"The Globocrats": Davos and the Bilderberg
The Economist's special report on global leaders
<http://www.globalresearch.ca>Global Research, January 22, 2011
The Economist
Not everyone loves Davos.“YOU can do nothing
against a conspiracy theory,” sighs Etienne
Davignon. He sits in a lofty office with a
stupendous view over Brussels, puffing his pipe.
He is an aristocrat, a former vice-president of
the European Commission and a man who has sat on
several corporate boards, but that is not why
some people consider him too powerful. He
presides over the Bilderberg group, an evil
conspiracy bent on world domination. At least,
that is what numerous websites allege; also that
it has ties to al-Qaeda, is hiding the cure for
cancer and wishes to merge the United States with Mexico.
In reality, Bilderberg is an annual conference
for a few dozen of the world’s most influential
people. Last year Bill Gates and Larry Summers
hobnobbed with the chairman of Deutsche Bank, the
boss of Shell, the head of the World Food
Programme and the prime minister of Spain. One or
two journalists are invited each year, on
condition that they abstain from writing about
it. (Full disclosure: the editor of The Economist sometimes attends.)
Because the meetings are off the record, they are
catnip to conspiracy theorists. But the
attraction for participants is obvious. They can
speak candidly, says Mr Davignon, without
worrying how their words might play in tomorrow’s
headlines. So they find out what other
influential people really think. Big ideas are
debated frankly. Mr Davignon credits the meetings
for helping to lay the groundwork for creating
the euro. He recalls strong disagreement over
Iraq: some participants favoured the invasion in
2003, some opposed it and some wanted it done
differently. Last year the debate was about
Europe’s fiscal problems, and whether the euro would survive.
The world is a complicated place, with oceans of
new information sloshing around. To run a
multinational organisation, it helps if you have
a rough idea of what is going on. It also helps
to be on first-name terms with other globocrats.
So the cosmopolitan eliteinternational
financiers, bureaucrats, charity bosses and
thinkersconstantly meet and talk. They flock to
elite gatherings such as the World Economic Forum
at Davos, the Trilateral Commission and the Boao
meeting in China. They form clubs. Ethnic Indian
entrepreneurs around the world join TiE (The
Indus Enterprise). Movers and shakers in New York
and Washington join the Council on Foreign
Relations, where they can listen to the president
of Turkey one week and the chief executive of
Intel the next. The world’s richest man, Carlos
Slim, a Mexican telecoms tycoon, hosts an annual
gathering of Latin American billionaires who
cultivate each other while ostensibly discussing regional poverty.
Davos is perhaps the glitziest of these
globocratic gatherings. Hundreds of big wheels
descend on the Swiss ski resort each year. The
lectures are interesting, but the big draw is the
chance to talk to other powerful people in the
corridors. Such chats sometimes yield results. In
1988 the prime ministers of Turkey and Greece met
at Davos and signed a declaration that may have
averted a war. In 1994 Shimon Peres, then
Israel’s foreign minister, and Yasser Arafat
struck a deal over Gaza and Jericho. In 2003 Jack
Straw, Britain’s foreign secretary, had an
informal meeting in his hotel suite with the
president of Iran, a country with which Britain
had no diplomatic ties. But Davos is hardly a
secretive institution: it is crawling with
journalists. The other globocratic shindigs are
opening up, too. Even Bilderberg has recently
started publishing lists of participants on its website.
Some American organisations, such as
foreign-policy think-tanks, are also well placed
to exert global influence. The Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, for example, has
established itself as one of the most globally
trusted talking-shops, with offices in Beijing,
Beirut, Brussels and Moscow, as well as
Washingtonthough it has yet to fulfil the vision
of its founder, Andrew Carnegie, who wanted it to
abolish war. The key to wielding influence, says
Jessica Mathews, Carnegie’s president, is “very
simple. You hire the best people.”
In countries where think-tanks are subservient to
the state, such as China and Russia, foreign
outfits such as Carnegie enjoy a reputation for
independence. If they can back this up with
useful knowledge, they can sway policy. For
example, Carnegie scholars advised the authors of
Russia’s post-Soviet constitution. And when
relations between American and Russia grew frosty
under President George W. Bush, Carnegie’s Moscow
office helped keep a line of communication open between the two governments.
Such meetings are “an important part of the story
of the superclass”, says Mr Rothkopf, the author
of the eponymous book. What they offer is access
to “some of the world’s most sequestered and
elusive leaders”. As such, they are one of “the
informal mechanisms of [global] power”.
Some globocrats think the importance of forums
like Davos is overstated. Howard Stringer, the
boss of Sony, is the kind of person you would
expect to relish such gatherings. Welsh by birth,
American by citizenship, he took over Japan’s
most admired company in 2005, when it was in
serious trouble, and turned it around in the face
of immense cultural obstacles. He says he has
enjoyed trips to Davos in the past but will not
attend this year. He can learn more, he says, by
listening to his 167,000 employees.
On the face of it there seems much to be said for
the world’s shakers and movers meeting and
talking frequently. Yet for all their tireless
information-swapping, globocrats were caught
napping by the financial crisis. Their networks
of contacts did throw up a few warnings, but not
enough to prompt timely action.
The limits of jaw-jaw
Jim Chanos, a hedge-fund manager who made his
first fortune betting that Enron was overvalued,
warned the G8 finance ministers in April 2007
that banks and insurance firms were heading for
trouble. He made another fortune when bank shares
crashed, but is still furious that his warnings
were politely ignored. He thinks it an outrage
that several senior regulators from that period
are still in positions of power. And he accuses
some bankers of “a wholesale looting of the
system” by paying themselves bonuses based on
what they must have known were phantom profits.
He thinks they should be prosecuted.
Globocrats failed to avert the crisis, but they
rallied once it struck. Rich-country governments
acted in concert to prop up banks with taxpayers’
money. In America the response was led by a
well-connected trio: Hank Paulson, George Bush
junior’s treasury secretary and a former boss of
Goldman Sachs; Tim Geithner, Barack Obama’s
treasury secretary and a former boss of the New
York Federal Reserve, as well as a veteran of the
IMF, the Council on Foreign Relations and
Kissinger Associates; and Ben Bernanke, of
Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton and the Bush
White House, who is now chairman of the Federal
Reserve. The bail-outs were unpopular everywhere,
but may have prevented the world’s banking system from imploding.
Governments are now trying to craft rules to
prevent a recurrence. Lots of people have offered
advice. Among the weightier contributions was a
report from the Group of Thirty (G30), an
informal collection of past and present
central-bank governors. The Volcker Report,
advocating a central clearing mechanism for
derivatives trading and curbs on proprietary
trading by banks, helped shape America’s
Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill. The G30 is
influential because it consists of people with
experience of putting policies into practice,
says Stuart Mackintosh, its director. So when it
makes recommendations, they can be turned into action, he adds.
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"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic
poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
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--
Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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