Phoenix Journal 208 - Four Winds 10

In discussion, Bergsten deplored the fact that most Western leaders—among them President Clinton,
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Jaques Chirac—are still somewhat “queasy” about
turning the citizens of their sovereign nations into the rootless subjects of grand transnational corporations.
But politicians can no longer halt or even delay the inexorable advance of globalism and international
“market dynamics”, and the financiers who understand these new forces now control the course of history,
Bergsten assured his fellow Bilderbergers. The audience, which included a sizable sprinkling of bankers
and currency speculators—among them two top executives of Goldman, Sachs, the giant Wall Street
investment bank—was “enthusiastic”, these sources recalled.
Along, with such declarations of one-world allegiance replacing traditional patriotism, the Bilderberg powwow
occasionally demonstrates that what some of the world’s most respected policymakers declare in
public and what they say in private are two entirely different notions.
FREE TRADER
Dr. Jeffrey Garten, dean of Yale University’s School of Management and a business economist, is as
devoted a free-trader as Bergsten. As under secretary of commerce for international trade under the late
Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, he was one of the architects of the nefarious North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and a promoter of ever-larger U.S. investments in so-called “emerging markets”,
such as Mexico’s loudly—and deceitfully—staged “repayment” of the bailout funds (some $15
billion of which it had received from the Clinton administration after NAFTA wrecked the Mexican economy).
This payback was a heartening sign of Mexico’s financial recovery, mainstream experts assured the public.
But in a briefing paper restricted to the small private audience of the Bilderberg encounter, Garten sounded
a very different tune. To be able to pretend it was paying back the Clinton administration, Mexico has
gone deeper into hock than ever before, the Yale dean admitted. The country’s external debt, which stood
at 35 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1992—an already ruinous level of borrowing—almost
doubled to a crushing 68 percent by the end of last year, Garten revealed.
Moreover, all these bailouts and borrowings had gone the way of all money in present-day Mexico: They
disappeared into the pockets of thieving bankers and grafting politicians. After scooping up well over $30
billion in bailout cash, “the [Mexican] banking system still teeters on the brink of insolvency,” Garten
concluded.
ANOTHER DISASTER
The meeting of the Bilderberg working group on Growth and Trade ended with a poignant new break,
according to a Turkish aide who took copious notes of Garten’s findings and subsequently made them
available to this reporter.
Andre Levy-Lang, chairman of giant Paribas financial conglomerate, announced he had been informed
moments earlier that Vietnam’s banking system had just collapsed.
After weeks of alarming reports that several Vietnamese banks were in trouble, the country’s central bank
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