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http://www.zcommunications.org/contents/186710
Bilderbergers Beware
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Populists confront US-European '.0001%' in Washington
By Patrick Bond <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/patrickbond>
Thursday, June 07, 2012
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Patrick Bond's ZSpace Page
<http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/patrickbond>
Near the Dulles International Airport west of Washington last weekend, I
found myself a couple of dozen meters away from a formidable gathering
of 150 powerbrokers -- the Bilderberg Group
<http://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/>-- whose capacity to move money and
influence events rivals even the upcoming G20 meeting in Mexico, last
month's G8 summit in Camp David and NATO military meeting in Chicago,
the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Spring Meeting in
April, or the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January.
The secretive Bilderbergers aren't normally a protest magnet, but for my
purposes, while passing through Washington, this was the best
opportunity to hear their critics from the libertarian-populist strain
of US civil society. Hundreds of demonstrators jammed the sidewalk all
weekend, mainly motivated by a call to 'Occupy Bilderberg 2012' made by
Alex Jones, who has a radio audience of three million and a lurid
infowars.com <http://www.infowars.com/>website ("There's a war on for
your mind!").
Protesters hurled creative abuse at the black limousines rolling past
towards the Chantilly Marriott Hotel entrance, and to protect them,
police arrested a few activists who dared step onto the road. These
particular masters of the universe first met at a hotel (The Bilderberg)
in Holland in 1954, co-hosted by Dutch royalty, Uniliver and the US
Central Intelligence Agency. The obscure brainstorming session would
become anannual intellectual and ideological "testing grounds for new
initiatives for Atlantic unity," according to Sussex University scholar
Kees van der Pijl, perhaps the world's most rigorous scholar of
transnational ruling classes.
Often compared to the Trilateral Commission (US, European and Japanese
leaders), Council on Foreign Relations thinktank in New York and
Bohemian Grove confab (near San Francisco) as low-profile talk shops for
key strategic role-players, the Bilderberg Group's website explains that
its "regular, /off-the-record /discussions helped create a better
understanding of the complex forces and major trends affecting Western
nations in the difficult post-war period. The Cold War has now ended.
But in practically all respects there are more, not fewer, common
problems -- from trade to jobs, from monetary policy to investment, from
ecological challenges to the task of promoting international security."
By inviting a few outside the US-Euro axis, Bilderberg organisers send
signals about which regions are considered important -- and Africa
doesn't feature. On this year's agenda were "Transatlantic Relations,
Evolution of the Political Landscape in Europe and the US, Austerity and
Growth in Developed Economies, Cyber Security, Energy Challenges, the
Future of Democracy, Russia, China and the Middle East."
The 2012 guest list included the top managers of international banks,
oil and chemical companies, high tech firms, the World Bank and World
Trade Organisation, plus rising government leaders, philanthropists and
old imperialists like Henry Kissinger.
This crew is bound to draw the ire of many victims, yet instead of the
kind of Occupy protests I witnessed in London last month -- a march
through The City with socialists and anarchists furious about
parasitical banking practices -- or at Wall Street's Zuccotti Park last
year and in various subsequent anti-bank protests by US leftists, the
weekend's Bilderberg protest displayed paranoia about the conspiracies
being hatched in the Virginia hotel.
These include everything from the vetting of top politicians -- after
all, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama came to Bilderberg to
'audition' just as their star rose -- to imposing 'Agenda 21'
sustainable development strategies, to arranging potential world
hyperinflation via the next bail-out round for the shaky financial
sector. Conversations revealed fears of a one-world government taking
away the patriots' guns and imposing a solution to climate change.
Many of these libertarians believe climate change is a plot by Al Gore
to impose world carbon taxes. If only -- for Gore is actually instead a
self-interested huckster for carbon trading, which is failing miserably
in Europe, as well as in the US (except California) in the wake of the
2010 closure of the Chicago Climate Exchange.
Mind you, some such conspiracy theories are sufficiently close enough to
an accurate reading of power to be taken semi-seriously. But it should
be patently obvious that at least since 1987 -- when CFCs in our old
fridges and deoderants were banned by a UN Montreal Protocol so as to
prevent the ozone hole from growing -- all subsequent world-government
ambitions to regulate ecology, manage trade, fix finance, coordinate
military activity and address the myriad of other world problems /have
been dismal failures/.
This is where I found myself differing most with Jones' supporters:
never before in history have world elites been so tempted to address
global-scale crises, but -- thanks to the adverse power balance
represented by neoliberal ideology in the 1990s, neoconservatism in the
early 2000s and some fusion of the two since Obama came to power --
/never before have they acted so incoherently. /
Today, the very words 'global governance' appear a contradiction in
terms. Scholars in this field whom I met at Sussex University for a
'SouthGovNet' conference on 'Rising Powers'
<http://www.southgov.net/sussexconference>last month were well aware
that the subimperialist group of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South
Africa cannot yet do imperialism's heavy lifting, even when it comes to
what is considered a 'global public good' -- non-collapsing
international financial networks -- via the desired G20 re-bailout of
the IMF (the BRICS are objecting to giving their $100 billion share of
the $430 billion that Christine Lagarde now seeks for a rainy European day).
Van der Pijl's exceptionally rich study of Bilderberg and subsequent
US-European geopolitical maneuvres, /The Making of an Atlantic Ruling
Class /(which thankfully Verso Press is about to reissue), provides the
theoretical underpinning that I feel Jones' passionately
conspiratorialist followers desperately need, if they ever aim to
/properly /judge the world's complex combinations of structure and agency.
As Marx remarked, "People make their own history, but not under
conditions of their own choosing." Developing an analysis of
political-economic structure -- the background conditions -- is the
vital missing element short-circuited by the libertarian right's shallow
habit of name-calling Bilderbergers 'Illuminati!'
How do we best understand the Bilderbergers, then? In his most recent
major article dissecting their agenda, based on the 2007 meeting, van
der Pijl insists, "The West, capital, and the state emerged in a single
process in which mutual relations are not external and optional but
internal, embodied in transnational classes."
Such elite networks are, Antonio Gramsci wrote in /The Prison
Notebooks,/ like "international political parties which operate within
each nation with the full concentration of the international forces. But
religion, Freemasonry, Rotary, Jews, etc., can be subsumed into the
social category of 'intellectuals', whose function, on an international
scale, is that of mediating the extremes, of 'socializing' the technical
discoveries which provide the impetus for all activities of leadership,
of devising compromises between, and ways out of, extreme solutions."
Likewise, van der Pijl sees the Bilderberg Group as an 'international'
of corporate capital, although possessing a narrower base than the Davos
crew because of its Atlanticist character. Hence the biggest
geopolitical and economic threat to the Bilderbergers is China.
Initially, he observes, the mood was welcoming, because "Beijing's
decision to peg the Chinese currency on the dollar in 1994, was seen as
a move to tie its fate more emphatically to the US economy and a further
commitment to become integrated into the expanding West at the height of
the Clinton globalisation drive."
However, van der Pijl continues, "The Chinese challenge to the West /and
the response to it/ were in 1996 still in a benign stage and were soon
beginning to mutate into a different direction," namely putting China
right after Iraq and Iran on Washington's enemy list, roughly a decade ago.
Five years back, van der Pijl identified Bilderberger priorities from a
list that an insider informant had jotted down: dividing Iraq, invading
Iran, controlling other oil and gas supplies, creating more EU-type
unions in the American Hemisphere, and "talking about China as the
World's next Evil Empire."//
Retroactively, in 2012, it is fanciful to imagine Washington's power to
fracture Iraq and to compel more economic 'unions', in the sense of a
single currency, fallen trade barriers (amplifying NAFTA) and
increasingly centralised state coordination. As for the other
projections five years ago, recall that the bubbly pre-crisis economic
period had not yet ended and Peak Oil was feared at an early date
(before the fracking boom), so the Bilderbergers' bravado is not surprising.
But they were nervous, too, of a coming political storm, remarked van
der Pijl. Representing both BP and Goldman Sachs in 2007, Peter
Sutherland (former WTO director) "was quoted as saying that it had been
a mistake to have referenda on the EU constitution. /'You knew there was
a rise in nationalism; you should have let your parliaments ratify the
treaty, and it should be done with.'/ Kissinger said words to the same
effect concerning unification of the Americas, stressing the need to
mobilise the enlightened media behind its propagation."
What kind of political storm did the Bilderbergers chat about last
weekend, in the wake of so much revolt across the world? In his 2007
paper, van der Pijl was correct to warn against "US rightwing
anti-globalists with a strong conspiratorial bent who consider
Bilderberg a permanent quasi-world government rather than a nodal point
(among several others) of the Atlantic ruling class as it evolves and
seeks to work out a strategic consensus."
But if the Bilderbergers agreed upon a strategic consensus, it was
probably extreme neoliberalism, taking advantage of financial capital's
crises by bailing out the banks and imposing financial capital's
austerity agenda. With Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish and Italian
social pressure rising, we can anticipate many more such populist
concerns about the anti-democratic IMF, European Central Bank and
financial institutions.
(To illustrate, near where I live in South Africa, the mysterious men
from Moody's rating agency are this month arm-twisting the state to
reinstate a hugely unpopular highway tolling strategy in the
Johannesburg-Pretoria region, in the face of both trade union and
middle-class white revolt.)
So there is no doubt that world banker domination -- which should have
been reduced by the 2008-09 financial melt -- will continue. Only the
occasional sovereign default -- Argentina (2002), Ecuador (2008),
Iceland (2008) and maybe Southern Europe this year -- or imposition of
exchange controls (as rediscovered by Malaysia in 1998 or Venezuela in
2003) reduces the banksters' grip.
Yet the libertarian protesters' fear of the elites has only superficial
commonality with the Occupy movement's more robust approach. The latter
want a forward-moving 'system change' -- as we heard from Occupy COP17
in Durban outside the climate summit last December -- whereas
nationalistic US nativism offers no grounds for broad-based alliances.
As expressed in a fairly typical protest banner on Saturday, "Warning to
secret societies: you are pissing off American patriots. We have machine
guns also." The macho, self-described 'paleo-conservative' narrative
plus the occasional undercurrent of anti-semitism is not language heard
from Occupy's collection of socialists, anarchists, liberals, Greens,
labour, civic activists, youth and the progressive faith community.
The strongest political effort by these libertarian anti-Bilderberg
protesters is to attempt the election of Texan member of Congress, Ron
Paul, as president, and with 20 percent popularity, he remains Mitt
Romney's only irritant within the Republican Party as the November
showdown with Obama now looms.
But with Obama continuing to molly-coddle Wall Street (e.g., still no
prosecutions for the great 2008-09 financial theft) and openly declaring
himself a militarist -- personally approving drone assassinations in the
Middle East and delighting in the Stuxnet cyberwar attack on Iran,
according to /The New York Times /last week -- the paranoid streak about
Washington's surveillance and proto-fascistic policing also resonates.
So long as they leave their guns behind, I wish them well, because to
have directed a great deal more media attention and popular hostility
against the '.0001%' gathered in the Marriot last weekend, was a public
service that the rest of our world should now build upon. But hopefully,
with political values more aligned to rainbow than Rambo.
/Patrick Bond directs the //Centre for Civil Society/
<http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/>/in Durban, South Africa./
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