (Fidelity). Here is a brief sketch of BlackRock.

The company’s very name, «black rock», is probably intended to convey an image of strength and solidity. In a recent article titled «The Wars of Wall Street» (May 13, 2015), Russian strategic analyst Elena Larina wrote: «…behind every well-known bank on Wall Street stand even more powerful and unregulated institutions. Those are asset management companies. The biggest and most mysterious of them is the BlackRock corporation headed by Larry Fink. Currently it manages assets – the vast majority of which are stocks – worth more than $4.5 trillion. Just one figure – $36.5 trillion – gives an idea of the extent of the firm’s predominance, and that number is slightly less than the capitalization of this company that is included in the S&P 500, meaning that BlackRock controls a significant part of corporate America».

BlackRock (BR) is an international investment company headquartered in New York (USA). At the end of 2013 it had $4.57 trillion in assets under management. By mid-2014, those assets had grown to $4.77 trillion. Some experts believe that BlackRock controls more assets than any of the other Big Four firms.

BlackRock is the youngest of the Big Four, founded in 1988. It has literally only been in the market for a quarter century, but has soared to heights beyond the reach of other companies. The company has a global presence, with 21 investment centers and 70 offices in 30 countries and with clients in 100 countries.

And unlike the family-owned FMR, BlackRock is a public corporation with shares traded on the stock exchange. The principal owners of BR, if one can trust Wikipedia, are Bank of America (34.1 %), PNC Financial Services (24.6 %), and Barclays PLC (19.9 %). But that information is likely out of date. NASDAQ claims that as of Dec. 31, 2014, BR’s biggest shareholders (share capital, %) were: PNC Financial Services – 20.98; Norges Bank Investment Management – 7.15; Wellington Management Co. – 6.38; FMR – 4.16; Vanguard – 3.89; State Street – 3.43; and BlackRock Institutional Trust Company (BRITC) – 1.98. In additional to institutional investors, mutual funds also hold shares of BlackRock, as is typical. Almost every member of the pantheon of the Big Four is included in the top ten of these funds (six from the coterie of Vanguard, two from FMR, and another two have to be looked at separately).

The biggest institutional shareholder is PNC Financial Services – an American financial company with $345 billion in assets at the end of 2014 and headquartered in Pittsburgh. But when we look at who owns PNC Financial Services, it appears that its five largest institutional investors include three of the Big Four. That would be Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock Institutional Trust Company (BRITC). The last of these companies is a division of BlackRock – part of its empire.

And the third largest institutional investor – Wellington Management Co. – is very closely linked to another member of the Big Four, the financial company Vanguard. Perhaps the only one of BR’s institutional investors that is relatively independent of the Big Four is the company Norges Bank Investment Management – a specialized division of the Norwegian central bank, which is responsible for investing the Pension Fund of Norway in the financial markets.

Individual shareholders, primarily those who serve as the company’s senior managers, also invest in BlackRock. The five biggest individual investors own shares equal to 1.16% of the company’s capital (as of April 2015).6 The key figures in BlackRock’s management are: Laurence D. Fink – founder, chairman, and CEO; Robert S. Kapito – founder and co-president; Charles Hallac – co-president; and Susan Wagner – founder and member of the board of directors.

It is worth noting that BlackRock has the smallest staff of any of the Big Four companies – numbering only 11,500 (in 2013). That works out to over $400 million in managed assets per BlackRock employee. That figure is beyond the reach of other companies and organizations in the American financial sector.

Like the other Big Four companies, BlackRock owns a capital stake in the leading banks on Wall Street. But the company also has an appetite for European banks. In December 2009, BlackRock purchased Barclays Global Investors for $13.5 billion. As we see, BlackRock has a very intimate relationship with Barclays bank. That bank, by the way, took first place in a ranking created by the Institute of Technology in Zurich. The Rothschild-led Barclays Bank also held some staggering positions during the global financial crisis.

Suffice it to say that in 2007, Barclays was the biggest institutional investor in some key Wall Street banks, such as Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of New York Mellon. Plus, Barclays was the second largest institutional investor in the US bank Wells Fargo. Incidentally, Barclays also held strong positions in many non-US banks. It is worth noting that BlackRock was as a major shareholder in those same banks as well (although not as significant a figure as Barclays). It could also be seen that BlackRock and Barclays seemed to work in tandem, but their codependence was not easy to establish.

It can be difficult to figure out which end is the dog and which end is her tail and who is controlling whom. Is Barclays directing BlackRock or is BlackRock running the bank? But most experts are inclined to believe that it is BlackRock that is dominating the famous Barclays bank, which has always been associated with the Rothschild family. Therefore, a correction can be made to the Swiss rankings, in order to take into account BlackRock’s purchase of Barclays. The Swiss list of top ten companies did not previously include BlackRock, but now it can be added with confidence. If BlackRock assumes Barclays’ place, that will put it right at the top. The company is very influential, publishing the credit ratings of countries all over the world. According to its January 2013 rating, the most creditworthy country is Norway, followed by Singapore, Switzerland, Sweden, and Finland. BlackRock awarded the United States only 15th place.

Of course BlackRock’s interests are not limited to banks. It buys shares in a wide spectrum of industries in different parts of the world. We have talked about how Fidelity owns a 7% stake in the world-famous company Google. And the second largest investor is BlackRock with 5.7%. NASDAQ provides information about the investment activity of several major divisions within the BlackRock financial holding company: BlackRock Group Ltd. (BRG), BlackRock Institutional Trust Company (BRITC); and BlackRock Fund Advisors (BRFA). See table 1.

Table 1.

The investment activities of BlackRock’s financial holding company (as of Dec. 31, 2014)

Source:  nasdaq.com; nasdaq.com; nasdaq.com.

Let’s take a closer look at BlackRock’s investment priorities based on the example of one of its divisions, BlackRock Fund Advisors (BRFA). These are the first ten positions in BRFA’s investment portfolio (the value of a block of shares as of Dec. 31, 2014 in billions of US dollars): Apple Inc. – 9.26; Microsoft – 5.03; Exxon Mobil – 4.91; Johnson & Johnson – 3.44; General Electric – 3.31; Chevron Corp – 3.11; Wells Fargo – 2.94; Pfizer Inc – 2.91; Berkshire Harthaway Inc – 2.89; and JP Morgan Chase – 2.75.

Here’s a guide to BlackRock’s investments in US banks (table 2). As we see, the financial holding company is involved with all of the Big Six Wall Street banks.

Table 2.

BlackRock’s investments in the Big Six US banks (in billions of US dollars; as of Dec. 31, 2014)

Source: nasdaq.com; nasdaq.com; nasdaq.com. .

And so, many banks and companies that are represented at the annual meetings of the Bilderberg Club, are, to a greater or lesser extent, dependent on BlackRock. If Philipp Hildebrand spoke at the current conference, then I am sure the other attendees listened to him with particular attention and respect. For this reason, one of the best-informed people in the world, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, once called BlackRock the most powerful financial corporation in the world.

The G7 concentrated on fighting terrorism, including the Islamic State, the relationship with Russia, financial markets (the heads of World Bank and International Monetary Banks were among the participants), the strengthening of World Trade Organization, the creation of US-EU economic association, tax evasion, Ebola virus and global ecological situation. 

The Astana ecumenical meeting was devoted to establishing peace on the basis of «global ethics». It stressed the importance of dialogue between religious and political leaders «to bring peace, security and harmony». It’s worth to note that in Astana the final declaration was read by Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran, a French cardinal of the Catholic Church and the President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue in the Roman Curia, not UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon or Secretary General of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Lamberto Zannier.

These issues are discussed publicly. As usually the real instruments of exercising global control were considered behind closed doors in Telfs-Buchen. There were tough measures taken to prevent information from leaking. Checkpoints were installed on the venues leading to the hotel. Military-grade security measures included new equipment to suppress cell phone communications, no matter the use of such devices is forbidden by European Commission Directive 1999/5/EC. Everyone who entered the security zone to be detained by police had to pay a 500 euros fine or spend two weeks in jail.

As a result, no information was available about the event, except the list of participants and the formally announced agenda. Normally the Bilderberg Club discussions are never made public. Media did not highlight the event. As usual, several hand-picked, influential journalists and prominent media figures were invited to this year’s meeting, but against journalistic standards they were strictly forbidden from revealing anything discussed during the event.This year’s attendees list included: Canadian journalist and National Post editor Andrew Coyne, former Economist Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, who now heads up former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s eponymous news outlet, Editor-in-Chief Economist Zanny Minton Beddoes. Beddoes previously worked as an economist at the bankster International Monetary Fund loan shark operation, and is a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

The meeting was also attended by chief economics commentator at The Financial Times and central bank apologist Martin Wolf. Also attending the conference for the first time was former Financial Times chief executive Rona Fairhead, who recently assumed the role of chairwoman for the BBC Trust, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s «governing body», and is also a director at HSBC. Mere hours after Fairhead was appointed head of BBC Trust last year, she was sued by HSBC shareholders alleging she helped launder money for terrorists and Mexican drug cartels.

As is known, American and British media are extremely monopolized. Chief editors and owners have close ties with state structures. Outlets are subject to strict censorship and function according to hard and fast rules. The ideas espoused at the meeting will be imperceptibly instilled by media to influence public opinion.

With all the secrecy around the event, the announced agenda and the list of attendees provide some clues to what the meeting was about. The key topics for discussion this year included: artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, chemical weapons threats, current economic issues, European strategy, globalisation, Greece, Iran, the Middle East, NATO, Russia, terrorism, the United Kingdom, the USA and the US elections. 

A look at the list of attendees makes think that the key items for debates were artificial intelligence, cybernetic security and current economic problems. The list of guests also included former US State Secretary Henry Kissinger, NATO  Secretary General Yens Stoltenberg and heads of major banks and companies. There were three attendees representing Google: Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google Inc., Demis Hassabis, Vice President of Engineering, Google DeepMind, Regina Dugan, Vice President for Engineering, Advanced Technology and Projects, Google. Her biography shows how close Google is tied to US military industrial complex. She served as the 19th Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – DARPA (2009-2012). In March 2012, she left government to take an executive role at Google. Just prior to the acquisition, it was announced that she would create, and lead, the Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group at Google-owned Motorola Mobility. 

In January 2014, Google announced the acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Lenovo but retained Dugan and her Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) team. Regina Dugan is known as an advocate of total surveillance. There are two things she and her team are working on – a digital tattoo and a once-daily pill, both of which would be used to authenticate you in some manner or another. The tattoo is a developmental system made by MC10. It has an antenna and some sensors embedded in it. The advanced tattoo could be used for authentication. The basic concept behind this type of tattoo isn’t all that different from the key fob you might use for work or the tap-to-pay credit card one might have. The main difference is that a person is less likely to lose his (her) tattoo. The pill has a small chip inside of it with a switch. It also has what amounts to an inside-out potato battery. When a person swallows it, the acids in the stomach serve as the electrolyte and power it up. The switch goes on and off, and it creates an 18-bit ECG-like signal in a human body and essentially the entire body becomes an authentication token. When a person touches his (or her) phone, computer, door, or car, he (or she) is authenticated in. The pill won’t be available in the near future, but it’s already received FDA clearance, which is normally a big hurdle. A person could take 30 of those a day for the rest of his (her) life. The pill has already been tested to work for authenticating a user with his or her cellphone, too. 

According to Dugan, Motorola is working with MC10 on a tattoo for authentication, and she has a prototype on her own arm. Dugan is also cooperating with a company called Proteus Digital Health that already has FDA clearance for an ingestible sensor as a medical device. She wants to use it for passwords, too. DARPA specializes on strategic micro systems (communications, electronic warfare, information nets security) and biological research, including gene engineering and applied neuroscience. The Agency closely cooperates with Google and NASA research center at Silicon Valley based Singularity University, the center of transhumanist thought. Transhumanism is an international cultural and intellectual movement with an eventual goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities. The research work is focused on developing artificial intellect – the technology of brain control. 

Eric Schmidt, the head of Google, never hid his plans to come up with the technology of total electronic surveillance. In his speeches he emphasizes that private life is a thing of the past. Schmidt wants Google to become a contemporary «Big Brother». The presence at the Telfs-Buchen meeting of people focused on the creation of artificial intellect and cyber security testifies to the fact that the global elite strive for drastic reform of society and bringing into life the ideas of transhumanism pretty soon. The plans envision imposing great limitations on private life and ultimately eliminating the right to privacy at all.

Working on the ways to intrude into people’s lives they arbitrarily construe the very notion of privacy. Asked about thee Bilderberg’s secrecy Schmidt said it was the right to privacy. According to him, to think that such meetings cannot be held privately means to promote the ideas of totalitarianism.

The 2013 Bilderberg club’s meeting showed that the forum goes through serious transformation. Having become associated with Google, the club has become kind of a Googleberg shifting its attention from other problems to mind control. Google has become a pioneer in the field of human control research. It has plans to build private cities. Lawrence "Larry" Page, an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur, who cofounded Google Inc., says the corporation has expressed interest in constructing cities, and CEO Larry Page wants to create autonomous zones that can experiment with social rules. The idea of private cities typically invokes fears of a dystopian future where malevolent corporations ruthlessly exploit the population for profits and establish the regime of totalitarianism and pervasive surveillance.

The real potential for Google and others creating private cities is in the developing world. The corporation believes that «poor countries are poor because they have predatory governments». Google thinks that these governments prevent their citizens from engaging in entrepreneurship. They also give monopoly privileges to their friends and family, enriching them at the expense of everyone else in society. These restrictions typically benefit the elite of those societies, condemning the masses to poverty. Without secure property rights and the rule of law, economic development is a pipe dream. The corporation believes it could offer hope. Because Google is worldwide and sufficiently well known, it could negotiate with developing nations’ governments for institutional autonomy to run private cities. Governments would merely need to get out of the way. This may seem like a tall order: abdicating power is rare. Luckily, it is already happening. Honduras passed a law allowing for zonas de empleo y desarrollo económico (ZEDEs), or autonomous regions. ZEDEs allow Honduras regions to opt out of civil and commercial law and import a legal system of their choosing. Further, ZEDEs are able to create their own administrative systems, allowing reprieve from corruption. Honduras is just the start. El Salvador and Costa Rica are considering creating their own autonomous regions. Whether the decision makers at Google choose to get involved is up to them. But Honduras offers a great opportunity to follow the company’s stated goals.

The major instrument of electronic control is electronic money. Those who are associated with banking business openly discuss the idea of drastically curbing cash or doing away with it at all. Last year, Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University published his report called Costs and Benefits to Phasing out Paper Currency. According to him, paper currency outlived its usefulness. He noted that it is precisely the existence of paper currency that makes it difficult for central banks to take policy interest rates much below zero, a limitation that seems to have become increasingly relevant during this century. Banning cash is also the way to do away with tax evasion and illegal activities. Striking a similar tone, former Bank of England economist Jim Leaviss penned an article for the London Telegraph published on May 13 called How to End Boom and Bust: Make Cash Illegal, in which he said a cashless society would only be achieved by «forcing everyone to spend only by electronic means from an account held at a government-run bank», which would be, «monitored, or even directly controlled by the government.» Willem Buiter, the Chief Economist at Citigroup, has recently advocated abolishing cash altogether in order to «solve the world’s central banks’ problem with negative interest rates».

Experts report that, no matter the issue was current economic problems, in reality it was the possibility of doing away with cash that the Bilderberg Club focused on this time. Naturally, there is no way to know what exactly decisions were taken. Economist Martin Armstrong was the only one to report about a secret meeting to end cash that was to be held in London in late May involving representatives from the ECB and the Federal Reserve. «I find it extremely perplexing that I have been the only one to report on the secret meeting in London. Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University, and Willem Buiter, the Chief Economist at Citigroup, will address the central banks to advocate the elimination of all cash to bring to fruition the day when you cannot buy or sell anything without government approval», wrote Armstrong. Armstrong first brought attention to the alleged meeting earlier in May when he revealed that representatives from the Federal Reserve, the ECB as well as participants from the Swiss and Danish central banks would all be attending a «major conference in London» at which Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University, and Willem Buiter, the Chief Economist at Citigroup, would give presentations.

While the world elite is providing funds for militants and pocket politicians who make the world plunge into the quagmire of wars, while the humanity is bracing up to counter viruses and epidemics invented by servants of the elite, the world rulers are consistent in their desire to create electronic governments using an integrated system of global electronic surveillance. Every man will have a constant international identification number to allow storing data on one’s private life, including the most delicate aspects, into a single data vase. Life would become totally transparent.

A special electronic card would store all the needed information to serve as a multipurpose document carrying out the role of passport, driver’s license, pension and medical insurance, the means to make transactions and a travel pass etc…With a microchip installed and an electronic identity card in a pocket a man would become constantly controlled by global surveillance system.

Banks, special services, the Pentagon and Google – they all pursue the same goal. They are building an electronic GULAG with no government, no national sovereignty and no personal freedom. All other things are nothing else but instruments to reach the paramount goal – absolute power.

We start at the G7 in the Bavarian Alps – rather G1 with an added bunch of “junior partners” – as US President Barack Obama gloated about his neo-con induced feat; regiment the EU to soon extend sanctions on Russia even as the austerity-ravaged EU is arguably hurting even more than Russia.

Predictably, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande caved in – even after being forced by realpolitik to talk to Russia and jointly carve the Minsk-2 agreement.

The hypocrisy-meter in the Bavarian Alps had already exploded with a bang right at the pre-dinner speech by EU Council President Donald Tusk, former Prime Minister of Poland and certified Russophobe/warmonger: “All of us would have preferred to have Russia round the G7 table. But our group is not only a group (that shares) political or economic interests, but first of all this is a community of values. And that is why Russia is not among us.”

So this was all about civilized “values” against “Russian aggression.”

The “civilized” G1 + junior partners could not possibly argue whether they would collectively risk a nuclear war on European soil over a Kiev-installed ‘Banderastan’, sorry, “Russian aggression.”

Instead, the real fun was happening behind the scenes. Washington factions were blaming Germany for making the West lose Russia to China, while adult minds in the EU – away from the Bavarian Alps – blamed Washington.

Even juicier is a contrarian view circulating among powerful Masters of the Universe in the US corporate world, not politics. They fear that in the next two to three years France will eventually re-ally with Russia (plenty of historical precedents). And they – once again – identify Germany as the key problem, as in Berlin forcing Washington to get involved in a Prussian ‘Mitteleuropa’ Americans fought two wars to prevent.

As for the Russians – from President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov downwards – a consensus has emerged; it’s pointless to discuss anything substantial considering the pitiful intellectual pedigree – or downright neo-con stupidity – of the self-described “Don’t Do Stupid Stuff” Obama administration policy makers and advisers. As for the “junior partners” – mostly EU minions – they are irrelevant, mere Washington vassals.

It would be wishful thinking to expect the civilized “values” gang to propose alternatives for the overwhelming majority of citizens of G7 nations getting anything other than Mac-jobs, or barely surviving as hostages of finance-junkie turbo-capitalism which only benefits the one percent.Rather easier to designate the proverbial scapegoat – Russia – and proceed with NATO-infused fear/warmongering rhetoric.

Iron Lady Merkel also found time to pontificate on climate change – instilling all and sundry to invest in a “low-carbon global economy.” Few noticed that the alleged deadline for full “decarbonization” was set for the end of the 21st century, when this planet will be in deep, deep trouble.

G7 summit at the Elmau castle in Kruen near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany (Reuters / Christian Hartmann)

Achtung! Bilderberg!

Obama’s neocon-induced newspeak continues to rule that Russia dreams of recreating the Soviet empire. Now compare it to what President Putin is telling Europe.

Last week, Putin found time to give an interview to the Milan-based Corriere della Sera at 2 am; the interview was published as the Bavarian Alps show went on, and ahead of Putin’s June 10 visit to Italy. Russia’s geopolitical interests and US- Russia relations are depicted in excruciating detail.

So Putin was a persona non grata at the G1 plus junior partners? Well, in Italy he visited the Milan Expo; met Prime Minister Renzi and Pope Francis; reminded everyone about the “privileged economic and political ties” between Italy and Russia; and stressed the 400 Italian companies active in Russia and the million Russian tourists who visit Italy every year.

Crucially, he also evoked that consensus; Russia had represented an alternative view as a member of the G8, but now “other powers” felt they no longer needed it. The bottom line: it’s impossible to have an adult conversation with Obama and friends.

And right on cue, from Berlin –where he was displaying his sterling foreign policy credentials, Jeb Bush, brother of destroyer of Iraq Dubya Bush, fully scripted by his neocon advisers, declared Putin a bully and rallied Europe to fight, what else, “Russian aggression.”

The rhetorical haze over what was really discussed in the Bavarian Alps only began to dissipate at the first chords of the real sound of music; the Bilderberg Group meeting starting this Thursday at the Interalpen-Hotel Tyrol in Austria, only three days after the G1 plus junior partners.

Possible conspiracies aside, Bilderberg may be defined as an ultra-select bunch of elite lobbyists – politicians, US corporate honchos, EU officials, captains of industry, heads of intelligence agencies, European royals – organized annually in a sort of informal think tank/policy-forming format, to advance globalization and all crucial matters related to the overall Atlanticist agenda. Call it the prime Atlanticist Masters of the Universe talkfest.

To make things clear – not that they are big fans of transparency – the composition of the steering committee is here. And this is what they will be discussing in Austria.

Naturally they will be talking about “Russian aggression” (as in who cares about failed Ukraine; what we need is to prevent Russia from doing business with Europe).

Naturally they will be talking about Syria (as in the partition of the country, with the Caliphate already a fact of post-Sykes-Picot life).

Naturally they will be talking about Iran (as in let’s do business, buy their energy and bribe them into joining our club).

But the real deal is really the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – the alleged “free trade” deal between the US and the EU. Virtually all major business/finance lobbyists for the TTIP will be under the same Austrian roof.

And not by accident Bilderberg starts one day before “fast track” presidential authority is to be debated at the US Congress.

WikiLeaks and a ton of BRICS

Enter WikiLeaks, with what in a fairer world would be a crucial spanner in the works.

The fast track authority would extend US presidential powers for no less than six years; that includes the next White House tenant, which might well be ‘The Hillarator’ or Jeb “Putin is a bully” Bush.

This presidential authority to negotiate dodgy deals includes not only the TTIP but also the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA).

WikiLeaks, just in time, published the Healthcare Annex to the secret draft “Transparency” chapter of the TPP, along with each country’s negotiating position. No wonder this draft is secret. And there’s nothing “transparent” about it; it’s an undisguised hold-up of national healthcare authorities by Big Pharma.

The bottom line is that these three mega-deals – TTP, TTIP and TiSA – are the ultimate template of what could be politely described as global corporate governance, a Bilderberg wet dream. The losers: nation-states, and the very concept of Western democracy. The winners: mega-corporations.

Julian Assange, in a statement, succinctly nailed it “It is a mistake to think of the TPP as a single treaty. In reality there are three conjoined mega-agreements, the TiSA, the TPP and the TTIP, all of which strategically assemble into a grand unified treaty, partitioning the world into the West versus the rest. This 'Great Treaty' is described by the Pentagon as the economic core to the US military's 'Asia Pivot.' The architects are aiming no lower than the arc of history. The Great Treaty is taking shape in complete secrecy, because along with its undebated geostrategic ambitions it locks into place an aggressive new form of transnational corporatism for which there is little public support."

So this is the real Atlanticist agenda – the final touches being applied in the arc spanning the G1 + added junior partners to Bilderberg (expect a lot of crucial phone calls from Austria to Washington this Friday). NATO on trade. Pivoting to Asia excluding Russia and China. The West vs. the rest.

Now for the counterpunch. As the show in the Bavarian Alps unrolled, the first BRICS Parliamentarian Forum was taking place in Moscow – ahead of the BRICS summit in Ufa next month.

Neocons – with Obama in tow – knock themselves out dreaming that Russia has become “isolated” from the rest of the world because of their sanctions. Since then Moscow has signed major economic/strategic contracts with at least twenty nations. Next month, Russia will host the BRICS summit – 45 percent of the world’s population, a GDP equivalent to the EU, and soon bigger than the current G7 – as well as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, when India and Pakistan, currently observers, will be accepted as full members.

G1 plus junior partners? Bilderberg? Get a job; you’re not the only show in town, any town.

Petraeus had passed on several 5-by-8 inch black notebooks containing classified information to Broadwell.

Despite his conviction, the former general remains a trusted adviser to the White House on its strategy in Iraq.

He will represent the United States on security issues at the Bilderberg confab in Austria beginning Thursday.

Unlike Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning, Petraeus was excused for his transgression because he is a valued insider and a key player in the global elite’s plan for a mass surveillance grid.

“Senators, generals, ambassadors, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the owner of The Atlantic were in the roster of powerful voices who wrote to a federal judge to ask him to go easy on” Petraeus, writes Cora Currier.

The list includes former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham and Admiral Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Dave is also humanly flawed, as many are, for which he has paid a huge price both personally and professionally,” Mullen said.

Double Standard

This attribute and excuse, however, was not extended to Snowden or Manning.

Snowden fled the United States and applied for political asylum to 21 countries after he leaked classified NSA information on mass surveillance. Vice President Joe Biden pressured the governments of those countries to refuse his asylum petitions. Snowden was eventually granted asylum in Russia.

Bradley Manning (now Chelsea Manning) was convicted in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses following his disclosure to WikiLeaks over 700,000 classified and unclassified but sensitive military and diplomatic documents. Manning was sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment and was dishonorably discharged from the Army.

Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of the website WikiLeaks where Manning’s cache of documents appeared, has been cloistered in the the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012. He applied for political asylum in the South American country but the British government says it will arrest and extradite him if he attempts to leave the embassy.

The fact David Petraeus will represent the United States at the Bilderberg meeting despite his criminal status demonstrates a double standard.

Government insiders handpicked by the global elite enjoy a special status while others, including a long list of whistleblowers, are routinely singled out by government for harsh and punitive treatment.

Petraeus Crucial to Surveillance Grid Agenda

In 2013, Petraeus attended the Bilderberg Group conference to push the “big data” agenda of the elite.

“The discussion about ‘big data’ is also likely to cover how social media can be used to launch more faux revolutions and social movements as it was in Egypt, which was aided in no small part by Google,”

Paul Joseph Watson wrote at the time.

As we have documented, the Internet of things is the process of manufacturing every new product with a system that broadcasts wirelessly via the world wide web, allowing industry and the government to spy ubiquitously on every aspect of your existence.

Petraeus has previously hailed the “Internet of things” as a transformational boon for “clandestine tradecraft”. In other words, it will soon be easier than ever before to keep tabs on the population since everything they use will be connected to the web, with total disregard for privacy considerations. The spooks won’t have to plant a bug in your home or your vehicle, you will be doing it for them.

It’s ironic that Petraeus is helping bolster the very same surveillance system that brought him down last year when details emerged of his extra-marital affair.

Kurt Nimmo, Global Research

The group’s press release stated that the meeting’s agenda would cover a wide range of issues such as the future of democracy and the middle class, the new international architecture of the Middle East, and the future of Europe. This vague and ambiguous wording concealed more specific issues that also became the subject of discussion. These included the prospect of Iran’s nuclear programme, particularly given the rapprochement between Russia, China and Iran; the rise of nationalistic movements in Europe increasing the risk of its disintegration; the gas agreement between Russia and China; the European Union’s future legislation on Internet privacy; cyber wars and their influence on Internet freedom; and climate change. 

There were two issues that became central: the situation in Ukraine, and Barack Obama’s foreign policy, regarded by the influential circles of the global establishment as inefficient. 

The tone of these discussions was set by the latest long-term gas contract between Russia and China. According to Western observers, the contract has allowed Russia to significantly strengthen its position in the world generally, and in Ukraine particularly. A long-term gas partnership between Russia and China deprives Kiev of its latest argument – control over the pipeline linking Russia to its European counterparts. At the same time, a strategic alliance between China and Russia has long been a headache for the West, which has done everything possible to prevent a rapprochement between the two countries.

One of the participants at the Bilderberg meeting in Copenhagen confirmed that Ukraine was one of the first issues to be discussed at the morning meeting on 31 May. Who exactly took part in the meeting is unknown, but certain conclusions can be made in view of the list of people invited.

It seems that the discussion’s participants were in no doubt that America’s current strategy in Ukraine is ineffectual, but were all completely unsure how it should be changed. They were particularly unsure about the extent to which it had become necessary for the West to reduce the level of tension in its relations with Moscow regarding the Ukrainian issue.

It is presumed that NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Philip Breedlove, a four-star American general and the commander of NATO forces in Europe, also took part in the Bilderberg discussion on Ukraine. Several days before the Bilderberg meeting, after a meeting of NATO Chiefs of Staff, the same Philip Breedlove announced that the alliance was not planning on changing the format of its relations with Russia on global security issues as a result of the Ukrainian crisis, especially with regard to Afghanistan. (It apparently did not occur to the US general to discuss whether Russia would like to maintain the format of its own relations with NATO in response to their differences over Ukraine.) Rasmussen’s position is less clear, but in recent public statements, he has not called for the confrontation with Russia to be intensified.

Eugene Rumer, Director of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at the Carnegie Center who previously called attention to the fact that the problem in Ukraine is far from the “Russian factor”, but the security vacuum created by the actions of the Kiev regime following events at Maidan, was also present at the Ukraine discussion. In addition, Rumer believes that Kiev’s attempts to obtain direct military aid from the US (in the form of arms supplies, for example) is counterproductive, since Ukraine itself is the 9th biggest arms exporter in the world, and its problem is not its lack of but rather its abundance of weapons.

It is revealing that there were almost no representatives from the European Union who are dealing with Ukraine invited to the meeting in Copenhagen (with the exception of Swedish Foreign Affairs Minister Carl Bildt). According to observers, the Europeans among the global elite are gradually being pushed aside from taking part in the resolution of the Ukrainian issue. 

On the whole, it was impossible for the fears of major industrialists and businessmen who traditionally make up a significant proportion of those invited to the Bilderberg meetings not to emerge during the discussions in Copenhagen, which are that the sanctions initiated by the Obama administration against Russia are wreaking havoc on their businesses without bringing any obvious benefits. 

In addition, critics of the Obama administration believe that by its actions in relation to the Ukrainian issue, it has created the conditions for Beijing and Moscow to begin successfully building long-term strategic relationships which the West cannot see as anything other than a threat to the system of global governance (hence containing the development of a partnership between China and Russia is once again a priority). 

After the Bilderberg Group meeting, it seems that pressure on Barack Obama is growing in the West from two sides simultaneously, from those who would like the White House to reduce the aggressiveness of its rhetoric towards Russia, and from those who are sharply critical of the US President’s indecisiveness and lack of determination regarding Ukraine and who believe that Ukraine should be kept as a territory to fight Russia in the years ahead.

It is difficult to say what the final balance of these forces will prove to be, but it is fairly obvious that dissatisfaction with Washington has grown in the West since the previous Bilderberg meeting. This dissatisfaction is shared by European leaders, transnational businesses, and even part of the US government elites. The irony of the situation revealed by the Ukrainian crisis is that there is a risk of the foreign policy isolation Washington used to scare Russia becoming real, albeit in other forms, for the US itself. 

It is unlikely that the results of the Bilderberg discussions will manifest themselves tomorrow, but they will begin to be felt by the autumn, and in all the most important areas of world politics – Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian…

An insider leaked the list of talking points for the ongoing Bilderberg conference to the investigative journalist last week, he said. The list has nine items, seven of which he shared:

1. Nuclear diplomacy and the deal with Iran currently in the making.

The club has long been cautious of a possible alliance between Russia, China and Iran. The deal that would lift Western pressure from the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program would affect this possibility.

2. Gas deal between Russia and China.

It came amid a serious political crisis in Ukraine, which threatens Russia’s supply of natural gas to European nations. Moscow has diversified its gas trade by sealing a long-term contract with Beijing. Potentially, China may replace the EU as the prime energy trade partner for Russia, a situation which strengthens Moscow’s position in Ukraine by undermining Washington’s effort to isolate Russia and Kiev’s leverage through its control of transit gas pipelines.

3. Rise of nationalist moods in Europe.

The agenda was formed before the latest European Parliament elections, which cast a spotlight on the trend. Populist eurosceptic parties are winning the hearts of Europeans from the UK to Greece to Hungary, dealing a blow to the union’s unity. A nationally driven and divided Europe would be reluctant to take globalization for granted.

4. EU internet privacy regulations.

Edward Snowden’s exposure of the scale of electronic surveillance on the part of the US National Security Agency and its allies worldwide sparked a major protest from privacy-seeking people. European politicians can’t ignore the calls to protect people’s communication from snooping, which potentially makes data collection more difficult. At least not immediately, as indicated by the apparent scaling down of Germany’s investigation into the NSA’s alleged surveillance.

5. Cyberwarfare and its potential effect on internet freedoms.

The destructive potential of cyber attacks is growing rapidly as reliance on the internet in all aspects of life rises. But the threat of state-sponsored hacker attacks is what some governments may use as a pretext for clamping down on the internet, undermining its role as a medium for the sake of security.

6. From Ukraine to Syria, Barack Obama’s foreign policy.

Critics of the US president blame him for betraying America’s leadership overseas, citing failures to defend American interests in Syria and lately in Ukraine. Obama’s newly announced doctrine calls on scaling down reliance on military force and using diplomacy and collective action instead. Bilderberg members will discuss whether this policy is doomed.

7. Climate change.

This is a regular topic for many high-ranking discussions, not only the Bilderberg conference in Denmark. People suspicious of the elites call climate change a euphemism for the artificial deindustrialization of some nations, with the goal of keeping the global economy under the control of transnational corporations and the expense of potential hubs of economic growth.

The Bilderberg Group is a six-decades-old club for some of the world’s most influential individuals, politicians, officials, businessmen, academics and European royalty, regularly gathering to discuss global policy issues. Critics accuse them of acting as a shadow unelected government, would-be rulers of the world, which take decisions affecting billions of people behind closed doors, with little regard for the needs or wishes of the general population.

In an apparent bid to dissipate these accusations, this time Bilderberg made its official agenda public. Among the 12 topics for this year’s conference were “the new architecture of the Middle East,” “Ukraine” and “The future of democracy and the middle class trap.”

4thmedia.org