The Systems Method

Bilderberg and Club of Rome

David Rockefeller	Henry Kissinger	Peter Carrington	James Wolfensohn

This is a brief chapter (and now an old one — assembled mostly in the late 1990s) on the Bilderberg group, and (no direct association) the Club of Rome. These are two of the perennial bugaboos of the frothing conspiracy theorist set. Let me not be the last to say that Bilderberg et al. are neither what the frothing set would have us believe, nor what the Bilderbergers et al. would have us believe. The truth probably isn't even strictly somewhere between their respective pretensions to reality.

The Bilderberg group is a self-governed association, a handful of whose associates are people somewhat like myself — academically minded economically oriented realists who recognize the superiority of open market systems to other systems and promote them on that basis. But most of them are the sort of people criticized and reviled by people like myself — hidebound bourgeois socialists blind to the perils of institutional rot, institutions of central control, and dilution of the prerogatives of private enterprises and of their principals and voluntary associates.

What Bilderberg associates all have in common is a desire to perpetuate some portion of the establishment status quo, and a belief that by guiding and coordinating the policies of transnational corporations and organizations, and the attitudes and policies that governments direct toward each other and toward private enterprise, this goal of perpetuation can be satisfied. The legal systems and political establishments of sovereign states emplace onerous obstacles to oligarchical globalism, but coordination of corporate policy — effectively erecting a global trust spanning all economic sectors — can be an end run around these restrictions. In this, the Bilderbergers are essentially correct, and so represent a genuine threat to civil society. If the legal entitlement to conduct endures, but the conduct is rendered economically impractical, the result is the same as if the conduct had been proscribed by law.

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The following book review, from The Economist 1999-Feb-13, is a useful introductory treatment of the systems paradigm, and particularly its strengths and weaknesses:

The systems approach

By the book

RESCUING PROMETHEUS.
By Thomas Hughes.
Pantheon Books; 416 pages; $28.50

AT AN American diplomat's home soon after Neil Armstrong had set foot on the moon in 1969, this reviewer teased a fellow guest whose firm had helped design the lunar-landing module: ``So, when the crunch came, Armstrong had to override your faulty computer and land the spacecraft manually.'' The guest was Simon Ramo, a guiding spirit behind the Atlas missile programme, the ``R'' in the aerospace firm TRW and, as a pioneer of systems engineering, one of the heroes of this book. ``Do you seriously believe,'' he replied, ``that we could allow a mere astronaut to override our lunar-landing system?''

His implication was that ``the system'' of hardware, software and communications protocols that managed the spacecraft had been programmed to allow for a very common human anxiety: the last-minute conviction that the machine has got it wrong. Had NASA engineers anticipated this and built in enough ``feedback'' to give the astronauts an illusion of control when they panicked? Shades of the computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick's ``2001''. The truth of Mr Ramo's boast is not the issue. The fact is that already 30 years ago there were large technical systems smart enough to do their assigned tasks while taking care of emergencies, errors and expediencies - even unpredictable ``wetware'' (humans) trying to mess things up.

Big engineering systems existed, to be sure, before systems engineering. The pyramids involved meticulous co-ordination. The cathedral builders of medieval Europe melded technology, utility and artistic skill into a form of religious architecture yet to be surpassed. For its day, Brunel's construction of the Great Western Railway was no less challenging than the Manhattan Project which produced the atom bomb nearly a century later.

By the mid-1950s, however, something had changed. The sheer scale of projects demanded a new approach. With its 18,000 academic researchers plus 70,000 workers spread around more than 200 firms, the Atlas project to build America's first intercontinental ballistic missile did more than change the cold war. It produced a new sort of management that spread through the military and industrial worlds to alter forever how the United States earned its keep.

As teams of engineers and scientists polarised around problems rather than technologies, new cross-disciplinary bodies such as Rand, Mitre, and Ramo-Wooldridge (later TRW) emerged in America to apply theories of queuing, games, decisions, information and control as well as statistics, operations research and linear programming in a wholly integrated way. As American industry inched into the systems era, its prowess evolved, from stamping out gadgets by the million to creating smaller numbers of much pricier and more complex things - airliners, fancy weapons, telecoms satellites, chemical plants, air-traffic controls. These, today, are among America's main exports.

In ``Rescuing Prometheus'', an industrial historian, Thomas Hughes, seeks to give the large technological undertakings of the cold-war era their due. His ode to systems engineering includes a detailed look at three large defence projects and one civilian one. The first, the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) project to build a radar-based air-defence system, is the most instructive - in large part because it was a flop.

As an air-raid defence system, SAGE worked well. Unfortunately, by the time it was deployed in 1958, missiles had replaced bombers as the big threat. But SAGE pioneered a new form of collaboration, in which a university (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) worked with the Pentagon during the design and development stage. Like the troublesome Erie Canal in the early 19th century, SAGE was one of technology's big learning experiences.

As chapters of post-war history, the author's three other examples provide a rare insight into industrial planning on a huge scale. His account of the Atlas missile programme is an eye-opener on how efficient the military-industrial complex really was when seriously competent people were in charge. The description of Arpanet, the forerunner of the Internet that the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency backed so that university researchers could easily communicate amongst themselves, explains a lot of what the web-surfers nowadays take for granted. The one purely civilian system Mr Hughes considers, Boston's central artery and tunnel-road project, makes much the same point as his other case histories, and with more or less equal force: no matter how much computational power is assembled or data collected, there is no substitute for managerial genius.

If this excellent book has a fault, it is the over-defensive tone that Mr Hughes adopts towards critics of the systems approach. When, in the 1960s and 1970s, this was applied to social problems such as poverty, healthcare and crime, the results were usually disappointing. Systems enthusiasts woefully underestimated the complexity of human behaviour and the great quantities of computing power needed to model it in any meaningful way. Misuse in the Vietnam war did not help. A reaction set in and ``the systems approach'' became a term of abuse. Yet, in its proper place - an industrial or military context with clear lines of command - systems engineering remains to this day the most powerful tool yet devised for problem-solving on a giant scale. As such, it needs no defence.

from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, System Dynamics Group, by Jay W. Forrester, Germeshausen Professor Emeritus and Senior Lecturer, D-4224-4 1991-Apr-29 (download in its entirety, in PDF format with graphics, from ftp://sysdyn.mit.edu/ftp/sdep/papers/D-4224-4.pdf):

System Dynamics and the Lessons of 35 Years

1. INTRODUCTION

The professional field known as system dynamics has been developing for the last 35 years and now has a world-wide and growing membership. System dynamics combines the theory, methods, and philosophy needed to analyze the behavior of systems in not only management, but also in environmental change, politics, economic behavior, medicine, engineering, and other fields. System dynamics provides a common foundation that can be applied wherever we want to understand and influence how things change through time.

The system dynamics process starts from a problem to be solved-a situation that needs to be better understood, or an undesirable behavior that is to be corrected or avoided. The first step is to tap the wealth of information that people possess in their heads. The mental data base is a rich source of information about the parts of a system, about the information available at different points in a system, and about the policies being followed in decision making. The management and social sciences have in the past unduly restricted themselves to measured data and have neglected the far richer and more informative body of information that exists in the knowledge and experience of those in the active, working world.

System dynamics uses concepts drawn from the field of feedback control to organize available information into computer simulation models. A digital computer as a simulator, acting out the roles of the operating people in the real system, reveals the behavioral implications of the system that has been described in the model. The first articles based on this work appeared in the Harvard Business Review (Forrester, 1958). From over three decades in system dynamics modeling have come useful guides for working toward a better understanding of the world around us.

The continued search for better understanding of social and economic systems represents the next great frontier. Frontiers of the past have included creating the written literatures, exploring geographical limits of earth and space, and penetrating mysteries of physical science. Those are no longer frontiers; they have become a part of everyday activity. By contrast, insights into behavior of social systems have not advanced in step with our understanding of the natural world. To quote B. F. Skinner:

"Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world... Today he is the thing he understands least. Physics and biology have come a long way, but there has been no comparable development of anything like a science of human behavior... Aristotle could not have understood a page of modern physics or biology, but Socrates and his friends would have little trouble in following most current discussions of human affairs." (Skinner, 1971, p. 3)

The great challenge for the next several decades will be to advance understanding of social systems in the same way that the past century has advanced understanding of the physical world.

2. DESIGNING MANAGERIAL AND SOCIAL SYSTEMS

Everyone speaks of systems: computer systems, air traffic control systems, economic systems, and social systems. But few realize how pervasive are systems, how imbedded in systems we are in everything we do, and how influential are systems in creating most of the puzzling difficulties that confront us.

People deal differently with different kinds of systems. Engineering systems are designed using the most advanced methods of dynamic analysis and computer modeling to anticipate behavior of a system when finally constructed. On the other hand, although political, economic, and managerial systems are far more complex than engineering systems, only intuition and debate have ordinarily been used in building social systems. But, powerful system-design methodologies have evolved over the last 50 years.

In designing an engineering system, say a chemical plant, engineers realize that the dynamic behavior is complicated and that the design can not successfully be based only on rules of thumb and experience. There would be extensive studies of the stability and dynamic behavior of the chemical processes and their control. Computer models would be built to simulate behavior before construction of even a pilot plant. Then, if the plant were of a new type, a small pilot plant would be built to test the processes and their control.

But observe how differently social systems are designed. We change laws, organizational forms, policies, and personnel practices on the basis of impressions and committee meetings, usually without any dynamic analysis adequate to prevent unexpected consequences.

"Designing" social systems or corporations may seem mechanistic or authoritarian. But all governmental laws and regulations, all corporate policies that are established, all computer systems that are installed, and all organization charts that are drawn up constitute partial designs of social systems. Such redesigns are then tested experimentally on the organization as a whole without dynamic modeling of the long-term effects and without first running small-scale pilot experiments. For example, bank deregulation and the wave of corporate mergers in the 1980s constituted major redesigns of our economy with inadequate prior consideration for the results. All systems within which we live have been designed. The shortcomings of those systems result from defective design, just as the shortcomings of a power plant result from inappropriate design.

Consider the contrast between great advances during the last century in understanding technology, and the relative lack of progress in understanding economic and managerial systems. Why such a difference? Why has technology advanced so rapidly while social systems continue to exhibit the same kinds of misbehavior decade after decade? I believe the answer lies in failing to recognize that countries and corporations are indeed systems. There is an unwillingness to accept the idea that families, corporations, and governments belong to the same general class of dynamic structures as do chemical refineries and autopilots for aircraft.

There is a reluctance to accept the idea that physical systems, natural systems, and human systems are fundamentally of the same kind, and that they differ primarily in their degree of complexity. To admit the existence of a social system is to admit that the relationships between its parts have a strong influence over individual human behavior.

The idea of a social system implies sources of behavior beyond that of the individual people within the system. Something about the structure of a system determines what happens beyond just the sum of individual objectives and actions. In other words, the concept of a system implies that people are not entirely free agents but are substantially responsive to their surroundings.

To put the matter even more bluntly, if human systems are indeed systems, it implies that people are at least partly cogs in a social and economic machine, that people play their roles within the totality of the whole system, and that they respond in a significantly predictable way to forces brought to bear on them by other parts of the system. Even though this is contrary to our cherished illusion that people freely make their individual decisions, I suggest that the constraints implied by the existence of systems are true in real life. As an example, we see the dominance of the political system over the individual in the evolution of the Federal budget deficit. Every presidential candidate since 1970 has campaigned with the promise to reduce the federal deficit. But the deficit has on the average doubled every four years. The social forces rather than the president have been controlling the outcome. How to harness those social forces has not been effectively addressed.

[...]

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Oct-13, p.C1, by Dennis K. Berman:

In NBC Deal, Learn From Game Theory

You read it here first. The much-discussed Comcast-NBC Universal deal is going to happen. Vivendi, which is deciding what to do with its 20% ownership in General Electric's NBC Universal, will flirt with IPOing its stake, but will relent to the Comcast plan. Surprisingly, the price will be lower than many expect.

Or at least, that's what the numbers on the spreadsheet predict.

That spreadsheet is the work of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, an unassuming-looking New York University and Stanford University researcher prone to big claims: Namely, that by using a mathematical model, he is uncommonly good at predicting the future.

Dr. Bueno de Mesquita is in the wonky business of applied game theory. This is the stuff of Cold War strategists, who deployed computers to find the most logical choices for fighting a war. Dr. Bueno de Mesquita's innovation is to update many of those Atari-era concepts for a Wii generation. That means bringing sophisticated game theory and prediction techniques into everyday choices: local politics, legal battles, and yes, Wall Street deal making.

The 62-year-old has honed down many of these concepts into a new book, called "The Predictioneer's Game." If you can stomach the author's self-regard, it's a bracing, eye-opening primer into the strategic decision-making that lies at the heart of the merger game.

Dr. Bueno de Mesquita is hostile to human sentiment. In his worldview, the world's actors -- be it priests, politicians, or bankers -- are cunning calculators of self interest. Mother Teresa? A do-gooder with a materialistic need for acclaim. What about a CEO considering the sale of her company? Like many people on Wall Street, Dr. Bueno de Mesquita favors big "golden parachutes" as a way to motivate CEOs to sell, and thus deliver a pay out for shareholders.

This world may be brutal, but it is rational. And because it is rational, it can be observed, understood and quite often predicted or manipulated, says Dr. Bueno de Mesquita.

The key to unlocking all this rests inside his mathematical model, which was developed over 30 years with early assistance from Defense Department grants (the military and CIA have used it). The model takes simple inputs for each player: a number that captures each player's desired outcome, his power, his negotiating flexibility and the issue's importance.

When just a few players are involved, it's easy to keep track of these dynamics. But once the group expands to dozens or hundreds, "you, being human, can only keep track of so much information," says Dr. Bueno de Mesquita. "The computer has this incredible memory." (You can play with a stripped-down version of the program at predictioneersgame.com)

The model then crunches the data, looking for the ebbs and flows of negotiation: who might form a coalition; who loses interest; and who can exert the most power as conditions changes. It is like chess, with people.

For the Comcast-NBCU game, I provided Dr. Bueno de Mesquita a crude approximation of the positions of the dozen parties most likely to influence a deal.

For example, I estimated that NBC boss Jeff Zucker had a strong preference for avoiding a Comcast deal, but had little power in the actual negotiations. I reasoned that Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy was less eager to do a Comcast deal if he could get a good price in an NBCU IPO. Liberty Media's John Malone was ranked as a bit player, willing only to buy NBCU at a cheap price.

Of course, these were rough estimates done on the fly. As Dr. Bueno de Mesquita reminded me, my evaluations could be flawed. His work was done over a weekend, which may influence the quality of the results. Most assignments can take three weeks, at an opening price of $50,000. He has been used by companies and banks in at least a dozen merger negotiations, he says. Most he can't disclose, save for his work aiding British Aerospace in its takeover of Marconi Electronic Systems in 2000.

Dr. Bueno de Mesquita remains confident that with rigorous data his model could predict outcomes with unexpected success. He is right nine times out of 10, according to a declassified CIA assessment which he is happy to boast about.

Whether the NBCU prediction will prove right is somewhat beside the point. The value of "The Predictioneer's Game" is that peels back the artifice of a politician rolling out a new law. Or a company proclaiming a transaction is, in Wall Street parlance, in the best interest of shareholders.

In this cruel, rational world, "getting the best deal possible doesn't mean the best for shareholders," says Dr. Bueno de Mesquita. "It means the best for the people making the decisions."

The Club of Rome offers the standard fare - disarmament, population control, fear of unbridled technology, macroeconomic modelling and management, etc. There is much more about the Club of Rome below. But in a fascinating twist, a member of the executive committee - Ilya Prigogine - has written a short paper that is at odds with much of the Club's traditional views - indeed, wonderfully dismissive of a core premise of the entire world government paradigm: the Bilderberger mentality, the Harvard Model, the whole bloody nine yards. Here it is in its entirety (hand-converted from RTF to HTML), from http://www.clubofrome.org/public/prigogi_txt_sat12.rtf:

Uncertainty: the key to the science of the future?

By Ilya Prigogine, Nobel laureate, Director of the International Solvay Institute of Physics and Chemistry in Brussels and the I. Prigogine Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems at the University of Texas at Austin; member of The Club of Rome.

In a world where little seems predictable, where every day brings news of further political and economic upheavals, where we are even threatened with radical changes in the global climate, certainty is a rare commodity. Yet in his best selling book, A Brief History of Time (1), Stephen Hawking argues that we are close to the certainty which will come from understanding the full complexity of the universe. Once the "complete theory" of the universe is discovered, Hawking says the only remaining question would be "why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason...", for then we would know the mind of God.

This quest for total understanding has been the ultimate goal of physics, from Leibniz three centuries ago to contemporary writers such as Steven Weinberg ⁽²⁾.

It is indeed a grandiose project. To quote Leibniz: "In the least of substances, eyes as piercing as those of God could read the whole course of the universe." There would be no distinction between past, present and future; we would share the certainty of God.

We can perhaps take comfort from the fact, recently pointed out by Stephen Toulmin ⁽³⁾, that the religious wars and political instability of the 17th century formed the background for Descartes to formulate his quest for certainty - a certainty that all human beings could share, irrespective of religion. Descartes' programme proved to be immensely successful : it influenced Leibniz's concept of "laws of nature" and found concrete expression in Newton's work which provided the model for physics for over 300 years.

For Einstein, also, science was a way of going beyond the turmoil of everyday existence. He compared scientific activity to the "longing that irresistibly pulls the town-dweller away from his noisy, cramped quarters and toward the silent, high mountains" ⁽⁴⁾. He, too, considered certainty to be the supreme ideal of science.

The problem with this ideal of certainty is that it is associated with a denial of time and of novelty which leads to feelings of alienation. As Weinberg has said, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." Indeed, the ideas of certainty forces us to give up the notion of events and eliminates the novelty and creativity without which our own lives would be pointless.

The logical consequence is dualism. In Descartes' system, matter follows deterministic laws and is radically separated from intellectual activity.

Certainty is, however, beginning to be challenged - quite rightly, in my opinion. We are witnessing the start of a timely reappraisal of the fundamental laws of physics. In 1986, the then president of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Sir John Lighthill, was moved to apologize collectively for physicists spreading ideas about determinism, based on their forebears' enthusiasm for the achievements of Newtonian mechanics - ideas which had since 1960 been proved false ⁽⁵⁾. This is a quite unusual confession. Certainty, for three centuries the key symbol of scientific intelligibility, is being put into question.

Lighthill was referring to developments in chaos theory, a topic too complex to explain here. I want only to make a remark based mainly on the recent work of my groups in Austin and Brussels. Chaos changes the formulation of the laws of physics: instead of expressing certainties, they express possibilities. At its beginning "the universe was like a newborn baby who can become a lawyer, an astronaut - but not all at the same time." As W. Thirring has written, "Our formulation of the laws of nature cannot contradict experience ... but they will be far from determining everything. As the universe evolves, the circumstances create new laws." ⁽⁶⁾

Some people may feel that giving up the ideal of certainty marks a defeat for human reason, but I do not agree.

Once we replace the deterministic description with one involving probability, we can introduce the arrow of time into our basic equations and start to describe an evolutionary universe, in agreement with the important place of evolution in describing everything from cosmology to human history.

We can now make predictions, going far beyond classical theory, about complex systems such as the stability of our planetary system and our ecosystem.

Once we include time, we begin to understand the variety of the physical world - both the order of living systems and the disorder existing in the universe. The distinction is basically due to the arrow of time: over time, non-equilibrium processes generate complex structures that cannot be achieved in an equilibrium situation. The result is a whole new physics and a new biology of non-equilibrium processes.

Since evolutionary events related to self-organization play an essential role in both living and non-living sytems, science is no longer deterministic. Nor is it reductionist as new properties of matter appear in non-equilibrium processes that cannot be expressed in terms of individual particles.

Even the direction of time itself becomes linked to global properties of ensembles, whether elementary particles, living cells or human populations. For example, societies evolve not because individuals become older, but because the relations between individuals change.

Far from coming to the end of science, as Hawking suggests, in my opinion we are only just beginning to be able to produce a coherent view of the universe. We come from a past of conflicting certainties - be they related to science, ethics or social systems - to a present of questioning. This will mean finding a type of scientific rationality more appropriate to our times.

The future is uncertain, but this uncertainty is at the heart of human creativity. Time becomes "construction" and creativity a way to participate in this construction. As Aurelio Peccei, the founder of the Club of Rome, said, "Inventing the future is the most important and most difficult human invention."

Hopefully, just as in the 17th century, our present turmoil is stimulating scientific developments which will contribute to inventing the future.

1 Bantam Books, New York 1988.
2 Dreams of a Final Theory (publication details to be supplied)
3 Cosmopolis The University of Chicago Press, 1990
4 Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, New York 1954, p. 225.
5 Proceedings of the Royal Society 402 1986, p. 35.
6 (to be supplied)

Bilderberg is driven by the systems methodology. This is the methodology satirized in The Report from Iron Mountain and Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. This latter in particular is a direct and deliberate indictment of Bilderberg. Of the former, Henry Kissinger wrote "Whoever wrote it is an idiot."

The system paradigm, in a nutshell, is the precept that one can effectively control the future by a two step process: (1) analyzing the present into primitive components and their interrelations, and (2) architecting a strategy of selective manipulation, reconstruction, introduction, and abolition, of components and interrelations. Strictly speaking, this methodology is the most effective of any - though if applied unwisely or maliciously, it is also the most destructive and pernicious.

Problems - grave problems - arise in three principal areas: (1) accurate, precise, thorough ascertainment of what the components and the interrelations are, (2) the choice of goal, and (3) the development of an implementation strategy. Total accuracy, precision, and thoroughness of analysis are impossible with any system of more than modest complexity. Societies of humans are, of course, of far more than modest complexity. Systematicians tend to underestimate the complexity of natural systems, and overestimate their capacity to accommodate complexity, both in analysis and in architecture. In particular, based on an undefendable presumption of rigor of analysis, and due to mistaken ascertainment of human nature, they develop architectures that include components and relations of rigor and regimentation, where chaos-tolerant components and relations of suggestion and flexibility are requisite.

Social and economic systematicians, being institutional academics as a rule, often choose and accept goals that are noxious, particularly when the system includes people. And, often through no deliberate intent, the architectures they develop cause disastrous collateral damage, wreaking havoc on human autonomy and conflicting wildly with the prerequisites of individual human fulfillment.

An old cliché is an apt caution for all systematicians and those subject to their machinations: A little knowledge is far more dangerous than none at all.

Bilderberg is where the top conspirators broadly effect implementation of their architecture. It is ground zero for practical conspirator coordination. The conspirator systematicians exhibit all the ills detailed above. In particular, the goal they accept is perpetuation of the existing power structure. This goal is inimical to humanity, and particularly noxious to its brightest and most inventive members. In one of those examples of happenstance that smack of fate, the chief conspirator architect - Henry Kissinger - has the initials HAK.

Using data assembled by Tony Gosling, I have done a simple analysis of attendance at Bilderberg '99 (Hotel Caesar Park Penha Longa, Sintra, Portugal), '98 (Turnberry, Ayrshire, Scotland), '97 (Pine Isle resort, Lake Lanier, near Atlanta, Georgia, USA), '96 (CIBC Leadership Centre, Toronto, Canada), and '95 (Zurich, Switzerland). The nucleus of power obviously is the set of people who attended all of them - these are the people Bilderberg is built around. I separately list people who attended four of the five meetings, and end with a list of curious attendees who aren't regulars. David Rockefeller is notable in his habitual attendance not only of Bilderberg, but of CFR and TLC gatherings, making it obvious that he is indeed the Chairman of the Board of the World. Hidden behind the scenes is the House of Rothschild, which nonetheless does make personal Bilderberg appearances.

My guess is that Sir Evelyn de Rothschild (Chairman, N M Rothschild & Sons - nmrothschild.co.uk) and perhaps some other Rothschilds set the covert agenda for each Bilderberg meeting, and have final say on who will attend in a given year, and David Rockefeller mediates their agenda, though Henry Kissinger may also act as a direct mediator. Carrington likely has much direct involvement in auditing prospective invitees. The Chairman - Peter Carrington, until 2000 when Etienne Davignon assumed the chairmanship - is the one who actually sends the invitations. The Advisory Group, Steering Committee, and Honorary Secretaries-General, nominally recommend attendees, but in practice this is not quite how things work.

Conrad Black brags (or confesses, depending on one's point of view) that "After 1986, I became the co-leader of the Canadian group and effectively chose most of the Canadian participants." Presumably, Agnelli "effectively" chooses the Italian participants, Balsemao the Portuguese, Barnevik the Swedish, Davignon the Belgian, Hoegh the Norwegian, Halberstadt the Dutch, Olechowski the Polish, de Pury the Swiss, Schrempp the German, Seidenfaden the Danish, Sutherland the Irish, Vranitzky the Austrian, Collomb the French, David the Greek, Carvajal Urquijo the Spanish, and Wolfensohn, all those not otherwise included. Selection of US and UK participants is clearly more complicated.

One might assume that those officially designated as "representatives" ("REP" in the below list) would be the ones that choose participants from their respective nations, but this is clearly not the case, considering that Black is not a "representative." Status as a representative is likely indicative of a person tending to organizational and reporting responsibilities specific to his nation. The Steering Committee ("STEERING") consists of four people responsible for more general administrative and organizational responsibilities. The role of the Advisory Committee ("ADVISORY") is unclear to me, but appears to be an ultra-select aristocratic old boy's club.

Tony Gosling has assembled a treasure trove of details on Bilderberg's history and function. This is vital reading.

This is Bilderberg

I have also created a complete alphabetically sorted list of all '95-'99 attendees.

Read here the documents presented at Bilderberg '99.

Here's Tony Gosling's mailing regarding Bilderberg 2003, just to refresh this info a bit:

Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 15:55:48 -0400
Subject: PEPIS #51 - Bilderberg participants, Versailles 2003
Reply-to: tony@gaia.org
Sender: messagebot@harry.flamingtext.com
From: "tony@gaia.org" <tony@gaia.org>

This is being sent on behalf of tony@gaia.org as part of the mailing list that you joined.
List: PEPIS
URL: http://www.bilderberg.org
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PEPIS #51 - 24May03 - Bilderberg participants, Versailles 2003

Here's this years list of participants, with a few comments.

The version of this participant list is on my web-page http://www.bilderberg.org/2003.htm#participants includes many links to Bilderberg participants' websites. It makes for interesting surfing. Please send me in any 'missing links' or comments.
Even though I clearly photographed King Juan-Carlos of Spain going into the conference he does not appear on the list - unless as an appendage of Queen Sofia - which I doubt. So I'd advise you to treat this official participant list with plenty of healthy suspicion.

cheers,

Tony

2003 Agenda -- from Bilderberg Press Release

"The conference will deal mainly with European-American relations and in this context Iraq, The Middle East after Terrorism, Non-Proliferation, The European Convention, Economic Problems." (rest of 'press release' much like previous years but no participant list yet)

2003 Participant list

BILDERBERG MEETINGS Versailles, France, 15-18th May 2003 CURRENT LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

B - Honorary Chairman - Davignon, Etienne - Vice-Chairman, Societe Generale de Belgique
GB - Honorary Secretary General - Taylor. J Martin - Chairman WH Smith PLC; International advisor, Goldman Sachs International

F - Adler, Alexandre - Editorial counsel, Le Figaro
I - Ambrosetti, Alfredo - Chairman Ambrosetti Group
TR - Babacan, Ali - Minister of Economic Affairs
GR - Bakoyannis, Dora - Mayor of Athens
GB - Balls, Edward - Chief Economic Advisor to the Treasury
P - Balsemão, Francisco Pinto - Professor of Communication Science, New University, Lisbon; Chairman and CEO, IMPRESA, S.G.P.S.; Former Prime Minister
P - Barroso, José M. Durão - Prime Minister
TR - Bayar, Mehmet A. - Deputy Chairman of DYP (True Path Party)
A - Becker, Erich - Chairman of the Managing Board and CEO, VA Technologie AG
I - Bendetti, Rodolfo de - Managing Director CIR S.p.A.
I - Bernabè, Franco - Chairman Franco Bernabe & C. S.p.A.
F - Beytout, Nicolas - Editor-in-Chief, Les Echos
KW - Bishara, Ahmad E. - Secretary General of Kuwait's liberal National Democratic Party
CDN - Black, Conrad M. - Chairman, Telegraph Group Limited
INT - Bolkestein, Frits - Internal Markets Commissioner, European Commission
USA - Bolton, John R. - Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security
F - Bon, Michel - Honorary Chairman, France Telecom
F - Bruguière, Jean-Louis - First Vice President, Justice Department
D - Burda, Hubert - Publisher and CEO, Hubert Burda Media Holding GmbH & Co.
F - Camus, Phillipe - CEO, European Aeronautics Defence and Space company European Aeronautics Defence and Space company (EADS)
INT - Cary, Anthony J. - Head of Christopher Patten's cabinet, EU. [Patten is European Commissioner for Enlargement]
F - Castries, Henri de - Chairman of the Board, AXA
E - Cebrián, Juan Luis - CEO, PRISA
B - Claes, Willy - Minister of State [Willy Claes is not now a Belgian Minister but former Belgian Foreign Minister and former Secretary General of NATO 1994-1995 - now disgraced - TG]
GB - Clarke, Kenneth - Member of Parliament, [former Chancellor of the Exchequer]
USA - Collins, Timothy C. - Senior Managing Director and CEO, Ripplewood Holdings LLC
F - Collomb, Bertrand - Chairman and CEO, Lafarge
F - Copé, Jean-François - Secretary of State in charge of relations with Parliament; Government Spokesman
USA - Corzine, Jon S. - Senator (D, New Jersey)
S - Dahlbãck, Claes - Chairman, Investor AB
GR - David, George A. - Chairman of the Board, Coca-Cola H.B.C. S.A.
USA - Donilon, Thomas E. - Executive Vice President, Fannie Mae
I - Draghi, Mario - Vice-Chairman and Managing Director, Goldman Sachs International
DK - Eldrup, Anders - CEO, Danish Oil and Gas Corporation
USA - Feldstein, Martin S. - President and CEO, National Bureau of Economic Research
CDN - Fell, Anthony S. - Chairman, RBC Dominion Securities Inc.
USA - Friedman, Thomas L. - Foreign Affairs Columnist, The New York Times
F - Gergorin, Jean-Luis - Executive Vice President, Strategic Coordination, European Aeronautics Defence and Space company (EADS)
USA - Gigot, Paul A. - Editorial page editor, The Wall Street Journal
F - Giscard d'Estaing, Valéry - French President 1974-81; Chairman of the Convention on the Future of Europe
N - Gjedrem, Svein - Governor, Central Bank of Norway
IRL - Gleeson, Dermot - Chairman designate, Allied Irish Banks, p.l.c.
GB - Gould, Philip - Public Relations Adviser to Prime Minister Blair
USA - Haass, Richard N. - Director, Office of Policy Planning Staff, State Department
NL - Halberstadt, Victor - Professor of Economics, Leiden University; Former honorary Secretary General of Bilderberg Meetings
CDN - Harper, Stephen - Leader of the Opposition
USA - Hertog, Roger - Vice-Chairman, Alliance Capital Management
NL - Hoop Scheffer, Jaap G. de - Minister for Foreign Affairs
USA - Hubbard, Allan B. - President, E&A Industries
USA - Hubbard, R. Glenn - Russell L. Carson Professor of Economics and Finance, Columbia University
USA - Johnson, James A. - Vice Chairman, Perseus L.L.C.
USA - Jordan, Jr., Vernon E. - Senior Managing Director, Lazard Freres & Co. L.L.C.
CH - Kielholz, Walter B. - Former Chairman of the Board, Credit Suisse; Executive Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors, Swiss Re
GB - King, Mervyn A. - Deputy Governor, Bank of England
USA - Kissinger, Henry A. - Chairman, Kissinger Associates, Inc.; Member, Defense Policy Board; Member J.P. Morgan International Council
FIN - Kivinen, Olli - Senior Editor & Columnist, Helsingin Sanomat
NL - Kok, Wim - Former Prime Minister
D - Kopper, Hilmar - Former Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Deutsche Bank AG
USA - Kravis, Henry R. - Founding Partner, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
USA - Kravis, Marie-Joseé - Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, Inc.
INT - Lamy, Pascal - Trade Commissioner, European Commission
F - Lellouche, Pierre - Vice Chairman, NATO Parliamentary Assembly
F - Lévy-Lang, André - Former Chairman, Paribas
S - Lindh, Anna - Minister for Foreign Affairs
FIN - Lipponen, Paavo - Former Prime Minister; Speaker of the Parliament
DK - Lykketoft, Mogens - Chairman, Social Democrat Party
CDN - MacMillan, Margaret O. - Provost, Trinity College, University of Toronto
RUS - Margelov, Mikhail V. - Chairman, Committee for Foreign Affairs, Council of Federation
F - Montbrial, Thierry de - President, French Institute of International Relations (IFRI)
INT - Monti, Mario - Competition Commissioner, European Commission
USA - Mundie, Craig J. - Chief Technical Officer, Advanced Strategies and Policy, Microsoft Corporation
N - Myklebust, Egil - Chairman, Norsk Hydro ASA
D - Naas, Matthias - Deputy Editor, Die Zeit
NL - Netherlands, H.M. the Queen of the [Queen Beatrix - Royal Dutch Shell]
PL - Olechowski, Andrzej - Leader, Civic Platform
FIN - Ollila, Jorma - Chairman of the Board and CEO, Nokia Corporation
INT - Padoa-Schioppa, Thomasso - Member of the Executive Board, European Central Bank
I - Panara, Marco - Journalist, La Republica
I - Passera, Corrado - Managing Director, Banca IntesaBCI
USA - Perkovich, George - Vice President for Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
USA - Perle, Richard N. - Member, Defense Policy Board ; Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for Public Policy Research; member Project for a New American Century (PNAC)
B - Philippe, H.R.H. Prince - Crown Prince of Belgium
I - Poli, Roberto - Chairman, Eni S.p.A.
F - Ranque, Denis - Chairman and CEO, Thales Aerospace and Defence
DK - Rasmussen, Anders Fogh - Prime Minister
CDN - Reisman, Heather - President and CEO, Indigo Books & Music Inc.
F - Riboud, Franck - Chairman and CEO, Danone Foods
CH - Ringier, Michael - CEO, Ringier AG
USA - Rockefeller, David - Member, J.P. Morgan International Council
P - Rodrigues, Eduardo Ferro - Leader of the Socialist Party; Member of Parliament
E - Rodriguez Inciarte, Matias - Executive Vice Chairman, Banco Santander Central Hispano
F - Roy, Olivier - Senior Researcher, CNRS
USA - Ruggie, John - Director, Center for Business and Government, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
NL - Ruys, Anthony - Chairman of the Board, Heineken N.V.
TR - Sanberk, Özdem - Director, Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation
I - Scaroni, Paolo - Managing Director, Enel S.p.A.
D - Schãuble, Wolfgang - Deputy Parliamentary Leader, CDU/CSU Group
D - Schily, Otto - Minister of the Interior
A - Scholten, Rudolf - Member of the Board of Executive Directors, Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG
D - Schrempp, Jurgen E - Chairman of the Board of Management, Daimler Chrysler AG
INT - Schwab, Klaus - President, World Economic Forum
DK - Seidenfaden, Toger - Editor in Chief, Ploitiken
RUS - Shevtsova, Lilia - Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
E - Spain, H.M. the Queen of [King Juan Carlos (see photo) arrived with the queen, but he is not on this list]
USA - Steinberg, James B. - Vice President and Director, Foreign Policy Studies Program, The Brookings Institution
CDN - Steyn, Mark - Journalist for various publications
IRL - Sutherland, Peter D. - Chairman and Managing Director, Goldman Sachs International; Chairman, BP Amoco
USA - Thornton, John L. - President and CEO, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
F - Trichet, Jean Claude - Governor, Banque de France
GR - Tsoukalis, Loukas - Professor, University of Athens; President Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy
A - Trumpel-Gugerell, Gertrude - Vice Governor, Central Bank of Austria
CH - Vasella, Daniel L. - Chairman and CEO, Novartis AG
NL - Veer, Jeroen van der - President, Royal Dutch Petroleum Company; Vice Chairman of the Committee of Managing Directors of Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies
F - Villin, Philippe - Vice Chairman, Lehman Brothers Europe
NL - Vries, Klaas de - Member of Parliament (Labour); Former Minister of the Interior
FIN - Whalroos, Björn - President and CEO, Sampo plc.
S - Wallenberg, Jacob - Chairman of the Board, Skandinavivska Enskilda Banken
GB - Williams, Gareth - Leader of the House of Lords
GB - Wolf, Martin H. - Associate Editor/Economics Commentator, The Financial Times
USA/INT - Wolfensohn, James D. - President, The World Bank
USA - Wolfowitz, Paul - Deputy Secretary of Defense, US Department of Defense
USA - Zakaria, Fareed - Editor, Newsweek International
USA - Zoellick, Robert - Principal Trade Adviser to the President
D - Zumwinkel, Klaus - Chairman, Deutsche Post Worldnet AG

Rapporteurs

GB - Micklethwait, R. John - United States Editor, The Economist
GB - Rachman, Gideon - Brussels Correspondent, The Economist

from BBC News Online, 2004-Jun-3, by Jonathan Duffy:

Bilderberg: The ultimate conspiracy theory

The Bilderberg group, an elite coterie of Western thinkers and power-brokers, has been accused of fixing the fate of the world behind closed doors. As the organisation marks its 50th anniversary, rumours are more rife than ever.

Given its reputation as perhaps the most powerful organisation in the world, the Bilderberg group doesn't go a bundle on its switchboard operations.

Telephone inquiries are met with an impersonal female voice - the Dutch equivalent of the BT Callminder woman - reciting back the number and inviting callers to "leave a message after the tone".

Anyone who accidentally dialled the number would probably think they had stumbled on just another residential answer machine.

But behind this ultra-modest façade lies one of the most controversial and hotly-debated alliances of our times.

On Thursday the Bilderberg group marks its 50th anniversary with the start of its yearly meeting.

For four days some of the West's chief political movers, business leaders, bankers, industrialists and strategic thinkers will hunker down in a five-star hotel in northern Italy to talk about global issues.

What sets Bilderberg apart from other high-powered get-togethers, such as the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), is its mystique.

Not a word of what is said at Bilderberg meetings can be breathed outside. No reporters are invited in and while confidential minutes of meetings are taken, names are not noted.

The shadowy aura extends further - the anonymous answerphone message, for example; the fact that conference venues are kept secret. The group, which includes luminaries such as Henry Kissinger and former UK chancellor Kenneth Clarke, does not even have a website.

DISCREET AND ELITE This year Bilderberg has announced a list of attendees They include BP chief John Browne, US Senator John Edwards, World Bank president James Wolfensohn and Mrs Bill Gates

In the void created by such aloofness, an extraordinary conspiracy theory has grown up around the group that alleges the fate of the world is largely decided by Bilderberg.

In Yugoslavia, leading Serbs have blamed Bilderberg for triggering the war which led to the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic. The Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the London nail-bomber David Copeland and Osama Bin Laden are all said to have bought into the theory that Bilderberg pulls the strings with which national governments dance.

And while hardline right-wingers and libertarians accuse Bilderberg of being a liberal Zionist plot, leftists such as activist Tony Gosling are equally critical.

A former journalist, Mr Gosling runs a campaign against the group from his home in Bristol, UK.

"My main problem is the secrecy. When so many people with so much power get together in one place I think we are owed an explanation of what is going on.

Mr Gosling seizes on a quote from Will Hutton, the British economist and a former Bilderberg delegate, who likened it to the annual WEF gathering where "the consensus established is the backdrop against which policy is made worldwide".

"One of the first places I heard about the determination of US forces to attack Iraq was from leaks that came out of the 2002 Bilderberg meeting," says Mr Gosling.

But "privacy, rather than secrecy", is key to such a meeting says Financial Times journalist Martin Wolf, who has been invited several times in a non-reporting role.

"The idea that such meetings cannot be held in private is fundamentally totalitarian," he says. "It's not an executive body; no decisions are taken there."

As an up-and-coming statesmen in the 1950s, Denis Healey, who went on to become a Labour chancellor, was one of the four founding members of Bilderberg (which was named after the hotel in Holland where the first meeting was held in 1954).

His response to claims that Bilderberg exerts a shadowy hand on the global tiller is met with characteristic bluntness. "Crap!"

"There's absolutely nothing in it. We never sought to reach a consensus on the big issues at Bilderberg. It's simply a place for discussion," says Lord Healey.

Formed in the spirit of post-war trans-Atlantic co-operation, the idea behind Bilderberg was that future wars could be prevented by bringing power-brokers together in an informal setting away from prying eyes.

"Bilderberg is the most useful international group I ever attended. The confidentiality enabled people to speak honestly without fear of repercussions.

"In my experience the most useful meetings are those when one is free to speak openly and honestly. It's not unusual at all. Cabinet meetings in all countries are held behind closed doors and the minutes are not published."

That activists have seized on Bilderberg is no surprise to Alasdair Spark, an expert in conspiracy theories.

"The idea that a shadowy clique is running the world is nothing new. For hundreds of years people have believed the world is governed by a cabal of Jews.

"Shouldn't we expect that the rich and powerful organise things in their own interests. It's called capitalism."

from WorldNetDaily, 2004-Jun-4:

Guess who's at super-secret Bilderberg meeting today
Italy hosts 50th-anniversary confab of mysterious society of world leaders

The 50th anniversary conference of the elite Bilderberg group -- which many believe conspires semi-annually to foster global government -- is under way in Stresa, Italy.

The conference, which began yesterday and will run through Sunday, is being hosted at the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromees.

Since 1953, the Bilderberg group has convened government, business, academic and journalistic representatives from the U.S., Canada and Europe with the express purpose of exploring the future of the North Atlantic community.

According to sources that have penetrated the high-security meetings in the past, the Bilderberg meetings emphasize a globalist agenda and promote the idea that the notion of national sovereignty is antiquated and regressive.

'Shadowy aura'

"It's officially described as a private gathering," noted a BBC report last year, "but with a guest list including the heads of European and American corporations, political leaders and a few intellectuals, it's one of the most influential organizations on the planet."

And according to a current BBC report on the conference in Stresa: "Not a word of what is said at Bilderberg meetings can be breathed outside. No reporters are invited in and while confidential minutes of meetings are taken, names are not noted. The shadowy aura extends further -- the anonymous answerphone message, for example; the fact that conference venues are kept secret. The group, which includes luminaries such as Henry Kissinger and former UK chancellor Kenneth Clarke, does not even have a website."

But, counter participants, the secrecy is not evidence of a grand conspiracy, but only an opportunity to speak frankly with other world leaders out of the limelight of press coverage and its inevitable repercussions.

"There's absolutely nothing in it," argues the UK's Lord Denis Healey, one of the four founders of Bilderberg. "We never sought to reach a consensus on the big issues at Bilderberg," he told the BBC. "It's simply a place for discussion."

Here is the partial guest list of the current meeting obtained by WorldNetDaily -- which includes Senators John Edwards, D-N.C. and Jon Corzine, D-N.J., Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, Melinda Gates (wife of Bill Gates), David Rockefeller, Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of the Washington Post Company, and even Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition:

N - Auser, Svein - CEO, DnB NOR ASA; D - Ackermann, Josef - Chairman, Group Executive Committee, Deutsche Bank AG; I - Ambrosetti, Alfredo - Chairman, Abbrosetti Group; TR - Babacan, Ali - Minister of Economic Affairs; P - Balsemao, Francisco Pinto - Chairman and CEO, IMPRESA, SGPS, Former Prime Minister; ISR - Barnavie, Elie - Department of General History, Tel-Aviv University; I - Benedetti, Rodolfo De - CEO, CIR; I - Bernabe, Franco - Vice Chairman, Rothschild Europe; F - Beytout, Nicolas - Editor In Chief, Les Echos; INT - Bolkestein, Frits - Commissioner for the Internal Market, European Commission, former leader of Dutch right wing Liberal Party VVD; USA - Boot, Max - Neoconservative, Council on foreign Relations, Features Editor, Wall Street Journal; CH - Borel, Daniel - Chairman, Logitech International S.A.; I - Bortoli, Ferrucio de - CEO, RCS Libri; S - Brock, Gunnar - CEO, Atlas Copco AB; GB - Browne, John - Group Chief Executive, BP plc; NL - Burgmans, Antony - Chairman, Unilever NV; F - Camus, Phillipe - CEO, European Aeronautic Defence and Space NV; I - Caracciolo, Lucio - Director, Limes Geopolitical Review; F - Castries, Henri de - Chairman, AXA Insurance; E - Cebrian, Juan Luis - CEO, PRISA (Spanish language media company), former Chairman, International Press Institute; TR - Cemal, Hasan - Senior Columnist, Milliyet Newspaper; GB - Clarke, Kenneth - Member of Parliament (Con.), Deputy Chairman, British American Tobacco; USA - Collins, Timothy C - MD and CEO, Ripplewood Holdings LLC, Yale School of Management, Trilateral Commission; USA - Corzine, Jon S. - Senator (D, New Jersey), Chairman and CEO, Goldman Sachs; CH - Couchepin, Pascal - Former Swiss President, Head of Home affairs Dept.; GR - David, George A. - Chairman, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company SA; B - Dehaene, Jean-Luc - Former Prime Minister, Mayor of Vilvoorde; TR - Dervis, Kemal - Member of Parliament, former senior World bank official; GR - Diamantopoulou, Anna - Member of Parliament, former European Commissioner for Social Affairs; USA - Donilon, Thomas L - Vice-President, Fannie Mae, Council on Foreign Relations; I - Draghi, Mario - Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Goldman Sachs; USA - Edwards, John - Senator (D. North Carolina), Democratic Presidential Candidate; DK - Eldrup, Anders - Chairman, DONG gas company (becoming privatised) A/S; DK - Federspiel, Ulrik - Ambassador to the USA; USA - Feith, Douglas J. - Undersecretary for Policy, Department of Defense; I - Galateri, Gabriele - Chairman, Mediobanca; USA - Gates, Melinda F. - Co-Founder, Gates Foundation, wife of Bill Gates; USA - Geithner, Timothy F. - President, Federal Reserve Bank of New York; I - Giavazzi, Francesco - Professor of Economics, Bocconi University; adviser, world bank and European Central bank; IRL - Gleeson, Dermot - Chairman Allied Irish Bank Group (currently being investigated for personal and corporate tax evasion); USA - Graham, Donald E. - Chairman and CEO, Washington Post Company; USA - Haas, Richard N. - President, Council on Foreign Relations, former Director of Policy and Planning staff, State Department; NL - Halberstadt, Victor - Professor of Economics, Leiden University; B - Hansen, Jean-Pierre - Chairman, Suez Tractabel SA; S - Heikensten, Lars - Governor, Swedish Central Bank; USA - Holbrooke, Richard C - Vice Chairman, Perseus, former Director, Council on Foreign Relations, former Assistant Secretary of State; USA - Hubbard, Allen B - President E&A Industries; USA - Issacson, Walter - President and CEO, Aspen Institute; USA - Janow, Merit L. - Professor, International Economic Law and International Affairs, Columbia University; USA - Jordan, Vernon E. Senior Managing Director, Lazard Freres & Co LLC; USA - Kagan, Robert - Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; GB - Kerr, John - Director, Shell, Rio Tinto, Scottish American Investment Trust; USA - Kissinger Henry A. - Chairman, Kissinger Associates Inc.; TR - Koc, Mustafa V. - Chairman, Koc Holdings AS; NL - Koenders, Bert (AG) - Member of Parliament, president, Parliamentary Network of the World Bank; USA - Kovner, Bruce - Chairman Caxton Associates LLC, Chairman, American Enterprise Institute; USA - Kravis, Henry R. - Founding Partner, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., acquisitions financier; USA - Kravis, Marie Josee - Senoir Fellow, Hudson Institute Inc.; FIN - Lehtomaki, Paula - Minister of Foreigh Trade and Development; FIN - Lipponen, Paavo - Speaker of Parliament; CHN - Long, Yongtu - Secretary General, Boao forum for Asia; P - Lopes, Pedro M. Santana - Mayor of Lisbon; USA - Luti, William J. - Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs; CDN - Lynch, Kevin G. - Deputy Minister, Department of Finance; USA - Mathews, Jessica T. - President, Carnegie Endowment for International War Peace; USA - McDonough, William J. - Chairman and CEO, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, former president, Federal Reserve Bank of New York; CDN - McKenna, Frank - Counsel, McInnes Cooper, former premier of New Brunswick; I - Merlini, Cesare - Executive Vice Chairman, Council for the United States and Italy, Council on Foreign Relations, former director, Italian Institute for International Affairs; F - Montbrial, Thierry de - President, French Institute of International Relations; INT - Monti, Mario - Competition Commissioner, European Commission; USA - Mundie, Craig J. - Chief Technical Officer, Advanced Strategies and Policies, Microsoft Corporation; N - Myklebust, Egil - Chairman, Scandinavian Airline System (SAS); D - Naas, Matthias - Deputy Editor, Die Zeit; NL - Netherlands, HM Queen Beatrix; GB - Neville-Jones, Pauline - Chairman, QuinetiQ (UK privatized military research/services company), governor of the BBC, Chairman Information Assurance Advisory Council, formar Chairman Joint Intelligence Committee, former Managing Director NatWest Markets; USA - Nooyi, Indra K. - President and CEO, PepsiCo Inc.; PL - Olechowski, Andrzej - Leader, Civic Platform; FIN - Ollila, Jorma - Chairman, Nokia Corporation; INT - Padoa-Schioppa, Tommaso - Director, European Central Bank; CY - Pantelides, Leonidas - Ambassador to Greece; I - Passera, Corrado - CEO, Banca Intesa SpA; USA - Perle, Richard N. - Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, former Likud policy adviser, former chair Defence Policy Board, former co-chairman, Hollinger Digital; B - Phillipe, HRH Prince; USA - Reed, Ralph E. - President, Century Strategies; CDN - Reisman, Heather - President and CEO, Indigo Books and Music Inc.; I - Riotta, Gianni - Editorialist, Corriere della Serra; USA - Rockefeller, David - Member JP Morgan International Council, Chairman, Council of the Americas; E - Riodriguez Inearte, Matias - Vice Chairman, Grupo Santander; USA - Ross, Dennis B - Director, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy; D - Sandschneider, Eberhard - Director, Research Institute, German Society for Foreign Policy; I - Scaroni, Paolo - CEO, Enel SpA; D - Schilly, Otto - Minister of the Interior; USA - Schnabel, Rockwell A. - Ambassador to the EU; A - Scholten, Rudolf - Director, Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG; D - Schrempp, Jurgen E. - Chairman, DaimlerChrysler AG; E - Serra Rexach, Eduardo - Head, Real Institute Elcano; RUS - Shevtsova, Lilia - Senior Associate. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; PL - Sikora, Slawomir - President and CEO, Citibank Handlowy; I - Siniscalo, Domenico - Director General Ministry of the Economy; P - Socrates, Jose - Member of Parliament; USA - Strmecki, Marin J. - Smith Richardson Foundation; B - Struye de Swielande, Dominique - Permanant repressentative of Belguim, NATO; IRL - Sutherland, Peter D. - Chairman, Goldman Sachs International, Chairman, BP plc; USA - Thornton, John L. - Chairman, Brookings Institution, Professor, Tsinghua University; I - Tremonti, Giulio - Minister of Economy and Finance; INT - Trichet, Jean-Claude - President, European Central Bank; I - Tronchetti Provera, Marco - Chairman and CEO, Pirelli SpA; N - Underdal, Arild - Rector, University of Oslo; CH - Vasella, Daniel L. - Chairman and CEO, Novartis AG; NL - Veer, Jeroen van der - Chairman, Committee of Managing Directors, Royal Dutch/Shell; GB - Verwaayen, Ben J. M. - CEO, British Telecom; former director, Lucent Technologies; I - Visco, Ignazio - Foriegn Affairs Manager, Banca D'Italia; INT - Vitorino, Antonio M. - Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner, European Union; INT - Vries, Gijs M. de - EU Counter Terrorism Co-ordinator; S - Wallenberg, Jacob - Chairman, SEB investments (including biotech); Chairman, W Capital Management AB; D - Weber, Jurgen - Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Deutche Lufthansa AG; GB/USA - Weinberg, Peter - CEO, Goldman Sachs International; NL - Wijers, Hans - Chairman, AkzoNobel NV; D - Wissmann, Matthias - Member of Parliament; GB - Wolf, Martin H. - Associate Editor/Economic Commentator, The Financial Times; INT/USA - Wolfenson, James D. - President, The World Bank; RUS - Yavlinsky, Grigory A. - Member of Parliament; USA - Yergin, Daniel - Chairman, Cambridge Energy Research Associates; D - Zumwinkel, Llaus - Chairman, Deutche Post Worldnet AG.

In addition, according to the Bilderberg.org website, two reporters ("rapporteurs") from the British publication The Economist will also be attending: Gideon Rachman, Brussels correspondent, and Adrian D. Wooldridge, the magazine's foreign correspondent. [Bilderberg has two Economist reporters in attendance every year, and they never disclose a word about the event. -AMPP Ed.]

That may afford slightly more transparency than in the past. In 1998, British free-lance journalist Campbell Thomas attempted to cover the conference in Turnberry, Scotland, for the Daily Mail. Thomas began by seeking the opinions of neighbors to the secret meeting being held nearby. One of those was a young woman who told him he was in the hotel's staff quarters and should leave immediately, which he did. A short while later, two local police officers arrested Thomas, who reportedly remained in custody for eight hours.

British journalist Jon Ronson, who is the author of a book on Bilderberg, had this to say: "I'm a sort of semi-conspiracy theorist when it comes to Bilderberg because I think they wouldn't go to that much trouble of having this incredibly expensive international conference every year and they'd go to all this trouble to keep themselves out of the press and be really secret and invite the world's most powerful people if it was just a chat and a game of golf, which is basically what they say it is. So I do think they have some impact on world affairs."

Some observers are even speculating that President Bush will make an appearance at this year's event, just as Bill Clinton did at the group's 2000 meeting. By coincidence, it just happens that Bush will be in Italy over the weekend ...

from American Free Press, 2004-Jun, by James P. Tucker Jr.:

Investigation Reveals: Bilderbergers Want Taxes Up, War in Iraq Over

Stresa, Italy-At this year's secret Bilderberg meeting, some of the world's most powerful elite focused on U.S. taxes and foreign giveaways, as well as the increasingly violent Iraq occupation and the role the United Nations should play in all future similar outbreaks of violence.

Prior to the meeting, a Bilderberg memo promised that its members would deal mainly with European-American relations and in that context, with U.S politics, Iraq, the Middle East, European geopolitics, NATO, China, energy and economic problems.

During the conference, Britain came in for harsh criticism for supporting the invasion of Iraq. It was also lambasted for failing to embrace the euro, despite Prime Minister Tony Blair's promise to do so at a Bilderberg meeting some years ago in the Scottish resort of Turnberry.

Bilderberg members also expressed frustration with the rising clamor in Britain to quit the European Union.

As expected, the United States was heavily criticized for the fact that its foreign aid was a smaller percentage of gross domestic product than that of other nations. That marked the third straight meeting at which Bilderbergers' decades of almost total congeniality was marred by hostility among the Americans, Britons and continental Europeans.

The first evidence of division in the ranks was apparent in 2002 when Bilderbergers met at Chantilly, Va., near Washington. Then, Europeans were angry that the United Sates was preparing for an invasion of Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tried to placate them with a promise not to invade "this year." Instead, the war began in March 2003.

Bilderbergers, however, remain united in their long-term goal to strengthen the role the UN plays in regulating global relations. Aside from that objective, other matters on this year's conference agenda included the following:

British elites are to press on with membership in the European Union despite growing domestic opposition.

The Free Trade Area of the Americas should be enacted and include the entire Western Hemisphere except for Cuba until Fidel Castro is gone. It should then evolve into the "American Union" as a carbon copy of the European Union.

An "Asian-Pacific Union" is to emerge as the third great superstate, neatly dividing the world into three great regions for the administrative convenience of banking and corporate elites. The United States and other international financial institutions should facilitate and administrate these global trade pacts.

Bilderbergers have, for some time, argued for three global currencies-the euro for Europe, the dollar for the American Union and another for the "Asian-Pacific Union."

One Bilderberger, Kenneth Clarke, a former chancellor of the British exchequer, saw the consolidation of currencies as an ideal strategy when he spoke to this reporter several years ago in Portugal. At that time, Clarke told me that "dollarization" would dominate the globe and "our children will laugh at all the petty currencies we have now."

Another much-discussed subject at this year's conference was the concept of imposing a direct UN tax on people worldwide. In order to achieve it, some Bilderbergers presented two proposals: a tax on oil at the wellhead and a tax on international financial transactions.

Bilderberg leaders tilted strongly toward the oil tax because everyone who drives a car, rides public transportation or flies in a plane will end up paying the tax. That will represent more people than those engaged in international financial transactions across the globe.

On the issue of Iraq, European Bilderbergers were more upset that the United States invaded without the UN's blessing than the fact that over 800 American soldiers have died and thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens have been killed. [Note that American Free Press is a fanatical left wing propaganda outfit - the author says American soldiers "died" but Iraqi citizens "have been killed", whereas of course many of those American soldiers were killed - many by booby traps. -AMPP Ed.]

Word reached the conference from Rumsfeld, who was unable to attend this year's meeting, that the U.S. military would assume a more defensive stance in Iraq, rather than the more provocative operations of door-to-door searches and widespread detention.

Rumsfeld was, however, represented in Stresa by Douglas Feith, his undersecretary for policy, and William Luti, deputy undersecretary for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. Former Pentagon advisor Richard Perle, one of the major architects of the war in Iraq, was also present. It had been Perle, Feith and Paul Wolfowitz who, from the mid 1990s, had fashioned the Middle East policy later adopted by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

European Bilderbergers also protested the fact that the Pentagon was considering reducing troop levels in Germany and tried hard to convince their American counterparts to resist the move. They argued it would "undermine unity" and, irrespective of the military implications, the German economy benefited annually from the millions of dollars spent by U.S. servicemen there.

Resistance in Britain to the euro, and to membership in the European Union, caused much concern and was deemed an obstacle to the solidification of the superstate.

It was noted that many Europeans were unaware of the European Parliament elections scheduled for June 10 and should there be a low turnout, it could be attributed to a protest boycott of the elections by EU opposition groups.

Four former Conservative members of Parliament have endorsed the United Kingdom Independence Party, which demands British withdrawal from the European Union. And, if allowed to vote in a referendum, it has been reported that Britons would reject membership in the European Union by strong proportions. A YouGov survey, taken at the end of May, showed 48 percent would vote to get out of the European Union and 36 percent would vote to stay in.

As it stands, Europeans can only select members for the European Parliament but not the EU Commission, the bureaucratic powerhouse of the union.

Bilderberg participants ended their secret sessions on an upbeat note with a ferry ride to a luxury island on Lake Maggiore, where John Elkman, the latest vice president of the Fiat motor company, will marry his new bride in September.

from The News, 1999-May-1:

International power brokers meet to discuss global future
World's most secret society to meet in Sintra

The world's most secret society is to meet in Portugal in June. Bilderberg, one of the most secretive organisation in the world, comprising presidents, royal families, ministers, top industrialists and financial leaders are set to meet in Sintra, Portugal at the beginning of June. Francisco Pinto Balsamão, former Portuguese PM, media baron and frequent attendee of the meetings is listed as the member for Portugal. The security for the Bilderberg meetings, which are held at irregular intervals and prompted by the state of world affairs, is the responsibility of the host country. According to sources in Washington, Bilderberg will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to reimburse the Portuguese government for deploying military forces to guard their privacy and for helicopters to seek out intruders. Bilderberg have ordered the resort to be shut down for a full 48 hours before the conference. The Bilderberg delegates, comprising some of the world's most powerful decision makers, will be here to discuss highly classified issues which are not supposed to be disclosed to the public by the press, before or after the meeting.

Initially alerted to this meeting by a New York reader who requested anonymity, The News contacted the Caesar Park Penha Longa resort in Sintra to verify the information that the secret meeting will be held at their resort. The only confirmation we received was that an organization `wishing for the utmost privacy' would be in Sintra and that the hotel was fully and exclusively booked by this organisation from June 2 to June 7.

The agenda for the meeting is said to include a "globilaztion summit", during which nations which cling tenaciously to their sovereign identities will be denounced by its leadership. The principal feature of Bilderberg is that it seeks one global government, (a structure similar to the European Union), while counteracting nationalist sentiment is supposedly its greatest battle. Renewed calls for the United Nations to be able to directly tax all people of the world is said to be another major topic to be tabled for discussion in Sintra. Bilderberg meetings are only held when and where the hosts can provide the highest levels of security for their guests. All Bilderberg participants, their staff members and resort employees will wear photo identification tags. They will have separate colours to identify the wearer as participant, staff member or employee. A computer chip "fingerprint" will assure the identity of the card's wearer.

According to the Washington based investigative newsletter, Spotlight, who claims to have a contact inside Bilderberg, any intruders are to be manhandled, cuffed and jailed and if the intruders resist arrest or attempt to flee, they will be shot. International and national media are said to be welcome only when an oath of silence has been taken, news editors are held responsible if any of their journalists 'inadvertently' report on what takes place.

Bilderberg members are immune to all forms of bureaucracy that face ordinary citizens on a daily basis. No visas are required and a free and safe passage is provided by the government providing the Bilderberg rendezvous. They travel to and from the airport to the resort in armoured vehicles with a police escort. Meetings are held annually but rarely at the same locations for obvious security reasons. The first Bilderberg conference was held at the Bilderberg Hotel in Osterbeek Holland in May 1954, and the organization is said to have been established as a secret and supportive wing of NATO and the Marshall plan which was launched in the 1940s.

International conspiracy

The News having researched various sources on the Bilderberg meetings, discovered that PSD co-founder, Francisco Pinto Balsemão, allegedly attended at least the previous two Bilderberg meetings held in Scotland (1998) and Georgia in the United States (1997). Balsemão is said to be the only Portuguese representative on the Bilderberg steering committee. Other prominent figures listed to have attended previous meetings are Ricardo Salgado chief executive officer at Banco Espirito Santo, Henry Kissinger, Tony Blair (who attended the meeting held in 1995) and Giovanni Agnelli who is the owner of the Fiat Motor Corporation.

The News is Portugal's largest circulation English language newspaper. Established for over 20 years, it is the only Portuguese newspaper on the net that covers all the major news about Portugal in the English language.

from The News, 1999-May-8:

Bilderburg meeting - wall of silence?

As revealed exclusively in The News last week, the Bilderbergs, reputedly the world's most secret society, are due to meet in Sintra next month. We have received e-mails from all over the world congratulating The News on making this information public. Yet in Portugal, as we closed the paper on Thursday, the press has remained tight lipped about this meeting, in spite of the fact that Portugal's national press agency LUSA decided to distribute The News' report to all the Portuguese media.

A quick search of the internet on the single keyword Bilderberg, will bring up some of the most extraordinary claims regarding the objectives and activities of this powerful group of industrialists, financiers and ex-politicians. It will also reveal many reports of the lengths to which this organisation will go to maintain full secrecy over its meetings. Much of the information could be seen as scurrilous, even far fetched, with claims that these people are part of what is described as the New World Order. An hour or so of research will be enough to find the names of most of the members, details of their past meetings and claims of what has been discussed.

It is not for this newspaper to become part of this speculation, yet it is extraordinary that even in a democracy such as Portugal, the very presence of what can only be described as one of the most prestigious meetings of powerful men and women from around the world, could remain unreported anywhere.

Except in The News.

from The Big Issue, 1999-Nov-15, by Gibby Zobel, from http://www.bigissue.com/london/articles/0006.htm:

The Bilderberg Papers
World exclusive: Leaked minutes from confidential meeting of world's elite...

In the first of a two-part series, Gibby Zobel uncovers how the global power elite decides our future at the shadowy Bilderberg Summit each year. Documents from the secret summit - leaked to The Big Issue - reveal what they said about money and war

For nearly 50 years an elite group of the West's most powerful men and women, a shadow world government, have met in secret. Tony Blair is in the club. Every US president since Ike Eisenhower has been too. So are top members of the British Government. So are the people who control what you watch and read - the media barons. Which is why you may never have heard of Bilderberg.

"Lines of black limousines, unmarked except for a 'B' on the windscreen, swept in, sometimes accompanied by police escorts, sometimes not," says an eyewitness of this year's meeting in Portugal. "A helicopter was overhead, and other security officers were prudently patrolling the hillsides. The policy on duty at the gates made it crystal clear that they were only the tip of the security iceberg."

For two-and-a-half days, relaxing in exclusive luxury amid vast armed security, the powerful leaders discussed past and future wars, a European superstate, a global currency, genetics, and the dismantling of the welfare state. Unaccountable, untroubled and unreported, the Bilderberg meetings have formed the basis of international policy for decades.

Last year freelance journalist Campbell Thomas was arrested just for knocking on doors near the clandestine gathering in Turnberry, Scotland. He remained in custody for eight hours. Other journalists were told that even the Bilderberg menu was confidential (a move they named 'Kippergate'). A serving police officer told 'The Big Issue': "Special Branch and CIA were everywhere - they were calling the shots."

Never in its 47-year history has the content of these discussions been made public. Until now. 'The Big Issue' has uncovered the Bilderberg Papers - the secret minutes of this year's meeting in Portugal. Some of it is banal, some of it sensational. It blows the lid off the thoughts of presidents, chairmen of multinational companies, world bankers, Nato chiefs and defence ministers.

The meetings are shrouded in such secrecy that Prime Minister Tony Blair, when asked last year in the House of Commons, failed to disclosed his own attendance at Bilderberg in Athens in 1993.

So, what have they been hiding?

- Nato gave Russia carte blanche to bomb Chechnya

- 'Dollarisation' could be the the next step after the single European currency

- A senior British politician thinks New Labour is "consolidating the victories of the Right". On welfare cuts he adds: "It might be easier for somebody who claimed to be a socialist to impose change."

- After Kosovo Nato is in danger of mimicking a colonial power

Although 14 media chiefs and journalists from across eight countries attended this year, none of them chose to tell their readers of the meeting. It would not serve their interests to be cut out of the elite loop. With an invite-only guest-list, covert operations and such deafening silence, it is little surprise that conspiracy theories have thrived, from the anti-semites who believe in a Jewish global elite, to the paranoid delusions of the radical left. The effect has been to leave the importance of the meetings tainted by association. It suits the Bilderbergers perfectly.

The Bilderberg meetings began in a Dutch hotel on May 29 1954, from where it gets its name. 'The Economist', in a rare reference to it in 1987, said that the importance of the meetings was overplayed but admitted: "When you have scaled the Bilderberg, you have arrived."

At last year's meeting, former defence minister George Robertson, who is now Nato secretary-general, planned strategies with the Bilderberg chair and ex-Nato chief Lord Carrington.

'Observer' editor-in-chief Will Hutton attended Bilderberg in 1997. He believes that it is the home of the "high priests of globalisation". "No policy is made here," he says, "it is all talk. But the consensus established is the backdrop against which policy is made worldwide."

The 64-page leaked document - The Bilderberg Papers - is dated August 1999. The powerful transatlantic clique at the private hideaway included new Northern Ireland secretary Peter Mandelson MP, environmentalist Jonathon Porritt, Kenneth Clarke MP, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, billionaire oil and banking tycoon David Rockefeller, Monsanto chief Robert B Shapiro, and the head of the World Bank, James D Wolfensohn.

Although Asian and African politics and economics were discussed the continents' countries had no seats at this summit. The official eight-strong UK delegation included bankers Martin Taylor, former chief executive of Barclay's and Eric Roll, a banker for Warburgs. They were joined by Martin Wolf of The Financial Times and two journalists from The Economist, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, who, the minutes indicate, prepared this document.

The papers are marked 'Not for Quotation'. It states: "There were 111 participants from 24 countries. All participants spoke in their personal capacity, not as representatives of their national governments or employers. As is usual at Bilderberg meetings, in order to permit frank and open discussion, no public reporting of the conference took place."

None of the quotes in each of the 10 sections are directly attributable to any named individual, but the moderator and panellists in each discussion are listed. It is made perfectly clear, however, who is saying what. It is not known who else is in the audience, but their comments are identified by their country and profession.

Over two weeks, we report on the central themes of this year's meeting. This week: money and war. Next week: genetics - what the head of Monsanto and a leading British environmentalist discussed behind closed doors.

what they said about money

Giants of the global banking world, in a debate titled 'Redesigning the International Financial Architecture', discussed the concept of 'dollarisation' which is sure to send euro-sceptics into a frenzy.

Around the table were Kenneth Clarke MP, Martin S Feldstein, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Stanley Fisher, deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Ottmar Issing, board member of the European Central Bank and Jean Claude Trichet, governor of the Bank of France.

Bilderberg is understood to have been the birthplace of the single European currency. The deputy director of the IMF opens by remarking: "It is worth noting that this is the first Bilderberg meeting where the euro is fact rather than a topic for discussion."

During the discussion, "One of the panellists was sure that if the euro worked, more regional currencies would emerge. Others raised the question of dollarisation as a possible cure."

There is a dissenting voice:

"The only possible reason for surrendering control of your monetary policy to Washington (where nobody would make decisions on the basis of what mattered in Buenos Aires [or London]) is the fairly rotten financial records of the governments concerned."

what they said about war

Despite Tony Blair's presidential stance over Kosovo, Nato's historic war was pilloried at Bilderberg. "The mood at the meeting was surprisingly subdued most of the speakers concentrated on the downside of the conflict," begins the discussion on Kosovo.

Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, weighs in, saying Kosovo "could be this generation's Vietnam". Nato is in danger of replacing the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires in a series of permanent protectorates, he said. Another panellist warned that troops could be there for 25 years. Kissinger felt that this left Nato open to accusations of colonialism. "How did one persuade countries like China, Russia and India that Nato's new mandate was not just a new version of 'the white man's burden' - colonialism?" asked Kissinger.

Charles D Boyd, executive director of the US National Study Group, said Kosovo is now a wasteland, a humanitarian disaster comparable with Cambodia. "Nato used force as a substitute for diplomacy rather than as a support for it it used force in a way that minimised danger to itself but maximised danger to the people it was trying to protect."

An unnamed British politician "wondered whether the [Nato] alliance could hang together after the end of the war. He warned that "there would be little popular enthusiasm for putting lots of resources into solving the region's gigantic problems."

Peter Mandelson told the group that "two roads stretch in front of Nato. One leads to a new division of Europe, where the continent returns to its ethnocentric ways. Under this scenario, the UN is fairly powerless, Russia and China are excluded, and Nato is little more than an enforcer. The second road is a little closer to the nineteenth century Europe, with all the great powers - not just America and the EU, but Russia, China and Japan co-operating."

from http://www.icom.net/~nexus/Bilderbergers.html:

The Bilderberg Group
- The Invisible Power House -

With its membership selected from the power élite of Europe and North America, many wonder if the Bilderbergers are conspiring to establish a 'new world order'.

---

Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 3, #1 (Dec '95-Jan '96).
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. nexus@peg.apc.org
Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381
From our web page at: http://www.peg.apc.org/~nexus/

© 1994 by Armen Victorian,
PO Box 99, West PDO,
Nottingham, NG8 3NT UK

---

The conspiracy theory writers have repeatedly linked one powerful global elite, the Bilderberg Group, with the ultimate take-over of the world. Members of the Bilderberg together with their 'sister' organisations-the Trilateral Commission (known also as the "Child of Bilderberg")(1) and the Council on Foreign Relations(2)-are charged with the post-war take-over of the democratic process. The measures implemented by this group so far prove the control of the world economy through indirect political means.

The constitution of several democratic monarchies of the Western Europe bans members of their royal families from playing an active role in the political process. However, the Bilderberg meetings provide this exact forum and platform for them.
"This unprecedented period of European cooperation is more than a product of simple nation-state diplomacy. One of the key institutions that has fostered unity and cooperation with the Atlantic Community beyond the old concepts has been the Bilderberg Group."(3)
"I tell you frankly that I am deeply alarmed today over the possibility that a right-wing reaction may draw some sections of capital so far away from our traditions as to imperil the entire structure of American life as we know it."(4)

These comments by Pasymowski and Gilbert(3) two decades ago may seem out of phase with the current events in former Yugoslavia, but, in terms of the continued stability of the "European State", they have proven to be largely accurate. Warfare has been removed from the intra-European systems as a means of controlling and directing nationalistic goals and ideas. Even in the case of former Yugoslavia, one observes that the current state of war has resulted from Tito's and the Soviet Union's demise. Consequently, the lid has been lifted on rivals and racial memories which had been artificially kept in place for previous decades. The several proto-states which make up the former Yugoslavia were not part of the economic and social development programs which evolved in Western Europe. As we would see, the way in which the rest of Europe evolved and developed was very different, and for very particular reasons.

Whether co-incidence or not, it is equally ironic that the current Chairman of the Bilderberg, Lord Carrington, was the first UN-appointed representative to bring peace to the war-torn Yugoslavia.

ORIGINS
The single most important personality connected with the birth and creation of the Bilderberg Group is Joseph H. Retinger (also known as L'Eminence-His Grey Eminence). Retinger had a colourful, lifelong career that raised him to the top of the world power élites. At his funeral in 1960, Sir Edward Bedington-Behrens said:
"I remember Retinger in the United States picking up the telephone and immediately making an appointment with the President, and in Europe he had complete entrée in every political circle as a kind of right acquired through trust, devotion and loyalty he inspired."

Retinger, as a Catholic, was viewed by many as an agent of the Vatican, acting in liaison between the Pope and the Father-General of the Jesuit order.

One of Retinger's renowned achievements in European politics was the founding of the European Movement, leading to the establishment of the Council of Europe on 5th May 1949. With its headquarters in Strasbourg, the Council Executive Committee provided Retinger his first major platform for his expansive ideology. From his earlier days at the Sorbonne, Retinger believed in greater European unity, both in military and economic terms. It was also at the same time when his interest in the guidance of the Jesuit order manifested itself. He spent a great deal of his time fulfilling these ambitions. He suggested to Premier Georges Clemenceau a plan to unite Eastern Europe-involving the merging of Austria, Hungary and Poland as a tripartite monarchy under the guidance of the Jesuit order. Clemenceau, doubtful of the Vatican-inspired plan, rejected Retinger's proposal outright. This plan labelled Retinger, thereafter, as a Vatican agent.

Retinger's activities were not limited to uniting Europe. Through his several trips to Mexico he played a key role in the creation of a trade union movement in the 1920s. Due to his unprecedented success, and by gaining the Mexican Government's trust, Retinger convinced them to nationalise the US oil interest in Mexico. In the process, Retinger conducted the secret negotiations with Washington for the Mexican Government.

Retinger also had an active war career. He was the political aide to General Sikorski, and served for the London-based Polish Government-in-exile. In addition, at the age of 58, he parachuted into German-occupied territory outside Warsaw for some sabotage missions.

Due to his high-profile career, in the 1950s he was able to create contacts with numerous high-ranking military officials and political leaders. His main aim was to unite the world in peace. His peace dividend was to be under the control of supernational, powerful organisations. He believed that such organisations would be immune from short-term ideological conflicts erupting between governments. To Retinger, it was insignificant what dominated the economic ideology of a country. He believed these differences could be brought into line by powerful multinational organisations dictating and applying powerful economic and military policies, thereby creating a union and a bond between the nations.

Retinger's personal 'left-wing' views from his heady days convinced him that many leaders of newly born socialist and communist nations would be prepared to talk to him. Additionally, his Church background gave him an arena for dialogue with people from the middle-ground connections in international relations.

Nevertheless, Retinger knew that control of the world affairs cannot be achieved without US participation. In pursuit of this ideology, he began a campaign for the creation of an Atlantic Community. This would make the development of Europe an important political aim for the American politicians, thereby preventing their retreat into political isolation.

Retinger, with this in mind, set out his carefully calculated move by involving one of his close and powerful friends, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Prince Bernhard, at the time, was an important figure in the oil industry and held a major position in Royal Dutch Petroleum (Shell Oil), as well as Société Générale de Belgique-a powerful global corporation.

In 1952 Retinger approached Bernhard with a proposal for a secret conference to involve the NATO leaders in an open and frank discussion on international affairs behind closed doors. The meeting would allow each participant to speak his mind freely because no media representative would be permitted inside; nor would there be any news bulletin about the meeting or the topics discussed. Furthermore, if any leaks occurred, the journalists would be discouraged from writing about it.

Prince Bernhard fully supported Retinger's proposal for an international meeting. Consequently, they formed a committee to organise a plan. In 1952, Bernhard approached the Truman administration and briefed them about the meeting. Despite a positive reception, it was not until the Eisenhower administration when the first American counterpart group was formed. The two key role-players in the US group were General Walter Bedell Smith (Director of the CIA) and C. D. Jackson. Both (European-American) groups working interactively set out to fulfil Retinger's initial plan. From the outset, the American group was heavily influenced by the Rockefeller family, the owners of Standard Oil-competitors of Bernhard's Royal Dutch Petroleum. From then on, the Bilderberg business reflected the concerns of the oil industry in its meetings.

According to Bilderberg's draft document of 1989:
"Bilderberg takes its name from the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland, where the first meeting took place in May 1954. That pioneering meeting grew out of the concern expressed by many leading citizens on both sides of the Atlantic that Western Europe and North America were not working together as closely as they should on matters of critical importance. It was felt that regular, off-the-record discussions would help create a better understanding of the complex forces and major trends affecting Western nations in the difficult post-war period."(5)

Retinger's main aim in creating Bilderberg had other more important, inherent aspects than an informal gathering of a group of the world's élite. It has been suggested that Bilderberg meetings ultimately would have implemented group dynamics techniques in the shape of a low- key international thinking group with the purpose of sensitising the less enlightened of its membership towards the new transitional diplomacy of the Cold War.

The first meeting witnessed the gathering of ideologies, poles apart. The issue of McCarthyism was reaching its peak in the United States. European participants, exasperated with the McCarthy propaganda, saw in their American counterparts a clear political shift towards an ultra-right-wing fascist state. Memories of World War II still fresh in their minds, the Europeans found the concept rather repulsive.

C. D. Jackson (a member of the CFR), in an attempt to regain the international delegates' confidence, stated:
"Whether McCarthy dies by an assassin's bullet or is eliminated in the normal American way of getting rid of boils on body politics, I prophesy that by the time we hold our next meeting he will be gone from the American scene."(6)

Nevertheless, McCarthyism proved to be a source of embarrassment for the US delegate.

OTHER GROUPS
The concept of Bilderberg was not new. Although similar groups were already in existence at the time, none attracted and provoked global myths the way Bilderberg has.

Groups such as Bohemian Grove, established in 1872 by San Franciscans, played an equally significant role in shaping post-war politics in the US.
"It was at the Grove, it is said, that the Manhattan Project was set up and that Eisenhower was selected as the Republicans' candidate for 1952."(7)

The Ditchley Park Foundation was established in 1953 in Britain with the same aim.(8)

Two years earlier, in 1952, Britain's Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery had suggested the idea of a NATO command-post exercise (a paper drill; no movement of forces) to train army divisional commanders. General Eisenhower, who was then NATO's European Commander, accepted it. As a result, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe Exercise-SHAPEX-was created. Ever since, an annual meeting has been held in SHAPE headquarters near Mons, Belgium, and the subject has been broadened to incorporate a wide array of topics.

The historical review of these groups reflects a sudden flourishing trend, and the realisation by the world's leaders of the need for creation of, at times, such overt concepts. The idea of establishing such élite groups did not die with the birth of Bilderberg.

In 1957, the first of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs took place.9 Pandit Nehru offered to host the first meeting. The founder members were personalities such as Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. Scientists from the United States and Soviet Union were regular participants in this East-West gathering of élites. Britain is known for its active participation and role in this group.
"The best feature of Pugwash is that it brings together people from East, West and non-aligned countries."(9)

Pugwash proved particularly valuable at the time when the relation between East and West was at a stalemate. Many significant topics were discussed in this forum. Ways of monitoring arms control agreements, nuclear disarmament, and reduction of East-West tensions were always on the top of the agenda. In the 1970s Pugwash embraced a range of issues including biological, chemical and conventional arms control, environment and development problems as well as conflicts around the world.

One of the latest groups is the Williamsburg, better known as the Asian Window. Its first meeting was financed by the late John D. Rockefeller in 1971, and continues to date. It brings together the Asian leaders and the Americans. Williamsburg has been particularly effective for discussing Vietnam, or the Indonesian corruption, or supposedly non-existent Japanese exchange controls. Different experiences of trade with China and Russia, or how Singapore has a lower infant mortality than America, have been some of the topics in the Williamsburg forum.

Nonetheless, none of these groups-including the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilaterals-commands the influence the Bilderberg has obtained in shaping and dictating global policies.

CHAIRMAN
"The first [Bilderberg] meeting was convened under the chairmanship of H. R. H. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who served as chairman for twenty-two years. He was succeeded by Lord Home of the Hirsel, former Prime Minister for the United Kingdom, who chaired the meetings for four years. At the 1980 meeting, Lord Home turned over the chairmanship to Walter Scheel, former President of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1985, Mr Scheel resigned, and was succeeded by Lord Roll of Ipsden, President of S. G. Warburg Group plc. At 1989 meeting, Lord Roll turned over the chairmanship to Lord Carrington,"(10) who still chairs the meetings.

CHARACTER OF BILDERBERG MEETINGS
"What is unique about Bilderberg as a forum is (1) the broad cross-section of leading citizens, in and out of government, that are assembled for nearly three days of informal discussion about topics of current concern especially in the fields of foreign affairs and the international economy; (2) the strong feeling among participants that, in view of the differing attitudes and experiences of the Western nations, there is a clear need to develop an understanding in which these concerns can be accommodated; and (3) the privacy of these meetings, which has no purpose other than to allow leading citizens to speak their minds openly and freely.

"In short, Bilderberg is a recognised, flexible and informal international leadership forum in which different viewpoints can be expressed and mutual understanding enhanced."(11)

In further recognition of this aspect, Paddy Ashdown, the Leader of the Liberal Party and a participant in the 1989 Bilderberg meeting, wrote to me:

"In view of the recent events right across Europe, this has turned out to have been an exceptionally useful opportunity to meet and discuss with many of the most expert people in the world on international relations. I found it a very stimulating and informative gathering."(12)

But others, such as Prince Charles, Lord Callaghan and Sir Edward Heath, were rather shy in their responses.(13)

PARTICIPANTS
There are usually 115 participants in each annual meeting. Eighty are from Western Europe and the remainder from North America. From this mixture, one-third are from government and politics, and the remaining two-thirds from industry, finance, education and communications. All the participants claim to attend the meeting in their private capacity and not as officials-though this claim, in the wake of the outcome of subsequent meetings, has proven to be highly questionable.

Participants are invited to the Bilderberg meeting by the Chairman, following his consultations and recommendations by the Steering Committee membership, the Advisory Group and the Honorary Secretaries-General. This approach ensures a full, informed and balanced discussion of the agenda items. The individuals are chosen based on their knowledge, standing and experience. The previous participants maintain that, at the meetings, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken and no policy statements are made.

FUNDING
The costs of the annual meetings are usually the responsibility of the Steering Committee members of the host country. But, the expenses of maintaining the Bilderberg meetings are covered entirely by private subscriptions. Although the meeting reports are published, nevertheless they are strictly for the participating members only. No reports are made available to the media.

[link to committee membership, venue history, and footnotes]

FOOTNOTES

[only one available - all were missing from my source, and one of the co-authors of the following provided this one himself -Ed.]

(3) "Bilderberg: The Cold War Internationale" by Eugene Pasymowski and Carl Gilbert, Congressional Record - Extension of Remarks in the US House of Representatives, September 15, 1971 Pages E9616 to E-9624

from The Nationalist Times, 1998-Oct, by Uri Dowbenko:

The Bilderberger Candidate

Where do candidates come from? Do they emerge out of nowhere? Do they just erupt on the national scene? Or, are they quietly chosen by covert power brokers to move the planet closer to a New World Order, a One World Government, a global dictatorship with high-tech feudalism as its goal?

Take for example Jimmy Carter. He was an obscure peanut farmer, the almost unknown governor of Georgia. Then -- as if by magic -- a media blitz blew him onto the covers of national magazines and established him as a front-runner in the 1976 election.

Likewise, Bill Clinton was an unknown governor of the state of Arkansas -- a defacto Rockefeller fiefdom, notorious for generational corruption that surpassed even the legendary graft of New York's Tammany Hall and the Democratic machine of the Daleys' Chicago.

After Clinton was invited to a 1991 meeting of the Bilderberg Group in Baden-Baden, Germany, he became a front-running candidate for President in 1992. Then, despite --- or maybe because of -- his well-known sexual/drug addictions and compromised background, Clinton was selected as the Group's choice for U.S. President.

Since its inception in 1954, the supra-national and highly secretive Bilderberg Group has played an active role in coordinating economic and political policies on a global level. An international cabal of corporate honchos and government officials, the Bilderbergers are simply the overlords of the Global Ruling Class.

According to Peter Thompson's essay "Bilderberg and the West" from the book "Trilateralism" (edited by Holly Sklar, South End Press, Boston), "Bilderberg is neither a world super-government nor is it merely a club where incidental shoptalk takes place. Top executives from the world's leading multinational corporations meet with top national political figures at Bilderberg meetings to consider jointly the immediate and long-term policies facing the West. . . "

"Bilderberg is not the only means of Western collective management of the world order, it is part of an increasingly dense system of transnational management. . ." writes Thompson. "Where necessary, a consensus is engineered on issues which must get congressional/parliamentary approval, but wherever possible executive agreements between governments are used to avoid the democratic process altogether."

Thompson writes that "bodies like the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the British Royal Institute for International Affairs, commonly known as 'Chatham House, and transnational counterparts like Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission play a crucial role in formulating policy directions, molding establishment consensus and even testing for likely opposition."

At a GOP fundraiser in Paradise Valley, Montana, New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman denied that she was tapped by the Bilderberg Group to run for U.S. President in 2000. "I was just learning," asserted Whitman, one of a literal handful of women invited to attend the secretive May 14-17, 1998 meeting in Turnberry Hotel, Ayrshire, Scotland.

At a picturesque ranch house about 40 miles north of Yellowstone National Park --- where Dennis Quaid filmed his TNT movie "Everything That Rises" --- Whitman was the guest of honor, introduced by Montana Gov. Mark Racicot at a fundraiser for Montana Rep. Rick Hill. Whitman's speech included the cryptic comment that "in the year 2000, the country's going to get the kind of president it deserves."

Afterwards, in remarks to the press, Whitman alluded to the conspiratorial reputation of the Bilderberger Group, saying "it's not a cabal."

Notwithstanding her remarks, 1998 Bilderberg Group attendees included the usual Globalist Good Ole Boys, regulars like David Rockefeller, Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank; and Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State and current Chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., a schmooze-for-hire firm that sells high-level introductions to world-class tyrants, arms dealers and their ilk.

Women attendees at Turnberry were few. Only Her Majesty Queen of the Netherlands; CFR member Jessica Tuchman Matthews, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Margaret MacMillan, Editor of International Journal; Marie-Josee Kravis, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute; and several European Community bureaucrats shared this "honor" with the New Jersey Governor.

Whitman herself acknowledged the fact that the obsessive secrecy has roiled many within the Group. She hinted that there was internal dissent regarding the bizarre and restrictive protocols, but defended the exclusion of the media, saying that people can speak privately and acknowledge their mistakes without being held to task by their constitutents.

Her congenial husband, Bill Whitman, who facetiously referred to himself as "the first lady of New Jersey in drag," added that when he flew in from London, he stayed in a motel down the road; he wasn't even allowed to sleep at the Turnberry Resort with his wife, the Governor.

Playing a round of golf at the exclusive resort the next day, Bill Whitman remarked in amusement that "people would be popping up from behind the shrubbery taking pictures." The Bilderbergers' tradition of secrecy has evidently created its own mystique and celebrity status.

It's not hard to see why the Group, command-and-control globalists, tapped Gov. Whitman. She's photogenic; she's attractive; and her politics reflect the Group's agenda --- people control under the guise of "environmentalism" and "free trade."

In Montana, dressed in an ivory blouse, dark slacks and cowboy boots, Whitman, with her blonde Princess Di hairstyle, appeared casually elegant even in a country setting. She spoke passionately of her "goal of preserving one million acres in New Jersey that's undeveloped but not preserved" as a "protective" measure, a faux-environmentalist stance that will undoubtedly win her many supporters.

Likewise her veto of a New Jersey bill that would have banned so-called partial birth abortions earned her the animosity of the religious right. Her answer to continuing criticism? "I'm not pro-abortion," said Whitman. "I'm pro-choice." This kind of sophistry is also highly respected by the political elites. [That is not sophistry, that is a legitimate and meaningful statement. -Ed.]

Repeating the mantra that "we are in a global economy," she inferred agreement with the Group's agenda --- linking countries through entangling economic treaties like GATT and NAFTA, as well as financial strangleholds through the International Monetary Fund and other multinational corporate loans with the usual draconian conditions.

After the scandalous record of the disgraced Clinton administration, Gov. Whitman as a "pragmatic" pro-choice Republican woman would appear to be the Group's obvious choice for President.

Since its founding, the Bilderberg Group has functioned as a defacto private Global Politburo with 120 attendees at recent yearly meetings. Historically, the Group's power is awesome. Bill Clinton, an obscure Arkansas governor, was tapped to run for president. Likewise, Margaret Thatcher as well as Tony Blair were tapped by the Bilderbergers to assume the reins of government in the United Kingdom. Congressman Gerald Ford --- later U.S. president --- also attended Group meetings in 1964 and 1966.

After Gov. Whitman's attendance at Turnberry, it's highly probable that she will either be a Republican vice presidential candidate with George W. Bush in 2000 or a presidential candidate herself in 2004.

In fact, the propaganda machine has already started. Bilderberger Bill Kristol, publisher of The Weekly Standard, has had his editor Fred Barnes write a glowing report of Bush Jr. as "The Heavyweight." This puff piece on behalf of the Texas governor attempts to establish him as a primary contender for president in the next election.

Objections to Bilderberg range from all sides of the political spectrum. A private, secret --- and by all accounts conspiratorial --- consensus on matters of public importance is considered at least in bad taste if not poor judgment by all serious advocates of representative government. In fact, the diffidence and arrogance of the Global Ruling Class --- the elites and their technocrats, the New World Orderlies --- seems outrageously antiquated in the face of continuing global problems. These interlocking supra-national elites --- members of the Bilderberg Group, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Royal Institute of International Affairs, as well as the foundations and think tanks of the Global Plutocrats --- would do well to reconsider their activities.

If global techno-feudalism, as posited by George Orwell's blueprint for world tyranny, "1984," and H. G. Wells' "The Open Conspiracy" is the Group's objective, then sovereign individuals of every nation will rise up with unprecedented fervor. An historical precedent, of course, is the collapse of the Tower of Babel, a case of seeming divine intervention which shattered the globalists' plan for their precious One World Government.

Those who pride themselves as the descendants of Nimrod had better think twice. There will be no cushions for them when they fall the next time around.

Gov. Whitman's choice is after all the Hobbes' choice. She is merely a pawn in the game, another contingency in the Group's global ledger of assets and liabilities. And the Group --- covert global king-makers and king-breakers --- is known to hedge its bets. Walter Mondale and Dianne Feinstein were Bilderbergers once too, but their political stars rose only so high.

The significance of her choice? As the Group has chosen Gov. Whitman, so she can still choose to opt out.

Copyright 1998. Uri Dowbenko, CEO of New Improved Entertainment Corp., can be reached by e-mail at u.dowbenko@mailcity.com.

from http://www.parascope.com/mx/bilder.htm:

The Bilderberg and the New World Order

---

Bilderberg Meets Secretly in Toronto

From Staff Reports

The Bilderberg, the highest echelon of the global financial and political elite, recently met at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Leadership Center (nicknamed the "Bohemian Grove of Canada" ) on the outskirts of King City, a suburb of Toronto.

At the meeting, which lasted from May 30 to June 2, the Bilderberg discussed global control of the air, water and public health, as well as the possible multi-billion dollar sale of the Canadian government-owned electric utility Ontario Hydro, according to informed sources quoted by The Spotlight.

As usual, the mainstream media completely ignored the event. This was not surprising, since many media power brokers regularly attend the meetings, including representatives of the major TV networks and the New York Times.

However, this year one major Canadian newspaper shattered the wall of silence in a spectacular fashion. The Toronto Star, one of the few remaining independent newspapers in Canada, ran a front page story on May 30 under the headline "Black Plays Host to World Leaders."

John Deverell, a Toronto Star business reporter, broke the story, based on a detailed news release from the Toronto-based New World Order Intelligence Update. Among the more than 100 attendees from around the world, Deverell listed U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry, Prime Minister Jean Chretien, Henry Kissinger, the queens of Netherlands and Spain "as well as other business, political and academic elite."

"For 42 years," Deverell reported, "the secretive organization has devoted itself to strengthening the Atlantic military alliance and economies... The guest list and agenda for the four-day conference are secret."

According to media magnate and permanent Bilderberg member Conrad Black, the ban on reporters "makes discussion more intimate and candid. There are no massive indiscretions, but the exchanges can be quite heated." This is a polite way of saying that members can secretly speak their minds about whatever grandiose schemes of world conquest they envision themselves as having the divine right to execute, without fearing that their words will ever be heard by the public.

This tactic is very similar to the Non-Attribution Rule used at Council on Foreign Relations meetings, which prevents statements made by attendees from being reported in the media. Many media CEOs, news anchors and influential members of the press fill seats in the CFR.

The Bilderberg and the New World Order

As far as global politics and finance go, the Bilderberg is the top of the pyramid, the all-seeing eye gazing upon the construction of a New World Order . This one-world system of governance, lurking in the shadows cast by flowery language about our new "global village," will transfer nearly all economic and political power into the hands of a small group of the world elite.

According to Bilderberg's draft document of 1989, "Bilderberg takes its name from the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland, where the first meeting took place in May 1954. That pioneering meeting grew out of the concern expressed by many leading citizens on both sides of the Atlantic that Western Europe and North America were not working together as closely as they should on matters of critical importance. It was felt that regular, off-the-record discussions would help create a better understanding of the complex forces and major trends affecting Western nations in the difficult post-war period."

According to Conrad Black, the Bilderberg "was set up in the mid-fifties by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.... [Meetings] normally include senior officials of the governments of all the countries represented, with a wide swath of enlightened business, academic, media and military leaders...."

Prince Bernhard gave the go-ahead, but the idea for the Bilderberg belonged to Joseph H. Retinger, a man who could make an appointment with the President of the United States just by picking up the telephone. In 1952, Retinger proposed a secret conference to Prince Bernhard which would involve the NATO leaders in an open and frank discussion on international affairs behind closed doors.

The Prince thought it was a grand idea, and they formed a committee to plan the conference. Berhhard briefed the Truman administration about the meeting in 1952, and although the idea was warmly embraced in the U.S., the first American counterpart group was not formed until the Eisenhower administration.

CIA Director General Walter Bedell Smith and C.D. Jackson were key players in organizing the American counterpart group, heavily influenced by the Rockefeller dynasty, whose Standard Oil holdings competed with Bernhard's Royal Dutch Petroleum. Hence, the interests of the oil industry were well-represented at Bilderberg meetings.

At early meetings of the Bilderberg, attendees expressed frustration with American politics, then in the throes of McCarthyism, whose nationalist ideology stood in the way of global planning. C. D. Jackson tried to quell their fears by saying, "Whether McCarthy dies by an assassin's bullet or is eliminated in the normal American way of getting rid of boils on body politics, I prophesy that by the time we hold our next meeting he will be gone from the American scene."

Bilderberg meetings are held in remote places, and attendees are encouraged to leave spouses and aides at home, to not use prepared texts, and to conduct discussions in English as much as possible.

Director and advisory board members include Gianni Agnelli of Fiat, Dwayne Andreas (controlling shareholder of Archer-Daniels Midland), Zbigniew Brzezinski (former national security advisor in the Carter administration), Lord Carrington (former British foreign and defense secretary and secretary-general of NATO), Andrew Knight (editor of the Economist), Richard Perle (former U.S. assistant secretary of National Defense and one of the champions of the Strategic Defense Initiative and Euro-missile deployment), Paul Volker (former Federal Reserve chairman), and George Will (U.S. conservative columnist and commentator), to name just a few.

"Providentially, the world became more accessible for me as Canada became less commodious," Conrad Black said in his biography, "A Life in Progress". "It was from Bilderberg that our company's eventual vocation as an international newspaper organization arose."

Critics of the Bilderberg say that the secret group:

• perceives itself as being supra-governmental;
• manipulates global finances and establishes rigid and binding monetary rates around the world;
• selects political figures whom the Bilderberg decrees should become rulers, and targets those whom it wants removed from power;
• decides which countries shall wage war on others.

Sources:

• Deverell, John. "Black Plays Host to World Leaders," Toronto Star , May 30 1996, page 1A.
• "The Bilderberg Group: The Invisible Power House." Nexus Magazine , Volume 3, #1 (Dec '95-Jan '96).
• New World Order Intelligence Update http://www.inforamp.net/~jwhitley
• Katson, Trisha. "Bilderberg To Meet Secretly in Toronto," The Spotlight, News Release.

(c) Copyright 1996 ParaScope, Inc.

here are Tony Gosling's Bilderberg pages, which include full attendance lists for Bilderberg '95-'98, current rosters of its advisory group, steering committee, national representatives, annual meeting locations since the group's inception in 1954, and many essays, newspaper articles, and press releases. Be forewarned that Tony Gosling is a left-liberal (socialist) environmental fundamentalist, though this detracts only occasionally from the value of the compilation he has put together.

here is the New World Order Intelligence Update's compilation of Bilderberg articles.

Read The Case Against Henry Kissinger, by Christopher Hitchens - described by Henry Kissinger as ``untrue, reckless, and contemptible'', a ringing endorsement given the source!

from the New York Post, 2001-Jan-7, by RICHARD JOHNSON with PAULA FROELICH and CHRIS WILSON

DIANA DETRACTOR TACKLES HENRY K

JOURNALISTIC attack dog Christopher "Hellbound" Hitchens blasts Henry Kissinger as a "war criminal" in a scathing 26-page jeremiad in the February issue of Harper's magazine.

The diatribe is just the first installment of a planned two-part offensive in the monthly against the former secretary of state penned by the Vanity Fair columnist. Controversial Hitchens is known for his blistering harangues against the likes of Mother Teresa, whom he called a "ghoul" and a "lapdog to dictators," and Princess Diana, who the native Brit accused of using the poor and sick as "accessories." In the article, peppered with photos of Vietnamese victims of napalm and Agent Orange, Hitchens accuses Kissinger of "war crimes [and] crimes against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap and torture," and says he has shown "a callous indifference to human life and human rights."

Kissinger's office, after we e-mailed some of the harshest quotes from the article, called Hitchens' accusations "untrue, irresponsible and contemptible."

Writing about Kissinger's public image, Hitchens says: "Everybody ?knows,' after all, that Kissinger inflicted terror and misery and mass death on [Cambodia], and great injury to the U.S. Constitution at the same time.

"Yet the pudgy man standing in black tie at the Vogue party is not, surely, the man who ordered and sanctioned the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of inconvenient politicians, the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers and journalists and clerics who got in his way? Oh, but he is."

Enabling Kissinger's elevation from "a mediocre and opportunistic academic to an international potentate," Hitchens writes, was his "sycophancy and duplicity, [and] power-worship and absence of scruple." Its effects were "uncounted and expendable corpses, [and] the official and unofficial lying about the cost."

Kissinger's career, he says, "debauched the American republic and American democracy, and it leveled a hideous toll of casualties on weaker and more vulnerable societies."

As if that wasn't enough of a broadside, in Harper's March issue, Hitchens promises a lengthy exposé on Kissinger's "crimes" in Bangladesh, Cyprus and East Timor.

(coming to Amazon.)

excerpted from Emerging Viruses, by Leonard G. Horowitz, from http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/9302/arch2.html:

Early Life

Henry Kissinger was the first-born son of German Jewish parents, Louis and Paula. The couple led their family to freedom in August 1938, less than three months before the Kristallnacht riots destroyed most of the Jewish institutions in Nazi Germany.

"My life in Fürch seems to have passed without leaving any lasting impressions," Kissinger told a German reporter more recently. That part of my childhood is not a key to anything." Minimizing the trauma he faced as a fifteen year old refugee, the statesman added, "I was not consciously unhappy. I was not acutely aware of what was going on. For children, these things are not that serious."

"Give me a break," I though on reading this, he's either got to be kidding or steeped in massive denial. I too, was a first-born son of a German­Jewish father and Austrian mother who were also fortunate to have survived the Holocaust. I could relate to Kissinger's plight better than most. Given this background, plus my postdoctoral degree in behavioral science, I understood well the role persecution can play in the development of personalities and personality disorders.

My mother, at age sixteen, was among the last group of Jews to leave Nazi Austria. Her immortal picture can be seen in the National Holocaust Museum, where she, among dozens, was photographed on her knees, scrubbing the streets of Vienna at Nazi gunpoint.

Though Kissinger may have been spared the worst, I found it incomprehensible that he could have left Nazi Germany, at that age and time, unfazed.

Denial and Paranoia

I was not alone in this view. Kissinger's childhood friends also felt his denial was a form of "self delusion". Isaacson wrote:

"Some of them see his escape from memory as a key to his legendary insecurities. The child who had to pretend to be someone else so that he could get into soccer games, they say, became an adult who was prone to deceit and self-deception in the pursuit of acceptance by political and social patrons..."

Despite Kissinger's denials, the Nazi atrocities "were able to damage his soul," said Fritz Kraemer, a German gentile who resisted Hitler and later became Kissinger's student in the U.S. Army. "For the formative years of his youth, he faced the horror of his world coming apart, of the father he loved being turned into a helpless mouse."

Kissinger's most obvious personality traits, Kraemer argued, could be traced to his Nazi experience. "It made him seek order and it made him hunger for acceptance, even if it meant trying to please those he considered his intellectual inferiors."

For Kissinger, the Nazi experience severed the connection between God's will and historic evolution - a basic principle of the Jewish faith and one of its most important contributions to Western philoso-phy. For faithful Jews, historic meaning is linked to divine justice. After witnessing Hitler's horror, Kissinger abandoned his religion and embarked on an intellectual journey to find an alternative way to interpret history.

Kissinger's traumatic childhood also instilled in him "a deep distrust of other people." He felt compelled to establish secret wiretaps on the phones of even his closest aides.

Another symptom of Kissinger's Holocaust rearing was his tendency to disguise, as an adult, any sign of personal weakness. This compulsion of his had been commonly observed; particularly in his approach to foreign policy negotiations. Kissinger's father, "whom he loved deeply, was graced by gentleness and a heart of unquestioning kindness. But such virtues served only to make him seem weak in the face of Nazi humiliations." Thus, as Kissinger matured, he "repeatedly attached himself to forceful, often over-bearing patrons with powerful personalities," including Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon.

Still another childhood legacy was his "philosophical pessimism." He maintained a dark and verboten world view "suffused with a sense of tragedy." He embraced the view that civilization's tendency is toward decay, and "statesman must continually fight against the natural tendency toward international instability."

"Given a choice of order or justice, he often said, para-phrasing Goethe, he would choose order. He had seen too clearly the consequences of disorder."

As a result, Nixon's Secretary of State became a philosophical, intellectual, and political conservative. He developed an intuitive aversion to change through revolution and became "uncomfortable with the passions of democracy and populism." In essence, Kissinger never embraced "the messy glory of the American political system" particularly since it constrained his "Realpolitik" approach to administering foreign policy.

The Harvard Experience

In the fall of 1947, Kissinger returned from [a military tour in] Germany to join Harvard's class of 1950 as a twenty-four-year-old mentally gifted sophomore. "We never, ever discussed our Jewishness," recalled Arthur Gilman, Kissinger's roommate. But during late-night discussions, Kissinger strongly opposed Israel's creation. "He said it would alienate the Arabs and jeopardize U.S. interests. I thought it was a strange view for someone who was a refugee from Nazi Germany." Herbert Engelhardt, another dormitory resident said, "I got the impression that Kissinger suffered less anti-semitism as a youth than I did growing up in New Jersey."

Kissinger's university acquaintances described him as an intensely driven, excessively mature, incessant reader who bit his fingernails and established his own rule. Despite his expressed interest in sports, the young immigrant skipped all athletic events, avoided drinking and partying with his housemates, failed to join clubs or societies, contributed nothing to school publications, and made no effort to participate in student activities. "Henry could be charming if he decided he wanted to be," said Gilman, "but he was really a loner."

With his interests peaked in government and philosophy, the straight-A student became fascinated with William Yandell Elliot, his first­semester course professor in "The Development of Constitutional Government." Owing to outstanding academic achievements, Kissinger was entitled to have Elliot serve as his senior faculty tutor. And in recommending Henry for Phi Bets Kappa, Elliot's endorsement read:

"I would say that I have not had any students in the past five years, even among the summa cum laude group, who have had the depth and philosophical insight shown by Mr. Kissinger. On the other hand, his mind lacks grace and is Teutonic in its systemic thoroughness. He has a certain emotional bent, perhaps from a refugee origin, that occasionally comes out. But I would regard him as on the whole a very balanced and just mind."

Kissinger's "Meaning of History"

"In Harvard's 350-year history," wrote another Harvard professor, Isaacson, "it has learned to take in stride the peculiar combination of intellectual brilliance and quirkiness that occasionally blossoms among its undergraduates. Even so, Henry Kissinger's senior thesis is still described in awed tones."

The 383-page "Meaning of History" introduced themes about freedom, morality, revolution, creativity, and bureaucracy that recurred throughout Kissinger's life. It provided a taste of the intellectual haughtiness for which he became famous; it provided an impression of how the future statesman waged the pursuit of peace as "a constant balancing act that lacked larger meaning."

In his chapter covering the early twentieth-century political philosopher Spengler, titled "History as an Institution," Kissinger paraphrased the nationalistic German scholar: "... amidst a repetition of cataclysmic wars the civilization petrifies and dies."

Thus, Kissinger advanced Spengler's portrayal of history as an incessant and existentially doomed power struggle: "a vast succession of catastrophic upheavals of which power is not only the manifestation but the exclusive aim." Then Kissinger provided a stark portrayal of historic determinism: "Life is suffering, birth involves death. Transitoriness is the fate of existence."

The cure for this moribund state of affairs, according to his thesis, lies in the development of personal awareness and "inward conviction" of each individual's freedom - a philosophy advanced most notably by the famous French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre who, following the lead of Karl Marx, became a principal promoter of communism.

Kissinger was also drawn to European conservatism, which focused on national sovereignty and balanced powers. "Youthful fascination with Kant's political writings could have moved Kissinger toward a Wilsonian view of America's interests and mission," explained Peter Dickson in his study of Kissinger. "Instead, the émigré turned to Meternich and Bismarck - the prime practitioners of power politics."

Kissinger's Realpolitik: Visions of a New World Order

Kissinger's Realpolitik - his practical philosophy of political history - as described in his Harvard thesis and demonstrated by his diplomatic behavior, showed that throughout his career he sought to "preserve [and even define a] world order." His approach to peace implied "artfully tending to balances of power." World peace was, therefore, not the defining policy objective for Kissinger.

Kissinger believed that a "balance of power" was the best that could be obtained. This, he believed, could be achieved through the acceptance and control of limited conflicts - "small wars." With this in mind, the diplomat's mission was to insure that the United States and not the Russians would lead and win many of these.

from http://www.fair.org/extra/best-of-extra/kissinger-conflict.html:

Henry Kissinger: The Walking, Talking Conflict of Interest

EXTRA! (10-11/89), Best of EXTRA!

On Sept. 13, 1989, the day Henry Kissinger ended his tenure as a paid analyst for ABC News, he became the newest member of CBS's board of directors. Kissinger's ties to the TV networks have always been close; no other "expert" is as ubiquitous on TV, commenting on what U.S. policy should be toward countries from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to Latin America.

In recent months, Kissinger has used his high media profile in a spirited defense of China. In a Washington Post/L.A. Times column ("The Caricature of Deng as a Tyrant Is Unfair", 8/1/89), Kissinger argued against sanctions: "China remains too important for America's national security to risk the relationship on the emotions of the moment." He asserted: "No government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators."

Kissinger's defense of China and other repressive governments has sometimes raised eyebrows. What it has not raised is tough questions from TV interviewers about Kissinger's business ties to these same governments. In a column alluding to FAIR's study that found Kissinger to be Nightline's most frequent guest, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen (8/29/89) sounded an urgent appeal: "Will someone please ask Henry Kissinger the 'C' question?" The "C" stands for conflict of interest.

When he's not pontificating in the media about foreign affairs, he's engaging in foreign financial affairs through his secretive consulting firm, Kissinger & Associates. The firm, representing some 30 multinational companies -- including American Express, H.J. Heinz, ITT and Lockheed -- earns profits by "opening doors" for investors in China, Latin America and elsewhere (New York Times, 4/30/89).

A Wall Street Journal article by John Fialka ("Mr. Kissinger Has Opinions on China -- and Business Ties", 9/15/89) reported that Kissinger also heads China Ventures, a company engaged in joint ventures with China's state bank. As its brochure explains, China Ventures invests only in projects that "enjoy the unquestioned support of the People's Republic of China." The Journal article was unusual in exploring the private business interests behind U.S. foreign policy, not the media's strong suit -- even when, as in Kissinger's case, they are rolled into one person.

In a letter to network TV news programs, FAIR urged that guest analysts be questioned about their financial links to the subjects they are discussing, and that such links be disclosed on the air: "Our society demands financial disclosure of politicians and government officials; shouldn't we expect the news media to disclose the financial interests of their guest experts when such interests are related to the issues under discussion?"

Read the ex-Yugoslavia files.

from The Spotlight, modtime 1999-Apr-7, by James P. Tucker Jr., from http://www.spotlight.org/Newsbureau/Spy/Bilder/bilder.html:

War Seen As Part of Plutocrats' Agenda

What charter? With Western Europe safe, NATO moves into the nation-building mode.

The U.S.-led NATO attack on a sovereign nation is part of a much bigger Bilderberg plan than stopping Serbians from butchering ethnic Albanians, according to a high State Department source.

"It is important to the Bilderberg scheme for world government to get NATO out from the limitations of its own charter," said the source, a reliable observer for more than a decade.

The treaty limits the alliance to a defensive position, providing that if any member nation is attacked, all NATO countries would respond, he pointed out. The treaty has no authority for an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation.

"By bombing Kosovo, the precedent is set," he said. "Despite the terms of the treaty, NATO now can go anywhere and attack anybody. This solidifies NATO's role as the UN's world army."

While not officially sanctioned by the UN because Red China and Russia would exercise Security Council vetoes and block the action, the UN bureaucrats privately celebrate NATO's attack, he said.

"It's all so transparent, but the media covers it up and Americans don't read enough anyway - that's why they're so damn ignorant," he said.

While ethnic Albanian blood is being spilled, the amount is exaggerated for propaganda purposes and there's much bigger bloodbaths elsewhere if we're looking for a fight, he said.

He also insisted that there was absolutely no risk of the civil war in Yugoslavia spilling over borders and involving other nations, another of the White House rationales.

President Clinton, he said, is "the most blood thirsty draft dodger in history."

Giving NATO a global role instead of only a mission to defend Western Europe is part of both evolving a world army and conditioning the public mind to accept surrendering national sovereignty, he said.

The source pointed to a March 28 column by Jim Hoagland of The Washington Post, who regularly attends Trilateral and Bilderberg meetings.

"The intervention in Kosovo should revive the concept of a `right to intervene' and lead to changes in the United Nation's standards for sovereignty and the existing protections those standards provide for criminal governments," Hoagland wrote.

"NATO's decision to bypass the Security Council to avoid Russian and Chinese vetoes based on `sovereignty' arguments reflects poorly not on NATO but on the Security Council as it is organized," he wrote.

"Using the Kosovo operation to override outmoded sovereignty concerns in international relations would be one measure of political success for this high-cost intervention," Hoagland added.

"Hoagland's column couldn't be better Bilderberg propaganda if Henry Kissinger had dictated it," the official said.

from Leading Edge, 1999-Apr-25, by Barry Chamish in Israel:

The Truth About Bosnia

From the author of ISRAEL BETRAYED, Barry Chamish sends us this article originally published in Leading Edge: His title was The Truth About Bosnia; Chamish' title to us is NWO KOSOVO My title is ***CAN YOU STAND THE TRUTH ABOUT NWO***

Maybe we do not want to know . .

***********************************************************

December 19, 1994, writer Warren Hough claims that Henry Kissinger was accused by French President Mitterand of being the "master manipulator" of the Yugoslav conflict.

The allegation is said to have been made at a meeting of the European Security Conference in Budapest, Hungary. According to Warren Hough:

As part of their war plans, the Serb leaders spent millions of dollars on contracts and payoffs in the United States.

Wall Street sources say that most of these short-lived deals were apparently set up to make money for Kissinger's consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, the founding director of which was Lord Carrington, a "peace" negotiator in the former Yugoslavia.

Money was also made for two of Kissinger's cronies, Lawrence Eagleberger and Brent Scowcroft. A review of bank records in New York City revealed that as early as 1992 Eagleberger (former US Secretary of State) and Scowcroft (White House national security advisor for George Bush), concealed a compromising "cash nexus" to the Serbs while they were supposedly formulating "impartial U.S. positions" toward the warring ethnic factions of the former Yugoslavia.

It is a point of interest that an advisor to Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic has been Sir Alfred Sherman, who has operated from an apartment next door to Karadzic's office.

According to published research, Sherman is known as the "inventor of Margaret Thatcher", and he was at the forefront of the maneuvering that led to her election.

The Serbs were funded by the Elite via Belgrade banks in involving massive drug money laundering. It is also amazing how many "foundations" were set up in the former Yugoslavia by financial speculator George Soros. He has set up these fronts in Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia and Belgrade.

Soros is a close friend of Lawrence Eagleberger at Kissinger Associates, the former US ambassador to Belgrade and a close ally of Slobodon Milosevic.

According to writer and researcher Ben Viden, writing in Nexus magazine in February 1996, America, Germany and Israel wre running a secret airlift of arms to Croatia and Bosnia from the start of the conflict.

French journalists revealed in 1994 that CIA agents were luring Bosnian Muslims into reckless and hopeless counter-attacks against the Serbs on false promises of U.S. support -- a fact backed up by George Kenney, an American official in charge of Yugoslavia affairs at the US State Department until he quit in disgust on August 14, 1992.

Warren Hough states that while the Muslims were set up, the Kissinger network was playing the "good-guy-bad-guy" game, which manipulators use so often. It involved the two Serb leaders, Milosevic and Karadzic, according to Hough.

Under this scenario, Milosevic, the client of Kissinger Associates, publicly repudiated and condemned the illegal onslaught of Karadzic's troops against Bosnian Muslims.

But covertly the Milosevic government furnished the "renegade" forces of Karadzic with all the weapons and support they needed to wage an implacable "war of extermination" against their Muslim neighbors.

Muslim resupply was, of course, blocked by "the UN arms embargo."

The research also claims that Saudi Arabia, itself a fascist tyranny, was being set up by this plan. According to some sources, King Faud was repeatedly assured that the U.S. planned to lift the arms embargo in time to allow weapons to reach the Muslims.

As a result, the King convinced other Islamic leaders to have faith in Washington.

Now, the Saudi monarchy is renounced as a traitor to Islam, which, of course, suits the manipulators well.

In the light of all this, there are some interesting connections between the "peace negotiators" in Bosnia.

Lord Carrington (Royal Institute of International Affairs, Bilderberger, Trilateral Commission, Committee of 300); Lloyd Owen, (Bilderberger, Trilateral Commission) and Sweden's Carl Bildt (Bilderberger) followed each other as official "peace negotiators" for the European Union in the former Yugoslavia.

Cyrus Vance (CFR, TC, BIL, Comm300) was the UN "peace negotiator" while at the same time a director of Manufacturers Hanover Trust. When Vance resigned, the UN appointed Norway's Thorvald Stoltenberg (TC, BIL). And, when they understandably failed to "achieve peace," Jimmy Carter (TC), flies to Bosnia as an "independent negotiator."

Later came Richard Holbrooke (TC, CFR, BIL) as the peace envoy of Bill Clinton (CFR, TC, BIL), and the U.S. ambassador of Yugoslavia was Warren Zimmerman (TC, CFR) who reported to Warren Christopher (TC, CFR).

Remember the horrific genocide in Rwanda?

Who arrived in Rwanda just days before it broke out on an undisclosed "diplomatic mission"? Lord Carrington and Henry Kissinger.

Can pigs fly?

So, the contrived "Bosnian Conflict" has led to the creation of the biggest multinational force assembled since World War II, made possible by deliberately-caused human suffering.

The main front man for this NATO world army was Bill Clinton, (CFR, TC, BIL), the "yes man" for David Rockefeller and the Elite.

On December 6, 1995, we saw a full-page advertisement in the (CIA-controlled) Washington Post placed by an organization calling itself the "Committee for American Leadership in Bosnia," signed by Zbigniew Brzezinski (CFR and TC founder, BIL), Congressman Stephen Solarz (CFR), George Soros (BIL),Michael Armacost (CFR and president of the Elite Brookings Institute), and Leslie Gelb (TC, president of CFR),

We have one-party states within a one-party world under a one-party army.

How many more have to suffer before the political stooges stop being duped?

How many more tragedies before the human race takes control of its own destiny?

What is true of Bosnia is also true of the conflict in Kosovo, stage two in the Balkans NATO-New World Order agenda.

Again we have the grotesque site of Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Secretary of State and High Priestess of American politics making speeches about "peace" and "freedom" when she is responsible for implementing policies of genocide.

This is the same Madeleine Albright who is involved in Project Monarch and other mind control programmes in which endless numbers of children are tortured and traumatised beyond the imagination.

To her the horrors of Kosovo are meaningless, except as a means to achieve the goal of those she salvishly serves.

Look at the other major puppets in the Kosovo massacre, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Both are knowing players in the agame of global control on behalf of their puppet masters. Both are worthy successors to the stream of deeply corrupt mass murderers who have occupied the White House and Downing Street.

They know that those who implement the abuse of ethnic Albanians are controlled by the same people who enforce the NATO bombings in response to this "tthnic cleansing".

As the Millennium approaches, the creation of global chaos will be increased at every turn and there is every chance that what we are seeing in Kosovo today will escalate into a much wider conflict.

Watch for the involvement of China and future hostilities also as NATO emerges as the global police force.

We need to stop looking to politicians for answers and start organizing ourselves in our own communities to build local economies and organizations which can operate outside this manipulation.

A good statement of intent, in my view, would be a mass-boycott of all state and national elections. To vote under present circumstances is to give credence to a system that is designed to control us and not to set us free.

By refusing to vote and have any part in it, we can show how we feel. We can say to the manipulators:

"We know what you are doing and the game is up."

"We will no longer be manipulated into supporting and maintaining the one-party state and a one-party world."

from the St. Peterburg Times "Global Eye," 1999-Apr-20:

Curious George

A CIA spymaster who headed the shadowy intelligence agency during one of its murkiest periods, the mid-1970s - when it was bankrolling the murderous coup in Chile and training cadres of right-wing Latin American militarists (including one Manuel Noreiga) in torture tactics - last week called for the release of Gen. Augusto "Cattle Prod" Pinochet from his "unjust" detention in Britain.

Yes, it was none other than good old George Bush, throwing the colossal force of his moral integrity behind Pinochet's cause, which has also been embraced by such humanitarian stalwarts as Margaret Thatcher and Henry Kissinger, MSNBC reports.

Pinochet, of course, is "suffering" from a draconian "incarceration" in a four-bedroom mansion in Surrey (which is costing his hard-right sugar daddies a cool $16,000 per month) while the British government decides whether to extradite him to Spain to face murder charges stemming from his tyrannical rule in Chile.

George, no doubt with a fond look back to those days when he used to help his good friend Gussy kick Commie butt (kidnapped, strapped-down, strung-up, slit-open, flayed-and-salted alleged Commie butt, sure, but what the hey), called Pinochet's luxury lock-up "a travesty of justice."

Well, he and Gus would know all about that, wouldn't they?

From Wayne Mann's 1998-May-25 TPDP, an editorial from the New York Times

AT HOME ABROAD / By ANTHONY LEWIS

Their Suharto and Ours

In December, 1975, President Ford and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, visited President Suharto in Indonesia. They reacted with a nod and a wink to his plans to seize East Timor. The day after they left, Indonesian forces invaded the distant island, using American arms. In the invasion and ensuing occupation, a third of East Timor's 600,000 people died.

When it was pointed out that using American arms aid for aggression violated U.S. law, Mr. Kissinger reportedly told his staff: "Can't we construe [stopping] a Communist government in the middle of Indonesia as self-defense?" (East Timor was in fact remote from Indonesia, and its mostly Roman Catholic people wanted independence, not Communism.)

That episode tells us that an element in American foreign policy also fell when President Suharto resigned last week. He was one more in a string of dictators who were admired by U.S. governments but rejected, in the end, by their own people.

Mr. Kissinger was most closely identified with the policy: the idea that we should support authoritarian rulers because they could assure stability. Thus Mr. Kissinger smiled on the Shah of Iran, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Yahya Khan of Pakistan and the like.

But it has turned out that tyranny does not assure stability. Democracy does. Suharto lasted a very long time compared with other tyrants, 32 years. But eventually resentment of his kleptocracy -- the corrupt enrichment of his children and other relatives -- boiled over.

Suharto ruled by fear, as tyrants always do. Anyone who looked like a potential opponent was imprisoned or brutalized into silence. [...]

Protests continued even after troops made the mistake, fatal for Suharto, of firing on an unarmed crowd.

The events in Indonesia have also buried a theoretical justification of strongman rule. That is the notion -- invented by Lee Kuan Yew, the longtime ruler of Singapore -- that Asians prefer order to freedom, and that such "Asian values" underlie the region's decade of rapid economic growth.

The economic miracle has come to an end in the Asian financial crisis. And political change, first in Thailand and South Korea, now in Indonesia, has shown that Asians do not really prefer to live under authoritarian regimes. They want a voice, and they want freedom.

[...]

The larger implications of Indonesian events are for China. Its Communist rulers have maintained stability by rapid economic growth and tight political control. Indonesia shows the limits of that formula. Continuing stability will surely depend on the introduction of democracy in China, however gradually.

There is also a lesson for the United States. Right up to the end, the U.S. Defense Department was training Indonesian units that specialize in the torture and "disappearance" of dissidents. Congress banned American training of Indonesian forces in 1992, but it went on secretly until a victim of torture escaped and told his story this month, shaming the Pentagon into cutting off the program.

In the world as it is, the United States cannot deal only with nice guys. We need good relations with some undemocratic governments. But we do not have to condone savagery, much less assist it.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies, known as the IISS and located at 23 Tavistock Street in London, was formed in 1958 as a result of decisions made at Bilderberg '57. E. H. van der Beugel, who chaired Bilderberg after the death of Retinger (l'eminence grise) in 1960, later became president of the IISS. Bertram Christoph, representative to Bilderberg for Germany and Bilderberg attendant in '95, '96, and '98, is a former director of the IISS.

An Altavista search for ``Bilderberg'' limited to host:*.eth.ch (the common domain of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) returns zero hits. This level of systematic blackout is quite routine with Bilderberg.

Another top-tier think tank associated closely with the international councils (now, with Bilderberg) is the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. Its current chairman is James Wolfensohn, an important inner circle Bilderberger.

from http://www2.admin.ias.edu/pr/about.htm:

ABOUT THE INSTITUTE

The Institute for Advanced Study is an independent, private institution dedicated entirely to the encouragement, support and patronage of learning through fundamental research and definitive scholarship across a wide range of fields. It was founded in 1930 by Louis Bamberger and Caroline Bamberger Fuld as a center where intellectual inquiry can be carried out in the most favorable circumstances. Over the past sixty-five years the Institute has been home to some of the most highly regarded thinkers of the twentieth century, drawing promising young postdocs and accomplished senior scholars from around the world to its New Jersey campus.

The Institute today consists of the School of Historical Studies, the School of Mathematics, the School of Natural Sciences and the School of Social Science. Each School has a small permanent Faculty, and some 160 fellowships are awarded annually to Visiting Members from other research institutions and universities throughout the world. In any given year they represent about one hundred higher education institutions and come from twenty to thirty countries. The Institute's nearly 5000 former Members hold positions of intellectual and scientific leadership in the United States and abroad.

More than a dozen Nobel Laureates have been Institute Faculty or Members, and many more are winners of the Wolf or MacArthur prizes or the Fields Medal. Most of the Faculty are members of the National Academy of Sciences or the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Institute has no formal curriculum, degree programs, schedule of courses, laboratories, or other experimental facilities. It is committed to exploring the most fundamental areas of knowledge, areas where there is little expectation of immediate outcomes or striking applications--nonetheless, the long-term impact of Institute research has sometimes been dramatic. No contracted or directed research is done at the Institute, and it receives no income from tuition or fees. Resources for operations come from endowment income, grants from private foundations and government agencies, and gifts from corporations and individuals. It has no formal links to other educational institutions, but since its founding the Institute has enjoyed close, collaborative ties with Princeton University and other nearby institutions.

Located on an idyllic campus on Olden Lane in the southwestern part of Princeton Township, the Institute's facilities include several academic buildings, two libraries, a dining hall, an auditorium, and housing for Members.

The main telephone number for the Institute is (609) 734-8000. Our mailing address is: Institute for Advanced Study, Olden Lane, Princeton, NJ 08540-0631. You may contact the Institute's Public Affairs Officer, Georgia Whidden, at (609) 734-8239. An e-mail address for each School's Administrative Officer is provided on this site on the pages for each of the Institute's four Schools.

---

Maintained by: Georgia Whidden
Last updated: September 15, 1998

from http://www2.admin.ias.edu/pr/tmf95f.htm:

JAMES D. WOLFENSOHN became the ninth President of the World Bank on June 1, 1995. A member of the Institute for Advanced Study's Board of Trustees since 1978 and its Chairman since 1986, Mr. Wolfensohn had been President and C.E.O. of his own investment banking firm, James D. Wolfensohn, Inc., for the last fourteen years.
Since Mr. Wolfensohn assumed the World Bank's presidency, he has spent much of his time traveling throughout the world to see first-hand the Bank's operations. He has been to Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Australia,East Asia, and the Middle East, meeting with government leaders, representatives of business, labor, non-governmental organizations, church groups, the media, students, and teachers. Mr. Wolfensohn believes that it is critical to form his own view of what the World Bank has done in the past and will do in the future. During an interview with The Washington Post, he said, "I'll be walking the streets, smelling it myself. I can't get that from listening to commentary in Washington."
This hands-on approach is typical for Mr. Wolfensohn. He served as a Royal Australian Air Force Flying Officer, and in 1956 was a member of the Australian Olympic Fencing Team. He holds B.A. and LL.B. degrees from the University of Sydney and was an attorney with an Australian law firm before attending the Harvard Graduate School of Business from which he received his M.B.A. A lover and patron of the arts, he has been Chairman of the Board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts since 1990, and earlier he was Chair of the Board of Carnegie Hall. Mr. Wolfensohn is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Director Phillip Griffiths said recently that he and all in the Institute community are delighted that, despite the demanding schedule Mr. Wolfensohn will face as President of the World Bank, he will be able to continue his commitment to the Institute and his chairmanship of the Board.

When Albert Einstein came to the United States, he stationed himself at the IAS. Einstein was a vocal proponent of the world government concept, including particularly the disarmament of nations. In the chapter on erosion of sovereignty is an essay that details Einstein's promotion of the world government concept, explaining why he considered it to be imperative. My own retorts are interstitiated therein.

from the Institute for Advanced Study, from http://www2.admin.ias.edu/pr/Trustees.htm:

THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES

JAMES D. WOLFENSOHN (Chairman)
President, The World Bank
Washington, DC

LEON LEVY (Vice Chairman)
Partner, Odyssey Partners, L.P.
New York, New York

JAMES G. ARTHUR
University Professor, Department of Mathematics
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada

RICHARD B. BLACK
President, Oak Technology, Inc.
Sunnyvale, California

MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG
President and Founder, Bloomberg Financial Markets
New York, New York

MARTIN A. CHOOLJIAN
President, CH Capital Corporation
Princeton, New Jersey

ANNE d'HARNONCOURT
The George D. Widener Director and CEO, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

MARIO DRAGHI
Director General of the Treasury, Ministry of the Italian Treasury
Rome, Italy

JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics
The University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

VARTAN GREGORIAN
President, Carnegie Corporation
New York, New York

PHILLIP A. GRIFFITHS
Director, Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey

AGNES GUND
President, The Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York

TORU HASHIMOTO
Chairman of the Board, The Fuji Bank, Limited
Tokyo, Japan

JON M. HUNTSMAN, Jr.
Vice Chairman, Huntsman
Salt Lake City, Utah

PETER R. KANN
Publisher and Chairman, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
New York, New York

HELENE L. KAPLAN
Of Counsel, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom
New York, New York

IMMANUEL KOHN
Senior Partner and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Cahill Gordon & Reindel
New York, New York

MARIE-JOSEE KRAVIS
Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute, Inc.
New York, New York

MARTIN L. LEIBOWITZ
Vice Chairman and Chief Investment Officer, TIAA-CREF
New York, New York

DAVID F. MARQUARDT
Managing Partner, August Capital
Menlo Park, California

ROBERT B. MENSCHEL
Limited Partner, Goldman Sachs & Company
New York, New York

NATHAN P. MYHRVOLD
Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Corporation
Redmond, Washington

MARTIN J. REES
Royal Society Research Professor, Institute of Astronomy
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, England

JAMES J. SCHIRO
Chairman, Price Waterhouse LLP
New York, New York

RONALDO H. SCHMITZ
Member of the Board of Managing Directors, Deutsche Bank AG
Frankfurt, Germany

RUTH J. SIMMONS
President, Smith College
Northampton, Massachusetts

CHARLES SIMONYI
Chief Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Redmond, Washington

MICHEL L. VAILLAUD
New York, New York

LADISLAUS VON HOFFMANN
President, Omicron Investments, Inc.
Washington, DC

BRIAN F. WRUBLE
Partner, Odyssey Partners, L.P.
New York, New York

MORTIMER B. ZUCKERMAN
Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, U.S. News and World Report
New York, New York

TRUSTEES EMERITI

CHARLES L. BROWN   v   THEODORE L. CROSS
JOSEPH L. DOOB   v   SIDNEY D. DRELL   v   WILFRIED GUTH
RALPH E. HANSMANN   v   HAMISH MAXWELL   v   MARTIN E. SEGAL
DONALD B. STRAUS   v   FRANK E. TAPLIN, Jr.

---

PRESENT AND PAST DIRECTORS

ABRAHAM FLEXNER (1930-1939)   v   FRANK AYDELOTTE (1939-1947)
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER (1947-1966)   v   CARL KAYSEN (1966-1976)
HARRY WOOLF (1976-1987)   v   MARVIN L. GOLDBERGER (1987-1991)
PHILLIP A. GRIFFITHS (1991- )

---

PRESENT AND PAST FACULTY

STEPHEN L. ADLER   v   JAMES W. ALEXANDER   v   ANDREW E. Z. ALFOLDI
MICHAEL F. ATIYAH   v   JOHN N. BAHCALL
ARNE K. A. BEURLING   v   ENRICO BOMBIERI   v   ARMAND BOREL
JEAN BOURGAIN   v   GLEN W. BOWERSOCK
LUIS A. CAFFARELLI   v   HAROLD F. CHERNISS   v   MARSHALL CLAGETT
GILES CONSTABLE   v   PATRICIA CRONE
ROGER F. DASHEN   v   PIERRE DELIGNE   v   FREEMAN J. DYSON
EDWARD M. EARLE   v   ALBERT EINSTEIN
JOHN H. ELLIOTT   v   CLIFFORD GEERTZ   v   FELIX GILBERT
JAMES F. GILLIAM   v   KURT GÖDEL
HETTY GOLDMAN   v   OLEG GRABAR   v   CHRISTIAN HABICHT
HARISH-CHANDRA   v   ERNST HERZFELD
ALBERT O. HIRSCHMAN   v   LARS V. HÖRMANDER   v   PIET HUT
ERNST H. KANTOROWICZ   v   GEORGE F. KENNAN
ROBERT P. LANGLANDS   v   IRVING LAVIN   v   T. D. LEE
ELIAS A. LOWE   v   ROBERT D. MacPHERSON
JACK F. MATLOCK, Jr.   v   MILLARD MEISS   v   BENJAMIN D. MERITT
JOHN W. MILNOR v    DAVID MITRANY
DEANE MONTGOMERY   v   MARSTON MORSE   v   ABRAHAM PAIS
ERWIN PANOFSKY   v   PETER PARET
TULLIO E. REGGE   v   WINFIELD W. RIEFLER   v   MARSHALL N. ROSENBLUTH
JOAN WALLACH SCOTT   v   NATHAN SEIBERG
ATLE SELBERG   v   KENNETH M. SETTON   v   CARL L. SIEGEL
THOMAS SPENCER   v   WALTER W. STEWART
BENGT G. D. STRÖMGREN   v   HOMER A. THOMPSON   v   OSWALD VEBLEN
HEINRICH VON STADEN   v   JOHN VON NEUMANN
MICHAEL WALZER v   ROBERT B. WARREN   v   ANDRÉ WEIL
HERMANN WEYL v    MORTON WHITE
HASSLER WHITNEY   v   FRANK WILCZEK   v   EDWARD WITTEN
ERNEST LLEWELLYN WOODWARD   v   C. N. YANG   v   SHING-TUNG YAU

Bilderberg is to the IISS roughly as Bohemian Grove is to the CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies, covered below).

from the Sacramento Bee, 1999-Aug-2, by Suzanne Bohan:

Movers, shakers from politics, business go Bohemian:
Annual Sonoma fete draws Bushes, Kissinger, Powell, Gingrich

MONTE RIO -- The Bohemian Club's Annual Summer Encampment came to a close here Sunday, ending a two-week retreat for the rich and powerful that President Herbert Hoover once called "the greatest men's party on Earth." The club's famed annual gathering has been held for more than 100 years at the 2,700-acre Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, about 70 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. This year's event drew in notables such as former President George Bush, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, retired Gen. Colin Powell, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Dow Chemical Chairman Frank Popoff, as well as actor Danny Glover.

The men gather to celebrate what they call "the spirit of Bohemia," said Peter Phillips, a Sonoma State University sociology professor who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Bohemian Club.

"This is a place men can go and hang out with people who are similar to them," he said.

The annual gathering near the Russian River, which was first held in 1879, starts with the "Cremation of Care" ritual, in which the club's mascot is burned in effigy, symbolizing a freedom from care. Members also perform several plays, and gourmet food and expensive wine are plentiful.

While the club was formed in 1872 by a group of San Francisco journalists, the male-only club now bars journalists from membership to protect the group's privacy. Membership is coveted, and people routinely wait 10 or 15 years before gaining admittance. There are currently about 2,700 members.

The club has drawn criticism for years because of its emphasis on privacy. What particularly concerns Phillips and others are the "Lakeside Talks" held during the summer retreat. This year, Powell was expected to deliver a talk titled "America's Promise Leading Armies and Leading Kids," and Popoff, of Dow Chemical, was to give a speech called "Environmental Journey."

"These are often public policy speeches," said Mary Moore, with Bohemian Grove Action Network, a protest group. "And the American public is not privy to it."

No one from the club returned several calls from The Bee.

Bohemian Grove Action Network has periodically held demonstrations at the grove, although none were held this year.

The point of the protests, Moore said, has been "to let the American public know that what they've learned in civics isn't the full story on how decision-making . . . is made in this country." The Bohemian Club, she said, "is one of the most elite organizations on the planet."

When the group sponsors public policy talks that are held without public scrutiny, "the average American feels left out of the process," she said.

Phillips echoes Moore's objections to the off-the-record nature of the Lakeside Talks.

"These are extremely powerful people and private discussions on policy issues that affect us certainly go against democratic principles," he said. "There's no reason that those speeches they're giving couldn't be transcribed and made public. They have a responsibility to be open about it."

from http://www.fair.org/extra/best-of-extra/bohemian-grove.html:

Inside Bohemian Grove: The Story People Magazine Won't Let You Read

EXTRA! (Nov./Dec. '91), Best of EXTRA!

When Dirk Mathison, San Francisco bureau chief for People magazine, infiltrated the exclusive Bohemian Grove retreat this summer, he got a view into the U.S. elite that very few reporters have glimpsed. Unfortunately, that elite includes the management of Time Warner, the owner of People, which prevented Mathison from telling his story.

Bohemian Grove, a secluded campground in California's Sonoma County, is the site of an annual two-week gathering of a highly select, all-male club, whose members have included every Republican president since Calvin Coolidge. Current participants include George Bush, Henry Kissinger, James Baker and David Rockefeller -- a virtual who's who of the most powerful men in business and government.

Few journalists have gotten into the Grove and been allowed to tell the tale (one exception is Philip Weiss, whose 11/89 Spy piece provides the most detailed inside account), and members maintain that the goings-on there are not newsworthy events, merely private fun. In fact, official business is conducted there: Policy speeches are regularly made by members and guests, and the club privately boasts that the Manhattan Project was conceived on its grounds.

Given the veil of secrecy that surrounds the Bohemian "encampment," a reporter needs to enter the grounds covertly in order to get a full portrait. Mathison entered the grounds three times July 1991, aided by activists from the Bohemian Grove Action Network.

He witnessed a speech -- "Smart Weapons" -- by former Navy Secretary John Lehman, who stated that the Pentagon estimates that 200,000 Iraqis were killed by the U.S. and its allies during the Gulf War. Other featured speakers included Defense Secretary Richard Cheney on "Major Defense Problems of the 21st Century", former Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano on "America's Health Revolution -- Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Pays", and former Attorney General Elliott Richardson on "Defining the New World Order".

Mathison's entree into the secret world of the Grove was cut short on July 20, however, when he was recognized by two of the participants in the festivities -- executives from Time Warner, People's publisher. More loyal to the Grove than to journalistic endeavor, they had the reporter removed from the premises (San Francisco Weekly, 8/7/91).

Mathison already had plenty of material, however, and turned in an article to his editors, which was scheduled to appear in the Aug. 5, 1991 issue. They were pleased with the piece, according to Mathison: "They liked it enough to expand it a bit," he told EXTRA!

But then the story was suddenly killed. Landon Jones, managing editor of People, told EXTRA! that the decision had nothing to do with the Time Warner executives. "It was cut partially because he hadn't been there long enough to get a complete story. Secondly, we felt very uncertain about reporting what we did have, because, and this is my fault and I take responsibility for this, I simply didn't realize it was technically trespassing."

For his part, Mathison said he did not know why the story was killed, and implied it would be nearly impossible to find the real reason. "It's easier to penetrate the Bohemian Grove than the Time-Life Building," he told EXTRA!

But the story raises questions about the ability of a media entity to report critically on an elite when its executives are enthusiastic members of that elite. Indeed, the Time organization was noted for sending a corporate plane to the Bohemian gathering every year, according to long-time Grove-watcher Kerry Richardson.

Time Warner is not the only media corporation with Bohemian connections. The list of Fourth Estate bigwigs who have been members or guests is extensive: Franklin Murphy, the former CEO of the Times Mirror corporation; William Randolph Hearst, Jr.; Jack Howard and Charles Scripps of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain; Tom Johnson, president of CNN and former publisher of the Los Angeles Times.

When Associated Press president Louis Boccardi spoke at one of the Grove's "Lakeside Talks" about kidnapped reporter Terry Anderson (Spy, 11/89), he referred to his audience as men of "power and rank" and "gave them more details than he said he was willing to give his readers."

Walter Cronkite, now on the CBS board, hangs out at the same lodge at Bohemian Grove as George Bush and the former chairs of Procter & Gamble and Bank of America; Cronkite's voice has served as the voice of the Owl of Bohemia, a fixture in the club's mock-druidic rituals.

The media figures attending the retreat all agree not to report on what goes on inside. The prohibition seems to apply to reporters who are not guests or members as well: In 1982, NPR got a recording of Henry Kissinger's speech at the Grove -- but declined to air it (Spy, 11/89). Also in 1982, a Time reporter went undercover as a waiter in Bohemian Grove; like Mathison's People article, his story was killed.

from BusinessWeek.com, 2007-Mar-12, by Jessi Hempel:

The Talk of TED
The California conference of entrepreneurs, scientists, celebs, and politicians highlights the environment, Rwanda, and war photos, among other topics

In recent years, the TED conference has gained a reputation for blissfully big ideas buoyed by unrelenting optimism. So few conference goers were prepared for venture capitalist John Doerr to choke up with emotion as he kicked off the second day of talks on Mar. 9.

"I'm scared," he told the audience, looking down at his 15-year-old daughter in the front row. "I don't think we're going to make it."

Doerr issued a passionate call to action for everyone to make environmental concerns their "next big thing." As one of several positive examples, he praised Wal-Mart for making great moves to address what he called the three largest energy drains in business—heating and cooling systems, lighting, and refrigeration. The giant's initiative forced its 60,000 suppliers to focus on environmental issues as well, he said.

"Going green is the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century," said Doerr, who through his venture firm's Greentech initiative is investing in the sector. Although much attention has been focused on fighting global warming, Doerr offered a bleak assessment of these efforts. "I'm afraid it's not enough," he said.

Going green is the most prominent of the themes that has emerged at TED this year, and it has taken on a newfound urgency. But if Doerr seemed depressed, the audience was energized.

And if anyone can do anything about this global warming crisis, surely they're here, where the entrepreneurial nature of investors like Doerr and Vinod Khosla meets the celebrity power of Oscar-winning actor Forest Whitaker or singer Paul Simon. Pepper in heavyweight academics like Nobel prize winner Murray Gell-Mann and a few politicians like the 42nd President of the U.S., Bill Clinton, and you have a promising team for social change.

Prized Participants

At least that's the hope within the community of TED loyalists, many of whom have been tromping to the Monterey Conference Center for this yearly ritual since 1984, when founder Richard Saul Wurman first convened a group of polymaths for an eclectic days-long dinner party-like event designed to trace the convergence of technology, entertainment, and design. British publishing entrepreneur Chris Anderson used his Sapling Foundation to purchase the conference in 2002 and has added a heavy dose of social entrepreneurship and philanthropy into the mix.

In recent years this has been played up with the TED Prize. Three winners are each given $100,000—and, more important, the support of the TED community—to carry out one wish each. This year's winners were President Clinton, the naturalist E.O. Wilson, and war photographer James Nachtwey.

Clinton will use the resource to augment his efforts to build a functioning health-care system in Rwanda. Wilson will launch a project, on the scale of the mapping of the human genome, to build an "Encyclopedia of Life"—a digital catalog of the 1.8 million known species of living things.

And with arguably the most moving talk of the trio, Nachtwey asked for help with diplomatic contacts to help him photograph a story he couldn't mention for political reasons but says the world needs to know about, and said the resources will help him display his work in new ways using the Internet. "I became a photographer to be a war photographer," he told the audience. "A picture that revealed the true face of war would almost by definition be an antiwar photograph."

Onstage Inspiration

As the conference nears its end, the skies are clear in Monterey. Rumor has it the aquarium is not to be missed, but few TEDsters are willing to give up couch space in the simulcast room where more than a dozen high-definition flat screens broadcast the talks to pockets of mesmerized conference goers.

Google founder Sergey Brin ushers his parents into the room. Cameron Diaz is leaning back on a couch. Two floors up, the several hundred people with main hall passes are squeezed into the intimate auditorium.

From the small stage with dramatic, blue-spotted backlighting and a floor-to-ceiling screen for visual aids, an eclectic group of speakers have offered rousing thoughts and opinions. We've seen two rounds of DNA strands and photos of Saturn, an Internet art project and animated data.

Cassini imaging team leader Carolyn Porco began the conference by showing photographs of Saturn and its moons, walking the audience across the pictorial coastline of another planet. "If we can demonstrate that Genesis has happened not once [on Earth] but twice [including Saturn] in the solar system, then by inference that means it has occurred a staggering number of times across the universe in its 13.7 billion year history."

After the kinetic professor Hans Rosling, a veteran speaker, showed how his data animations bring statistics to life (viewable at www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=hans_rosling), he ripped off his button-down shirt to reveal a black tank top with gold sparkles and, in a single motion, slid two feet of metal—a Swedish sword from the early 1800s—down his throat. He had to do something to top last year's presentation.

Side Talks

Founder of Intellectual Venture and former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold managed to hit everything from penguin poop to intelligent life on other planets to whale sex in his 18-minute talk. He followed Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, who used the platform to drive home the difference technology has made for children. "Kids are different from us," he told the audience. "We watch TV, they make TV."

As usual, much of TED's magic happens in the all-too-brief windows of time between sessions. That's when investors and mentors approached NYU grad student Jeff Han after he presented his interactive touch-screen technology last year. He has now started his own company.

It's also when architect Cameron Sinclair, having won the TED Prize, met Dan Shine, director of AMD's 50x15 initiative. And it's why, despite the fact that TED's talks are now available over the Internet for free, and despite the fact that Anderson jacked the price to $6,000, next year's conference sold out just 10 days after registration opened.

Surely the conference isn't the only place to collect new ideas and build the relationships to put them into action, but amid a growing number of similar confabs—Pop!Tech, for example, or even Davos—it's still a hot ticket.

here is a brief on the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This organization, by all appearances, is entirely evil and subversive. It is a hub of practical globalist-feudalist policy development, promulgation, and implementational coordination. Browsing directories of recent issues of their journal or of their recent publications provides ample demonstration of this. Elite congressional involvement is extensive. The CSIS is a major doctrinal organ. Almost all of their publications are available only through purchase at significant cost, but they are nonetheless all available to the public.

from http://www.csis.org/html/csislead.html:

Who leads CSIS?

CSIS receives guidance and direction from several groups that oversee its operations

Board of Trustees

The Board of trustees is composed of distinguished U.S. business and academic leaders.

Chairman

Sam Nunn, former U.S. Senator

Vice Chairman and Cofounder

David M. Abshire
President & CEO, The Center for the Study of the Presidency

Chairman, Executive Committee

Anne Armstrong*
Former Ambassador to Great Britain

President and CEO

Robert B. Zoellick

Members

Lester M. Alberthal, Jr.
Betty Beene
Reginald K. Brack, Jr.
William E. Brock
Harold Brown
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Robert A. Day
Michael P. Galvin*
Joseph T. Gorman
Carla A. Hills
Ray L. Hunt
James A. Kelly
Henry A. Kissinger
Donald B. Marron
Homer A. Neal
John E. Pepper
William J. Perry
Charles A. Sanders
John C. Sawhill
James R. Schlesinger
William A. Schreyer*
Brent Scowcroft
Murray Weidenbaum
Frederick Whittemore
R. James Woolsey
Amos A. Jordan, Emeritus
Leonard H. Marks, Emeritus
Robert S. Strauss, Emeritus

*member of the Executive Committee

Advisory Board

The Advisory Board is composed of both public and private sector policymakers, including 14 members of Congress. The Board is cochaired by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carla Hills.

Corporate Officers

Anthony A. Smith, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer
Richard M. Fairbanks III, Managing Director for Domestic and International Issues
William J. Taylor, Jr., Senior Vice President for International Security Affairs
Erik R. Peterson, Senior Vice President and Director of Studies
Bradley D. Belt, Vice President for International Finance and Economic Policy
Judy L. Harbaugh, Vice President for Development
M. Jon Vondracek, Vice President for External Relations
Brenda Palmer, Vice President for Finance and Administration

Counselors

CSIS Counselors are world-class strategists who have formerly held top-level government posts. They bring to the Center an extensive reserve of expertise and experience.

William E. Brock
Harold Brown
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Henry A. Kissinger
Mack McLarty
Sam Nunn
James R. Schlesinger

Advisers

Senior advisers and associates are an integral part of the CSIS family. They provide substantive counsel and input on the full range of Center projects.

Distinguished Senior Scholars

Fred C. Iklé (in residence)
Bernard Lewis (Princeton University)

Senior Advisers

J. Carter Beese
Wayne Berman
M. Stanton H. Burnett
Derek H. Burney
Richard R. Burt
William Clark, Jr.
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Diana Lady Dougan
Ernest Graves
Max M. Kampelman
Robert H. Kupperman
David McCurdy
Robert G. Neumann
Stephen J. Solarz
The Duke of Westminster

Distinguished Senior Adviser

William J. Crowe, Jr.

from http://www.csis.org/html/mission1.html:

What is CSIS?

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is a public policy research institution dedicated to analysis and policy impact. CSIS is the only institution of its kind that maintains resident experts on all the world's major geographical regions. It also covers key functional areas, such as international finance, U.S. domestic and economic policy, and U.S. foreign policy and national security issues.

For more than three decades, the strategic approach of CSIS has emphasized long-range, anticipatory, and integrated thinking on a wide range of policy issues.

The Center's staff of 80 research specialists, 80 support staff, and 70 interns, is committed to generating strategic analysis, analyzing policy options, exploring contingencies, and making recommendations.

Founded in 1962 and located in Washington, D.C., CSIS is a private, tax-exempt institution. Its research is non-partisan and non-proprietary. On January 1, 1999, Sam Nunn assumed the position of chairman of the CSIS Board of Trustees, formerly held by Anne Armstrong, and Robert Zoellick assumed the presidency as David M. Abshire became the CSIS chancellor.

The Center's gateway to Asia is the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum CSIS. It is the hub of a network of 20 research institutes around the Pacific Rim. Forum programs encompass current and emerging political, security, economic, and business issues. Brent Scowcroft chairs its Board of Governors and James A. Kelly is its president.

from http://www.csis.org/html/csismiss.html:

What is the CSIS Mission?

The mission of CSIS is policy impact.

Its goal is to inform and shape selected policy decisions in government and the private sector to meet the increasingly complex and difficult challenges that leaders will confront in the next century.

How does CSIS implement this mission?

CSIS achieves this mission in three ways:

By generating strategic analysis

CSIS is a source of scholarly analysis on international public policy issues, such as the following:

The Seven Revolutions Project, which identifies and analyzes the issues that leaders will face in the year 2020. This project assesses trends in seven areas of revolutionary change: demography, environment, technology, knowledge, economics and finance, conflict, and society and politics. Trends within these Seven Revolutions, analysis of links among those revolutions, and the Center's contingency thinking have been woven together into a multimedia presentation that has been shown around the world.

Global Trends 2002 brings together CSIS experts to examine major world trends over the next decade and their implications for a number of key countries. Designed to offer useful, near-term insights to decision makers in business and government, Global Trends 2002 differs from Seven Revolutions in three primary ways: its shorter time frame, its more in-depth research and analysis, and its use of specific contingency analyses and country projections.

Middle East Dynamic Net Assessment examines the strategic environment in the Middle East, taking in to account the most recent political and military developments in the region, and explores the implication s for regional security.

By convening policymakers and other influential parties

CSIS has a long-standing reputation for bringing together leaders from government, the private sector, and academia from around the world. Examples include:

Global Organized Crime examines the implications of this burgeoning threat to global stability and information technology security from narcotics trafficking, financial crime, Russian and Asian organized crime, terrorism, and the nuclear black market. The project is chaired by Judge William Webster.

The Global Information Infrastructure Commission is designed to foster private sector leadership and private-public sector cooperation in the development of information networks and services. The 40 commissioners include CEOs of major international corporations, the World Bank, and government representatives. Commission cochairs are Minoru Makihara (CEO of Mitsubishi), Les Alberthal (chairman and CEO of EDS) and Volker Jung (executive vice-president and member of the managing board of Siemens AG).

The American-Ukrainian Advisory Committee identifies opportunities for closer political and economic cooperation between the two countries. The committee makes concrete recommendations at the highest political level to the two governments to assist Ukraine in consolidating its independence and in undertaking the transition to a market economy. The chairman of the group is CSIS counselor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

By building structures for policy action

CSIS mobilizes government and private-sector leaders in action commissions and other high-level groups and then moves policymakers to take concrete actions.

These initiatives are designed to achieve specific, well-defined results—such as replacing the current anti-savings, anti-investment tax code in the United States and increasing foreign investment flows to economies in transition.

Specifically, CSIS action commissions and other high-level groups have been formed in Poland and with the MERCOSUR countries to explore concrete ways of promoting foreign investment, encouraging private enterprise, and expanding economic, financial, and political ties with the Unites States. At home, CSIS has had an important policy impact on fiscal, tax, health care, and capital market reform as a result of its Strengthening of America Commission and its follow-up effort, the National Campaign to Strengthen America.

from http://www.csis.org/html/csisorg.html:

How is CSIS Organized?

Programs | Major Projects
Endowed Chairs | Membership Groups

Programs

• African Studies: Helen Kitchen, Chair; Constance J. Freeman, Director
• Americas Program: Georges A. Fauriol, Director
• Asian Studies: Gerrit W. Gong, Director
• Domestic Policy Issues: Bradley D. Belt, Director
• Energy and National Security Studies: G. Henry Schuler, Chair; Robert E. Ebel, Director
• European Studies: Simon Serfaty, Director
• International Finance and Economics: Vacant
• International Communications: Diana L. Dougan, Chair; William B. Garrison, Jr., Director
• Islamic Studies: Shireen T. Hunter
• Middle East Studies: Anthony Cordesman and Judith Kipper, Codirectors
• Political-Military Studies: William J. Taylor, Jr., Director
• Preventive Diplomacy: Joseph V. Montville, Director
• Russian and Eurasian Program: Keith Bush, Senior Associate
• South Asia Program: Teresita C. Schaffer

Major Projects

• Global Organized Crime
• National Commission on Retirement Policy
• New Global Economy Project
• Strategic Energy Initiative
• Turkish Studies Project
• Unilateral Economic Sanctions Project
• U.S.-EU-Poland Action Commission
• MERCOSUR Project
• U.S.-Romanian Action Commission

Endowed Chairs

• Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy: Sir Laurence Martin
• Freeman Chair in China Studies: Gerrit W. Gong
• Japan Chair: William T. Breer
• Henry A. Kissinger Chair in International Politics, Diplomatic History, and National Security Policy: Walter Laqueur
• William M. Scholl Chair in International Business: vacant
• William A. Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis: Erik R. Peterson
• William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy: Sidney Weintraub

Membership Groups

The Houston and Dallas Roundtables bring together local business leaders and CSIS experts to discuss current international political and economic trends.

The Washington Roundtable meets three to four times a year with members of Congress, executive branch officials, and other Washington experts to discuss pressing policy issues of the day.

The International Councillors: CSIS Counselor Henry Kissinger chairs the semiannual meetings of this group of international business leaders who discuss the implications of the changing economic and strategic environment.

The International Research Council: The Council is a group of world renowned scholars who oversee the development and execution of the Center's research agenda. Cochairs are Walter Laqueur and Murray Weidenbaum.

The 2020 Committee is a network of younger members of the CSIS community who are also leaders in business and government. Established a the time of the Center's 30th anniversary in 1993, the 2020 Committee was given a charter to oversee and advise CSIS as it looks ahead toward the next 30 years. Michael Galvin is the committee's chairman.

from http://www.csis.org/html/csiscomm.html:

How does CSIS communicate?

Conferences - CSIS convenes 700-800 meetings, seminars, and conferences each year in Washington and throughout the world. (Go to our Calendar of Upcoming Events or Chronicle of Past Events)

Networks - CSIS creates and manages dozens of formal and informal networks and has expanded significantly onto the Internet through its web site, http://www.csis.org.

Media - CSIS generates thousands of media appearances, articles, and background contacts annually. (Go to the CSIS Press Page)

Publications—CSIS publications include its periodical, The Washington Quarterly, and the Washington Papers, the Significant Issues Series, CSIS Panel Reports, CSIS Reports, and books copublished with scholarly presses. The Center also produces several newsletters, News@CSIS, Euro-Focus, Post-Soviet Prospects, as well as the CSIS Watch, a concise analysis of breaking political and economic events faxed to members of Congress, executive branch officials, and corporate executives. A catalog of CSIS publications is available through the Publications Office at 202-775-3119 (phone), 202-775-3199 (fax), books@csis.org, or on the Publications section of the website.

Who funds CSIS?

Contributions from more than 300 corporations, foundations, and individuals constitute 85% of the revenues required to meet the Center's budget, which in 1997 was $17 million. The remaining funds come from endowment income, government contracts, and publication sales.

from http://www.csis.org/pubs/pubstwq.html:

The purview of The Washington Quarterly is broad, ranging across the full set of political, economics, and security issues related to the international engagement of the United States. But its focus is policy and the way in which analysis of international events must be translated into policy choices and actions. Its contributors are professionally, politically, and geographically diverse [We got Marxists! We got Fabians! We got fascists! We got it aaaaalll! -Ed.]. TWQ has subscribers in more than 50 countries and is available in bookstores and on newstands.

contents of the Spring 1999 issue of the CSIS' Washington Quarterly, from http://mitpress.mit.edu/journal-issue-abstracts.tcl?issn=0163660X&volume=22&issue=2:

Volume 22 Issue 2
Spring 1999

---

GUEST EDITORIALS

__________________________
Pages 7-9

The Other Asian Crisis
By Jacob Park

The attention lavished on the Asian financial crisis is warranted, but is helping to obscure another, and ultimately more threatening, danger: a regional ecological disaster.

__________________________
Pages 11-15

Protecting Democracy Abroad: Bringing Despots to Justice
By Morton H. Halperin [a strident Marxist -Ed.] and Kristen Lomasney

It's time for the next logical step in human rights law. As it does with war criminals, the world community should prosecute individuals for human rights violations.

__________________________
Pages 17-23

Dealing with the Backwoods: New Challenges for the Transatlantic Relationship
By Volker Stanzel

America, the sole superpower, has been throwing its weight around, and America's allies are looking for ways to respond. These reactions could become dangerous fissures within U.S. alliances.

---

ROUNDTABLE

Pages 27-35

China into the Abyss?

In our second roundtable, top China hands discuss whether the Asian financial crisis is about to suck China in--or whether Beijing can weather the storm.

---

Challenges in the Global Economy

__________________________
Pages 39-58

Global Competitiveness Revisted
By Rosabeth Moss Kanter

One of the world's leading business and finance experts surveys the emerging interdependencies of global trade and economics.

__________________________
Pages 59-82

Global Competition and the Changing Role of the American Corporation
By Marina v.N. Whitman

The character of the modern American corporation is changing along with the world economy.

__________________________
Pages 83-100

Phone Calls and Fax Machines: The Limits to Globalization
By Hugh Louch, Eszter Hargittai, and Miguel Angel Centeno

The grand rhetoric about "global communications" begins to look a little flimsy when compared to the real facts about international telephone calling. It has not exploded in recent years, and it has not become truly global.

__________________________
Pages 101-111

The IMF and World Bank: Time to Merge
By James B. Burnham

These two global economic behemoths, founded for very different purposes, are for all intents and purposes indistinguishable--and their artificial separation is inefficient.

__________________________
Pages 113-122

Poor Rich Venezuela: Miracle in Reverse
By Georgie Anne Geyer

Expectations--and uncertainty--are running at a fever pitch for Venezuela's new president. Journalist Georgie Anne Geyer offers the fascinating results of an extended, revealing interview with the man who could personify a new trend in Latin American politics.

---

Security Issues

__________________________
Pages 125-138

Open NATO's Door Carefully
By Hans Binnendijk and Richard L. Kugler

Three staunch advocates of NATO expansion warn that the first round--embracing Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic--should remain the last round for some time to come.

__________________________
Pages 139-147

The Nonproliferation of States: A Reply to Pascal Boniface
By Scott Pegg

In a previous issue of TWQ, Pascal Boniface argued persuasively that a "proliferation of states" constitutes one of the next big threats to global stability. Absolutely not, replies Pegg: no such trend toward global fragmentation exists, and none will emerge.

---

Global Reportage: Germany, South Africa, Cyprus, and Japan

__________________________
Pages 151-168

Letter from Magdeburg
By G. Pascal Zachary

If you think Germany is one country, you're wrong. In many ways, it's still two--and its eastern half is plagued with social and economic problems that don't seem to be getting better.

__________________________
Pages 169-181

Why Killers Should Go Free: Lessons from South Africa
By David Goodman

South Africa's much-heralded Truth and Reconciliation Commission has endured a few years of bad press, with skeptics inside the country and around the world wondering why it was ever formed. Goodman tells us why the Commission made a lot of sense after all.

__________________________
Pages 183-193

Conciliation in Cyprus?
By Christopher de Bellaigue

Our intrepid contributing correspondent in Ankara travels to Greece and both parts of divided Cyprus to find an alarming buildup of military hardware on the island, sabre-rattling from both Athens and Ankara, and general intransigence toward a solution.

__________________________
Pages 195-212

Japan: The Enigma of American Power
By Patrick Smith

Japan, Smith has long been reminding Americans, is a different country than we have assumed. It is now in the process of reclaiming its unique identity. As it does so, relations with the United States are likely to become rocky.

---

U.S. Politics

__________________________
Pages 215-230

Bridging the Gap
By Alice Wang

Contributing correspondent Alice Wang investigates the likely future of what some view as the Republican Party's last, best hope for real majority status--the "compassionate conservative" movement.

__________________________
Pages 231-237

Looking Ahead to 2000
By Charles E. Cook Jr.

The The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) is yet another thinktank in this constellation.

compiled by David Shedrow:

FACULTY JOHNS HOPKINS PAUL H. NITZE SCHOOL OF ADVANCED INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (SAIS)

CFR Paul Nitze SAIS founding father, has been diplomat-in-residence at SAIS since retiring from the State Department on April 30, 1989.

CFR member Paul Wolfowitz, Ph.D. is SAIS Chairman and Dean

CFR Zbigniew Brzezinski is SAIS Robert E. Osgood Professor of American Foreign Policy

CFR Fouad Ajami (Majid Khadduri Professor and Director of Middle East Studies)

CFR member A. Doak Barnett (Professor emeritus of Chinese Studies),

CFR member Frederick Brown (Fellow, Foreign Policy Institute and Adjunct Professor Southeast Asian Studies Program),

CFR member Charles Doran (Andrew W. Mellon Professor of International Relations and Director of Canadian Studies),

CFR member Isaiah Frank (William L. Clayton Professor of International Economics),

CFR member Francis Fukuyama (Director of the SAIS Telecommunications Project and Fellow, Foreign Policy Institute),

CFR member Charles Gati (Fellow, Foreign Policy Institute)

CFR member Christian Herter (Professorial Lecturer in International Relations)

CFR member David M. Lampton, Ph.D.(George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies and Director of China Studies)

CFR member Michael Mandelbaum (Christian A. Herter Professor and Director of American Foreign Policy)

CFR member Steven Muller (Fellow, Foreign Policy Institute)

CFR member Donald Oberdorfer (Journalist-in-Residence, Foreign Policy Institute)

CFR member George Packard (Edwin O. Reischauer Professor and Director of the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies)

CFR member Riordan Roett (The Sarita and Don Johnston Professor and Director of Latin American Studies)

CFR member Hederick Smith (Editor-in-Residence, Foreign Policy Institute)

CFR member S. Frederick Starr (Chairman, Central Asia Institute)

CFR member I. William Zartman (Jacob Blaustein Professor of International Organizations and Conflict Resolution and Director of African Studies).

The two CFR Fellows on the SAIS faculty are Andrew J. Bacevich and Wilford L. Kohl.

(A full faculty list is available at http://www.sais-jhu.edu/faculty/index.html.)

To a degree, the Club of Rome epitomizes the world government movement's general blandness, mediocrity, and mealymouthed words that jail. This is certainly true for such Club initiatives as the RIO Project ("Reshaping the International Order"). In his essay on chaos, J. Orlin Grabbe says

The liberal's preoccupation with social "problems" and the Club of Rome's obsession with entropy are essentially expressions of the Second School view. Change, the fundamental motion of the universe, is bad.

Grabbe defines the Second School as those who believe that "Chaos is a Result of Breaking Laws" - a belief diametrically opposed to natural law, hence antithetical to the Innovist ethic, hence quite positively evil. That said, Grabbe has jumped the gun, as becomes clear upon a reading of Ilya Prigogine's brief paper on uncertainty, included above.

I find myself actually liking the Club, from what I know of them. Many of the complaints lodged against the Club could just as easily be lodged against myself - for example, general indictment of the methods of systems analysis (I am, of course, a systematician). One of the Club's founders was a real WWII hero, a partisan jailed by the Italian fascists. The Club seems to be populated, at its highest level, by people who are innocent of the many horrors orchestrated by elites in other superficially similar organizations of this century. After extensive exposure to frightening organizations such as Bilderberg, the Club seems disarmingly sincere and admitting of fallibility. The Club is mentioned by others in ominous terms, but this seems thoroughly uncalled for. Still, many of these Clubbers are the same sort of people who embark on well-meaning programs in the United Nations that often involve calamatous unintended consequences.

The Club of Rome maintains (or rather, forgets to maintain) a web site at http://www.clubofrome.org, which seems a bit buggy and is littered with grammatical and lexical errors. The Club's Executive Committee has a mailbox, executive.committee@clubofrome.org. I have compiled the critical portions of their site into an omnibus page, which is 90K in length. Here are some key excerpts:

A novelist would probably reject the contacts and encounters that led up to the creation of the Club of Rome as too improbable for a good story. An Italian industrialist who has spent much of his working life in China and Latin America meets, via a Russian (although this is at the height of the Cold War), a top international scientific civil servant, Scots by birth and now living in Paris. They find they share similar concerns, become friends, decide to draw others (American, Austrian, British, Danish, French) into their discussions. Unfortunately, the first proper meeting of this group, in Rome in Spring 1968, is a total flop but a handful of die-hards carry on, and within a few years millions of people all round the world are talking about their ideas.

The Club of Rome is a center of research and a think tank, it is also a center of action, of innovation and initiative. The Club of Rome, founded in 1968 in Rome, is a group of scientists, economics, businessmen, international high civil servants, Heads of State and former Heads of State from the five continents, who are convinced that the future of humankind is not determined once and for all and that each human being can contribute to the improvement of our societies.

We, the members of the Club of Rome, are one hundred individuals, at present drawn from 52 countries and five continents.

Currently there are 30 National Associations spread across all five continents.

1986:
The Club decided on a deliberate change of emphasis in tackling "the predicament of mankind". While maintaining the distinctively global approach, it chose to focus on particular aspects, sometimes even concentrating on a single major one. Possible topics were then defined by Alexander King in his statement The Club of Rome, Reaffirmation of a Mission. These topics are: governability, peace and disarmament, population growth, human resources, and assessment of the consequences of advances in science and technology.

As the 21st century approaches, there is a growing sense of uncertainty and anxiety. Faced by increasing complexity, dizzying globalisation and a world subject to constant political, economic and social upheavals, human beings today are fearful. We appear to be in the early stages of the formation of a new type of world society.

Nothing escapes this tidal wave that carries all before it. Yet the greatest impact is undoubtedly on human hearts and minds. This why our aim must be essentially normative and action-oriented. We must develop common standards, based on a sense of our shared responsibility towards future generations. The basis of the new order should be an understanding that human initiatives and institutions exist only to serve human needs. Central to it should be values that cannot be imposed from outside but must grow as part of the renewal occurring within every human individual.

The essential mission of the Club of Rome is to act as an international, non-official catalyst of change. This role is prompted by the slowness and inadequacy of governments and their institutions to respond to urgent problems, constrained as they are by structures and policies designed for earlier, simpler times and by relatively short electoral cycles. This, in view of the confrontational nature of much of public and international life, the stifling influence of expanding bureaucracies and the growing complexity of issues, suggests that the voice of independent and concerned people, having access to the corridors of power around the world, should have a valuable contribution to make towards increasing understanding and, at times, jolting the system into action.

The members of the Executive Committe are frequently consulted by decision-makers in international institutions, governments, the business community and civil society; this has always been an important part of our work.

Aware of the importance of the information society, the Club has adopted a policy of world-wide communication, using all the means available, and most recently the Internet with our web site.

However, the Club itself tends normally to adopt a low profile, and the passionate debate sparked by "The Limits to Growth", updated by the authors under the title "Beyond the Limits", has been the only and unexpected exception to this desire to operate discreetly. We believe that we are sometimes more effective when we work behind the scenes.

Alexander King, as the "keeper of the ideology" from the outset, was inspired by the model of the Lunar Society of Birmingham: a group of independent-minded people (such as Wedgwood the potter, James Watt, Priestley the discoverer of oxygen, Erasmus Darwin) who dined together once a month towards the end of the 18th century and discussed the promises and problems offered by contemporary developments in science and industry. The Lunatics, as William Blake called them disparagingly, had no political power or ambitions, but they could see the interconnections between all that was happening around them and the potential for changing the nature of society. No bureaucracy, just thinking and doing.

Eventually the Club did have to draw up some statutes and choose a President (Aurelio Peccei), but that was all. It was decided to limit the membership to 100 because it was feared that larger numbers would become unmanageable and would necessitate a paid secretariat, hence all the usual paraphernalia of finance committees, etc. that they hoped to avoid. So that the Club should be seen to be entirely independent, financial support would not be sought or accepted from governments or industry. For the same reason, there should be no political affiliations or appointments - members appointed to political positions were expected to become sleeping members while in office (this happened, for example, for Okita and Pestel). Otherwise the membership should range as widely as possible, in terms of expertise and geography. A concern with the problematique, and the need to delineate it and understand its nature, was the main requirement for membership, irrespective of political ideology.

The majority ultimately decided that it would take too long and cost too much to develop the Ozbekhan model to the point where it would produce useful results.

Once again, the enterprise might have foundered; but once again, a deus ex machina appeared, this time in the shape of Professor Jay Forrester of MIT, who had been invited to the meeting. For thirty years he had been working on the problem of developing mathematical models that could be applied to complex, dynamic situations such as economic and urban growth. His offer to adapt his well-tried dynamic model to handle global issues was gratefully accepted, and the way ahead suddenly seemed less uncertain. A fortnight later, a group of Club members visited Forrester at MIT and were convinced that the model could be made to work for the kind of global problems which interested the Club. An agreement was signed with a research team at MIT in July 1970, the finance provided by a grant of $200 000 that Pestel had obtained from the Volkswagen Foundation.

The team was made up of 17 researchers from a wide range of disciplines and countries, led by Dennis Meadows. From their base at the Systems Dynamics Group at MIT they assembled vast quantities of data from around the world to feed into the model, focusing on five main variables: investment, population, pollution, natural resources and food. The dynamic model would then examine the interactions among these variables and the trends in the system as a whole over the next 10, 20, 50 years or more if present growth rates were maintained. The global approach was quite deliberate; regional and area studies could come later.

In a remarkably short time, the team produced its report in 1972: The Limits to Growth, written.very readably for a non-specialist audience by Donella Meadows. The response to the book - in all 12 million copies have been sold, translated into 37 languages - showed how many people in every continent were concerned about the predicament of mankind. "The Club of Rome" had begun to make its mark, as its founders had hoped, on the whole world.

Quite wrongly, the Report tended to be perceived as presenting an inescapable scenario for the future, and the Club was assumed to be in favour of zero economic growth. In fact the projection of trends and the analysis of their cross impacts were intended to highlight the risks of a blind pursuit of growth in the industrialised countries, and to induce changes in prevailing attitudes and policies so that the projected consequences should not materialise.

Eduard Pestel was one of those deeply concerned about the undifferentiated global approach adopted in Limits to Growth. As a professional systems analyst (he had established his own Institute for Systems Analysis in Hannover in 1971) he was the obvious person to produce a better one. Accordingly, even before the Meadows Report was published, he and Mihajlo Mesarovic of Case Western Reserve University had begun work on a far more elaborate model (it distinguished ten world regions and involved 200,000 equations compared with 1000 in the Meadows model). The research had the full support of the Club and the final publication, Mankind at the Turning Point, was accepted as an official Report to the Club of Rome in 1974. In addition to providing a more refined regional breakdown, Pestel and Mesarovic had succeeded in integrating social as well as technical data. The Report was less readable than Limits to Growth and did not make the same impact on the general public, but it was well received in Germany and France, in particular.

Peccei persuaded the Austrian Chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, to host a meeting in February 1974 on North-South problems which brought together six other heads of state or government (from Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, Senegal, Sweden and Switzerland), senior representatives of three others (Algeria, the Republic of Ireland and Pakistan) and ten members of the CoR Executive Committee. Peccei deliberately did not invite any of the major European powers, the USA or the USSR so as to prevent the debate turning into a forum for national or ideological position statements. To encourage the participants to speak freely, they were asked to come without accompanying civil servants and assured that nothing they said would be attributed to them. The two-day private brainstorming meeting ended with a press conference for 300 journalists and the CoR Executive Committee members issued their "Salzburg Statement", which emphasised that the oil crisis was simply part of the whole complex of global problems; the nine recommendations related to many of the issues covered in the NIEO.

Scholars from the First, Second and Third Worlds were invited to participate in the RIO project (Reshaping the International Order), but only Poland and Bulgaria accepted from the Communist bloc. The basic thesis was that the gap between rich and poor countries (with the wealthiest roughly 13 times richer than the poorest) was intolerable and the situation was inherently unstable. What would be required to reduce the gap to 6:1 over 15 to 30 years? (Though still large, this ratio seemed the lowest that could be realistically proposed.) Unlike Limits to Growth the model allowed the developing countries 5% growth per annum, whereas the industrialised countries would have zero or negative growth; all, however, would benefit from more sensible use of energy and other resources and a more equitable distribution of global wealth. The main Report argued that people in the rich countries would have to change their patterns of consumption and accept lower profits, but a dissenting group saw consumption as a symptom rather than a cause of the problems, which stemmed rather from the fundamental power structure.

Another new development was the decision to invite prominent world figures who share the Club's concerns to become Honorary Members. Although their positions may prevent them from taking a public stance, as in the case of the Queen of the Netherlands or the King and Queen of Spain, they can and do give valued moral support. Among the others are former President Gorbachev, former President Richard von Weizsäcker of Germany, the first President of newly democratic Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel, President Arpad Göncz of Hungary, President Carlos Menem of Argentina, and the Nobel laureates Ilya Prigogine and Lawrence Klein.

As to the more private face of the Club, the personal diplomacy always practised by members was given new impetus by the gradual thaw in East-West relations after 1985. Two examples are particularly striking. Before the Rejkavik Summit in October 1986, Eduard Pestel and Alexander King sent a memo to both President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, suggesting that the United States and the USSR might be induced to work together on reducing arms sales to poorer countries - the superpowers would gain politically, if not economically, from such efforts, and they would benefit from the experience of actually working together. The response from the White House was perfunctory, but Gorbachev immediately reacted very positively, and this led to personal contacts between the Club and the Soviet leadership during the crucial period of glasnost and perestroika. Similar contacts made by Adam Schaff in Poland led to the creation there of a National Association of the Club of Rome, providing a meeting ground for members of the Communist Party, the Roman Catholic church and Solidarity.

Following the collapse of communism, National Associations for the Club of Rome were established across Eastern Europe, in Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Hungary, Rumania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine; National Associations already existed in Poland and Russia. Chapters were also created in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, Puerto Rico and Venezuela). Currently there are 30 National Associations spread across all five continents.

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Ricardo Diez Hochleitner, Président
Bertrand Schneider, Secretary General
Ruth Bamela Engo-Tjega, President of African NGO
Belisario Betancur, ex-President of Colombia
Umberto Colombo, ex Minister of Research and Universities of Italy
Orio Giarini, Secretary General of the Geneva Association
Bohdan Hawrylyshyn, Chairman,Council of Advisors of the Parliament of Ukraine
Alexander King, co-founder of The Club of Rome
Yotaro Kobayashi, President of Fuji Xerox
Eberhard von Koerber, President of ABB Europe
Ruud Lubbers, ex-Prime Minister of the Netherlands
Manfred Max-Neef, Rector, Universidad Australe de Chile
Samuel Nana Sinkam, FAO Director for Congo
Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Laureate, Professor, Université Libre of Bruxelles

"A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence."
-G.K. Chesterton

from The Scientist, Vol:9, #14, pg.1, July 10, 1995, by Franklin Hoke, from http://www.the-scientist.library.upenn.edu/yr1995/july/attack_950710.html:

Scientists See Broad Attack Against Research And Reason

Perceived anti-science sentiments include postmodernism, creationism, and alternative medicine--but those targeted say they are no threat.

A rising tide of "irrationalism" in the United States and Europe is helping to fuel dangerous anti-science sentiments, according to a number of researchers and academics. Proof, they say, can be seen in the increased prominence given to postmodernist science studies in the universities, creationism, and alternative medicine.

They claim that the spread of these and other untestable belief systems in society may destabilize science by skewing science education and diminishing public support for experimental research.

"There is a widespread, powerful, corrosive hostility toward science," declares Paul R. Gross, University Professor of Life Sciences and director of the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. "It's really toward scientists, by the way, but the confusion is universally made between scientists as persons and the body of knowledge that survives called science."

Postmodernist members of those disciplines engaged in science studies--sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, for example--counter that their critiques are, for the most part, friendly efforts to understand and not to undermine science and scientists. And some alternative medicine proponents say they welcome the role science plays in evaluating therapies.

Last month in New York, about 200 scientists and scholars concerned about the perceived growth in anti-science thinking met to hear speakers describe the problem and map out tactics to counter it. Several attendees from the groups being criticized at the meeting took issue with what they felt was the vitriolic tone of many of the speakers.

With mathematician Norman Levitt from Rutgers University, Gross cochaired the May 31-June 2 conference, sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences and called "The Flight From Science And Reason." Gross and Levitt are coauthors of the book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), which has become one of the clarion calls for those worried about anti- science.

Battling Postmodernism

The meeting's primary critical focus was postmodernism, a powerful intellectual shift in many humanities disciplines over the past few decades. Postmodernism has many facets--social constructivism and poststructuralism among them--but one of its central notions is that humans cannot perceive the natural world directly. Instead, perceptions must pass through such filters as language and culture, which define our understanding of the world.

It is this idea that angers some experimental scientists, who maintain that science is distinguished by its reliance on empirical data, by the fact that others can replicate its experiments, and by its predictive capability.

"All scientists have a fundamental faith--and it is a faith--that there is a real world out there that has rules that can be understood by rational means," explains David L. Goodstein, vice provost and a professor of physics and applied physics at the California Institute of Technology. "That's what science is all about, and all scientists must believe that. Those who say science is socially constructed, it's not written in nature, it's whatever the scientists and their masters want it to be--that's crackpot. That's where I draw the line."

Individuals pursuing constructivist lines of thinking suggest that differing worldviews serve different purposes for social and natural scientists.

"If I, as an anthropologist, just pull back from my insistence that we can only know the external world through our language, our culture, I can get along fine with the natural scientist who believes that he's finding out what is truly the case in the natural world," says Emily Martin, a Princeton University anthropology professor. Martin does ethnographic studies with immunologists and is married to a biophysics professor. "In order for natural scientists to carry on their work, to do what they do on a daily basis, to carry out experiments, and so on, they have to believe that they are finding out about the natural world. The only effect it would have on them if they shifted their worldview would be that they couldn't carry out their science anymore.

"It's part of the worldview of a natural scientist that the real world actually exists and they are actually finding out about it. Part of the worldview of an anthropologist is that the real world exists, but I can only know about it through my own language, my own culture, so I never can get at it except through these veils, these lenses, these gauzy filters. If they took away my worldview, I couldn't do my ethnography, either."

Gerald Holton, a professor of physics and the history of science at Harvard University, maintains that irrationality of the type described at the conference and espoused by researchers such as Martin is cyclical, having arisen periodically in modern times at least since the Romantic rebellion at the turn of the 19th century. Holton is the author of Science and Anti-Science (Harvard University Press, 1993).

"William Blake and Johann Wolfgang Goethe were outraged by contemporary science," Holton notes. "They called Newton the Satan, because he wanted a science which is consensual--what is right, what is fact, is only what can be agreed on by many people--whereas they felt what is important is the individual, the experience of yourself, by yourself, not the collectivized view of science that imposes a vision that has to be shared by many."

Facing Fundamentalism

A number of speakers contended that research funding cuts proposed in Congress and religious fundamentalists' inroads into science education are far more serious threats than the internecine academic conflict with postmodernists. Fundamentalists were not represented among the participants at the meeting.

"It's not [the postmodernists'] fault that they're going to be cutting the funds for science, coming with a cleaver at us all," Bogdan Denitch, a City University of New York professor of sociology, told the meeting attendees. "That happens to be people entirely different who don't even know what postmodernism is, nor care about it. That comes from far more powerful forces, ranging from the Christian majority to the good folks who pass laws enforcing creationism as a logical and equal alternative to paleoscience and evolution. Those are the folks, in my opinion, who are at the cutting edge of the assault on rationality and reason in politics."

Some researchers from the disciplines being criticized at the conference found themselves in substantial agreement with the speakers over the role fundamentalists are playing in controlling research funding and educational priorities.

"The things that are endangering science are also endangering the social sciences as well, so that we're all in danger of having National Science Foundation and other funding sources cut back," says Rena Lederman, a professor of anthropology at Princeton and daughter of Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman. "And that's not good for any of us if we're interested in basic research."

Paul Kurtz, a professor, emeritus, of philosophy at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and founder of the Amherst, N.Y.-based Academy of Humanism, drew the meeting participants' attention to a recently released statement from 180 religious leaders opposed to patents on human genes and genetically engineered animals and plants. In published accounts, the reason given by several of the leaders was that humans and animals are creations of God and, as such, should not be patented as inventions.

"It may be that [gene] patenting ought to be overturned," Kurtz said, "but the reasons that are given are what I question."

Opposing Alternative Medicine

Kurtz joined others at the meeting in declaring the rising popularity of alternative medicine as another indication of irrational thought, on a par with the growing number of reported UFO encounters, out-of-body experiences, and relationships with guardian angels. Belief in alternative medicine, however, might have direct human costs, Kurtz warned.

"It's clear that in the area of health there's a major assault on the scientific approach," he stated. "There is a clear and present danger. It's a danger to public health. The National Institutes of Health, for example, has a new section on alternative medicine, which is, perhaps, symptomatic [of this assault]."

While acknowledging that the four-year-old NIH Office of Alternative Medicine (F. Hoke, The Scientist, March 7, 1994, page 1) is likely performing serious, empirical studies of alternative therapies, Paul Gross contends that the money would be better spent on conventional possible treatments: "Most of the claims of miraculous cures from most of the varieties of alternative medicine--not all, but most--are patent nonsense on their face. Studies of placebos are worth doing, but those would be studies of placebos and not a comprehensive, worldwide study of acupuncture, for example, which in my view would be a waste of time." James Gordon is chairman of the Office of Alternative Medicine's advisory council and a clinical professor of psychiatry and community and family medicine at Georgetown University Medical School. Gordon, who did not attend the New York meeting, is also director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C. He uses acupuncture with many of his patients, and declares that there are a number of "very good laboratory science and good clinical studies" in peer- reviewed journals supporting the efficacy of acupuncture. "What I'm struck by," he notes, "is that most of the people who are most vociferous in their attacks don't have a very solid foundation in the area which they're attacking."

Although proponents of alternative medicine were not represented among the speakers, one self-described past-lives psychotherapist rose to challenge the meeting as one-sided at one point and was summarily denounced.

Heated Words

Indeed, some academics from fields that were attacked at the meeting were dismayed at what they felt was a polarizing vehemence on the part of many speakers. Several cited as an example the talk given by Mario Bunge, a professor of philosophy and head of the Foundations and Philosophy of Science Unit at McGill University in Montreal.

"Walk a few steps away from the faculties of science, engineering, and medicine," Bunge suggested. "Walk towards the faculty of arts. Here, you will meet another world, one where falsities and lies are manufactured in industrial quantities. Here, some professors are hired, promoted, or given power for teaching that reason is worthless, empirical evidence unnecessary, objective truth nonexistent, basic science a tool of either capitalists or male domination, and the like. Here, we find people who reject all the knowledge painstakingly acquired over the past 5 million years.

"This fraud has got to be stopped, in the name of intellectual honesty. Let them do whatever they please, but not in schools, because schools are supposed to be places of learning. We should expel these charlatans from the university."

Barry Gross, a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, made similar assertions: "The sole remedy at our disposal is to quarantine the anti-science brigades and inoculate the rest of the population against them. Scientists will have to devote some of their energy to systematic confrontation with the enemies of science."

Some of the intended targets of such broadsides who attended the meeting say that they see themselves as critics, certainly, but not as the "enemies of science." They suggest that a dialogue between the admittedly different perspectives might be more useful in bridging the gap.

"None of us agrees with everything published in the name of science studies," says Rena Lederman. "There's a lot of internal critique. I don't mean to deny that the academic students of science aren't frequently critical of aspects of science, but I don't take that to be a locus of dangerous anti-science. They're trying to understand how scientists do what they do, how scientists communicate their results, how science ideas are used by laypeople. They are engaged in a detailed analysis of the place of science in American and European culture, an important contribution to knowledge. It's certainly not a sign of some kind of anti-intellectual, purely political, ideological, know-nothing Luddite attack."

"It's a shame, almost a tragedy, that [the meeting speakers'] reaction has taken such an extreme and virulent form, almost hate-mongering, because they do have important things to say," observes Emily Martin.

Several social scientists in the audience complained that, while suffering withering criticism at the hands of several speakers, they were not given a voice at the lectern to respond.

Meeting organizers countered that it was their views that had been excluded from debate in recent years. The burgeoning numbers of postmodern academics who interpret the world as no more than a social construction, they said, have dominated discussion.

"The strong constructivists have been in charge, in control of departments of sociology, anthropology, and, to a very significant extent, history of science nationwide [in the U.S.] and in Western Europe for 15 years," says Paul Gross. "We are the oppressed. We have to find a voice, and so this meeting is our voice."

The following FANTASTIC article ought to be read straight to the end. Brilliant observations and analyses are enunciated throughout.

from the Progressive Review, by Sam Smith, modtime 1999-Feb-11, from http://prorev.com/brains.htm:

---

BRAIN DRAIN
The Fall of the American Intelligentsia

By Sam Smith

Intelligentsia: A class of well-educated persons constituting a distinct, recognized, and self-conscious stratum within a nation and claiming or assuming for itself the guiding role of an intellectual, social or political vanguard -- Webster's Third New International Dictionary

Cultural phenomena don't usually sign surrender terms so it's a bit hard to pinpoint when the American intelligentsia collapsed, but the day that 400 historians joined the Clinton defense team will probably do as well as any.

In a statement replete with bad history, lousy law, and childish politics the 400 academics provided intellectual succor to the nation's leading suckee, that felonious fraud in the White House.

Ex cathedra, ex cathedra, ex cathedra onward; into the valley of fin-de-siecle decadence rode the 400. . . It was an act so obsequious in cause and transparent in purpose that only the similarly sycophantic Eleanor Clift could keep a straight face when the matter was discussed on the McLaughlin show.

The ad was the handiwork of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who has been flailing about for the past few decades seeking a president who will treat him as kindly as did John F. Kennedy.

It was not the first time that Schlesinger has served as prop man for presidential mischief. Back when JFK was getting ready to invade Cuba, the New Republic got wind of the CIA's training of Cuban exiles. Schlesinger was shown an advance copy of the article, which he promptly passed to Kennedy, who in turn asked (successfully) that TNR not print it. The New York Times also withheld a story on the pending invasion, which Schlesinger would later praise as a "patriotic act" although he admitted wondering whether if the "press had behaved irresponsibly, it would not have spared the country a disaster."

Schlesinger was a prototype for that modern phenomenon, the meddlesome Harvard prof seeking manly vigor by helping presidents ravage this country or that -- including sometimes our own. Henry Kissinger and McGeorge Bundy would soon follow. Later, the staff and management of the Harvard Business School would assist at the collapse of the Russian economy even as their colleagues at the Kennedy School were teaching scores of American politicians how to repeal 60 years of social progress.

Of course, gratuitous abuse by the intelligentsia began well before the Bay of Pigs. Compared to those men of the mind involved in the Inquisition, for example, Schlesinger & Co. look pretty respectable. And it certainly hasn't all been Harvard's fault; as LBJ once told an aide, the CIA was filled with boys from Princeton and Yale whose daddies wouldn't let them into the brokerage firm.

The American intelligentsia has repeatedly let the country down. Consider that exemplar for generations of law school students: Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Prospective litigants have all learned Holmes' immortal warning that "the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic." Fewer, I suspect, have also learned that these words were uttered in defense of the contemptible Espionage Act and that Holmes himself was among those upholding Eugene Debs' sentence of ten years in prison for saying such things as "the master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles."

And as early as the turn of the century, Julian Benda noted in the 1920s, there had been a shift among intellectuals from being a "check on the realism of the people to acting as stimulators of political passions. He described these new intellectuals as being most interested in the possession of concrete advantages and material values, while holding up to scorn the pursuit of the spiritual, the non-practical or the disinterested.

Thus there is no argument here that the capitulation of many intellectuals in the matter of Clinton is novel. What is the unique, however, is the absence of its alternative. There is, for example, nothing even remotely close to the sort of intellectual division that occurred during the Vietnam War in which the Kissingers and Bundys were matched by others -- including those the New York Times in 1970 headlined as "1000 'ESTABLISHMENT' LAWYERS JOIN WAR PROTEST."

In The Twentieth Century: A People's History, Howard Zinn describes a response by some of the intelligentsia stunningly at odds with what we are currently observing:

The poet Robert Lowell, invited to a White House function, refused to come. Arthur Miller, also invited, sent a telegram to the White House: "When the guns boom, the arts die." Singer Ertha Kitt was invited to a luncheon on the White House lawn and shocked all those present by speaking out, in the presence of the President's wife, against the war. .... In Hollywood, local artists erected a 60-foot Tower of Protest on Sunset Boulevard. At the National Book Award ceremonies in New York, fifty authors and publishers walked out on a speech by Vice President Humphrey in a display of anger at his role in the war.

These, remember, were protests against a far more liberal, far more Democratic president than we have today -- a man who had already shepherded through Congress the most progressive social changes since the New Deal. Further, the demon waiting in the wings was not a bland George Bush virtually indistinguishable from the incumbent but Richard Nixon.

Those, however, were different days. Now we have Toni Morrison exculpating Clinton because of his "blackness" and Schlesinger exculpating him because Reagan lied as well.

Today, on the flimsiest and most sophistic of grounds, the intelligentsia has lined up behind the slimiest president in American history. It's just lucky we didn't have to rely upon this craven crowd when we were fighting George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Carmine DeSapio and Richard Daley. They probably would have lectured us all about party unity.

The Kool-Aid Clintonistas

Nowhere is the problem more visible than among the media intelligentsia. As the impeachment hearings neared, the Kool-Aid Clintonista media dropped all pretense of objectivity and instead loyally chugalugged cups of White House spin at their moral Jonestown. Not since the days when hundreds of their colleagues shilled for the CIA have so many media members betrayed their own craft with such mindless loyalty to terminally corrupted power.

The charge was led by upper class outlets. There was Vogue, which gave Hillary Clinton a free make-over just in time for the House hearings. There was NPR, which still considered Linda Tripp's deception of Monica Lewinsky a greater affair of state than Clinton's deception of his wife, daughter, cabinet members, media, law enforcement officials, Congress, and the grand jury. And there was the New Yorker, which saw its primary function as translating the philosophy of James Carville into Larchmont lockjaw.

The techniques were varied. For Vogue, the retouched photo; for NPR a pseudo-literary deconstruction of the Tripp-Lewinsky tapes; for Newsweek, the neatly destructive headline: "An implausibly optimistic Starr grinds on: The Last True Believer." And for the New Yorker, the convenient pocket quote: "Virtually nothing that Starr may say about Whitewater can matter anymore."

The New Yorker was, on average, the worst of the lot. So shameless was its coverage that its letters column became the only place one could expect to find common sense on Washington affairs.

Inside the book, you had Morrison claiming that "the president is being stolen from us" and Jane Smiley virtually applauding the president for demonstrating in his relationship with Monica a "desire to make a connection with another person .... something I trust."

Joe Klein was so reckless in his support of the Washington establishment that he not only savaged independent counsels but even departmental inspectors general. Klein and his colleagues proved not only extraordinarily soft on crime; they seemed almost to consider it a perk of office or at least a personal lifestyle choice not to be trifled with by mere minions of the law.

This deterioration in the mind of the minds was not just a domestic problem either, as witnessed by a multinational manifesto issued by the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Desmond Tutu, William Styron, Lauren Becall, Jacques Derrida, Sophia Loren, Carlos Fuentes, Vanessa Redgrave and the ever-faithful Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Nat Hentoff wrote:

You might think they would be calling for an end to the ethnic cleansing Kosovo or for the immediate relief to the hundreds of thousands of black Christians and animists in the south of Sudan. . . No, these stars are engaged in a much more vital crusade. . . They instruct us that 'a statesman is answerable to public opinion or to the law only for his public acts.'

This infantile and disingenuous recomposition of the law was furthered by Renata Adler in Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair had theretofore distinguished itself in these matters by turning down a blockbuster story with the explanation that it wasn't interested in substance.

Adler wrote what was probably the worst major piece about the Clinton scandals, a tower of twaddle based entirely on an uninformed reading of the Starr report which she called "utterly preposterous . . . inaccurate, mindless, biased, disorganized, unprofessional and corrupt." Adler also tossed off incorrect constitutional legal opinions with such aplomb you would never guess she was only a novelist -- that is until you got to strange sentences like "if Ms. Lewinsky had had a constitutional lawyer the case against her would have been thrown out." It's hard to throw out a case when no one has been charged.

Adler drew vast conclusions from tertiary data with the speed of a tenured member of the John Birch Society, complained about the small type of the Starr Report, and found evil lurking in the fact that the Tripp tapes were not listed in proper numerical order.

It must be said in VF's defense, however, that it also ran a contrary piece by Christopher Hitchens. Like Adler, Hitchens was disinclined to enlighten his readers beyond the matter of sex. Still he did score some good points.

For example, concerning those who said, "Let's get on with the agenda," Hitchens wrote, "Excuse me -- what fucking agenda? Clinton hasn't had a press conference, except when hiding behind embarrassed foreign statesmen, since April, hasn't been to anything much but fund-raisers on the domestic front, and on the international scene has sleepwalked through several major crises."

Still in the end, Hitchens -- like Adler and most other commentators -- was so obsessed with the very prurient interest so frequently ascribed to Starr, that he, too, missed the story.

Which is that the Clinton scandals have truly not been about sex. The Lewinsky saga is but a metaphor, a window out of which one can look upon toxic brown fields of crime and corruption. It has come to the fore in no small part precisely because Clinton and his capos were so effective at the very things of which he is accused -- lying and obstruction of justice -- that the prosecutor was repeatedly blocked in his search for the truth.

Starr, to be sure, has fallen down badly. He has turned his back on evidence of massive drug-dealing in Arkansas, taken a high dive in the Foster death, and mangled the prosecution of Webster Hubbell, the matter of the FBI files, and Travelgate. But neither these nor any personal failings of Linda Tripp alter one iota of the tale's true essence.

The Clinton story is actually about the unprecedented criminal corruption of an administration. It is about a mobbed-up president whose close allies have included over two-score individuals and firms convicted of such crimes as drug trafficking, racketeering, extortion, bribery, tax evasion, kickbacks, embezzlement, fraud, conspiracy, fraudulent loans, illegal gifts, illegal campaign contributions, money laundering, perjury, and obstruction of justice. It is about many more members of his political machine who have taken the Fifth or fled the country.

It is about criminals including drug dealers having direct access to the White House.

It is about a criminal, Webster Hubbell, being appointed to the number 3 spot at the Justice Department.

It is about the President's lifelong association with the Dixie Mafia, including members active in the drug trade.

It is about the abuse of 1,000 FBI files.

It is about the false prosecution of a White House official whose only real crime was occupying a position wanted by a friend of Bill.

It is about illegal foreign campaign contributions and possibly related espionage.

It is about the extraordinary number of people around Clinton who have died under mysterious circumstances.

It is about the repeated abuse of women with whom Clinton has had relations, women who have often been multiple victims: first as abused sexual partners and then as terrorized, bribed, or publicly trashed former partners.

It is about campaign contributors paying de facto bribes of $100,000 in order to ride in a taxpayer-funded plane and get government help in swinging private deals.

It is about Bill Clinton saying "I don't recall" or its equivalent 140 times before the grand jury.

It is about a president who has consistently used the power of his office to prevent law enforcement officials from carrying out their duties and, when that hasn't worked, has conducted a propaganda jihad against them and anyone else who dared to challenge him.

It is about a leader who has manifestly failed to faithfully execute the laws of the land and has become America's most corrupt president.

And, finally, it is about a intelligentsia that created the Clinton myth and now, like their icon, refuses to admit its error and the terrible damage it has done.

 

A few clues

How did the brain of these well-educated Americans become so addled that they could no longer identify simple matters of truth and honor? That they no longer comprehended the meaning of words like bribe or sexual relations or is, yet presumed to lead us in matters of the mind? How did it happen that the best and brightest should find themselves defending the most puerile of vices and most corrupt of crimes with arguments that would shame a defense attorney fresh from the bar exam?

Bearing in mind that there is no good explanation for madness and that we are observing not only a test of constitutional principles but a demonstration of chaos theory, here are a few clues that may help:

In places of power knowledge has become increasingly second-hand. As our elites become better educated, more of what passes for learning is vicarious, e.g. learned from books rather than from experience. As Robert Louis Stevenson said, books are all right in their way but they are a pretty poor substitute for life.

In earlier times the learned either had to retreat to monasteries or else have their abstract knowledge constantly jostled by the daily demands of survival as well as by the philistinism and practical knowledge of the non-literate masses. Consider how different the daily life of a Jefferson or a Frederick Douglass was in comparison with that of a Tina Brown or Henry Louis Gates. In earlier times the privilege of the insular world belonged to a few monks and scholars; today it is just another commodity one can purchase.

In fact, among the most dramatic changes in Washington has been the disappearance of the practical person, the individual -- whether pol, hack or advisor -- who more than compensated for deficiencies in formal learning with a superb understanding of life. It is these individuals who lent some sanity to Washington life when politicians went bad. They were either masters of the pragmatic or of the moral, but in either case served as the gyro compass of national politics.

In their place we find a town overflowing with decadent dandies who, to quote a 19th journalist, have been educated well beyond their intellects. They keep busy creating fictions about the nature of politics and the presidency that coincidentally serve their own ambitions, until they become incapable of returning to reality and helpless before the banal practicalities of such evils as high crimes and misdemeanors.

For many of the elite, the Clinton scandals have forced them to look at real politics for the first time. They have few tools for this. After all, they work with paradigms and perceptions -- not with life.

Above all they have been taught to rely excessively on deductive thinking, in which inferences are drawn from theories rather than from facts; and in which, too often, life's phenomena are misfiled according to musty and presumptuous principles rather than truly understood.

If you think I exaggerate, consider this: while in discussions about a title for my last book, The Great American Political Repair Manual, my editor called with a concern. She said that two of her colleagues had told her that repair sounded too much like work. Of course. I had forgotten that in many parts of Manhattan the idea of repair was alien. When something broke, you just called the super.

The problem with such a dependent culture is not new in America but it doesn't have a particularly happy history. For example, one cause of the failure of early Virginian colonization was that every cavalier brought along a valet who was meant to do all the work. Thus the colony had to feed two people for every one on the job.

While the feeding problem has been largely solved in modern America by turning the cavaliers' valets into restaurant waiters, the liabilities of entitled inutility remain, among them the desiccation of the mind.

The intelligentsia, like everything else, has become corporatized. This can be seen at its worst on campuses and in publishing houses. Journalism and academia have become so subordinated to the needs of their controlling conglomerates that the vital ground between starvation and surrender has become, economically at least, increasingly difficult to hold. The safest route is to cling to symbols while shucking substance, to serve in a House of Lords of the mind, robed and bewigged but naked of power and meaning.

This alteration in the relation of the intellectual to the culture was instinctively grasped by a DC elementary school student the other day as she defined the difference between art and graffiti as "Art is when you have permission to do it." These are days when you not only need permission for art, but also to think. And the place you go for permission is, more likely than not, a corporation.

The blacklisting of skepticism.. For much of my life I have hewed to H. L. Mencken's dictum that the liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by those "who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving that doubt, after all, was safe -- that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud."

For much of my life this strategy has worked. Even in the gathering gloom of the Reagan-Bush years. But with the arrival of the Clinton administration and its cultural as well as political authoritarianism, skepticism began being blacklisted. Not only was belief to be unopposed by doubt but the terms themselves were banned. In their place was only loyalty or disloyalty. Not unlike the situation a free thinker might have run into in late 17th century Marblehead or mid-20th century Moscow.

To retain doubt was to risk being declared, among other things, a conspiracy theorist. One didn't need either a conspiracy or a theory to earn the title. Just a reasonable interest in facts and what they might mean. Or, perhaps, reasonable questions about the reliability of those serving a president who would defend himself before Congress by lying under oath about his previous lies under oath.

In fact, conspiracies are most often redundant in such a context. Put enough Yale graduates in the same room and you can reasonably predict their consensus on many matters, particularly those of interest to the Council on Foreign Relations or the Washington Post. If you are educated well enough, you'll know what to do when the time comes. No conspiracy is necessary.

Under the rules of the Clinton years, truth belongs to the one with the most microphones clamped to his podium and the most bucks to buy them. In the end it has become a struggle for the control of fact and memory not unlike that described in 1984:

"Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory.

In such a time those with wrong memories and wrong facts are considered mad, disparaged, and dropped from the Rolodex. To hold power happily, one must not be curious and one must not question fully accredited paradigms. To think is to fail. Again from 1984:

"From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated."

The decline of the struggling intellectual. America has frequently been blessed by the bitter dissatisfaction of those still barred from tasting the fruits of its ideals. It has been the pressure of the dispossessed, rather than the virtue of those in power, that has repeatedly saved this country's soul.

In this century, three such influences have been those of immigrants, blacks, and women. Yet in each case now, social and economic progress has inevitably produced a dilution of passion for justice and change.

Thus we find ourselves with a women's movement much louder in its defense of Bill Clinton than about the plight of its sisters at the bottom of the economic pile. We have conservative black economists decrying the moral debilitation of affirmative action but few rising to the defense of those suffering under the rampant incarceration of young black males. As Angela Davis recently told a group of black newspaper columnists, today some people don't even know what you mean when you speak of "the struggle."

We are also near the end of an succession of Jewish writers and thinkers, raised on the immigrant experience, who created much of the form of progressive 20th century America. Economic progress has calmed the sound of revolution and reform; in its stead we find the conservative Ben Stein speaking at a Jewish anti-abortion conference:

I'll tell you how I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Jewish position in America had changed dramatically. The wife of a very close friend of my father died a few weeks ago and they had the memorial service at the Chevy Chase Club. And there was a cantor with a yarmulke giving the service at the Chevy Chase Club. And I cannot describe to you how astonishing a turn of events this was.

Wow. If Emma Goldman could only see you now.

The point is not to begrudge anyone's social and economic progress. But if you listen carefully to black and feminist leaders today, if you press them as to why they remain so attached to Clinton, you will often hear something quite similar to Stein's view of achievement -- such as "look at all the appointments he's made" -- in fact a Reaganesque trickle-down view of cultural triumph.

Meanwhile, those truly at the bottom -- such as black and white men without a college education or new immigrant groups -- are rarely heard from or about except in reports on crime and poverty.

Outside of rap and rock, the economically disposable young male -- forming no small portion of the nearly three million Americans in prison -- remains a crisis rather than a validated culture. And when was the last time you read about Ethiopian and Salvadoran American life in the New Yorker?

The dirty secret of 20th century social movements is that they have been successful enough to create their own old boy and girl networks, powerful enough to enter the Chevy Chase Club, and indifferent enough to ignore those left behind.

Their elites have joined the Yankee and the Southern aristocrat and the rest of God's frozen people to form the largest, most prosperous, and most narcissistic intelligentsia in our history.

And as the best and brightest drive around town in their Range Rovers, who will speak for those who, in Bill Mauldin's phrase, remain fugitives from the law of averages?

We are building an oligarchy that gets its faces from Benetton but its economics from Dickens. Which is why a new President Clinton could claim his administration would "look like America" and still have the most millionaires ever in a White House cabinet. In a more recent example, a biracial coalition of successful Washingtonians went to the polls to vote for a black man alleged to represent highest ideals of the corporatist state -- it was claimed he was a "good manager." But no one in the major media noted that in the city's poorest and blackest ward, turnout for this "new era" dropped 51% from the previous mayoral election.

The rise of a post-modern adhocracy. Behind the disintegration of interest by the intelligentsia in justice and human decency has been the triumph of the various cross-currents of post-modernism. Clinton is the archetype, the man who -- so it was said in Arkansas -- would turn green if he lay on a pool table. The man who is advised weekly by pollsters on what to say he thinks. The man, who when confronted with the crisis of his life, turned first to a spin doctor to see if he could once more talk his way out of it.

But it goes much deeper than that. Once a culture accepts a value vacuum it delivers itself to an adhocracy based on propaganda and force. Truth becomes the privilege of those who are the best liars and biggest bullies.

Such an adhocracy requires not just Napoleons of the moment, seizing each sound bite and every news slot as though it were another mile of Europe, it also requires the acquiescence of all those who once would have said simply, but with force: no, that is wrong.

Instead we have an intelligentsia that, rather than doing its true work on behalf of human betterment, has become merely the technocracy of a Peronist post-constitutional regime. Instead we have an intelligentsia believing that all facts are malleable, all truths disposable, and, in the end, the only real test is what you can get away with

Long before the rise of deconstructionism, there was a name for such an approach; it was called anarchy. And those who practiced it best were not scholars and philosophers but the leaders of gangs, armies, mobs and dictators

Hence we find the journalist who asked a source the other day, "putting morality aside, what do you think?" We have a president whose disposition was greatly complicated by the fact that no one could figure out any way to shame him. We have talking heads treating the darkest of public affairs as though at just another sports contest. We have a MSNBC lightweight expressing righteous annoyance that the Lewinsky tapes weren't more interesting. And we have member after member of the intelligentsia pimping for Clinton as though it were a sign of solidarity -- wearing sophistry like a crossed ribbon on their lapel.

How long Weimar America can go on like this is anyone's guess. There is enough disgust around to fertilize yet another national transformation. There is also enough despair to prevent it.

I do know that much of this need not have happened if those blessed with the time, intellect, and position to reflect on something other than survival had used their gifts more wisely. Their betrayal of America shares with that of Clinton an egregious failure of stewardship for our times.

One of Camus' characters writes a German friend after the war:

This is what separated us from you; we made demands. You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth.

This then is what comprises the high crimes and misdemeanors of America's intelligentsia: it was willing to trade in the truth just to sit a little closer to power.

from TPDL 1999-May-1, from the Washington Post 1999-Apr-25 p.B7, by George Will:

PhD Plenty

Here is an irony to savor.

Once upon a time, Marxists predicted that the inevitable collapse of capitalism would be brought on by (among other "contradictions" in the system) a crisis of overproduction. That is, the steady impoverishment of the masses would mean an insufficiency of customers for what capitalism produced.

Like so many of Marx's predictions, that one is tardy in coming true. (An admirer once said of Leon Trotsky: "Proof of Trotsky's farsightedness is that none of his predictions have come true yet.") However, at long last there is indeed a crisis of overproduction in one little niche of our capitalist culture, and it is the niche where such Marxists as still exist have gone to earth.

It is in higher education. The professoriate is reproducing itself too promiscuously. There is a glut of PhDs.

This is merely the market speaking, and no Marxist worthy of his membership in the Modern Language Association (many members of which teach literature as sublimated class struggle) will willingly bend a knee to market forces. Still, although this crisis will not produce capitalism's final convulsion that ushers in socialist perfection, it is instructive. Markets communicate important information (this is why socialist nations are, strictly speaking, ignorant) and the more-than-saturated academic job market reveals important cultural facts.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, a window on the sometimes strange world of academics, reports that in 1997 universities awarded a record number of PhDs -- for the 12th consecutive year. The number, 42,705, is 10 percent higher than just five years ago and 32 percent higher than a decade ago. "However," the Chronicle says laconically, "the rate of growth in doctorates has slowed, leading some observers to predictions of a downturn within several years."

Within several years. It is nice to know that in today's revved-up world of globalized hypercommerce, where a tap on a computer key can speed vast sums around the world in response to minute changes in conditions, there still is a little lagoon of calm, where market signals, however strong, receive a leisurely response.

For more than merely "several years," there has been a buyers' market for PhDs. That will not be dramatically changed by the current modest spike in tenure-track hiring, which is being produced by two factors: retirements among faculty hired during the higher education boom of the 1960s, and surging revenues and endowments produced by the soaring economy and stock market.

The growth of a reserve army of unemployed PhDs is faster in the humanities than in fields such as engineering because engineers can more easily find attractive jobs in the corporate world. The MLA estimates that fewer than half the 8,000 PhDs hoping to be professors of literature who will be produced between 1996 and 2000 will find tenure-track jobs within a year of acquiring their degrees. And many MLA graduate students become quite cross when urged to consider alternatives to academic employment. Says one militant from the University of Florida, "I didn't go $80,000 in debt to do something else."

Academics are not immune to the spirit of the age, the entitlement mentality. They insist that the overproduction of PhDs is really just an underproduction of jobs to which they are entitled. Part of their problem is that the academy is not immune to the trend elsewhere in the economy toward "temps" -- part-time workers, often called "adjunct professors." At four-year public institutions, 23.7 percent of faculty are part-time; at private institutions, 38 percent.

Some in the anxious proletariat of those earning or possessing PhDs want to elbow aside the proletariat of "temps" -- many of whom have not yet earned PhDs -- by pressuring universities to require full-time professors to teach even elementary writing courses. But some universities are more inclined to offer freshly minted PhDs career counseling that directs them away from academia, to government or business employment.

Many political science PhDs can put their skills to work in the growing world of public policy think tanks. But such options are, to say no more, fewer for the MLA member who has just polished off his dissertation on, say, "Unconscious Homoerotic Motifs in the Poetry of Rudyard Kipling and Lyrics of Mick Jagger." Which is why lots of graduate students are not amused by a campus joke:

The science PhD asks, "Why does it work?" The engineering PhD asks, "How does it work?" The liberal arts PhD asks, "Do you want fries with that?"