WED, 11/19/2014 - BY ANDREW GAVIN MARSHALL
Meet the Bilderberg Group – an annual gathering of 130 of the Western world’s top financial, corporate, political, academic, media, military and policy elites, held every year since 1954.
They meet behind closed doors, at five-star hotels, where participants are encouraged to speak frankly – meaning "off the record" and away from the prying eyes and piercing ears of the public. Some journalists and media executives are invited, but they don’t actually cover the meetings: they simply attend them as guests.
The famous exclusivity and secrecy of the Bilderberg Group, we are told, is designed to encourage frank and open discussions among some of the most influential people in North America and Western Europe. But unlike its portrayal as a place where powerful people simply "talk shop," critics for years have considered the meetings a form of secret world government, and a shadowy cabal.
Bilderberg is a meeting of the movers and shakers, the managers and policy-makers, the plutocrats, technocrats, financiers and imperialists of the North Atlantic powers. Its original purpose was to provide a forum where Western European elites could meet in private with American officials to encourage the strengthening of the "Atlantic Alliance." The forum has provided the geopolitical and economic framework for behind-the-scenes collaboration and cooperation between the major NATO powers.
Founding members of the group in 1954 included Joseph Retinger, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and David Rockefeller of the United States. Named after the Hotel de Bilderberg in the Netherlands, where the first conference took place, attendees decided to hold a conference annually with locations rotating between Europe and North America. In its early years, much of the funding for the group came from the CIA and American philanthropic foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
Part One LINK
GLOBAL POWER PROJECT: IS THE BILDERBERG GROUP PICKING OUR POLITICIANS?
WED, 11/26/2014 - BY ANDREW GAVIN MARSHALL
The Thatcher and Clinton Factors
One good example of this is the rise of Margaret Thatcher. In 1975, when Thatcher became the leader of the opposition in British Parliament, she was invited to that year’s Bilderberg conference. A Financial Times article that year by C. Gordon Tether noted that Thatcher and other British participants “were engaging – in company with a handful of British banking and industrial chiefs – in ‘completely private talks on world problems’ with the top-most brass of the international business community – the super-capitalists.”
The article noted that “if Bilderberg is not a conspiracy, it is conducted in such a way as to give a remarkably good imitation of one.”
Jon Ronson interviewed the member of Bilderberg (who remained anonymous) that had invited Thatcher to the meeting. The former Bilderberg member recalled that Thatcher had sat in silence for the first two days of the meeting, leading to some participants “grumbling” about this lady who “hasn’t said a word.” So the Bilderberg member spoke with Thatcher, and then, “the next day she suddenly stood up and launched into a three-minute Thatcher special... The room was stunned. Here’s something for your conspiracy theorists. As a result of that speech, David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger and the other Americans fell in love with her. They brought her over to America, took her around in limousines, and introduced her to everyone.” Four years later, Thatcher was Prime Minister, and her reign left a legacy of privatizations, neoliberalism and profit for the powerful.
But Thatcher is not the only politician who reached great heights after attending a Bilderberg meeting. Bill Clinton was invited to a 1991 meeting in Germany when he was the Governor of Arkansas. Two years later he would be the U.S. president. Clinton was invited by his friend and Bilderberg Steering Committee member Vernon E. Jordan Jr., a major corporate figure in America who later became known as President Clinton’s “closest confidant.”
As the Washington Post reported in 1998: “Plenty of governors try to make that scene; only Clinton got taken seriously at that meeting, because Vernon Jordan said he was okay.”
Vernon Jordan later recalled that after Bill Clinton won the presidential election and became president, “the steering committee of Bilderberg came to Washington in January, and I called the president up and said ‘Mr. President, they’re here’ – and he came to the Four Seasons hotel, and the Europeans felt like they owned them because they met him when he was totally unknown.”
No comments:
Post a Comment