Bilderberg.org

[marektysis]

Nerves are fraying as Europe's debt crisis escalates
Posted By David Bosco Monday, September 19, 2011 - 11:53 AM Share

The escalating rhetoric of European and international policymakers may as good a gauge of the seriousness of the European debt crisis as bond yields.

World Bank chief Robert Zoellick became the latest senior figure to criticize the indecisiveness of Europe's leadership. In an interview published today, Zoellick discounted the notion that emerging-market reserve funds will be able to save Europe. "There’s no silver bullet [for Europe]," he told the Wall Street Journal. "There’s no panacea. Nobody is going to come in with a big bag of money to buy out the problem." Zoellick argues that simply buying time is no longer a viable option for European policymakers. His comments reinforce pressure from U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and IMF chief Christine Lagarde, both of whom have argued that European leaders need to take more decisive steps.

For their part, European leaders are bristling at the drumbeat of criticism. In response to Geithner's intervention, several European finance ministers pointed out acidly that Europe's economic fundamentals aren't very different from those of the United States. "I found it peculiar that even though the Americans have significantly worse fundamental data than the euro zone . . . they tell us what we should do," complained Austria's finance minister.

Meanwhile, key Greek leaders have had just about enough of being kicked around by European policymakers. In a rambling statement issued over the weekend, Greek finance minister Evangelos Venizelos warned that the Greeks cannot tolerate continued "humiliation."

It is very crucial that Greece protects itself against such a tense background. We should not be the scapegoat or the easy excuse that will be used by European and international institutions in order to hide their own lack of competence to manage the crisis and give a definitive and complete answer to the attacks against euro, the world’s strongest currency.
http://bosco.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/09/19/europe_on_the_defensive

-----------------------
NOW THE CHOICE IS CRUCIAL: MORE EUROPE OR RETOUR TO CHAOS...
Marek

[marektysis]

For an unknown reason, due to probable troubles in next territories, or else reasonnable reason i guess, i just learned that a partial mobilisation is taking place in Israel.

I believe this will become more understandable in following days or weeks, God willing.

Marek Tysis

[marektysis]

http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/BACHMANN-IOWA_6095109/BACHMANN-IOWA_6095109/

[vorkosign]

Texas governor Rick Perry don't suport bilderbergers..
he werbaly atack Ben Bernanka few times..
press and media know that.
why this forum contemplate about Perry in that way???
_________________
I tell anyone about someone who change everyone.

[marektysis]

Perry was attending a Bilderberg meeting a few years ago.
All that is true and can be checked.
Personnally I know him as a friend of Israel and have nothing against him.
But explain me why he was invited?

Marek

[vorkosign]

well,that friend of Izrael hate american imigrants...
he have afair about HPV.
many tinage american girls must admit that potencialy dangerous vaccine...
_________________
I tell anyone about someone who change everyone.

[marektysis]

Dear Vorkosign,
I don't know about vaccines only that they are dangerous, and that a benefactor as our international philantropist Bilderberger Gates is giving his money to save the emerging countries ( read under developped ones) to kill a max of its citizen while pouring a lot of money in his pockets. Otherwise why would he have so much influence over the WHO? i don t know over the position of Rick Perry over all that.
What I know, is that he never expressed regrets over his presence during one tenure of Bilderberg meeting, as did Margaret tatcher and other ones
who divulgated the dark inside side of this annual mob conference.

Grabbing the money and power over the world and beginning again up the limit of viability of the world, they know surely how to proceed.

They are the kings of pickpockets and lying peoples.

get my best regards.

Marek

[marektysis]

Merkel To Meet IMF, ECB, OECD, World Bank Thursday


BERLIN -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the heads of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, European Central Bank and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development will meet Thursday before a November summit of the Group of Twenty major industrialized and emerging economies.

Merkel will give a press briefing on the international monetary system after meeting in Berlin with the IMF's Christine Lagarde, Robert Zoellick of the World Bank, the ECB's Jean-Claude Trichet and Angel Gurria of the OECD, Germany's government said.

Discussions will also include finding ways out of the financial crisis.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and French Finance Minister Francois Baroin will also attend the top-level meeting.

Merkel, Lagarde, Zoellick, Gurria and Baroin will later Thursday be joined by Pascal Lamy, the head of the World Trade Organization, for a second meeting.

-By Bernd Radowitz, Dow Jones Newswires; +49-30-2888-4126; bernd.radowitz@ dowjones.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires
09-30-110935ET

[marektysis]

The Road from Depression
30/09/2011 By George Soros

Financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression with incalculable political consequences. The authorities, particularly in Europe, have lost control of the situation. They need to regain control, and they need to do so now.

Three bold steps are needed. First, the governments of the eurozone must agree in principle on a new treaty creating a common treasury for the eurozone. In the meantime, the major banks must be put under the direction of the European Central Bank in exchange for a temporary guarantee and permanent recapitalization. Third, the ECB would enable countries such as Italy and Spain temporarily to refinance their debt at a very low cost.

These steps would calm the markets and give Europe time to develop a growth strategy without which the debt problem cannot be solved. Indeed, the importance of developing a growth strategy cannot be overstated, because the debt burden – the ratio of debt to annual GDP – rises and falls in part as a function of the rate of economic growth.

Since a eurozone treaty establishing a common treasury will take a long time to conclude, in the interim the member states must appeal to the financial authority that already exists, the ECB, to fill the vacuum. In its current form, the embryo of a common treasury – the European Financial Stabilization Facility – is only a source of funds; how they are spent is left to the member states. Enabling the EFSF to cooperate with the ECB will require a newly created intergovernmental agency, which will have to be authorized by Germany’s Bundestag and perhaps by other eurozone members’ parliaments as well.

The immediate task is to erect the necessary safeguards against contagion from a possible Greek default. Two vulnerable groups – the banks and the government bonds of countries like Italy and Spain – need to be protected.

To accomplish these related tasks, the EFSF would be used primarily to guarantee and recapitalize the banks. Systemically important banks would have to agree with the EFSF to abide by the ECB’s instructions as long as the guarantees are in force. Banks that refuse would not be guaranteed, but enough would agree to provide the ECB with the required critical mass.

The ECB would then instruct the banks to maintain their credit lines and loan portfolios while closely monitoring the risks they run for their own accounts. These arrangements would stop the concentrated deleveraging that is one of the main causes of the crisis. Completing the recapitalization would remove the incentive to deleverage, at which point the blanket guarantee can be withdrawn.

To relieve the pressure on the government bonds of countries like Italy, the ECB would lower its discount rate. It would then encourage the countries concerned to finance themselves entirely by issuing treasury bills – and encourage the banks to buy them. The banks could rediscount the bills with the ECB, but they would not do so as long as they earned more on the bills than on the cash.

These measures would allow Greece to default without causing a global meltdown – which does not mean that Greece would be forced into default. If Greece met its targets, the EFSF could underwrite a “voluntary” restructuring at, say, 50 cents on the euro. The EFSF would have enough money left to guarantee and recapitalize the European banks, and it would be left to the IMF to recapitalize the Greek banks. How Greece fared under these circumstances would be up to the Greeks.

I believe that these steps would bring the acute phase of the euro crisis to an end by staunching its two main sources (weak banks and vulnerable sovereigns) and reassuring the markets that a longer-term solution is in sight. The longer-term solution itself would be more complicated because the regime imposed by the ECB would leave no room for fiscal stimulus and the debt problem cannot be resolved without growth. How to create viable fiscal rules for the euro would be left to the treaty negotiations.

Many other proposals are under discussion, because officials now realize that “kicking the can down the road” has brought them to the end of the highway. Most of these proposals seek to leverage the EFSF by turning it into a bank, an insurance company, or a special-purpose vehicle that takes the riskier tranche of a public-private partnership. While practically any proposal is likely to bring temporary relief, the financial markets are just as likely to see through them and find them wanting, especially if they violate Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty (the no-bailout clause), which my proposal scrupulously respects. That said, some form of leverage could be used in recapitalizing the banks.

The course of action outlined here does not require leveraging or increasing the size of the EFSF. But it is more radical, because it puts the banks under European control. That is liable to arouse the opposition of both the banks and national authorities – opposition that only public pressure can overcome.

Copyright Project Syndicate, the world’s pre-eminent source of original opinion commentaries. (Follow PS on Facebook and Twitter)
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http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/09/the-road-from-depression/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+social-europe%2FwmyH+%28Social+Europe+Journal%29

[marektysis]

We are getting so close to a financial collapse in Europe that you can almost hear the debt bubbles popping. All across the western world, governments and major banks are rapidly becoming insolvent. So far, the powers that be are keeping all of the balls in the air by throwing around lots of bailout money. But now the political will for more bailouts is drying up and the number of troubled entities seems to grow by the day. Right now the western world is facing a debt crisis that is absolutely unprecedented in world history. Europe has had a tremendously difficult time just trying to keep Greece afloat, and several much larger European countries are now on the verge of a major financial crisis. In addition, there are a growing number of very large financial institutions all over the western world that are also rapidly approaching a day of reckoning. The global financial system is a sea or red ink, and when we get to the point where there are hundreds of ships going under how is it going to be possible to bail all of them out? The quotes that you are about to read show that quite a few top financial and political insiders know that things cannot hold together much longer and that a horrific economic crisis is coming. We built the global financial system on a foundation of debt, leverage and risk and now this house of cards that we have created is about to come tumbling down.

A lot of people in politics and in the financial world know what is about to happen. Once in a while they will even be quite candid about it with the media.

As I have written about previously, Europe is on the verge of a financial collapse. If things go really badly, things could totally fall apart in a few weeks. But more likely it will be a few more months until the juggling act ends.

Right now, the banking system in Europe is coming apart at the seams. Because the global financial system is so interconnected today, when major European banks start to fail it is going to have a cascading effect across the United States and Asia as well.

The financial crisis of 2008 plunged us into the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

The next financial crisis could potentially hit the world even harder.

The following are 12 shocking quotes from insiders that are warning about the horrific economic crisis that is almost here....

#1 George Soros: "Financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression with incalculable political consequences. The authorities, particularly in Europe, have lost control of the situation."

#2 PIMCO CEO Mohammed El-Erian: "These are all signs of an institutional run on French banks. If it persists, the banks would have no choice but to delever their balance sheets in a very drastic and disorderly fashion. Retail depositors would get edgy and be tempted to follow trading and institutional clients through the exit doors. Europe would thus be thrown into a full-blown banking crisis that aggravates the sovereign debt trap, renders certain another economic recession, and significantly worsens the outlook for the global economy."

#3 Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, global head of securities services at UniCredit SpA (Italy's largest bank): "The only remaining question is how many days the hopeless rearguard action of European governments and the European Central Bank can keep up Greece’s spirits."

#4 Stefan Homburg, the head of Germany's Institute for Public Finance: "The euro is nearing its ugly end. A collapse of monetary union now appears unavoidable."

#5 EU Parliament Member Nigel Farage: "I think the worst in the financial system is yet to come, a possible cataclysm and if that happens the gold price could go (higher) to a number that we simply cannot, at this moment, even imagine."

#6 Carl Weinberg, the chief economist at High Frequency Economics: "At this point, our base case is that Greece will default within weeks."

#7 Goldman Sachs strategist Alan Brazil: "Solving a debt problem with more debt has not solved the underlying problem. In the US, Treasury debt growth financed the US consumer but has not had enough of an impact on job growth. Can the US continue to depreciate the world’s base currency?"

#8 International Labour Organization director general Juan Somavia recently stated that total unemployment could "increase by some 20m to a total of 40m in G20 countries" by the end of 2012.

#9 Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackerman: "It is an open secret that numerous European banks would not survive having to revalue sovereign debt held on the banking book at market levels."

#10 Alastair Newton, a strategist for Nomura Securities in London: "We believe that we are just about to enter a critical period for the eurozone and that the threat of some sort of break-up between now and year-end is greater than it has been at any time since the start of the crisis"

#11 Ann Barnhardt, head of Barnhardt Capital Management, Inc.: "It's over. There is no coming back from this. The only thing that can happen is a total and complete collapse of EVERYTHING we now know, and humanity starts from scratch. And if you think that this collapse is going to play out without one hell of a big hot war, you are sadly, sadly mistaken."

#12 Lakshman Achuthan of ECRI: "When I call a recession...that means that process is starting to feed on itself, which means that you can yell and scream and you can write a big check, but it's not going to stop."

*****

In my opinion, the epicenter of the "next wave" of the financial collapse is going to be in Europe. But that does not mean that the United States is going to be okay. The reality is that the United States never recovered from the last recession and there are already a lot of signs that we are getting ready to enter another major recession. A major financial collapse in Europe would just accelerate our plunge into a new economic crisis.

If you want to read something that will really freak you out, you should check out what Dr. Philippa Malmgren is saying. Dr. Philippa Malmgren is the President and founder of Principalis Asset Management. She is also a former member of the Bush economic team. You can find her bio right here.

Malmgren is claiming that Germany is seriously considering bringing back the Deutschmark. In fact, she claims that Germany is very busy printing new currency up. In a list of things that we could see happen over the next few months, she included the following....

The Germans announce they are re-introducing the Deutschmark. They have already ordered the new currency and asked that the printers hurry up.

This is quite a claim for someone to be making. You would think that someone that used to work in the White House would not make such a claim unless it was based on something solid.

If Germany did decide to leave the euro, you would see an implosion of the euro that would be truly historic. But as I have written about previously, it should not surprise anyone that the end of the euro is being talked about because the euro simply does not work. The only way that the euro would have had a chance of working is if all of the governments using the euro would have kept debt levels very low.

Unfortunately, the financial systems of the western world are designed to push governments into high levels of debt. The truth is that the euro was doomed from the very beginning.

Now we are approaching a day of reckoning. We have been living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world, but the bubble is ending. There are several ways that the powers that be could handle this, but all of them will lead to greater financial instability.

In the end, we will see that the debt-fueled prosperity that the western world has been enjoying for decades was just an illusion.

Debt is a very cruel master. It will almost always bring more pain and suffering than you anticipated. It is easy to get into debt, but it can be very difficult to get out of debt. There is no way that the western world can unwind this debt spiral easily.

The only way that another massive economic crisis can be put off for even a little while would be for the powers that be to "kick the can down the road" a little farther by creating even more debt. But in the end, you can never solve a debt problem with more debt.

The next several years are going to be an incredibly clear illustration of why debt is bad. When the dominoes start to fall, we are going to witness a financial avalanche which is going to destroy the finances of millions of people.

You might want to try to get out of the way while you still can.
This article is tagged with: Macro View, Economy, United States

http://seekingalpha.com/article/297081-prophets-of-doom-12-insider-quotes-about-the-nearing-economic-crisis

[kevink]

Ackermann: The EU must be saved though this will further destroy the economy and financial system.

“A lot of people have lost confidence in whether Europe is going to make it. My strong conviction is yes, we will, but it will take much longer than some people think and that will have an impact on the real economy but also an impact on the financial markets”.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-05/imf-renews-call-for-ecb-to-step-up-response-if-crisis-worsens.html

[marektysis]

Dear Kevin;

have a look of the following interview of Robert Shapiro, adviser to the IMF:
We are all togheter tied to this huge and future powerful problem for the
whole human kind: a catastrophe is coming near all of us, in two or three weeks from now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UGDTtqklSo&feature=player_embedded



“Bankruptcy scares many people, but it shouldn't.
All that happens is that the financial claims on the firm get restructured.
When the firm is in very bad trouble, the shareholders get wiped out,
and the bondholders become the new shareholders.
When things are less serious, some of the debt is converted into equity.
In any case, without the burden of monthly debt payments,
the firm can return to profitability”

Joseph Stiglitz, 1999



Marek

[marektysis]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-09/trichet-throws-away-script-as-he-reminds-u-s-euro-built-to-last.html
Trichet Throws Away Script, Reminds U.S. Euro Built to Last

By Simon Kennedy - Oct 10, 2011 3:41 PM GMT+0200


Jean-Claude Trichet stood on a stage at Washington’s Willard Hotel, leafed through his prepared speech, and cast it aside.

The reason for the European Central Bank president’s Sept. 23 ad-libbing: a desire to rebut what he called the “particularly gloomy” economic outlook of the previous panel featuring former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and Pacific Investment Management Co. Chief Executive Officer Mohamed El-Erian.

“The overall picture when you look at the euro area as a whole is very, very different from the perception,” Trichet told the conference organized by the Bretton Woods Committee.

Taking on American economists and investors has become a regular feature of Trichet’s final days atop the ECB. Since mid- June he has delivered three speeches in the U.S. defending his 17-nation economy against critics who say it’s riddled with fault-lines threatening the single currency he helped build in three decades of policy making. His tenure ends Oct. 31.

Trichet says that the euro-area’s strengths are too often “overlooked,” as are its similarities with the U.S., and he suggests the region’s monetary and fiscal policies are misunderstood. His argument resonates because naysayers were taking potshots at the euro even before it began trading in 1999.

U.S. Skepticism

“There is widespread skepticism toward the euro in the U.S.,” said Jacob Kirkegaard, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “As far back as the 1990s there was talk the euro wouldn’t happen and wouldn’t work, but it did.”

The euro and European stocks rose today after German and French leaders pledged to devise a plan to stem the debt turmoil within three weeks. Commodities gained for a fourth day.

Among the euro skeptics was Harvard University Professor Martin Feldstein, who wrote in a 1998 paper that monetary union would prove an “economic liability” because divergent economies couldn’t fit under one monetary roof. Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate who died in 2006, said “it’s highly unlikely that it’s going to be a great success,” and would splinter as soon as the “global economy hits a real bump.”

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan disclosed in the German version of his 2007 memoir that he had doubted the euro would happen. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman warned its economy may be dogged by deflation.
Figuring It Out

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner is also pressuring Europe, saying Oct. 6 its crisis poses a “significant risk to global recovery.” He and Trichet will this week attend a Group of 20 finance chiefs meeting in Paris.

Even as the debt crisis roils markets and threatens to tip the world back into recession, the euro is stronger than the average value during its lifetime, evidence that investors agree with Trichet about its survival. Six of the euro’s 17 members still have AAA ratings at Standard & Poor’s, which the U.S. lost on Aug 5.

“The Europeans will figure it out,” Citigroup Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit told Bloomberg Television on Sept. 29. “They’ll get through the debt crisis and get to the other side being fully committed to the euro and the euro zone.”

Nevertheless, the 19-month debt turmoil is hardening the opinions of doubters. Feldstein told Bloomberg Television on Sept. 2 that the euro has proved a “failure” and Greece should take a “holiday” from it. Krugman wrote in his Sept. 12 New York Times column that the euro could collapse in “a matter of days.”
Likely to Shrink

Pimco’s El-Erian said at the September Willard Hotel event that the rot has reached Europe’s “core,” at least one euro member will restructure its debts, and that politicians needed to choose between a fiscal union or smaller euro zone. Summers, who in 1997 said there are “serious economic challenges that will have to be overcome” if the euro is to succeed, complained of “grudging, incrementalist” policy decisions in Europe and urged leaders to fix the continent rather than focus on Greece.

“In a three to five year horizon I would expect there is a good probability the euro zone is going to be smaller than the current size of it,” Nouriel Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics LLC, said in an Oct. 3 interview.

This is the chorus that Trichet is seeking to silence, even as he acknowledges some European governments behaved “improperly” by disregarding fiscal discipline and says leaders must accelerate efforts to beat the crisis and take steps to avoid a repeat. He also wants banks to reinforce their balance sheets.
Growth Argument

ECB officials “are not blind and we are not hiding,” Trichet said Sept. 23.

One of his arguments is that critics miss the euro zone’s strengths. In an Aug. 27 speech to fellow central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming he estimated that the region has logged per-capita growth of around 1 percent a year since 1999, just below the U.S.’s 1.1 percent, and that the figures match once adjusted for population growth. During that time, the euro-area has created 14 million jobs, six million more than America, he said.

Four weeks later in Washington, he noted the euro-area will run a budget deficit of about 4.5 percent of gross domestic product this year and its current account is broadly in balance, better than “other advanced economies.” The International Monetary Fund predicts a U.S. budget shortfall of about 10 percent this year and a current account deficit of 3 percent.
Parallel Lines

Geithner acknowledged last week that U.S. policy makers must “recognize that we caused enormous damage to our credibility” in causing the credit crisis. That means they should assume a “position of extraordinary humility” when offering guidance to other countries, he said.

Europeans “welcome the advice, although they like to remind people that the U.S. has lots of challenges,” he said.

To refute the charge that the economy he oversees is too diverse to corral, Trichet tasked his economists with drawing parallels and differences between the 17 euro nations and 14 U.S. metropolitan areas. The study found that prior to the financial crisis which began in 2007, regional growth rates for both areas differed by about 2 percent, while inflation diverged by 1 percent.
‘Wrong Track’

The economists found similarities in pockets of boom and bust, as well as territories facing long-term structural challenges. Spain and Ireland are mirrored by Nevada and Florida as locales where house prices outpaced the averages of neighbors. Onetime manufacturing U.S. powerhouses Michigan and Ohio have suffered below-average growth like Portugal.

It is “often assumed that the U.S. economy would be significantly more homogenous than the economy of the euro area,” Trichet said in Jackson Hole. “Looking more closely at the regional dispersion across U.S. regions and euro area economies does not confirm this.”

Honors may be even, said Allen Sinai, president of New York-based Decision Economics Inc., who attended recent speeches by Trichet. He says the Frenchman is right to defend the central bank’s work, yet wrong to argue the euro area cannot fracture.

“Jean-Claude Trichet has been a man on a mission dedicated to the political unification of Europe, but Europe is on the wrong track,” said Sinai. “As a central banker, he is a hero.”
Roubini, Krugman

Countering criticism from Roubini and Krugman that the ECB is too focused on inflation and was wrong to raise its benchmark interest rate twice this year, Trichet says delivering price stability is the best thing the ECB can do for its economy and notes it has done that for a decade. To ease the financial system, the ECB was the first central bank to respond to the credit crisis in 2007 and has kept pumping banks with liquidity since then, he said in Washington.

The ECB left its key interest rate at 1.5 percent on Oct. 6, yet Trichet announced it will offer one-year loans to banks and resume purchases of covered bonds from next month.

While acknowledging the economic policy errors of European governments, Trichet also defends their need to observe democracy by taking time to win parliamentary approval for the crisis-fighting measures they agreed July 21, adding that sovereigns outside his continent also over-spent. It took two votes of Congress to pass the Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008, while the U.S.-led push to “spend, spend, spend” during the recession was not the best advice for all, he says.
‘Less Optimistic’

Critics may also be underestimating the will of politicians to hold the euro together given it partly evolved from the desire to avoid another war. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said yesterday after talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy that the region’s two main economies would defend the single currency “with all our strength” and turn it into a “stability union.”

The leaders gave themselves three weeks to devise a plan to recapitalize banks, get Greece on the right track and fix Europe’s economic governance.

Americans cite Europe’s lack of labor mobility and cross- border fiscal transfers as undermining its claims to construct an optimal currency zone, according to a January 2010 paper co- written by Lars Jonung, a professor at Sweden’s Lund University, when he was a European Commission adviser. The lack of a Federal Reserve-like unemployment goal also prompts criticism.

Now while he says he is “less optimistic” about the future of the euro than he was when he wrote the paper, Jonung says neither Trichet nor his opponents are right.

“U.S. economist were critical of the euro, but nobody mentioned Greece was cheating and under-reporting deficits,” he said. “Trichet of course has to defend the project, but he has to be optimistic.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Simon Kennedy in Paris at skennedy4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: John Fraher at jfraher@bloomberg.net

mAREK tYSIS

[marektysis]

Romney Foreign Policy Bench Impresses
By Steve Clemons

Oct 11 2011, 12:04 AM ET 6

During the very start of George W. Bush's first presidential n mid-1999, Robert Zoellick -- now head of the World Bank -- was tasked with organizing a myriad of advisory committees to the Bush Campaign.

The focus of these committees ranged from trade to the domestic economy to national security questions on many tiers and across regions. At the time, it appeared that Zoellick had tied up most of the high quality policy practitioners who tilted Republican or Independent across Washington's rich think tank ecosystem, thus stealing most of the creative op-ed writing and policy punditry talent away from other Republican contenders.

Interestingly, after John McCain lost the primary battle with George W. Bush, McCain began investing much more heavily in building relationships with key think tanks -- including the New America Foundation -- and also launched a couple of think tanks himself, one on media reform and the other on campaign finance.



Mitt Romney may be taking a page out of the George W. Bush/Zoellick playbook in the announcement this past Friday of his roster of national security advisers. While I found myself disappointed in Romney's articulation of a foreign policy vision, I was much more impressed by those names who appear, and also don't appear, on Romney's advisory list.

I can't remember a time when I haven't seen Bill Kristol listed as a key national security adviser to the frontrunning GOP candidate, but his name is not there. Elliot Abrams, a top tier national security voice in the G. W. Bush White House and senior staff at the Council on Foreign Relations, also did not make the list.

Frank Gaffney, President of the Center for Security Policy, who has been an active proponent of the anti-Sharia fearmongering movement in America is also not listed. John Bolton is not there, at least not in person -- though perhaps in spirit via a couple of proxies. The American Enterprise Institute's Danielle Pletka is not listed on the female-light list, though her husband is on one of the working groups.

Interestingly, out of the top 24 advisers Romney announced, only three are women -- Paula Dobriansky, Kerry Healy, and Meghan O'Sullivan.

Among the Advisers are Cofer Black -- who used to run some of the key anti-terror black ops before becoming Vice Chairman of Blackwater (which is left off of his official bio tag on Romney's site); former UN Management Official Christopher Burnham who is known to be very close to former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton; former Department of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff and former NSA Director General Michael Hayden -- two of the countries leading authorities on cybersecurity and broad homeland security. Both Chertoff and Hayden are the Chuck Hagels of the list -- mostly non-ideological, completely pragmatic and realistic in their views -- a real counterbalance to some of the others on the roster.

Eliot Cohen and Robert Kagan are on the list -- both the most erudite and intellectually honest of the neoconservative establishment. They are the best, with perhaps only Francis Fukuyama their equal -- but Fukuyama is for the moment ducking the political scene as he builds his new nest of work at Stanford University. David Frum, whom I respect, would be a good addition to the Romney neoconservative bench in my view -- and pretty much supports Romney, I think, over the anti-intellectual pale shades of Palin that are his GOP rivals.

John Danilovich is not a household name -- but then neither has the Millennium Challenge Corporation ever become a real headliner. Danilovich used to head the MCC during the Bush years and did an admirable job of working to keep American aid and development assistance moving to nations where it would make a measurable difference. So many want to cut all international assistance that I think it's symbolically important that Romney wanted to show he had people like Danilovich and former Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky on board to show a commitment to broad international engagement and to the reform and further development of international institutions. Interestingly, the section on engagement and institutions was about the only really good part of Mitt Romney's recent foreign policy address.

Former U.S. Senator Norm Coleman, also on the list, is an interesting guy whom I have gotten to know recently -- but he was John Bolton's next to best friend in the U.S. Senate during the 21 month battle the G. W. Bush administration waged to try and get Bolton's Ambassadorial appointment to the UN confirmed. Bolton's best friend was probably Senator Jon Kyl -- but Coleman, who has been active in U.S.-China circles of late, could be a proxy of sort for some of John Bolton's more pugnacious, "pound Iran a lot, hug Israel more" posture on foreign policy.

The Heritage Foundation's Kim Holmes is another solid choice for the Romney team -- and while also a fellow traveler of the kick-every-international-institution in the knees John Bolton school, he is thoughtful, has an open mind and listens to alternative points of view, and knows how to engage in civil debate -- something increasingly in short supply in Washington. So, though I see the world differently than Holmes, I'd have a beer or glass of wine with him any time and be interested in his views on reforming international institutions.

John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy and a former carrier-based aviator, is an interesting choice for the Romney team as he has recently written a broadside in a military journal against the Navy's management, lamenting the loss of confident swagger among Navy servicemen in the past in favor of politically correct debates about women and gays. Lehman isn't calling for a repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell in the way that Michele Bachmann has, but Lehman's remarks may open Romney up for an attack by those in the gay community and gay-friendly community worried that he would roll back rights recently secured.

Some of the more balanced realists in the Romney camp include former Department of Defense Comptroller Dov Zakheim who is often wrongly confused as a neoconservative. Zakheim chuckled once when he said to me that "neoconservatives were once liberals, and I was never a liberal." Former Congressman Vin Weber -- who has been a part of a huge number of the bipartisan foreign policy study group efforts in Washington these past many years operates in the pragmatic center with a conservative tilt. Eric Edelman, who is the defense establishment neoconservative policy hand realists most like, is also very balanced, thoughtful, and civil in his views -- none of the flamboyance of other better known neocons. Mitchell Reiss, a former director of policy planning at the State Department and now president of Washington College, is in general a realist who believes in the power of harsh, decisive military punch against enemies as a first step toward talking with terrorists.

CFR President Richard Haass' protege Megan O'Sullivan who rise high in the Bush Administration for her counsel on Afghanistan and Iraq is also on the team. Despite the miscalculations on Iraq and the subsequent over-dedication of resources toward Afghanistan by the Obama administration, O'Sullivan's counsel on these issues and writing has been steady and based on serious consideration of cost-benefit scenarios -- none of the "never give up, never surrender" stuff that Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Max Boot likes to offer.

Dan Senor is on the team as well -- and is controversial among a lot of groups for spinning reality more than offering the public true reads on what was going on in Iraq. Senor is also at the Council on Foreign Relations and is probably pretty well steeped in the deeper grit now of how hard and complicated -- and ultimately debilitating -- these wars abroad have been for the United States. I'll need to hear where he comes out before extending my critique. Robert Joseph, also a national security hawk and protege of John Bolton, is on the roster -- but Joseph was very important, along with Eisenhower Fellowships President John Wolf (not on the list) -- in actualizing the Proliferation Security Initiative, which I think has emerged as one of the more important accomplishments in multilateral diplomacy of the GW Bush administration. So thumbs up on Robert Joseph as far as thoughtful national security conservatives go.

There are others I could go into like the human rights oriented Pierre Prosper, or Walid Phares, among the Special Advisers -- or into former arms control hawks like Steve Rademaker whose spouse runs the foreign policy shop at the American Enterprise Institute -- but think my central point is made.

This group of people are not the kind who would surround an Obama presidential campaign, but they are the people who would surround a Bob Dole, or a Jon Huntsman, or a G. W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan.

They are diverse, deep thinkers, mostly civil in their willingness to engage alternative ideas, and serious in their views about America's vital interests. I have a number of disagreements on world view with some of these folks -- but if I were assembling a conference, this would be the crowd I'd want to have there.

Romney has not brought bomb-throwers into this mix, and that's an interesting and mature sign.

Now if he can just get his team to help him pull together better constructed foreign policy speeches!

Photo Credit: Reuters/Chris Keane

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/romney-foreign-policy-bench-impresses/246450/

[marektysis]

Bilderberg president, Viscount Davignon to deliver speech in Romania this week
People | Romania Insider | October 12, 2011 at 5:29 pm

Viscount Etienne Davignon (in picture), the president of the annunal conference of the Bilderberg group, will be in Romania at the end of this week to deliver a conference at the Romanian Central Bank (BNR). He was invited by the BNR governor Mugur Isarescu and will deliver a speech on the ‘European Union after the sovereign debt crisis’.

Étienne Francois Jacques Davignon (Viscount Davignon) is a Belgian politician, businessman, and former vice-president of the European Commission.

The Bilderberg Club is an annual, unofficial, and invitation-only conference that gathers around140 guests from North America and Western Europe. The club gathers influential people like politicians, bankers, business people who meet and talk about worldwide issues.

The group’s steering committee president is Henri de Castries, head of insurer Axa. Bilderberg takes its name from the hotel in Holland, where the first meeting took place in May 1954. The group’s latest meeting in St. Moritz, from June this year, gathers guests like David Rockefeller, Former Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank Peter Löscher, the President and CEO of Siemens AG, John Micklethwait, the Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, Walter Rothensteiner, Chairman of the Board of Raiffeisen Zentralbank Österreich AG, Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google Inc., Peter Sutherland, Chairman of Goldman Sachs International, among others. The list of participants here.

editor@romania-insider.com

(photo source: IEA)
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http://www.romania-insider.com/president-of-bilderberg-viscount-davignon-to-deliver-conference-in-romania-this-week/37366/