Looming Soros Conference Will Focus on Rearranging Global ‘Financial Order’

On April 8, dozens of "academic, business and government policy thought leaders" are scheduled to gather for a forum reminiscent of the 1944 Bretton Woods gathering that helped launch the World Bank and International Monetary Fund following World War II.

The George Soros-founded Institute for New Economic Thinking will hold its annual conference April 8-11, 2011 at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, N.H.  According to the group's website, the event will bring together economic figures such as Soros, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker to discuss a new, globalized vision of economics in the post-war world.

"This conference reflects INET's dedication to inspiring and provoking new economic thinking," the website says.

"Crisis and trauma offer us a rare opportunity to work together to create real lasting change.  This is one of those times," INET says.  Promoting "real" justice and equity requires "reinventing" the prevailing economic model -- capitalism:

The organization's social media advertises a very progressive view of economics:

The Institute recognizes problems and inadequacies within our current economic system and the modes of thought used to comprehend recent and past catastrophic developments in the world economy. The Institute embraces the professional responsibility to think beyond these inadequate methods and models and will support the emergence of new paradigms in the understanding of economic processes.

The Institute firmly believes in empowering the next generation, providing the proper guidance as we challenge outdated approaches with innovative and ethical economic strategy. The Institute’s objective is to expand the conversation to create an open discussion for a wider range of people. Some would say that present day dialogue is closed and polarizing. We recognize the need for an environment that is nourished and supported by discourse, a discussion that spans a much wider spectrum of thinking and incorporates the insights of other intellectual disciplines in both the natural and social sciences.

"In the years since the 1944 conference, the globalization of production, trade, and especially finance, has transformed our economy, but has not yet transformed our system of regulation or our tools of policy intervention," the group's website says. "Indeed, our very habits of thought and speech lag behind the realities that we desperately need to think and speak about."

More than two-thirds of the scheduled event speakers have direct ties to Soros, notes Media Research Center's Dan Gainor.

While INET claims more than 200 will attend, only 79 speakers are listed on its site - and it already looks like a Soros convention. Twenty-two are on Soros-funded INET's board and three more are INET grantees. Nineteen are listed as contributors for another Soros operation - Project Syndicate, which calls itself "the world's pre-eminent source of original op-ed commentaries" reaching "456 leading newspapers in 150 countries." It's financed by Soros's Open Society Institute.

"We need a global sheriff," Soros has explained in the past, and the upcoming conference, "Crisis and Renewal: International Political Economy at the Crossroads" may provide a forum for discussion of a new global financial order.

In the 2000 version of his book "Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism," Soros wrote how the Bretton Woods institutions "failed spectacularly" during the economic crisis of the late 1990s. When he called for a new Bretton Woods in 2009, he wanted it to "reconstitute the International Monetary Fund," and while he's at it, restructure the United Nations, too, boosting China and other countries at our expense.

"Reorganizing the world order will need to extend beyond the financial system and involve the United Nations, especially membership of the Security Council,' he wrote. 'That process needs to be initiated by the US, but China and other developing countries ought to participate as equals."

Soros emphasized that point, that this needs to be a global solution, making America one among many. "The rising powers must be present at the creation of this new system in order to ensure that they will be active supporters."

And that's exactly the kind of event INET is delivering, with the event website emphasizing "today's reconstruction must engage the larger European Union, as well as the emerging economies of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia." China figures prominently, including a senior economist for the World Bank in Beijing, the director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the chief adviser for the China Banking Regulatory Commission and the Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations.

This all may be easy to do with the power, influence and reach of George Soros who funds more than 1,200 different organizations around the globe, Gainor adds.

So how might the United States fit into this idea of a new international cooperative between the developed and developing world?

It doesn't, Gainor concludes. The INET conference is about "changing the global economy and the United States to make them 'acceptable' to George Soros."