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Opinion

Battle of the Conferences: Bilderberg Vs. St. Petersburg

Kevin Barrett

Russian President Vladimir Putin takes on US dollar hegemony at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, also attended by Chinese President Xi Jingping.

This year’s Bilderberg Conference — a shadowy meeting of Western potentates — took place May 30–June 2 at the Hotel Montreux Palace in Montreux, Switzerland. The Bilderbergers, one third of them Americans, the other two-thirds Europeans, meet annually under the strictest secrecy to set the agenda for continued Western capitalist domination of the planet.

One week later, Russia hosted the multipolar world’s answer to Bilderberg, the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. There, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, among other leaders, offered an explicit challenge to the Western-dominated neoliberal world order of the Bilderbergers.

Though the Bilderberg conference has been one of the world’s most important annual events since its 1954 debut, a near-complete mainstream media blackout made the group and its annual gatherings almost unknown to the Western and global publics until recently. For many decades, the official mainstream media line held that the notion that global elites meet secretly at Bilderberg every year was just a “conspiracy theory.” Academicians likewise avoided the topic. Only the tenacious reporting of alternative journalists including Jim Tucker, Daniel Estulin, Tony Gosling, and Alex Jones forced big media to begin reporting on Bilderberg and acknowledging its significance.

Today, the mainstream takes note of Bilderberg, dutifully bashes “conspiracy theorists” for worrying about it, but offers little insightful reporting on the event. The surprising exception is the work of British comedian/journalist Charlie Skelton, whose article “Silicon Valley in Switzerland: Bilderberg 2019 and the High-Tech Future of Transatlantic Power” was somehow published in Newsweek. Skelton points out that this year’s conference featured a sinister Trumpian militarist agenda,

The White House is making itself felt at this year’s conference, by sending along not only Pompeo, but Trump’s dealmaking diplomat son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and two members of his National Security Council. Not to be outdone, the Pentagon has sent two senior officials: their top military strategist and the technical director for AI.

The overriding theme of this year’s conference, Skelton writes, was the “blurring of tech and war.”

Even the New York Times couldn’t help to admit that Pompeo’s extra-secret Bilderberg appearance (he wasn’t on the official guest list) involved a warmongering agenda aimed at Iran, Venezuela, and China,

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is on a weeklong trip to Europe where he is raising sensitive issues with national leaders — from Iranian missiles to Chinese technology to the economic collapse of Venezuela — but the most colorful conversations could take place this weekend out of public earshot in a secretive conclave at a Swiss lakeside resort.

Since Bilderberg is where future wars are plotted “out of public earshot,” one wonders how many millions will die as a result of those top-secret “colorful conversations.”

It isn’t just war plans that are given the nod at Bilderberg. Little-known politicians who show up at Bilderberg conferences routinely rocket to superstardom shortly thereafter. Examples include then-obscure Arkan-sas governor Bill Clinton (1991); minor opposition back-bencher Tony Blair (1993); First Lady (not politician) Hillary Clinton (1997); not-exactly-famous German politician Angela Merkel (2005); “most-obscure junior US Senator” Barack Obama (2008); small-time political outsider Emmanuel Macron (2014); and many more, none of whose portentous appearances at Bilderberg conferences were noted by the mainstream. Since this year’s conference featured a similarly obscure American politician named Stacey Abrams, a failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate, one wonders whether she may miraculously rocket to the status of “President Abrams.”

This year’s “blurring of war and tech” Bilderberg Conference may be setting the stage for intensified 4th Generation hybrid warfare aimed at shoring up Western global domination, which is crumbling on many fronts: militarily, where the loss of Syria looms as the first major post-9/11 regime change failure (and where Russian and Chinese capabilities are steadily improving); economically, where the West continues to lose ground against the rest of the world while facing a looming debt-driven downturn; politically, where populist anti-EU and anti-globalization sentiment continues to rise; and in the information sphere, where alternative media has been so successful in challenging mainstream orthodoxy that the big tech monopolies have been forced to take extreme Orwellian measures, including widespread shadow-banning and wholesale deplatforming, in hopes of salvaging their consent-manufacturing machinery.

As Charlie Skelton suggests, the US seems to be striving to increase its dominance over its European Bilderberg underlings, as illustrated by the ramping up of American-driven 4th generation warfare initiatives. But is Europe fully on board? Just one week after Bilderberg, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) offered the Europeans a very different vision: a world dominated by equitable trade and negotiation rather than all-out Hobbesian struggle. Russian President Vladimir Putin headlined SPIEF, accusing the US of “unbridled economic egoism” that is “a path to endless conflicts, trade wars and maybe not just trade wars. Figuratively speaking, it’s a path to battles without rules that pit everyone against everyone else.” Putin issued an undisguised call for the end of US dollar hegemony,

New economic centers have emerged, the role of regional currencies has risen, the balance of powers and interests has shifted. Obviously, those deep changes require adaptation on the part of international financial organizations and re-thinking the role of the dollar. After becoming the global reserve currency, it transformed into an instrument of pressure by one country on the rest of the world.

China, already the world’s biggest economy by some measures, was in the mood to listen. Standing alongside Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping did not disagree. And why should he? The US has declared open war on China’s tech flagship, Huawei, and kidnapped its acting CEO, Meng Wanzhou, who is being held on various Trumped-up charges including conspiring to evade Iran sanctions. Trump’s war on Huawei is just one front in his larger trade war on China, which has intensified in recent weeks.

Will Europe, representing the relatively powerless two-thirds of Bilderberg attendees, abandon the sinking American ship of lunatic Captain Donald “Ahab” Trump and instead embrace the multipolar world being built at SPIEF? One indication that it could happen: shortly after SPIEF closed, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov announced that he and MarosSefcovic, vice-president of the European Commission for the Energy Union, “have agreed to set up a working group that will deal with a transition to using the ruble and euro in bilateral payments,” thereby ditching the dollar and driving another nail in its coffin.

Talk of the demise of the dollar, and with it US global hegemony, is everywhere these days. In early-June 2019, just as Bilderberg was closing and SPIEF opening, Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, speaking at the Nikkei Conference on the Future of Asia, highlighted his proposal for a gold-backed pan-Asian currency designed to provide an exit to what he called the “dollar trap.”

I recently met the Kuala Lumpur businessman who financed a major anti-riba conference many years ago at the behest of Shaykh Imran Hosein. Speaking privately after that conference, Dr. Mahathir reportedly told the businessman that he would love to spur the creation of a gold-backed alternative currency, but there was only one problem: the Americans would immediately declare that Malaysia was a rogue state harboring WMD and terrorists!

Today, the world is losing its fear of such threats. Dr. Mahathir is openly pushing his plan to de-dollarize Asia not only because he is 93 years old and unfazed by what the Americans might do to him, but also because the world economy, and balance of power, has changed.

How much longer will US and European Bilderberger elites continue to rule the world — or imagine that they do? Will 2019 be seen in retrospect as the year the multipolar world, symbolized by the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, eclipsed Bilderberg as the place where the most important decisions were made?


Article from

Crescent International Vol. 48, No. 5

Shawwal 27, 14402019-07-01


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