Weren't there a lot of conspiracy theories about the trilateral commission in the 70s? David Spiro shows that cooperative efforts to deal with the oil shocks were in fact not successful--despite all those trilateral conferences. Brenner describes a world in which those putatively conspiring states of the trilateral commission are locked in neo mercantalist conflict through the weapons of currency devaluations and wage repression--despite efforts at cooperative macroeconomic adjustment. It seems to me clear that power and discord has trumped international plans or conspiracies time and time again. In fact, such conspiracies about trilateral cooperation seem to be simply mirror images of the bourgeoisie's own fantasy of international economic cooperation and crisis free capitalism, as Bill Gates calls it. Kautsky's and Hilferding's international economics all over again. I don't know whether Holly Sklar's own 1970s analysis of the trilateral commission devolves into such a vision of the effective ability of the trilateral powers to actually conspire or represented a resurrection of revisionist economic theory.
Yours, Rakesh