Lawmakers Mum on Trilat Tax Hike

Tucker wants to know if taxpayers paid for Brussels junket for public servants

By James P. Tucker Jr.

Congressmen who attended the Trilateral Commission’s meeting in Brussels on March 23 refused to comment on the proposal to increase your gas taxes by $1 a gallon or whether they traveled at taxpayers’ expense.

The questions were posed by AFP to all three lawmakers who attended the gathering: Sens. John Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) and Dianne Feinstein (DCalif.) and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.). Their offices all sounded surprised and disturbed by the questions and the request for comment on the TC meeting, but promised to ask their bosses and call back.

Each office was given a telephone number and email address for a response. None responded. The question of whether the lawmakers paid their own travel costs was for the record.

It has been established, for many years, that when federal officials or congressmen attend TC meetings or those of the brother group, Bilderberg, taxpayers pay their travel costs and they don’t fly coach.

TC and Bilderberg pay the lavish costs of lodging and meals. Such secretive meetings of federal officials and private citizens—even when they are high officials of other governments, international financiers and owners in international corporations—are illegal under federal law. This was dramatically demonstrated when federal Judge Royce Lamberth fined the Clinton White House and harshly denounced Hillary Clinton’s health care taskforce for holding closed meetings with private-sector “experts.” Thus, the lawmakers and federal bureaucrats who attended were using taxpayer money to break the law.

The issue of imposing a $1 increase on the federal gasoline tax leaves legislators gun shy. Voters are unlikely to greet such a plan enthusiastically at a time of record-high fuel costs. Consumers can expect help from the private sector.

Economists say that, on average, 20% of the cost of anything you buy—from a necktie to a house—can be attributed to the cost of transportation—from the long trip from raw material to finished product to the marketplace.

When John Deutch, former CIA director and former deputy defense secretary, called for the $1 tax increase, he played the “blame America” game, which is popular in the TC-Bilderberg cabal and soundly applauded by American members. Americans are causing too much pollution, he said, while Europeans happily pay $5 to $6 a gallon for fuel, making small cars and bicycles popular.

While such a big increase may seem a political stretch, when the Trilaterals called for a gas tax increase to be imposed on Americans years ago, The Washington Post endorsed it in an editorial the day after the meeting ended. Donald Graham the newspaper’s chief executive, has attended all TC and Bilderberg meetings, like his mother and father before him.

In another development, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, was questioned sharply by Europeans about comments that seem to suggest the United States may invent a reason to attack Iran. Most European members, who championed earlier wars, were opposed to the attack on Iraq and a future attack on Iran.

“A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran” could result from “some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Brzezinski told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Feb. 1.

Europeans pressed Brzezinski: Does this mean the United States will stage an incident as an excuse to invade Iran?

His responses were non-committal.

AFP correspondent James P. Tucker Jr. is a veteran journalist who spent many years as a member of the “elite” media in Washington. Since 1975 he has won widespread recognition, here and abroad, for his pursuit of on-the-scene stories reporting the intrigues of global power blocs such as the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission.

(Issue #16, April 16, 2007)