THE GST/VAT REAL PURPOSE-ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL ANSCHLUSS (UNIFICATION)

European Community Economics, on Tax harmonisation; it had its origin with the Neumark Committee in 1962, which proposed to have a system of common central taxation to bring the EEC's economies under central administration of European Commission and the Brussels Bureaucracy.

What the government never told you, about GST, the bipartisan Neo-Liberalism (economic rationalism), the Free Trade blocs,European Union's and Eastasia Common Market.

last update 24th April 2002-more coming soon this month from the ALP Hobart Convention on the WTO, ASEAN and APEC policy plans....

Beware of the Glittering Generalities and the Virtue Words in Neo-liberal speak:

Competition, Free Trade, Competitive, Openness,Reform, Privatisation, Mutual Obligation (does not count politicians and meddling corp suits), trade flows, capital flows, Increased Co-operation.

Important definitions in the making of Common Market with view to a political bloc

WHAT IS TAX HARMONISATION? We have to grant that the Euro fanatics were more honest in claiming to use the GST for the common market, unlike here it was another of those never-ending economic reform, to make us 'competive internationally'.
Even Pinochet introduced a GST!

WHAT VAT MEANS that's GST in Europe, why it continues to be an important pillar of Pan European political and economic integration (read political absorbtion), this is known as the spill-over effect of legislation and jurisdictions.

[THE TREATY OF ROME] Politicians are all liars, and nothing they say sould be believed......

see the section on monetary union which comes after tax harmonisation and non-discriminatory treatment of imports with the added 'bonus' of a foreign court over-ruling the national parliament. Unelected Law makers indeed!

Note: similar tactics are being used to bring about the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) and eventual currency between Australia and New Zealand by the name of ANZAC Dollar (Helen Clark last year at the South Pacific Forum 2000)

Shows the formation of the Regional govt and the attrition of the Nation-States, done via economics and later politics, please note:great use of intergovernmental summits were made to over ride the national parliaments. Do not give an inch to the trade bloc, it is political from A to Z

As of December 2000, the pathological liars at the EU and its neo-fascists corporate heads are proceeding with the creation of a regional army to buffer up the Germany's Eastern to Russia, it is Drang Nach Osten (drive/push to the east) all over again.

It was on the papers too!

Tuesday 19 September 2000

Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Brussels

accessed date 4th October 2001

http://www.mvcf.com/news/cache/00128/

DECLASSIFIED American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.

The documents confirm suspicions voiced at the time that America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state. One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.

The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington's main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.

The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA's first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement's funds.

The European Youth Campaign, an arm of the European Movement, was wholly funded and controlled by Washington. The Belgian director, Baron Boel, received monthly payments into a special account. When the head of the European Movement, Polish-born Joseph Retinger, bridled at this degree of American control and tried to raise money in Europe, he was quickly reprimanded.

The leaders of the European Movement - Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak - were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation. ACUE's funding came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations as well as business groups with close ties to the US government.

The head of the Ford Foundation, ex-OSS officer Paul Hoffman, doubled as head of ACUE in the late Fifties. The State Department also played a role. A memo from the European section, dated June 11, 1965, advises the vice-president of the European Economic Community, Robert Marjolin, to pursue monetary union by stealth.

It recommends suppressing debate until the point at which "adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable".

The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification
- From Lobster 32

Lobster is a six-monthly magazine/journal devoted to parapolitics, uncovering hidden forces that govern the way we live. Typical articles include: 'The CIA, drugs and the media', Jane Affleck's web survey, 'the Rockefeller UFO initiative'. It is an independently published by the editor and needs all the support it can get. The following article has been used with permission, if you like what you read do please consider taking out Lobster's modest subscription.

The annual cost is between six and nine pounds stirling depending on where you live. Postal address and email at the bottom of the article.

The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification
Mike Peters

Despite their reputation for 'empiricism', British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called 'Establishment' in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain became diverted from empirical investigation of power, as the study of national and international power-structures became conducted under the aegis of increasingly abstract theoretical categories derived from Marxism, and in particular by a wave of concepts based on Poulantzas's 'structuralist' critique of Miliband, and was followed by ever more esoteric discussions of the 'theory' of the state (e.g. Jessop, 1990), culminating in the hegemony of a post-Marxist version of Gramsci's conception of 'hegemony' - in which 'struggle' is posited without any identifiable human beings as its active protagonists, and with the stakes reduced to ideas rather than concrete interests.

This was in sharp contrast with the USA, where the impetus of C. Wright Mills's pioneering study of the network of interests involved in the Cold War (Mills, 1956) was continued by a flourishing group of scholars. There has been nothing in Britain of comparable scope or detail to the work conducted in the USA by G. W. Domhoff, Thomas Dye, Mark Mizruchi or Noam Chomsky, etc.

The present article is concerned with one specific facet of American power-structure research which, I believe, has important implications for the study of power in the UK. This is the subject of power-elite networks and forums, conceptualised as arenas for the conduct of intra-capitalist and inter-corporate strategic debates and long-range social planning, from which wider 'democratic' interference is carefully excluded.

The particular institution about which I will present information is the so-called 'Bilderberg Group', which is an interesting example of this kind of power-elite forum. It is one among a number of little-publicised institutions which have played an important role providing a means for debates and discussions to take place amongst different capitalist groups and different national governments over long-term planning issues and, especially, in Co-ordinating strategic policy at an international level. Other such bodies on this trans-national scale include the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in the USA, with its UK sister organisation, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (otherwise known simply as Chatham House) and the Trilateral Commission (which itself grew out of Bilderberg meetings and has been essentially a more globalist version of the latter, since it incorporates Japanese representatives). Each of these bodies will be mentioned in what follows.

One of the 'functions' such institutions appear to serve is that of 'mediating' between the economic interests of private capital and the requirement of a general interest on the part of the capitalist class as a whole. I shall suggest that much of the theorising about the 'state' in the tradition of structural Marxism since the 1970s has confused this relation between capital and national governments, owing to the tendency to reify the abstraction called ?the state' and posit it as enjoying a virtual autonomy vis-à-vis capital; whereas the empirical evidence lends more support to the rather hastily dismissed (and often grotesquely caricatured) model called 'instrumentalism?.

To anticipate what will be said later, I believe that one of the key assumptions often made by structural Marxists, namely that the capitalist class is always divided into competing fractions which have no mechanisms for co-ordination other than the state, is not empirically sustainable. Part of this misconception, it could be said, derives from an over-literal understanding of the concept of the 'market' as constituting the only social relation amongst different fractions of capital. At least as far as the very large, and above all, the international (or as we would say in today's jargon, the ?global?) corporations are concerned, this is definitely not the case: very sophisticated organs do exist whereby these capitalist interests can and do hammer out common lines of strategy. Bilderberg is one of these mechanisms.

As the second world war drew to a close, the capitalist class in Western Europe was under severe threat from an upsurge of working class radicalism, the management of which required a strategy more sophisticated than conventional repression, and the first steps were taken, by political panes of both left and right, to develop 'corporatist' programmes based on a kind of national protectionism. By contrast, in the USA, the war had brought to dominance an internationally-oriented capitalist class who saw very clearly that their interests lay in a thorough 'liberalisation' (1) of the world market, abolition of tariffs etc.. Only the false wisdom of hindsight could make the eventual Atlantic Alliance system that emerged by 1950 seem preordained by 'objective' historical forces. Indeed, so used have we become to hearing phrases like 'American imperialism' and witnessing US interventions throughout the world that we can forget just how difficult it was for this internationally oriented fraction of the American capitalist class to impose its agenda upon the US state: the deep-rooted tendency of American political culture has always been what Europeans call Isolationist' and it took extensive political work to drag the Americans into these foreign entanglements. In this paper I will not be looking in any detail at how these interests influenced the US government during and after the Second World War, but rather at how they succeeded in effecting the integration of the Western European capitalist class into a new Atlantic alliance system

The period 1945-50 is highly complex and debate still rages over the origin and nature of the 'Cold War': for example over the degree to which the US was acting offensively or defensively against a (real or imagined) Soviet threat, as well as over the relation between the external or geopolitical aspect of the Cold War on the one hand and its domestic, ideological or 'class' aspect. And die recent work of. Alan Milward, for example, has thrown into question many of the received assumptions about the causes and consequences of the 'supranational' institutions created in Europe in the aftermath of the war (Milward, 1984 and 1994; Anderson, 1996).

The beginnings of a clarification of these events were made with the pioneering analysis of Kees Van der Pijl, in conjunction with other Dutch Marxist scholars (Fennema, Overbeek etc.) ten years ago, together with the detailed empirical work of US power-researchers (e.g. the journal Critical Sociology). With the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent 'coming out' of veteran anti-Communists now prepared to open up some of their dubious accomplishments to outside scrutiny (Peter Coleman, Brian Crozier e.g.), more direct documentary evidence of the scope and intensity of covert US involvement in European politics in the post-war period is now available.

The official version of the history of the creation of the Atlantic system reads like the 'lives and teachings of saints (Milward, 1992). in these school textbook accounts, each of the pillars of the post-war world order has its great founding father, whose photographs invariably appear in magazine articles:

* the European Community is the work of Jean Monnet (with his faithful discipline Schuman)

These are not just myths; they are, in intelligence parlance, more like 'cover stories'.

The Marshall Plan is named after the speech on June 5 1947 by US Secretary of State Marshall, which invited European countries to join in a co-operative plan for economic reconstruction, with explicit requirements for trade liberalisation and increases in productivity. Over the next ten months there emerged the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948, which set up the Economic Co-operation Agency (ECA) to administer the European Recovery Programme (ERP) - the so-called 'Marshall Aid' - which gave $13 billion in aid to 16 western European states. In four years, the ECA was superseded by the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) in 1951 which in turn was transformed into the Foreign Operations Agency (FOA) in 1954, later the International Co-operation Agency (ICA) in 1955 and finally the Agency for International Development (AID) in 196l (Carew 1987 p. 6ff). it is generally recognised that this aid had a decidedly militaristic purpose, being essentially a prerequisite for the development of NATO. (2)

It is less generally acknowledged, however, that this unprecedented exercise of international generosity (dubbed by Churchill the 'most unsordid act in history') served direct economic purposes for the internationally oriented US corporations which promoted it. William Clayton, for example, the Under-secretary for Economic Affairs, whose tour of Europe and letters sent back to Washington played a key role in preparing the plan, and who pushed it through Congress, personally profited to the tune of $700,000 a year; and his own company, Anderson, Clayton & Co. secured $10 million of Marshall, Plan orders up to the summer of 1949. (Schuman 1954 p. 240). General Motors similarly got $5.5 million worth of orders between July 1950 and 1951 (14.7% of the total) and they Ford Motor Company got $1 million (4.2% of the total).

The origins of the Marshall Plan are in fact to be found in the 'War and Peace Study Groups' instituted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1939. (For the details see Shoup & Minter p. 117 ff). on December 6 1939 the Rockefeller Foundation granted the Council nearly $50,000 to finance the first year of the project. Well over 120 influential individuals (academics and business leaders), at least 5 cabinet levels departments and 12 separate government agencies, bureaux or offices were involved in this. There were altogether 362 meetings and no less than 682 separate documents produced. I find it frankly astonishing that virtually none of the British academic scholarship on this period even acknowledges the existence of the CFR, let alone the War and Peace Study Groups. Evidence is surely required to show that they had no influence, if that is what scholars believe.

The plan which Marshall presented in his speech had already been outlined in the proposals of a CFR study group of 1946 headed by the lawyer Charles M. Spofford and David Rockefeller, entitled 'Reconstruction in Western Europe'; and the specific proposal for unifying the Western European coal and steel basin as a bulwark against the USSR was made by John Foster Dulles in January 1947.

To trace the origin of the movement for European unification, however, requires that we go back to May 8 1946 and an address given at Chatham House by a Pole named Joseph Retinger. In this talk he outlined a plan for a federal Europe in which the states would relinquish part of their sovereignty. At the time, Retinger was secretary general of the Independent League for European Co-operation (ILEC), run by the Belgian Prime Minister Paul van Zeeland. During the war Retinger worked closely with van Zeeland and other exile leaders who would become prominent in the Bilderberg network, (including Paul Rijkens, whom we will meet again shortly). (3) Out of these connections was born in 1942-3 the Benelux customs union, a kind of prototype of the Common Market.

The ideas adumbrated by Retinger were not new: there is a whole history of such projects for European unification and for even larger global schemes. One might just note here the assumption of the need for a 'great power' status as well as the almost taken-for-granted racism which informed Retinger's thinking:

'The end of the period during which the white man spread his activities over the whole globe saw the Continent itself undergoing a process of internal disruption........ there are no big powers left in continental Europe....... [whose] inhabitants after all, represent the most valuable human element in the world.' (Retinger 1946, p. 7)

Shortly after this speech, Retinger was invited by the US ambassador, Averell Harriman, to the USA to secure American support for ILEC.

'I found in America a unanimous approval for our ideas among financiers, businessmen and politicians. Mr Leffingwell, senior partner in J. P. Morgan's [bank], Nelson and David Rockefeller, Alfred Sloan [chair of General Motors], Charles Hook, President of the American Rolling Mills Company, Sir William Wiseman, [British SIS and] partner in Kuhn Loeb [New York investment bank], George Franklin and especially my old friend Adolf Berle Jr [CFR], were all in favour, and Berle agreed to lead the American section [of ILEC]. John Foster Dulles also agreed to help. (Pomian 1972, p. 212)

Thus was formed the European Movement (whose first congress at the Hague in 1948 is- the origin of the Council of Europe), which received substantial contributions from US government secret funds as well as private sources via the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE). The names mentioned above are significant in the present context: Leffingwell preceded John McCloy and David Rockefeller as CFR chair, 1946-53, and had been a CFR director since 1927, while Franklin was executive director of the CFR 1953-7 and was later a Trilateral Commission Co-ordinator: also, incidentally an in-law of the Rockefellers.

US funding for the European Movement extended beyond 1952, most of it going to the European Youth Campaign, initiated by John McCloy, whose own career virtually personifies the Atlantic ruling class as a whole: a corporate lawyer of relatively humble origins, he became, through his contacts at Harvard, assistant Secretary of War 1941-45 and first President of the World Bank (IBRD), which he revamped to suit the interests of Wall Street; and then US High Commissioner for Germany 1949-52 (where, among other things, he enabled Krupp to regain control of his steel companies, advising on the establishment of the Krupp-Stiftung, modelled on the Ford Foundation - he was connected to Adenauer through his German wife, whose sister married Lewis Douglas, J. P. Morgan financier and later US ambassador to Britain), after which he became a director of both the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Ford Foundation in 1953. He was also an active member of the Bilderberg Group, becoming chair of the Council on Foreign Relations itself.

As for ACUE, its chair was William Donovan (who ran OSS - forerunner of the CLA during the war) and its vice-chair was Allen Dulles (who was a leading figure in the CFR War and Peace Study Group during the early part of the war, and later the director of the CIA); and it was run in Europe by another CIA executive, Thomas W. Braden.

'The Treaty of Rome [1957], which brought the Common Market into being, was nurtured at Bilderberg meetings.' (George McGhee, former US ambassador to West Germany)

'Bilderberg' takes its name from the hotel, belonging to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, near Arnhem, where, in May 1954 the first meeting took place of what has ever since been called the Bilderberg Group. While the name persisted, its meetings are held at different locations. Prince Bernhard himself (who, incidentally, was actually German not Dutch) was chair until 1976 when he was forced to resign because of the Lockheed bribery scandal. The possible significance of this group may be gleaned from the status of its participants: the membership comprises those individuals who would, on most definitions, be regarded as members of the 'ruling class' in Western Europe and North America-In particular, the conferences brought together important figures in most of the largest international corporations with leading politicians and prominent intellectuals (in both academia and journalism).

Moreover, virtually all the European institutions we take for granted today, or treat as if they 'emerged' as a matter of course, from the ECSC, EEC and Euratom down to the present European Union, were conceived, designed and brought into existence through the agency of the people involved in Bilderberg.

What Gill has referred to, with disarming brevity, as its 'almost completely secretive' character (Gill 1990, p. 129) is neither incidental nor superficial but integral to its functioning. It is essential that these discussions be kept out of the public sphere. The lengths to which the organisers go are quite astonishing. An entire hotel is taken over in advance (existing guests being moved out) and a whole caravanserai, including special catering staff and armed security guards, descend on the site several days in advance. I recommend the amusing account by Robert Eringer - to my knowledge the only journalistic investigation yet conducted (Eringer 1980). The maintenance of this secrecy has been remarkably effective. In 1967, Cecil King, then chair of the International Publishing Corporation (at the time the press group with the largest circulation in the UK) and chair of the Newspaper Proprietors Association, formally requested his fellow proprietors to see to it that 'on no account should any report or even speculation about the content of the conferences be printed' (quoted in Sklar 1980, p. 178).

On one of the few occasions when Bilderberg meetings were mentioned in a major British newspaper, the outcome was quite interesting. In the 'Lombard' column of the Financial Times, C. Gordon Tether wrote on May 6 1975: 'If the Bilderberg Group is not a conspiracy of some sort, it is conducted in such a way as to give a remarkably good imitation of one.' In a column written almost a year later, for the March 3 l976 edition, Tether wrote: 'The Bilderbergers have always insisted upon clothing their comings and goings in the closest secrecy. Until a few years back, this was carried to such lengths that their annual conclave went entirely unmarked in the world's press. In the more recent past, the veil has been raised to the extent of letting it be known that the meetings were taking place. But the total ban on the reporting of what went on has remained in force....Any conspiratologist who has the Bilderbergers in his sights will proceed to ask why it is that, if there is so little to hide, so much effort is devoted to hiding it.'

This column never appeared: it was censored by the Financial Times editor Mark Fisher (himself a member of the Trilateral Commission), and Tether was finally dismissed from the 'Lombard' column in August 1976.

It is important at the outset to distinguish the active, on-going membership from the various people who are occasionally invited to attend. Many of those invited to come along, perhaps to report on matters pertaining to their expertise, have little idea there is a formally constituted group at all, let alone one with its own grand agenda. Hence the rather dismissive remarks by people like sixties media guru Marshall McLuhan, who attended a Bilderberg meeting in 1969 in Denmark, that he was 'nearly suffocated at the banality and irrelevance,' describing them as 'uniformly nineteenth century minds pretending to relate to the twentieth century'. Another of those who have attended, Christopher Price, then Labour MP for Lewisham West, found it 'all very fatuous.... icing on the cake with nothing to do with the cake.' (Eringer 1980, p. 26). Denis Healey, on the other hand, who was in from the beginning and later acted as British convenor, says that 'the most valuable [meetings] to me while I was in opposition were the Bilderberg Conferences'. (Healey 1990, p. 195)

Bilderberg from the beginning has been administered by a small core group, constituted since 1956 as a steering committee, consisting of a permanent chair, a US chair, European and North American secretaries and a treasurer. Invitations are 'only sent to important and generally respected people who through their special knowledge or experience, their personal contacts and their influence in national and international circles can further the aims set by Bilderberg.' (Retinger, cited in Sklar p. 168)

'...during the first 3 or 4 years the all-important selection of participants was a delicate and difficult task. This was particularly so as regards politicians. It was not easy to persuade the top office holders to come Retinger displayed great skill and an uncanny ability to pick out people who in a few years time were to accede to the highest offices in their respective countries today there are very few figures among governments on both sides of the Atlantic who have not attended at least one of these meetings.' (Pomian, pp. 254-5)

The Bilderberg discussions are organised on the principle of reaching consensus rather than through formal resolutions and voting. Such is the influence and standing of the active members that, if consensus for action is arrived at, one might expect this to be carried out and the resulting decision to be implemented in the West as a whole. But the exact position of the group, and that of other such groups, is only discernible by a close scrutiny of the specific careers and connections of the individual participants. Here, one has to say that social theorists seem convinced of the irrelevance of this kind of information, which would be called 'prosopographic' (i.e. data pertaining to concrete individuals, which companies they represent, their family connections etc.). This is somewhat contradictory, of course, because in their every-day roles, social theorists are just as interested in this kind of information as anyone else, and display a keen sense of its political relevance when it comes to conducting their own careers: but it has it nonetheless become almost a matter of principle to denounce use of this kind of data in social science itself. This tendency seems to come from a reification of the concept of 'roles' (as if these were real rather than constructs) and possibly from a functionalist assumption that social systems are subject to laws; with concrete human actors having no significance in shaping outcomes.

The initiative for the first convocation came from Joseph Retinger, in conjunction with Paul Rijkens, President of Unilever. Retinger has already been introduced; and the significance of Unilever needs to be examined briefly. Unilever is one of the largest and most powerful multinational corporations in the world and one of the top European capitalist companies. In the 1950's the advisory directors of Unilever were as follows (and I'm drawing attention to the links with the Rotterdam Bank and Philips, the electrical firm):

· H.M. Hirschfield: also on the board of Philips and Rotterdam Bank and with the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs during the war, and after it Commissioner for the Marshall Plan in the Netherlands;

· H.L. Wolterson: also chair of Philips and on the board of Heldring and Pearson (linked with the Rotterdam Bank);

· P S.F Otten: also President of Philips (and married to a member of the Philips family)

One of the unusual features of Unilever is its bi-national structure (Stokman et al, 1985): it is a jointly-owned AngloDutch company, with a 50/r0 structure and a unitary board. This was a very useful device during the war, when operations could be shifted easily from the Netherlands to the UK. Philips had a similar arrangement under a Dutch law called the Corvo Law, whereby in an emergency it could divide itself into two parts, which it did when the Germans invaded: one with its HQ in Germany and the other American. Both these parts got large military contracts during the war, playing a role on both sides (Aaronovitch 1961, pp. 110-11). Unilever's financial advisers are the US investment bank Lazard Freres, which handles the private financial affairs of many of the world's wealthy families, including the Agnellis of Fiat. (See Koenig, 1990, Reich. 1983, Business Week June 18 1984).

Unilever's chief adviser on international affairs was David Mitrany, whose book, A Working Peace Svstem, published in 1943, secured him this post. (He also worked for Chatham House). it was Mitrany who coined the term 'functionalism' to refer to the strategy of supra-national integration through a series of sectoral processes of internationalisation, designed to set in motion an autonomous logic, making inevitable further integration and ultimately making national states obsolete (Groom and Taylor p. 125 ff.). In the post-war period there were three basic models for European union: alongside the 'functionalists' (in this sense), were the 'inter-governmentalists' (e.g. Spaak) and the 'federalists' (e.g. Monnet himself). In the 1960s the functionalists used the slogan 'Atlantic Partnership' as the framework for the integration or synchronisation of US and European interests.

The immediate chain of events leading to the setting up of the first conference was as follows. Prince Bernhard set off for the USA in 1952 to visit his old friend Walter Bedell Smith, director of the newly-formed CIA. Smith put the organisation of the American end into the hands of Charles D. Jackson (special assistant for psychological warfare to the US President), who appointed John S. Coleman (president of the Burroughs Corporation. and a member of the Committee for a National Trade Policy), who in turn briefly became US chair of Bilderberg.

Charles Jackson was president of the Committee for a Free Europe (forerunner of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) whose extensive operations financing and organising anti-Communist social democratic political intellectuals has only recently been fully documented (see Coleman 1989); and ran the CIA-financed Radio Free Europe in Germany. Earlier he had been publisher of Fortune magazine and managing director of Time/Life, and during the war was deputy head of psychological warfare for Eisenhower. At the time of Bernhard's visit he was working with a committee of businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic which approved the European Payments Union.

It was thus a European initiative, and its aim was, in official bland language, to 'strengthen links' between Western Europe and the USA. A selected list of people to be invited to the first conference was drawn up by Retinger, with Prince Bernhard and Rijkens, from the European countries of NATO plus Sweden. The resulting group consisted of the Belgian and Italian prime ministers, Paul van Zeeland and Alcide de Gasperi (CDU), from France both the right wing prime minister Antoine Pinay and the Socialist leader Guy Mollet; diplomats like Pietro Quaroni of Italy and Panavotis Pipinelis of Greece; top German corporate lawyer Rudolf Miller and the industrialist Otto Wolff von Amerongen and the Danish foreign minister Ole Bjorn Kraft (publisher of Denmark?s top daily newspaper); and from England came Denis Healey and Hugh Gaitskell from the Labour Party, Robert Boothby from the Conservative Party, Sir Oliver Franks from the British state, and Sir Colin Gubbins, who had headed the Special Operations Executive (SOL) during the war.

On the American side, the members of the first Bilderberg assembly included:

· George Ball, who was head of Lehman Brothers, a former high State Department official, where he was architect of the policy of Atlantic Partnership, and later member of the Trilateral Commission. Ball was closely associated with Jean Monnet, owing to his work as legal counsel for the ECSC and the French delegation to the Schuman Plan negotiations.

· David Rockefeller was the key American member of Bilderberg. Space only permits the briefest sketch of his direct economic and political involvements: head of the Chase Manhattan Bank, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, member of the Business Council, the US council of the International Chamber of Commerce, and, of course, the founder of the Trilateral Commission.

· Dean Rusk: US Secretary of State 1961-69, earlier President of the Rockefeller Foundation 1952-60, having succeeded John Foster Dulles, himself an earlier Secretary of State and - this is not at all a coincidence - a close personal friend of Jean Monnet whom he had first met at Versailles in 1918 as well as of Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State and the true author of the Marshall Plan.

The final list was 67. Since then, the group enlarged somewhat, but the steering group remained the same size. (4)

After Retinger's death in 1960, the role of secretary was taken over by E. H. van der Beugel, who had headed the Dutch bureau for the Marshall Plan and later became president of KLM airlines and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. After the resignation of Prince Bernhard, the role of chair was taken by British ex-prime minister Lord Home.

The status of the group and its meetings is ostensibly 'private'. Gill names it simply 'a private international relations council', but nothing could be more misleading than this name private, unless in its sense of ?secret? When political leaders gather together with a view to arriving at consensus, in conjunction with leaders of industry and finance and press magnates and leading journalists, then this is not the same kind of thing as an assembly of ordinary private citizens. The vocabulary of pluralist political science ('lobbies', 'non-governmental organisations' etc.) systematically distorts the actual power relations at work in these different kinds of associations. It is even questionable whether Bilderberg meetings are really 'private' in the legal sense of non-governmental. Robert Eringer, for example, having received an official reply that 'government officials attend in a personal and not an official capacity', found that in fact officials had attended Bilderberg conferences at government expense and in their official capacity. The British Foreign Office responded to his queries by saying 'we can find no trace of the Bilderberg Group in any of our reference works on international organisations', while he later learnt that the Foreign Office had paid for British members to attend Bilderberg conferences.

Van der Pijl's assessment of the role of Bilderberg seems about as accurate as the available information would allow:

'Rather than constituting an all-powerful secret Atlantic directorate, Bilderberg served, at best, as the environment for developing ideas in that direction, and secrecy was necessary for allowing the articulation of differences rather than for keeping clear-cut projects from public knowledge. In this sense Bilderberg functioned as the testing ground for new initiatives for Atlantic unity.' (Van der Pijl p. 183)

But on occasions the group is known to have exerted real power. An (unnamed) German participant at the 1974 conference held six months after the Arab Israeli War at Edmond de Rothschild's hotel at Megeve in France, commented:

'Half a dozen knowledgeable people had managed, in effect, to set the world's monetary system wolfing again [after OPEC's quadrupling of oil prices], and it was important to try to knit together our networks of personal contacts. We had to resist institutionalism, bureaucratic red-tape, and the creation of new procedures and committees. Official bodies should be put in the position of ratifying what had been jointly prepared in advance.' (Sklar, p. 171)

The Treaty of Rome signed on March 25 1957 created the 'common market' (the European Economic Community) and its roots were laid down in the ECSC (the European Coal and Steel Community) established on April 18 1951, based on the Schuman Plan of May 9 1950 (Vaughan 1976, Milward 1984). It is not implausible to suggest that the route from the one to the other in fact passed through the first five Bilderberg conferences, May 1954 at Oosterbeek (Netherlands), March 1955 at Barbizon (France), September the same year at Garmisch (Germany), May 1956 at Fredensborg (Denmark) and finally in February 1957 at St. Simon's Island (Georgia, USA); and that these secret meetings played a decisive role in overcoming the opposing, centrifugal tendencies symbolised by the collapse of the European Defence Community in 1954, the Hungarian revolution and its suppression and the fiasco of the Anglo-French adventure at Suez in 1956 - the last gasp of independent European imperialism.

Even more important the 'protectionism' implicit in the European unification project was successfully subordinated to the ?liberalising? hegemony of the Americans, through the close involvement of the key US players at every stage. The evidence for this is entirely circumstantial, and this hypothesis must remain speculative, but I believe there is a prima facie case to launch an investigation. It should be clear from the details recounted earlier that not all the possible roads led to the Rome Treaty, and that there is far more to the politics of European 'integration' than the legislative enactments already known about.

Monet himself, who mentions-neither Retinger nor Bilderberg in his memoirs (Monnet 1978), cannot have been unaware of the activities of these crucial constituents of his programme. However much he may be portrayed in the hagiographies as a far-sighted idealist, Monnet was, first and foremost, an international financier, with an extensive network of connections on both sides of the Atlantic, occupying a particular place in the configuration of capitalist interests forming what Van der Pijl calls the Atlantic circuit of money capital (Van der Pijl 1984). He was, for example, a close friend of all the key figures in the US power structure; but, more importantly, his network centred around the New York investment banks Lazard Freres (run by Andre Meyer who was also on the board of Rockefeller's Chase International Bank), and Goldmann Sachs, which, after the war gravitated into the Rockefeller orbit. Monnet's right-hand man, Pierre Uri, was European director of Lehman Brothers; and Robert Marjolin, one of Monnet's assistants in the first modernisation plan, subsequently joined the board of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Uri and Marjolin were also active in Bilderberg.

When Monnet resigned from his position of 'High Authority' in the ECSC in 1955 to run his Action Committee for a United States of Europe (ACUSE), his secretary at ECSC, Max Kohnstamm who had earlier been private secretary to Queen Wilhelmina, (i.e. Prince Bernhard's mother-in-law), and then Dutch representative in the Schuman Plan negotiations, became the vice-president of ACUSE, which had extensive overlaps with Bilderberg. Kohnstamm, for example, later became a member of the Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission, and Georges Berthoin, who was Monnet's private secretary at the ECSC 1951-55, took over Kohnstamm's place on the Trilateral Commission in 197S. Francois Duchene and Paul Delouvner, who both worked for ECSC in the fifties (and joined the Trilateral Commission in the 1970s), Guy Mollet and Antoine Pinay were in the Bilderberg network (5)

It would be simply too large and complex a matter to trace the twists and turns in the politics of European unification since the period from the fifties to the present. Too much water has flowed under the bridge, and it is doubtful that it is any longer even the same bridge, so many times has Europe' or the European idea' had to be periodically 'relaunched'. Instead of even attempting this in broad outline, I will draw attention very briefly to the role played by secretive and unaccountable organisations of members of the European economic and political elites.

One little-reported group, for example, which seems to wield immense influence is the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT). To my knowledge there have only been two or three reports of this group in the British press, and yet in articulating the demands and interests of the largest and most powerful European multinational corporations, it surely calls for close study. I suspect this is the same group as that mentioned in passing in Charles Grant's biography of Jacques Delors. Delors' arrival as European Commissioner in 198S, he says, could not have occurred at a more propitious moment: he had spent the autumn of 1984 searching for a 'Big Idea' to relaunch the EEC.

'That autumn, in Brussels, Delors had met a group of officials and industrialists brought together by Max Kohnstamm, who had been Monnet's chief assistant. After Monnet's death in 1979, Kohnstamm had become one of the guardians of the sacred name of federalism. The Kohnstamm group advised Delors to make the internal market his priority and to lay down a timetable of eight years (the life of two Commissions) for its achievement...... At the same time Wisse Dekker, the chairman of Philips, made several speeches calling for the EEC to remove its internal barriers by 1990.' (Grant 1994, p. 66)

If this is in fact referring to the same group as that known as the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), then we have an example of a continuity between the fifties and today. This ERT comprises the chairs/CEOs of the leading European multinational corporations and it is by no means a mere assembly of dignitaries. This is an extremely powerful body. According to research conducted by the ASEED collective, its reports feed directly into the European Commission decision making process. One of its first reports, for example, entitled 'Missing Links', urged the immediate construction of a series of large-scale transport projects, including the Channel Tunnel. As well as Dekker of Philips, other leading figures in the ERT are Agnelli of Flat, Gyllenhammer of Volvo, and Denys Henderson of ICI.

A persistent problem with theories of power over the last 20 years has been their lack of engagement with empirical evidence, compounded by the demonstrable empirical ignorance of theorists. It is as if every academic feels able to develop theories about power, and engage in debates it, without any requirement for relevant information, or at any rate with a tacit assumption that everyone at has such information.

One possible place to start an attempt to 'theorise' the role of Bilderberg and other international power-elite forums, might be to re-enter an old debate at the beginning of the present century: this is the debate between Lenin and Kautsky over imperialism.

Lenin?s theory of imperialism sought to explain the first world war by reference to what he called inter-imperialist rivalries. While this theory has had an enormous influence during this century (it under-pins, for example, much contemporary discussion of the relations between 'the West' and the 'Developing World, in which it i assumed that power operates between geographically-defined regions, and that nation-states act at the behest of nationally-based capitalist classes), it is nevertheless demonstrably false in a number of crucial particulars. For example, one of the difficulties in Lenin's theory is reconciling it with the increasing interpenetration of national economies by trans-national capitalist blocs. To put this issue simply: wars take place between states, but inter-capitalist rivalries do not necessarily coincide with the territories between states, especially where international or trans-national corporations have developed. The material presented here, I would suggest, is of just this kind: it shows an inter-penetration of capitalist interests between the USA and Western Europe, and indicates a field of 'political struggle' within and between states, entirely outside that of the public sphere.

What is far less well-known today, however, is Kautsky's alternative conception which explicitly addressed this issue, and can be summed up by his notion of ultra-imperialism (Fennema, 1982). The simple hypothesis is that rival capitalist interests may, at least for a time, be able to coalesce into a relatively unified hegemonic bloc. Now this idea of a tendency towards stabilisation on a global scale may sound unrealistic today, but arguably this was what was achieved for fifty years, at least in the American-dominated half of the world, after 1945. It could even be said that the demise of the other half permits its universalization. Where are the 'inter-imperialist rivalries in the world today'?

When first asked for a title for this paper, I briefly entertained the idea of using the above sub-heading, (paraphrasing a recent film-title), and I do believe it is important to ask why certain topics rather than others are deemed worthy of investigation. The material presented here is certainly 'dated' and therefore unfashionable, but similar information about the present could be investigated. It is surprising and somewhat depressing that such investigations no longer seem to be being carried out in universities today. (6) Academics often represent themselves somewhat flatteringly as 'critical' intellectuals, independent from or even determinedly opposed to the established systems of power in society, willing to face personal or professional risks in the pursuit of truth. Maybe they are more like lambs.

(1) The term 'liberal' signifies policies opposed to restrictions on international trade. The distinction between 'free trade' and 'protectionism' in international trade does not correspond exactly with the theoretical opposition of 'competition' and 'monopoly'. None of these concepts have straightforward empirical reference. The 1992 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) for example, is in fact profoundly 'protectionist' in relation to such matters as intellectual property rights (software, patents for seeds, drugs etc.) with elaborate 'rules of origin' designed to keep out foreign competitors etc. see Dawkins 1993.

(2) If the Marshall Plan had military objectives (containment of Soviet influence) as much as economic ones (creation of markers for US industry), then NATO has a civilian, political and ideological role as much as a military one. NATO has been relatively neglected by students of 'supranational' organisations, and it is often Presumed to be just a treaty rather than a quasigovernmental organisation in its own right. Its highest political body, th North Atlantic Council, covers foreign policy issues as well as strictly military questions, and the North Atlantic Assembly works to influence the parliamentary members of individual countries. It falls within the brief of NATO to conduct propaganda and defend states the 'infiltration of ideas'. Few citizens of NATO countries are aware of the whole apparatus to which membership commits them - e.g. Plans 10 G and 100-1 under which in 'emergency situations' special US units would be activated to suppress any movement 'threatening to US strategic interests'.

(3) It is extremely difficult to define the exact status of Retinger. One Polish war-time exile leader has been quoted as saying that Retinger was 'suspected of being in close touch not so much with British politics as with certain of its discrete institutions'. Presumably SIS. See Korbonski p. 20.

(4) Later American participants included Robert MacNamara, US Secretary of Defence under Kennedy and Johnson (earlier chair of the Ford Motor Company, and later President of the World Bank); and McGeorge Bundy, who worked on the Marshall Plan, was US National Security Adviser and later special foreign policy adviser to Kennedy and Johnson 1960-65, and became President of the Ford Foundation 1966-79. His brother, William Bundy, was with the CIA 1951-61 and later managed the CFR journal Foreign Affairs from 1979, after working at the Pentagon 1964-69. He married Dean Acheson's daughter. Finally, all three Directors of the CIA in this period were also members of Bilderberg: Allen Dulles (John Foster Dulles's brother), John McCone and Richard Helms. Needless to say, all these figures were also members of the CFR. For more details of participants see the essay by Thompson in Sklar ed. 1980, and Eringer 1980.

(5) Pinay, who was French Prime Minister in 1951, figures rather allusively in Brian Crozier's memoirs (Crozier, 1993 ch. XV) as the eminence grise of the controversial 'Pinay Cercle', an anti-communist intelligence outfit in the 1970s and 80s (Ramsay & Dorril 1986, p. 39 and Teacher 1989).

(6) It is ironic that while the initial research which discovered the existence of the Bilderberg network and explored its ramifications within the power structure of Atlanti capitalism came entirely from Marxist and left-inclined scholars in the USA, the whole subject has now been virtually taken over by the US far right as the centre piece of its own bizarre world-view. These writers of the far right (Anthony Sutton, Lyndon La Rouche, Spool and the Liberty Lobby etc.) have added virtually nothing to our understanding or knowledge of the phenomenon, and accordingly, are not referenced in the bibliography below. They have, however, contaminated the topic with their confusion. Since around the mid-1980s, the American Left has dropped the whole issue like a hot potato. For a singular exception sec Brandt 1993, which is essentially a response to Bcrlet, 1992.

Anderson, Perry 'Under the Sign of the Interim', London Review of Books, 4 January 1996

Ayala, Cesar J. 'Theories of Big Business in American Society' Critical Sociology, Vol.16 No. 2-3, Summer-Fall 1989

Brandt, Daniel 'Multiculturalism and the Ruling Elite', NameBase Newsline, October- December, 1993

Carew, Anthony Labour under the Marshall Plan Manchester University Press, 1987

Chomsky, Noam Powers and Prospects, South End Press, 1996 Coleman, Peter A Liberal Conspiracy, Macmillan 1989

Cumings, Bruce 'Chinatown: Foreign Policy and Elite Realignment' in Ferguson, Thomas & Rogers, Joel (ads.) The Hidden Election, Random House, 1981

Hawkins. Kristin NAFTA: The New Rules of Corporate Conquest Open Magazine, 1993

Fennema, Meindert International Networks of Banks and Industry Maninus Nijhoff, 1982

Fennema, Meindert & van der Pijl, Kees 'International Bank Capital and the New Liberalism' in Mizruchi, Mark & Schwartz, Michael (eds.) Inter-corporate Relations, Cambridge University, 1987

Freitag, Peter J. 'The Cabinet and Big Business: A Study of Interlocks', Social Problems Vol. 23, 1975

Gill, Stephen American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge University Press, 1990

Groom. A. J. R. & Taylor, Paul beds.) Frameworks for International Co-operation, Pinter, 1990

Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri The CIA and American Democracy Yale University Press, 1989

Koenig, Peter 'A prince among bankers who wears Lazard's triple crown' Independent on Sunday, 11 February 1990

Pisani, Sally The CIA and the Marshall Plan University of, Edinburgh Press, 1992

Pomian, John (ed.) Joseph Retinger: Memoirs of an Eminence Grise Sussex University Press, 1972

Ramsay, Robin & Dorril, Stephen 'The Pinay Circle' Lobster 17, 8 November 1988

Ramsay, Robin & Dorril Stephen 'In a Common Cause: the AntiCommunist Crusade in Britain 1945-60' Lobster 19, May 1990

Shoup, Laurence H. & Minter, William Imperial Brain Trust Monthly Review Press, I977

Teacher, David The Pinay Circle and Destabilisation in Europe' Lobster 18, October 1989

Tether, C. Gordon The Banned Articles of C Gordon Tether Hetheringstoke, 1976

Preceeding article is copyright The Lobster, a most readable intelligence oriented journal from Humberside in North East England

Contact: Robin Ramsay (Dept. W)
214 Westbourne Avenue
Hull HU5 3JB
United Kingdom

The Tax Harmonisation was explicitly stated in the Treaty of Rome, a constitution for a European regional govt nothing less , read all about it here. See section 95 on the non-discrimination clause regarding taxation for the EU member states.

The Australian Corporate community has fallen hook, line and sinker for the promises of bigger markets if they force the Federal government to remove the trade barriers and implement the standard economic rationalist (neo-liberal) package (structural adjustment, same thing happens with IMF bailout conditions) as was in the European Union in order to enjoy the benefits of "free trade". The only problem is that Australia's policy-making elite is complying with this. The result is a ballooning trade deficit and foreign debt. Must have been the excessive alcohol they consumed at the World Economic Forum (Davos) and policy wonks at the OECD, that's the source of the intractable and inexorable Globalism.

[German Unification and the European Community:t GST is an integrationist tax.

See below for more detail on the Business Council of Australia and the GST, just use the control + F key and type Business Council of Australia . www.bca.com.au ,tap tax reform link.

[REFORMING BUSINESS TAXES] by Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Joanna M. van Rooij you VAT to be competitive, everyone else in the blocs has one too....as well for economic intergration with a tax regime that does not discriminate...

The European tradition of Statism and Corporatism is contrary to the traditions of common law and libertarianism of the Anglo-Saxon culture...the fascism of the European Union is simmering just underneath the polished caparace of expensive business suits.

[ACQUIS COMMUNITAIRE:what it means] irreversible transfer of sovereignty to the supranational government, in this case it is referred as the Federal Govt's supramacy over the States' parliament's laws.

[Tax enforcement - cementing the EU state by Christopher Arkell]

[Tax, Sovereignty and Lobbyists.] A litany of name-calling and old boogy men from KPMG's attack on legitimate national sovereignty.

The previous lecture suggested that there are three broad global movement which are affecting political authority at the national level: the growth of International Organizations (IOs), Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and Trans-National Corporations (TNCs).

[MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING ON SALES TAX HARMONIZATION ]

Canada high and dry on GST, and the precusors to NAFTA and APEC.

[Govt rejects call for MAI inquiry] Free Trade, free from electoral accountability.

Can't handle (the electorate) the free trade benefits? well that's because the benefits are a lie, and they don't want to tell the people the truth and politicians won't tell ya.

[Britain 2007] According to the CSIS, Britain will cease to exist as an independent political unit by 2007,once the EMU (one europe, one currency, one deutchmark) goals are achieved. Here are a number of propositions and policy guidelines to achive them complete and total political merger. Thanks to Tony Blair, Britain has been merged with Eurasia, unlike the book "1984" it was not Oceania...... .Succeeding where invading armies fail, LEGAL ANSCHLUSS .

bank to control one's economy from the comfort of Frankfurt Central European Bank, thanks so much to Wim Duisemberg for the 10% Unemployment to have the convergence criterium realised.

of Australian treasurers very often, see P Costello rather friendly participation in APEC,

Not Govt Central Planning of the national economy but corporate central planning thanks to business leaders and academics.

[Europe’s Global Role Dependent on Internal Reform Peter D. Sutherland] The following text is an edited transcript of remarks made by Peter D. Sutherland to the 1999 annual meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Washington, D.C. Peter D. Sutherland, former Director-General of WTO/GATT, is based in London as Co-Chairman of BP Amoco and also Chairman and Managing Director of Goldman Sachs International. Deals with creeping Regionalisms.

[The Commission on Global Governance] The Case for Regionalism Multilateralism as a step to global governance. Regional Governments aid in the creation of a supranational govt, so says the UN's CGG.

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[Sir Oswald Mosley The Greater Britain ] A manifesto by the Corporate statists......the Lord Haw-Haw of the

'Net,Sir Oswald Mosley this is his manifesto on corporate statism or in the vernacular "Fascist" economic and social organisation. Please compare with Bertram Grose's 'Friendly Fascism' book review to understand the Fascist economy of the corporate state. Nowdays, the preach Neo-liberal economism yet they are far and beyond the free maket economy and individualism are no more than a rhetorical clutch....

Walter Funk, but the characters at Brussels have problems in telling the truth behind the barrage of euphemisms, newspeak and doubletalk.

There is scarcely a single pillar of the present "European" Union which does not have its origins in the blueprint for Europe outlined by Hitler's Nazi regime - with which the French and Italian war time governments were pleased to co-operate. which rose up in both 20th century European wars to frustrate the ambitions of Germany and Italy - the two countries with the shortest and most unstable sense of nationhood. By far the most ambitious project of today's Eurofederalists is the establishment of a single currency. Although this is paraded as a European currency it is quite clear that, should it ever become a reality, it will in effect be a German currency controlled by a central bank based in Frankfurt - ironically in the former headquarters building of I. G. Farben, the manufacturer of the Nazis' death gas Zyklon B. (One of the industrial contributors to the Nazi paper on the EEC discussed below was Dr Reithinger of I.G. Farben.) It should be no surprise to the observer of today's "European Community" that its attempts at supranational government differ very little from the last time such an enterprise was undertaken. Then as now the main barrier to a European superstate was the national identities and loyalties of the peoples of Europe. Just as the rise of the nation state produced unparalleled prosperity from inter-nation free trade and new forms of accountability to national parliaments, so it was the individual nations which rose up in both 20th century wars to frustrate the ambitions of Germany and Italy - two nations with the shortest and most unstable sense of nationhood. It is the sense of nationhood which alone produces strong social bonds and a willingness to make sacrifices for the common good. All European attempts to ignore these common identities and bonds have failed comprehensively and catastrophically. Hitler's attempt was perhaps the most horrific since all the power of modern warfare and the civil means of propaganda and suppression were used to bring about the Procrustean political and economic union of European nations. Hitler's plans were collectivist, statist, meticulous and all embracing. We are grateful to Christopher Story, the expert on security and foreign affairs, for printing his translation of the 1942 report of the Nazi "Europaische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft" (European Economic Community) prepared by the Reich's Economics Minister and President of the Central Bank, Herr Funk and various industrialists, academics and civil servants. The Reichsmark was to be the leading currency in a German economic area and, after the Dollar the world's second pivotal currency. In July 1940 plans had been drawn up for a "Europabank" through which all European countries controlled by the Nazis would settle payments and which would be the centre of the "closed economic settlement" in Europe. The Nazis not only planned a common agricultural policy (directed from Berlin rather than from Brussels but with the same principles as today) but also a common monetary policy, a common transport policy ("trans European networks") a common trade policy (ie a Single Market) and - more overt and honestly expressed than today - the direction of labour and state economic control. Today capital is increasingly directed by the state (in Brussels and national capitals) through government ownership, subsidy and tax incentives. Where capital is forced to go labour is forced to follow. The British worker (as yet only manual labour rather than white collar) is increasingly joining the Italians, Yugoslavs and Turks as the travelling "guest workers" of Europe. In other words we do have the modern equivalent of the Nazi "direction of labour". State control, despite privatisation, has never been more overt, be it through GATT obstruction, the direct and indirect imposition of the "Social Chapter" or massive state subsidies of basic (and even advanced) industries, condoned by a Council of Ministers which frequently overrides market solutions. Like the modern Europe, the Nazis planned industrial and agricultural capacity (Britain was to have an exclusively agricultural output under a Gauleiter), organised central direction of the European economy (since Maastricht the British Chancellor of the Exchequer has to clear his economic policies with "Europe") the creation of a larger trading area outside the central core (at Heathrow airport there is an entrance marked "European Economic Area"), the establishment of regional committees to report to Berlin, increased European food production regardless of cost in the name of "self sufficiency", common social conditions for all employees, a European motorway network and harmonisation of European Exchange Rates. In summary a Professor Hunke, President of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce, concluded that the important economic principal was the destruction of the "English system" of free trade based on the nation states. Those of us who have lived and worked in Germany know that even the post war German mind is uncomfortable with free, responsible and atomistic change. They prefer the certainty of the domination of one element by another, properly documented, organised and policed. Freedom of capital, for such a mind set, must mean domination over labour. Neither the German right nor left are convinced of the democratic force of competition and spontaneous methods of social distribution. Therefore the Nazis - and their descendants in the European civil service and continental Governments - choose the domination of labour (and the State which organises labour) over capital. The inevitable next step is to control external trade so that the internal plan cannot be disturbed. This is of course the very process which enslaved Soviet, Eastern Block and Third Reich workers and which destroyed wealth and jobs both in and outside British nationalised industries. The Nazi Professor Funke expressed this belief in these words which effectively summarise the collectivist notions and economic structures of todays "European" Community. "...the individual will be replaced by the people, the world market will be replaced by living space (Lebensraum) And capital will be replaced by the organisation of labour." The equivalents of these concepts in today's European Union are "solidarity", "the Single Market" and the "Social Chapter". The Nazis, like the European Union, despised Adam Smith and his concepts of free trade, the international division of labour and the "wealth of nations". They preferred organised trade outside the state and organised labour and controlled capital within (as Hunke put it) "an enclosed settlement in Europe". The important concept of "Lebensraum" which was seen initially as a Nazi idea of space for Germans, was extended to mean Lebensraum for the people of Nazi Europe and it was to embrace a "supplementary colonial economic area" - a concept which lives on today in the European Union's idea of a "European Space". For the Nazis this meant "access" to essential goods and raw materials just as the Energy Committee of the European Parliament and a former Director General of the European Commission have described Britain's North Sea Oil as "European". The 1930's Europe, like the 1990s version, spoke of "human resources" or "biological resources" just as we might talk of commodities - things to be enhanced and exchanged. The Nazi EEC report has a heading "Exchange of workers on the basis of agreements between Member States". The enhancement of workers includes, under both regimes, state organised and promoted culture. The idea of a Ministry of Culture, common on the continent and promoted in the European Community, is rightly seen as an Orwellian horror by most Britons - but not to those enhancing the commodity of labour through whose increasing Europeanisation more profitable "exchange" will be possible. (see the consequences in the Conclusion below) One of the most pernicious "European" policies, swallowed hook, line and sinker by the abysmal British Parliament of 1992-3, is the establishment of "Committees of the Regions" - the direct descendant of the Nazis' "European Regional Policy" - which is designed to give regional political and economic organisations direct access to funds raised at the centre (Berlin then, Brussels today) bypassing and therefore rendering irrelevant the National Governments and their own "regional policies". Either national governments raise even more funds to compete with their own taxpayers money channelled through the European central power or they save money by allowing the latter full rein to take over economic and political power in what were once nation states. This is particularly dangerous in the United Kingdom where the regions of Scotland and Wales are easily tempted to imagine that by "going direct to Europe" they are re-asserting their own national identity against Westminster. It has also been made clear by Brussels that in the new Europe Ireland is one "region" - thus attacking the principal of self determination for the people of Ulster. But surely Europe is not really threatening the United Kingdom? Surely those Germans who today press for a United Europe cannot be compared to Hitler? Even though the motivations may be different, the effect is already the same - ie the destruction of national constitutions. While railroading Europe into ever greater integration along German lines, Helmut Kohl initially refused to confirm the post war Polish border with Germany and has pursued a hate filled campaign on behalf of the Nazis war time allies Croatia, despite their hideous crimes against the Bosnians. Kohl sees Maastricht as: ".. a new and decisive stage towards the creation of the United States of Europe." Kohl has said he would not be satisfied with just a common market for independent sovereign states - how reminiscent of Professor Hunke's Nazi version: "There is no sense in putting together all European countries by means of a Customs Union in order to reconstruct for practical purposes a reduced form of the English world economy." This is of course precisely the line taken today by France and Germany and the European Community. Just as Kohl and Mitterand combined to subsidise and protect state industries in coal, steel, aircraft, airlines and electronics to "build up" Europe to compete so did Hunke take the line: "The German Empire has in recent years redirected its economic focus back towards the state sector by means of a considerable degree of self sufficiency because this was the political pre-requisite for the economic independence of Europe." Where the Nazis drew their inspiration from ancient teutonic myths, the bucolic romanticism of German poets and the collective inevitability of "fate" to construct their hideous empire, today we see Helmut Kohl surrendering to the mythology of "fate". "There is no alternative to a policy which aims at combination unless we wish to challenge fate." Few words are more resonant of the historical German collapse into anti-rationalism, anti-individualism and the herd instinct which has twice destroyed Europe than "das deutsche Schicksal" (German fate or destiny). To say that the European Community was based on the Nazi version of Europe or that there are parallels would be an understatement. The entire "European" enterprise since the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 (and given an enormous boost by the Maastricht Treaty on European Union) is an exact replica of the Nazis' ideas for Europe. If there is a major difference it is that unlike Monsieur Delors, Hitler was at least elected by universal franchise, and by 1942 Hitler spoke for far more (albeit conquered) countries than does the EU today. But the most significant common thread running through both the Nazi and modern versions of the European State is the contempt for "the English system" - ie a belief in democratic government based on the individual, the nation state and free international trade. The defeat of Hitler and Mussolini was far more significant for its social and economic implications than for its military triumph. The ideas of collectivism, statism, trade protectionism and corporatism are not so physically apparent as the blitz and marching armies, which is why they have so successfully re-established themselves in Europe, under the guise of the "European" Union. This is an extract from Rodney Atkinson and Norris McWhirter's book Treason at Maastricht. Copies of which can be had from Compuprint, 1 Sands Rd, Swalwell, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE16 3DJ or ordered electronically A more detailed look at the Nazi Europaische Wirtsschftgemeinschaft can be had from International Currency Review, Occasional Paper 4, World reports Ltd, 108 Horseferry Road, Westminster, London SW1

THIS ARTICLE FROM KEELE GROUP http://www.keele.ac.uk/socs/ks40/eunazi.html PLEASE NOTE: JAPAN'S RULING ELITES CREATE SIMILAR THEMES FOR THEIR OWN TRADE BLOC, WHERE THE MILITARY FAILED,

Walter Funk - As a close friend of President Hindenberg, Walter Funk was accustomed to high-level political and administrative interactions. When Hitler came to power, Funk was appointed to the position of Press Chief of Hitler's government. Shortly after his appointment, Goebbels formed the Ministry of Propaganda and Funk's office was subordinated to Goebbels. Later he was appointed to replace Hjalmar Schacht as Minister of Economics. That office, too, came under the control of Goebbels. Some months later, he was appointed by Hitler as President of the Reichsbank. The bank was assigned the role of economic planning for the war effort.

Funk also attended the high-level meeting following the events of Kristallnacht. It was at this meeting that the decision was made to hold the Jews responsible for the destruction visited upon them by roving Nazi gangs. Under Heydrich's and Goebbels leadership, it was also decided at that Jews would be excluded from the German economy -- a distinct first step in the direction of the Holocaust.

One tense moment in the trial occurred when documentary evidence was presented by the prosecutor's staff that the Reichsbank received and held a large deposit from the SS. The deposit consisted of bags of jewelry and other valuables, including dental gold, taken from Jewish victims in eastern Europe. Funk consistently denied knowledge of the contents of those bags and the prosecutors could never show conclusively that he did have such knowledge. Now could they demonstrate conclusively that he was instrumental in planning military operations, or that he was directly involved in "crimes against humanity."

Walter Funk was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released from Spandau Prison in 1957 and died in 1960.

The measures for racial extermination dovetail into the policy of Eugenics the Americans and British academics developed two decades prior to WWII. See more in The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations funding of the Eugenics movement in the Angloxason nations....more coming soon.

The aborted 'denazification' of Germany was the result of William H Draper who asserted to the Allied Control Council for Germany that dismantling of the cartel industrial structure would lead to economic dislocation and would make Germany prone to Communist subversion, strangely he argued this after a few days in Germany, ditto the when he met Douglas MacArthur at SCAP in Japan so the war criminals were far more successful in staying in

William H Draper before becoming part of the US Army was Vice President of Dillon, Read, a bank along with Morgan heavily invested in Germany and Japan's economic expansion and tranfered military know-how. This also includes Henry Ford, Edsel Ford , John D Rockefeller, Max and Paul Warburg chairing I G Farben and The US Federal Reserve Bank who lent the infamous funds for the Dawes and Young plans which funded the carterlisatioin of Germany's economy. The rest is history .