February 23, 2008 (LPAC)--Felix Rohatyn convened a conference in Lyon, France, on April 6, 2000, called the "First Transatlantic Summit of Mayors." Rohatyn clone and Denver mayor Wellington Webb opened it by saying that the Twentieth Century was a century of nation-states; the Twenty-first will be a century of cities.
Lyndon LaRouche says that Rohatyn and his cronies are making exactly the same mistake as the Venetians of the Fourteenth Century, with their Lombard League, which led Europe into a dark age. How can they show they are not making exactly the same mistake?
Rohatyn's drive for a feudalist International Conference of Mayors has continued since.
In June of 2003, the Second International Conference of Mayors summit meeting took place in Denver, Colorado, alongside the annual summer meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. According to a news report of the time, there were repeated calls during the conference for regional collaboration and partnerships to strengthen the political power of cities and bolster their resources.
This meeting was a follow-on to a meeting held in New York and Washington in April of 2002, that was dubbed "The International Conference of Mayors' International Summit on Terrorism and Travel/Tourism." That meeting, which brought together 30 mayors from eleven different countries, issued a communique that stated, "the tragic and criminal acts of September 11 dramatically highlighted the interdependence of all people, the need to strengthen anti-terrorism efforts, and the critical role of mayors in their respective nations." The communique also requested that the executive director of the U.S. conference, Thomas Cochran, "work with his counterparts, mayors and appropriate representatives across the world to create the structure" of a permanent International Conference of Mayors." The Denver meeting was the outcome of that request.
In his remarks to the April 2002 meeting, Cochran noted that it was the third of a series of meetings that began in 2000 under the conference presidency of then-Denver mayor Wellington Webb, with the cooperation of Felix Rohatyn, then-U.S. ambassador to France, John Kornblum, who was the U.S. Ambassador in Germany, and the Aspen Institute in both countries.
