• GOP, corporate execs, big donors meet behind closed doors, Bilderberg style, to take down Trump.
By Mark Anderson —
Top legislators, including United States House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), met secretly with corporate heads, neoconservative Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, political strategist Karl Christian Rove, and several billionaire GOP donors off the Georgia coast on March 3-6. The chief focus of the strategy session: how to stop billionaire candidate Donald J. Trump from getting the GOP presidential nomination.
And a tip from an alert AMERICAN FREE PRESS reader and a leaked account that appeared on the Global Research news website revealed that this particular “World Forum,” as the annual meeting is called, was even closed to reporters.
The forum was held on Sea Island by the neoconservative, pro-war American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Sea Island is part of a group of islands, formally called the Golden Isles, which includes Jekyll Island, where in 1910 Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island conspired with bankers, dressed as duck hunters, to lay the groundwork for what became the privately owned and controlled Federal Reserve System.
Several leaders in the technology industry, such as Apple Inc.’s Tim Cook, were on the island, which is curious since Cook is reportedly fencing with the federal government on whether to unlock Apple users’ private data for the government in its so-called war on terror. Trump did call for a boycott of Apple, recently, for its refusal to provide the feds with the key to accessing data on its iPhone.
Senate Majority Leader Addison Mitchell “Mitch” McConnell Jr.(Ky.) was also present. And along with Ryan, the House was represented on the island by Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frederick Stephen “Fred” Upton (R-Mich.), Budget Committee Chairman Thomas Edmunds Price, M.D. (R-Ga.) and Banking Committee Chairman Thomas “Jeb” Hensarling (R-Texas), among other Republican legislators who hold key positions.
Liberal New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. was reportedly there as well, cavorting with a bunch of self-proclaimed “conservatives.” Sulzberger took part without arranging to report about the island getaway, reminiscent of the media’s role at the super-secret annual Bilderberg meetings.
So, leading members of Congress colluded with corporate entities and with the head of the nation’s “newspaper of record,” offering them an opportunity to lobby behind closed doors. One question on people’s minds is: Are they trying to sidestep the will of the voters?
Also, will the Republican Party really have an honest and open election system under the Constitution, or is this more evidence of a shadow government where closed-door conferences override the people and advance the goals of the wealthy elites?
According to some recent reports, Rove has been entertaining bringing Mitt Romney out of storage to run him—again—for the GOP nomination. If certain lost souls among the GOP would want to put fresh makeup on the starchy former Massachusetts governor for another try, then the Republican Party’s desperation has reached a whole new low.
Kristol noted on Twitter that the AEI meeting was off the record. However, some accounts claimed that the Israel-first editor went so far as to remark in his “Kristol Clear” commentary March 7 under the Weekly Standard banner: “The key task now, to once again paraphrase Karl Marx, is less to understand Trump than to stop him. In general, there’s a little too much hand-wringing . . . and fatalism out there and not quite enough resolving to save the party from nominating or the country electing someone who simply shouldn’t be president.”
Interestingly, the private AEI World Forum, which has been taking place 1982 and saw former U.S. President Gerald R. Ford as one of its founders, is off the record and to some extent mirrors the above-noted highly exclusive Bilderberg meetings which have taken place nearly every year since 1954 in Europe and North America. Elected and appointed U.S. officials attending the AEI, just like at Bilderberg, meet “off the grid” to discuss policy plans with U.S-based corporate heads and with foreign officials and foreign business interests.
Although Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, mentions that “the World Forum consists of plenary sessions, topical small-group discussion sessions, informal conversational time, and recreational activities”—while regularly meeting every summer in Beaver Creek, Colorado—the Vail Valley Foundation was quoted by Wikipedia as saying: “Senior U.S. cabinet officers and legislators provide candid briefings on important policy initiatives. Heads of major international corporations discuss business and financial developments. Government officials from Europe, Asia and the Americas debate international strategic and economic issues in a private, informal atmosphere, far removed from the distractions of day-to-day business.”
So, the AEI’s extra emergency spring forum on Sea Island was all-the-more significant, especially considering that this meeting took place in tandem with the March 2-5 Conservative Political Action Conference in nearby National Harbor, Maryland. Certain neoconservative figures such as Kristol evidently moved from one event to the other, while spouting anti-Trump rhetoric and tactics. Kristol’s boss, Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes, told the massive CPAC crowd in a panel discussion that, supposedly, some of his upper-tier Republican pals would rather vote for Hillary Clinton than Trump, and that some of them hoped for another GOP candidate to eclipse Trump.
Mark Anderson covers the annual Bilderberg meetings and is chairman of AFP’s new America First Action Committee, designed to involve AFP readers in focusing intensely on Congress to enact key changes, including monetary reform and a pullback of the warfare state. He and his wife Angie often work together on news projects.
Will the Oligarchs Kill Trump?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Narrow victories in the Kentucky caucuses and the Louisiana primary, the largest states decided on Saturday, have moved Donald Trump one step nearer to the nomination.
Primaries in Michigan, Mississippi and Idaho on March 8, and in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina on March 15, may prove decisive. If Marco Rubio does not win his home state of Florida, he is cooked, as is Governor John Kasich if he does not win Ohio.
Ted Cruz already looks to be the last man between Trump and a GOP nomination that has gone, in the last seven elections, to George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney.
All five of those nominees since 1988 seem appalled by Trump’s triumphs, and only slightly less so by the Cruz alternative.
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Not in memory has the leadership of a party been so out of touch. The Republican rank and file are in revolt, not only against the failures of their fathers but the policies of their present rulers.
Some among the GOP elites, who have waited patiently through the Obama era to recapture control of U.S. foreign policy, are now beside themselves with despair over Trump’s success.
Fully 116 members of the GOP’s national security community, many of them veterans of Bush administrations, have signed an open letter threatening that, if Trump is nominated, they will all desert, and some will defect—to Hillary Clinton!
“Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin,” says Eliot Cohen of the Bush II State Department. According to Politico’s Michael Crowley, Cohen helped line up neocons to sign the “Dump-Trump” manifesto.
Another signer, Robert Kagan, wailed in The Washington Post, “The only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.”
Are they serious?
Victory for Clinton would mean her remaking the Supreme Court, killing all chances that Roe v. Wade could be overturned, or that we could get another justice like Antonin Scalia before 2021.
What are these renegades and turncoats so anguished about?
Trump calls the Iraq War many of them championed an historic blunder. Trump says that, while a supporter of Israel, he would be a “neutral” honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians in peace negotiations, as was Jimmy Carter at Camp David.
Trump says he would “get along very well” with Vladimir Putin, as Richard Nixon got along with Leonid Brezhnev and Mao Zedong.
Trump would launch no new crusades for democracy. He would not oppose Russia bombing ISIS. He would build that wall on the border. He would transfer from U.S. taxpayers to rich allies more of the cost of defending themselves.
Do not most Americans agree with much of this?
Yet this neocon ultimatum about deserting should the voters nominate Trump testifies eloquently to their loyalty.
With every ex-president and ex-nominee repudiating Trump, and foreign policy elites going rogue, the GOP hierarchy is saying: We will cut Trump dead, just as the Rockefeller-Romney crowd cut Barry Goldwater dead.
This is pure my-way-or-the-highway politics.
But it raises anew the question: Can the establishment stop Trump?
Answer: It is possible, and we shall know by midnight, March 15. If Trump loses Florida and Ohio, winner-take-all primaries, he would likely fall short of the 1,237 delegates needed for nomination on the first ballot.
How could the anti-Trump forces defeat him in Ohio, Florida and Illinois? With the same tactics used to shrink Trump’s victory margins in Virginia, Louisiana and Kentucky to well below what polls had predicted.
In every primary upcoming, Trump is under a ceaseless barrage of attack ads on radio, TV, cable and social media, paid for by super PACs with hoards of cash funneled in by oligarchs.
But Trump, who is self-funding his campaign, has spent next to nothing on ads answering these attacks, or promoting himself or his issues. He has relied almost exclusively on free media.
Yet no amount of free media can match the shellfire falling on him every hour of every day in every primary state.
Our Principles PAC, backed by Nebraska’s billionaire Ricketts family, has poured millions into trashing Trump. American Future Fund is dumping $1.75 million in Florida this week; Club for Growth $1.5 million.
Hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer is backing the Conservative Solutions PAC, which has dumped millions into anti-Trump ads and plans to spend more than $7 million between March 1 and 15, with $4 million of that going into Florida. The super PAC pile-on is unprecedented.
How well Trump fares in Michigan and Mississippi, measured against how well he was doing in polls last week, will reveal just how successful super PAC savagery has been in changing hearts and minds.
Can millionaires and billionaires who back open borders, mass immigration, globalization and the disappearance of nation states into transnational collectives overwhelm with their millions spent in ads the patriotic movements that arose this year to the wonderment of America and the world?
Has that proud 18th century boast of Americans, “Here, sir, the people rule!” given way to the rule of the oligarchs?
Patrick J. Buchanan is a writer, political commentator, presidential candidate and author.
