James Corbett’s Reportage: Essays on the New World Order is not a speculative tract about coincidences. It is an exposé on the deliberate architecture of global power. Corbett’s essays weave a documented story of how elites coordinate across borders and decades, ensuring that what appears as drift or happenstance is in fact strong networking that steers the teleology of the modern world.
At the core of Corbett’s argument is the insistence that politics is not primarily left versus right, but “up versus down.” The “upists” are the oligarchs who convene in Bilderberg conferences, Davos gatherings, and central-bank boardrooms. The “downists” are the rest of humanity—fragmented, distracted, and managed by illusions of party competition. Corbett insists the apparent binaries are stagecraft. Real decisions are made in private conclaves, and they are implemented through disciplined institutional continuity.
Corbett begins with evidence that is beyond denial: the 1955 Bilderberg conference minutes, which explicitly called for “arriving in the shortest possible time at the highest degree of integration, beginning with a common European market.”¹ Two years later, the Treaty of Rome launched the European Economic Community. What is striking is not just the parallel, but the consistency: fifty years later European leaders celebrated the Treaty of Rome as the founding act of the European Union. This was not organic evolution. It was teleology—guided integration by a transnational network meeting behind closed doors.
The later substitution of the Lisbon Treaty for the failed “EU Constitution” confirms the pattern. When French, Dutch, and Irish voters resisted, elites simply repackaged the project under a different name, forcing a second referendum in Ireland until they obtained the “correct” answer.² This is not democratic course correction; it is managerial persistence in service of a predetermined goal.
The Financial Crown: BIS and FSB
If Bilderberg represents the visible summitry of oligarchs, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Financial Stability Board (FSB) represent the crown infrastructure of financial teleology. The BIS openly defines itself as “a bank for central banks.”³ Its mandate is not speculative—it is codified as a coordination hub through which unelected monetary officials establish frameworks that shape global markets.
The 2008 financial crisis was not the end of globalization; it was its consolidation. In London, the G20 declared the need for a “new world order” of finance. The BIS and its FSB arm proceeded to draft global rules on bank resolution, deposit seizures (“bail-ins”), and capital standards that every major economy now enforces.⁴ Mark Carney, who chaired the FSB while serving as Bank of Canada governor, exemplifies how individuals are cultivated to move seamlessly between national posts and global rulemaking boards. This is not drift. It is deliberate embedding of national policy inside a global script.
Corbett devotes a provocative section to pre-9/11 securities activity. Peer-reviewed research confirms statistically abnormal options trading on airlines and defense contractors in the days prior to the attacks.⁵ The official 9/11 Commission dismissed the money trail as “of little practical significance.”⁶ Corbett reads that line not as bureaucratic negligence but as systemic self-protection: financial networks tied to political families (including Bush relatives and their Stratesec security firm connections)⁷ were shielded from scrutiny, because following the money would expose the interlocking web of insiders.
Here again, Corbett stresses that anomalies are not random. They point to a pattern: financial intelligence and insider advantage are structural features of crisis management. Crises are not only political opportunities; they are profit engines.
A Managed Teleology
Corbett’s larger claim is that these are not isolated curiosities but the working grammar of oligarchy. Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope is not merely cited as a warning but as confirmation from within the establishment itself: parties are designed to be “almost identical” so that electoral turnover never disrupts the teleological project of global governance.⁸
The method is simple: divide the populace along culture-war and partisan lines, while uniting policy through elite networks. Thus, whether it is EU integration, global financial regulation, or the management of war and terror, the outcome is structurally the same: consolidation upward.
Yet Corbett does not end with despair. He distinguishes between “hopium”—the false messianism of electoral saviors—and genuine hope, which lies in voluntary cooperation from the bottom up. His voluntarism is not utopian but strategic: the only counter to top-down networking is bottom-up networking, communities that refuse to outsource sovereignty to institutions designed to neutralize it.
Conclusion
Reportage succeeds as a map of teleology in action. It shows how private conferences, unelected financial boards, and even crises themselves are woven into a coherent trajectory. Readers who dismiss these connections as coincidence will find themselves facing documented evidence of continuity, coordination, and conscious design.
If politics is indeed up versus down, then Reportage makes clear where “up” resides: not in parliaments or ballots, but in the boardrooms of Basel, the resorts of Bilderberg, and the circuits of capital that write tomorrow’s rules today.
Notes
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“Bilderberg meeting report, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1955,” conference minutes, available through public archives.
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“Ireland rejects EU Lisbon Treaty,” BBC News, June 13, 2008; “Ireland backs EU’s Lisbon Treaty,” BBC News, October 3, 2009.
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Bank for International Settlements, “About BIS,” official mission statement.
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Financial Stability Board, Key Attributes of Effective Resolution Regimes for Financial Institutions (2011; rev. 2014).
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Allen M. Poteshman, “Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” Journal of Business 79, no. 4 (2006): 1703–1726; Marc Chesney, Ganna Reshetar, and Mustafa Karaman, “The Impact of Terrorism on Financial Markets,” Journal of Banking & Finance 35, no. 2 (2011): 253–267.
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The 9/11 Commission Report (2004), p. 172.
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SEC filings for Securacom/Stratesec (1990s), listing Marvin P. Bush and Wirt D. Walker III as directors.
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Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1966).
