The Bilderberg Group (BG): So named for the Hotel de Bilderberg in the Netherlands where the first meeting was held in 1954, it sought to promote "Atlanticism". Among the 11 Americans attending the first conference were David Rockefeller, Dean Rusk, and George Ball who was then head of Lehman Brothers. Denis Healey, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, an original group founder and, for 30 years, a steering committee member, has said: "To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair. Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn't go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing".
Much of the planning for both the Common Market (including its NAFTA counterpart) and the European Union (can a North American Union be far behind?) was developed within the BG. Daniel Estulin, a critic of the BG, has written they seek success in manipulating the public "to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self."
Caroline Moorhead has written the BG is "an exclusive club, perhaps without power, but certainly with influence". Bankers, politicians and directors of large businesses typically weight the attendee annual list of participants. Prominent BG American attendees include Henry Kissinger, Paul Volker, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Donald Rumsfield, Rupert Murdoch, and George Soros as well as former Presidents Ford and Clinton. Former British Prime Ministers include Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown.
The BG is an exclusive extension of the British Royal Institute of International Affairs and American CFR's while including prominent Continental Europeans.
The Chicago School: Beginning in the 1970's, real wages stopped rising. Productivity rose as U.S. corporations replaced workers with machines and computers. At the same time these corporations were beginning to shift operations abroad to achieve higher profits on lowered wages. Also, they were hiring more women and immigrants at lower wages than being paid to the men. The reforms including those intended to minimize corporate size and minimize financial speculation achieved by FDR in the 1930's, always fought against by banking, business and industry, were largely made ineffective by the end of the century. Additionally, tax relief, since, has been particularly favorable to the wealthy.
Considering that rising productivity increased both worker wages and owner profits each decade from 1820 to 1970, the national economic shift in income inequality is the greatest experienced in the lifetime of any current reader. For one and a half centuries, the American Dream prevailed. The ability for each succeeding generation to improve its way of life has been in decline for the past 3-4 decades. The 1970's is when Capitalism Hit the Fan, or at least began to, according to the documentary of Richard D. Wolf, economics professor in the Graduate Program of International Affairs of the New School University in New York.
"Robber Barron" periods were, at various times and under various presidential administrations, constrained to the general improved condition of society. Cognizance of stakeholder interest beyond ownership, to including customer, labor, and community interests have, on the whole, worked to the economic benefit of the nation and its citizens. The philosophical shift to unconstrained free market capitalism is now engrained into the souls of business, banking, and industrial owners. It is best explained by Milton Freedman of the "Chicago School" referring to the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago when, in 1970, he wrote in the New York Times Magazine, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Business: "When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the "social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system, I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely' with profit but also with promoting desirable "social' ends; that business has a "social conscience' and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of re -formers. In fact they are - or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously - preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades."
When discussing corporate power, the power resides not in the corporation directly but rather in the hands and minds of the senior executives and principle owners. Evidence of this powers control of Government to the detriment of society at large is overwhelming. In part 5, the extension of this power through the Trilateral Commission, NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Chamber of Commerce will be reviewed.
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