Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission
Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission
In April 1971 Bilderbergers extended their preoccupation with “current problems of social instability” into the more creative realm of “the contribution of business in dealing with” these problems. “The possibility of a change of the American role in the world and its consequences” was another issue of importance.
In August 1971 Nixon formally broke with central agreements of the post-war economic system so carefully architected by the Bilderbergers and other elite planners.
There are immediate and long-range costs to any policy that attempts to guarantee oil supplies from the Middle East, but the trilateral reports boldly state what no politician has been willing to tell the US people:
The building of petroleum-related industries such as refining and petrochemicals in the producing countries is natural and inevitable.
There are two sides to the Saudi-US special relationship: assured stable supplies of oil for the trilateral industrial powers is only half the relationship. A much more important factor in understanding the nature of this alliance is the recycling of Saudi revenues back to the US market. The fact is that US multinational corporations have benefited disproportionately from Saudi oil revenue expenditures on US goods and services.
A look at the larger picture illustrates that the special relationship has been anything but one sided. During the period 1974-77 the US purchased $106 billion worth of goods and services from OPEC countries. But during the same four year period, more than $108 billion of OPEC petrodollars were returned to the United States. Seventy billion dollars of this total represented purchases of US goods and services. The remainder was invested in the United States, largely in the form of bank deposits or purchases of US Treasury bonds and corporate securities.
The primary goal of trilateral policy in the Middle East is to maintain this exchange of oil for goods and services. It is in this context that the Iranian revolution and the precedence it establishes for a slower pace of modernisation, raises a serious challenge to the trilateral managers. The loss of Iran as a regional power willing to produce oil at full capacity and to reinvest its petrodollars in purchases of US arms and industrial plants is a substantial setback to Washington. The possibility of a similar political upheaval in Saudi Arabia is more remote for the simple reason that the Saudis do not face these kinds of internal security problems. But the declines in Iranian oil exports can only compound the difficulties in persuading the Saudis that they should continue to export oil at nearly three times the rate necessary to meet their external payments.
The ‘trilateralists’ are acutely aware of this problem. A July 1978 Trilateral Commission report, Energy: Managing the Transition , acknowledges, “Within the Saudi government there is no opposition to raising production further because of the lack of domestic need for expanded current revenues. There is a feeling that domestic expenditures have increased too quickly, engendering waste and fuelling strong inflationary pressures in that country.”
In response to these pressures the United States has made every effort to institutionalise the special relationship. Two organisations exist through which American interests in Saudi Arabia are guarded. The US-Saudi Joint Commission on Economic Co-operation, administered by the US Treasury Department , has a mandate to insure the recycling of Saudi petrodollars through an ambitious $140 billion industrialisation programme. The other institutional pillar of the special relationship is, of course, the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), representing Mobil, Exxon, Texaco, and Standard Oil of California.
A bridge between the trilateral powers and regional powers, like Saudi Arabia, is the multi-national corporation. Aramco is still an appropriate conduit for trilateral diplomacy, though the oil fields themselves have long been nationalised. Aramco has created a company state in Saudi Arabia over the last 57 years and had the far-sighted political good sense to forego confrontation tactics in its dealings with the Saudi elite.
The company has made itself indispensable to the production and marketing of oil whilst recognising the strict boundaries of Saudi culture and religion, the Royal Family’s right to regulate modernisation, and in turn the Saudi monarchy has provided the company with long-term security.
Aramco is a strong structural factor conducive to Saudi co-operation with the trilateral powers. Saudi relations with the United States are more fragile than they appear; for one thing, they are clouded by a US de-facto alliance with Israel. Whatever their affinity to US economic interests, the Saudis are subject to the same political imperatives as any other Arab state. The trilateral foreign policy strategist recognises that regional powers often inherit compelling cultural or political ideals, which if violated, would jeopardise their political consensus.
The process of entanglement also proceeds on other fronts - the Saudis have been made to recognise that no currency other than the US dollar can handle the large transactions involved in marketing their oil. By conducting their business in American currency, the Saudis have become the primary backers of the US dollar as the global trading currency and finally as a regional power of increasing importance in the Middle East, will be the supply of ever more sophisticated armourments and the expansion of their small army.
The US-Saudi Joint Commission was founded in 1974 to provide the Kingdom technical and managerial assistance. In 1976-80 it directly administered nearly $800 million worth of development projects in the country. The Commission works in close tandem with the Saudi Planning Commission in the implementation of a $140 billion Five Year Plan for the B-series Bonds, 1975-80 or CUSIP 912810BU1-17. The Rules & Regulations governing this CUSIP were released March 1973 and research reveals that planning and administrative changes in the US Government to effect the same 1970.
The question must be raised if the quadrupling of the oil price that followed was by design? The result was the birth of the debt system, and the Saudis received the exchange for ‘good and services’ for 25% in the Dollar.
A great deal of business was at stake. Bechtel Corporation, for instance, was supervising the construction of a $20 billion dollar industrial park at Jubail on the Arabian Gulf. And in what is the largest industrial project ever undertaken by a single company, the Fluor Corporation built the plants necessary to process enormous natural gas reserves into fuel for local industry. This particular project is an excellent example of how trilateralists so hope to entangle the Saudis that they could no longer conceive of cutting back on oil exports (See Holly Sklar’s book on Trilateralism, published 1980 - see file number 28).