Bilderberg.org

[marektysis]

Yesterday, the 12-foot-tall lizards that secretly rule the world were playing golf. Today, they decide exactly how to destroy democracy.

"The Death Star is orbiting at maximum velocity here," yells American radio host and conspiracy theorist par excellence Alex Jones into his microphone. "And we're here proving that the Death Star exists!"

The Bilderberg Group, a secrecy-shrouded 40-year-old annual meeting of political, financial and business leaders, has become a circus.

This year it is being held at The Grove, an exclusive resort set among fields and curtained by trees in Hertfordshire, down the road from where Harry Potter was filmed.

Four years ago Bilderberg was barely on the radar. But thanks to exposes from journalists including topical comedy writer Charlie Skelton it now attracts wide attention, especially from anti-globalism and anti-capitalism protesters.

And of course Jones, who describes himself as "the T-Rex of political talk". He flew over from the States and managed to book a room in the same resort.

But he was spotted and ejected by management, and is furious. "It's very humiliating to have booked something and be told you can't be there while slimy lobbyists meet to engage in crime," he ranted, in between accusing the Bilderberg members of everything from funding al-Qaeda to using humanity as guinea pigs to experiment with immortality drugs.

Police are clearly worried. On Tuesday The Grove basked in sunshine, as golf buggies whirred over rolling hills, past picturesque ponds and back to the immaculately classy resort buildings.

But outside, tied to lampposts, were worried warnings to local residents.

Roads around The Grove were to be blocked to all pedestrians "because of the likelihood of danger to the public ... from public order issues and/or terrorism", said one sign from the county council.

Part of the security is due to the calibre of attendees.

The group have published a list of the more than 120 people at the meeting, chaired by Henrie de Castries, chairman and CEO of the AXA group.

Business leaders on the list include Marcus Agius, who recently left the helm of Barclays bank after the Libor scandal, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Eric Schmidt, head of Google, Michael Evans the chair of Goldman Sachs, the head of HSBC, the CFO and chairman of Shell, a chief analyst from Stratfor, Klaus Kelinfeld, chair and CEO of Alcoa, the CEO of Prudential and the president and CEO of Siemens. And many more.

Political figures include Henry Kissinger, Britain's shadow Chancellor and Chancellor Ed Balls and George Osborne, Jose Barroso, president of the European Commission, and Mario Monti, former Italian prime minister.

Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF is there, as well as scandal-clouded former general David Petraeus.

Skelton argues that the presence of politicians and public servants makes the group's secrecy more egregious.

"The opacity of this event doesn't exactly sit well with this new era of transparency that George Osborne has been keen to trumpet," he told the International Business Times. "The group releases a very sketchy agenda as to what is discussed but it doesn't amount to very much."

This year's publicly-released agenda includes vaguely-described items such as "developments in the Middle East", "US foreign policy" and "major trends in medical research".

In a statement, the group said the conference was "designed to foster dialogue between Europe and North America".

"The conference has always been a forum for informal, off-the-record discussions about megatrends and the major issues facing the world," it said. "Thanks to the private nature of the conference, the participants are not bound by the conventions of office or pre-agreed positions.

"No resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued."

In the absence of publicity, conspiracy theorists run wild, blogging that Bilderberg are a "shadow world government" controlled by "deluded plutocrats" and aristocrats determined to subjugate and exterminate all opposition.

On Jones' Infowars site, one report argues that the Bilderberg Group were key lobbyists behind the European common market and the Euro, as part of a plan to destroy the sovereignty of European states.

Activists plan to hold a kind of 'fringe festival' near the event, featuring speakers, comedy, music, workshop and arts. On the road leading to The Grove, self described 'info-warrior' Rob wandered in for a look before the police lockdown takes hold. He says he's looking forward to the festival.

Rob points up to the hotel and says, quite seriously, "That's the Illuminati up there. That's the top rung of the people who really run the world." He explains that after the Second World War, the Nazi hierarchy quietly moved to the US and continued to pull the strings of the New World Order.

He doesn't mention the lizards. But he doesn't need to.

- Sydney Morning Herald

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/8759752/Death-Star-comes-to-UK-countryside

[marektysis]

Tech aristocracy joins conflab with Secret Rulers of the World

Annual Bilderberg meeting sets conspiracists' tongues wagging
By Iain Thomson in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Some of the biggest names in the technology industry are among the guests at the 61st annual meeting of the Bilderberg Group – a secretive talking shop for the top echelons of business and politics or a shadowy cabal seeking to rule the world, depending on whom you believe.

Eric Schmidt, making his fourth trip, will represent Google as the group meets at the Grove Hotel in Watford, UK. Another old conference hand, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, will also be there. Craig Mundie, formerly Microsoft CTO and now Ballmer's special advisor, is on the guest list, as is PayPal-founder and Facebook-backer Peter Thiel and online activist Lawrence Lessig.



Technology issues are on the agenda, according to the organization's press release. Among the 12 topics for discussion over the three days of the conference: "How big data is changing almost everything", "Cyber warfare and the proliferation of asymmetric threats", and "Online education: promise and impacts".

Also on the 140-person guest list is the head of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde, president of European Commission José Barroso, government bigwigs from across Europe and the US (including long-time attendee Henry Kissinger), the heads of financial, manufacturing, and media companies in the US and Europe, and a light smattering of journalists, all of whom have been sworn to secrecy.

Secret rulers of the world?
The Bilderberg Group takes its name from the hotel used for the first meeting back in 1954. The group was set up by European and US statesman as a confidential conference for the great and the good to discuss world issues candidly and openly.

The conference is hosted in a different venue each year in a quiet five-star hotel with good security and attached golfing facilities. Attendees are encouraged to speak their minds and are forbidden to discuss conversations in the conference with outsiders. This year's conference even has a no-fly zone set up over the hotel's grounds.

For years the group met behind closed doors and its existence wasn't mentioned in the mainstream media. But with the increase in information from internet communications, the news of the get-togethers got out and conspiracy groups got interested, not least because of the august attendee roll.

Former British professional footballer and now conspiracy-theory loon David Icke claims that Bilderbergers have created genetically-engineered blood lines of people to run the world as the captains of industry and use 3D projections to manipulate human perception and emotions. He also claims many are 12-foot, blood-drinking, shape-shifting lizards.

It has also been reported (correctly) that presidents Clinton, Bush the Second, and Obama all attended conferences before they were elected, as were British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

This is taken by some as proof that the group picked them for their roles, but Bilderberg founder and British cabinet minister Dennis Healey said that invitations are simply issued to people who show potential.

In an interview with journalist Jon Ronson for the documentary "Secret Rulers of the World", Healey said that the group was set up to allow people at the top of their respective fields to discuss world issues, and while attendance does give the advantage of networking, it's not a sinister cabal set on world domination.

"To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair," he said. "Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn't go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing." ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/04/tech_heads_at_bilderberg/

[marektysis]

By Ben Rankin Comments
Bilderberg Group: Secret meeting of world's top politicians and businesspeople gets underway at Hertfordshire hotel
6 Jun 2013 12:07
As delegates arrived for the conference, protesters heckled their cars as they disappeared down the driveway

Security fence surrounds The Grove hotel

Delegates for a private conference of top politicians and businesspeople from around the world have started to arrive at a luxury country hotel.

Several cars with blacked-out windows entered the gates of the Grove Hotel, near Watford, in Hertfordshire, this morning for the secretive meeting of the Bilderberg Group.

It is thought billionaire executives from multinational companies such as Amazon and Google, high-ranking political figures including Chancellor George Osborne, and even members of royal families are among the 130 or so attendees.

Amid tight security, members of the press and a handful of protesters gathered in a fenced-off area just inside the grounds of the hotel, but around half a mile from the redbrick hotel.

As delegates arrived for the four-day meeting, protesters heckled their cars as they disappeared down the driveway.

Michael Meacher, the Labour MP, called the delegates the "real top brass of Western finance capitalism".

He said he believed Osborne would be attending for the sixth time this year, and named the meeting's "steering committee" as Henri de Castries, the chairman of Axa, Peter Thiel, "a billionaire venture capitalist", Thomas Enders from EADS, the defence manufacturing company, and Peter Sutherland, the chairman of Goldman Sachs.

Speaking in the pen near the hotel gates, he said: "They are the leaders of the biggest banks, the biggest multinational companies, people from the UN institutions like the World Bank, World Trade Organisation, several EU commissioners and several politicians from the US, Canada, the UK and the EU.

"These are people who are all in the most dominant positions in the governance of Western capitalism.

"They only meet in order to concert their plans about the future of capitalism over the immediate future period - the next year or two.

"My objection is that it's being done in utter secrecy with the police keeping everyone else out."

The politician said although he has no problem with powerful people meeting in private, the numbers at the Bilderberg meeting means they should be held accountable.

"When 130 of the leaders from all across the West get together, and many of these are billionaires, they are people who are immensely wealthy and immensely powerful," he said.

"And when they all get together, it's not just to have a chat about the latest problem, it is to concert plans for the future of capitalism in the West.

"That is on a very different scale."

Alex Jones, the US television personality and Bilderberg researcher, said: "It is very, very sinister.

"Not everybody who goes to Bilderberg, from my research, is a scoundrel or a villain. But there are definitely villains who are there who are basically trying to organise government and business."

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/bilderberg-group-secret-meeting-worlds-1936009

[marektysis]

Conspiracy theorists claim it is a shadow world government. Former leading members tell the Telegraph it was the most useful meeting they ever went to and it was crucial in forming the European Union. Today, the Bilderberg Group meets in Britain.

(Clockwise from left) Christine Lagarde, a protester from the 2012 meeting in Virginia, Henry Kissinger, George Osborne and David Petraeus Photo: PA/REUTERS/AP

By Matthew Holehouse9:56AM BST 06 Jun 2013874 Comments

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“The abuse is terrible,” said Peter Mandelson, leading the walking party through the throng of protesters and carrying the group’s uniform orange ski jacket under his arm.
Amid the din, Peer Steinbruck, the former German Finance Minister, pointedly refused to break off his conversation with Thomas Enders, the head of defence giant EADS. Behind him, Eric Schmidt, the Google founder, picked up the pace along the narrow road and kept his eyes fixed on the Suvretta hotel ahead. Franco Bernabe, the vice chairman of Rothschild Europe, grinned through the chorus of booing and chanting in German down megaphones, before ducking under the police tape and into the safety of the hotel's grounds.
It was June 2011. Demonstrations were sweeping through the stricken eurozone, China and North Africa. And in tranquil St Moritz, high in the Swiss alps, half a dozen of the most powerful men in the West had taken a break from a weekend of intensive and strictly confidential debate to walk in the woods, when their paths crossed with the protesters who had come from around the world to keep an eye on them.
The gathering was entirely innocent, the walking party would insist. But what were they doing there?
No such encounters will take place in Watford this week, as the Bilderberg, the annual conference for 140 of the world’s most powerful, meet for four days at The Grove, a £300-a-night golf hotel close to the M25. The entire hotel has been booked out, and a high fence erected around the exclusion zone. Armed checkpoints have been set up on local roads, and locals must show their passports to enter their own driveways. The Home Office may foot the bill. A US news site dedicated to uncovering conspiracies had booked a room for last week but were told by phone not to turn up.
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The Bilderberg was founded in 1954 to bring the leaders of Western Europe and the United States closer as the Soviet Union cemented its control of the Eastern bloc. They met first at the Bilderberg Hotel, near Arnhem, at the instigation of Joseph Retinger, a Polish polio victim who had fought the Nazis during the war. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was the chair. In that first meeting, the participants – including bankers, economists, and the future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell – debated the Communist threat and the prospect of European integration.
Publicly, the group says it is still merely a debating society – a forum for leaders to "listen, reflect and gather insights" unbound by official policy positions.
But while they rankle at the conspiracy theorists, former leaders of the Bilderberg confences says they were the most important events they ever went to, and the freedom of speaking away from the ears of Whitehall officials meant the discussions that took place decisively shaped modern Europe.
It is above all a club for life’s winners. George Osborne, Ed Balls and Ken Clarke, the Cabinet Minister who also serves on the group’s steering committee, will arrive this afternoon, as will Mr Mandelson. They will be joined by Jose Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission; Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF; Francois Fillon, the former French Prime Minister; Robert Rubin and Timothy Geithner, the former secretaries to the US Treasury; and serving prime ministers, foreign ministers and finance ministers from across north west Europe.
The chairmen and chief executives of some of the world’s biggest businesses will attend, with a combined wealth running into hundreds of millions of pounds – from Deutsche Bank, Barclays, Amazon, Google, Shell, HSBC, Lazard, Prudential and Alcoa. Henri de Castries, the chairman of the Bilderberg, is the head of AXA, the insurance giant. Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal, is also on the guest list. Goldman Sachs and BP have in recent years been donors to the British committee organising this week's gathering.
Then there are the defence officials: Olivier de Bavinchove, the commander of Eurocorps, the EU’s standing army; Sherard Cowper-Cowles, the former British diplomat who now works for BAE Systems; Robert Kaplan, the chief analyst at intelligence firm Stratfor; Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state; and David Petraeus, the former US commander in Afghanistan who briefly ran the CIA. Those are the publicly issued names. A source involved in this year’s planning admits sometimes others may turn up, “just for the day”.
On the agenda is economic growth, big data, Africa, medical research and the rise of cyber warfare. The future of the welfare state is likely to be discussed, as one topic is titled "jobs, entitlement and debt". Another session is called simply "current affairs".
The debates take place with the delegates seated together in one large room. Some prepare written papers. It is bad form not to join in the discussion; they are not there to listen, a source says. On Saturday afternoon there will be time for golf, followed by dinner at which guests are seated alphabetically. Discussions are minuted and a report of what each guest said circulated, former guests say, but there are no formal resolutions voted on or policies adopted.
Few want to talk about it. I’m out of the office when Baroness Williams of Crosby returns my call, but when her secretary learns it is about the Bilderberg she says she cannot speak. The Treasury’s press office do not answer emails asking whether the Chancellor has arranged any meetings with delegates in advance, and if he is attending in an official capacity, or what he might say. Ed Balls’s staff are similarly shy.
Emanuele Ottolenghi, an expert in Iran at the Washington think thank Foundation for the Defense of Democracies who will sit next to Osborne at dinner, politely emails: “The conference is off the record. I will, therefore, be unable to comment on it, before or after.”
I asked if he will make a case for the defence of off-the-record meetings. They are far from unique to the Bilderberg. He replies with a link to an old Daniel Pipes essay on the rise of conspiracy theories, which argues they have flourished in the States amongst the politically disaffected, the hard Right and, controversially, the black community. “I sympathise with your point of view, and can recommend this as a frame of reference,” he says.
And the conspiracy theoretician-in-chief is Daniel Estulin, a 46-year-old Lithuanian and the author of the best-selling The True Story of the Bilderberg Group. Fidel Castro, the former Cuban leader, is a fan. It argues the group’s founders were former Nazis, and it now gathers to choose presidents and control the media.
“Bilderberg is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a conspiracy reality,” he writes from Moscow, where he is filming his weekly show for Russia Today, the Kremlin-backed broadcaster. “It was a vehicle through which private financier oligarchical interests were able to impose their policies on nominally sovereign governments. The idea is the creation of a global network of cartels, more powerful than any nation on Earth, destined to control the necessities of life of the rest of humanity.”
A major victory, he tells me, was engineering the 1973 oil price shock to prop up the dollar and make Wall Street rich. He sends me long lens photographs he took of de Castries and Richard Holbrooke, the US diplomat, relaxing in chinos and linen jackets at a gathering in Italy. He's unsure what they were up to.
But high on the agenda in Watford will be Eric Schmidt and Google, his sources say. “It is an integral part of the United States security apparatus. Your information is processed, analysed and stored for later use,” he adds. He adds: “Limitless anything spells c-o-n-t-r-o-l.”
He asks for a copy of the guest list. I direct him to a newspaper story, taken from a press release on the Bilderberg's official website.
“Lots of the stuff written about it is a load of crap,” says Lord Healey of Riddleden, who served as Chancellor to Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. He would know. He attended the first Bilderberg meeting in 1954 and sat on the steering committee for forty years.
“Those who weren’t invited were very jealous. Some people described it as a secret Communist organisation. Others said it was a secret American organisation. But it was balls.”
For much of the post-War era Healey helped set the agenda and chose the delegates. He is proud of their record in spotting future leaders. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were invited early in their careers. “The steering committee, because of their wide range of backgrounds, made some very good choices,” he says.
Lord Carrington is also frustrated at the theories. “I remember there was this American who thinks it’s a great conspiracy and the Queen is involved, and probably Satan,” he said.
Carrington, now 93, was Margaret Thatcher’s foreign secretary during the Falklands War, and after leading Nato he served as chairman of the Bilderberg in the 1990s. He has never spoken publicly about the role before.
“The reason people talk about conspiracy is if you want people to speak freely on matters of importance, either financial or political, they don’t want every word they say reported in the press. It’s been secret in that sense,” he says.
Healey is sure of the influence of the group. At 95, his memory for dates and speeches has dimmed, but he recalls discussing at length the Vietnam war with Henry Kissinger.
Most vividly, he recalls its role in bringing the architects of the European integration – Schmidt, Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing, Leone – together for open-ended discussions with bankers and economists about how the European monetary system might work.
“The great advantage of the Bilderberg thing was they did not have to reach agreement. You had time to discuss things with people who influence events who normally you would not meet at all.”
He adds: “People could talk very freely, much more freely than they would at home.”
Would the European Union and single currency have taken the shape they have now without those early Bilderberg meetings, I ask him.
“I think it was a very important element in it. Whether it would have happened without it is difficult to say,” he says.
Other accounts suggest the annual meeting can be decisive.
Alexandre Lamfalussy, the banker who went on to run the European Monetary Institute, the forerunner to the ECB, recalls sitting next to Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor, at the Bilderberg in the mid-1980s. He was asked whether Germany would ever be unified. It was inflammatory, and publicly unutterable, with Soviet troops still occupying the East. “It’s going to happen,” Kohl said. “Forget about your reticence, you will have to understand that German division will not endure.” Americans at the table thought, at first, he was joking.
Similarly, according to the author Jon Ronson, during the Falklands War David Owen managed to turn the weight of world opinion with a single speech demanding sanctions on Argentina before an audience of foreign ministers at Bilderberg. The sanctions were later imposed.
And for business leaders, it is a perfect opportunity to lay the groundwork for deals. According to Tom Bergin’s Spills and Spin, the account of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, Lord Browne, the head of BP, used a walk by Lake Como at the 2004 gathering in Italy to suggest a vast merger with Shell to create the world’s biggest oil company. Lord Browne left under the impression it would happen.
Such cosiness, critics say, is a threat to democracy.
“If our politicians want to be wined and dined in luxury for three days with Goldman Sachs, that seems to me a little bit like lobbying,” says Hannah Borno, a journalist and transparency campaigner, who will be outside The Grove today. She wants the minutes of the discussions to be published. She is puzzled as to how the Bilderberg Association is granted tax exemption as a charity, when groups such as private schools usually need to pass a public benefit test.
She adds: “Conspiracy theories have served the group quite well, because any serious scrutiny could be dismissed as hysterical and shrill. But look at the participant list. These people have cleared days from their extremely busy schedules."
Such scrutiny would kill the Bilderberg, delegates insist, and as a consequence international relations would suffer.
“I found it the most useful of all the meetings I attended regularly. The Bilderberg was the best because the level of the people attending regularly was so much higher,” says Healey. “There was the Atlantic Institute which discussed the Americans’ and Canadians’ issues, and there was the purely European one, which used to meet in Germany. But Bilderberg was the most useful of the lot.”
Healey, who like Carrington served in the war, writes of the meetings in his memoirs: “Experience has taught me that lack of understanding is the main cause of all evil in public affairs. Nothing is more likely to produce understanding than the sort of personal contact which involves people not just officials or representatives, but human beings.”
Carrington also enjoyed the equality shared amongst the leaders when away from the office.
“The fact they were whatever they were made no difference, because everybody was pretty distinguished,” he says. “They behaved like ordinary people, if you can believe that.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10102168/Bilderberg-Group-No-conspiracy-just-the-most-influential-group-in-the-world.htm

[marektysis]

he Bilderberg Group is powerful, works in shadows
June 6, 2013
The Marietta Times

Every year since 1954, a secret cabal of heads of state, media insiders, corporate hounds, academic masters, moneychangers and other entities have met in secret in locations all throughout the "free" Western world. Their transparency is next to zero. They have never been investigated or reported on in the "mainstream" news. They are an organization like no other that has played out behind the scenes with the most powerful people on planet Earth. Yet most likely you have never heard of them, even though it is not all that unlikely, these off-the-record meetings have influenced each of our lives in many ways, great or small. This is the Bilderberg Group, so named after their first meeting at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Holland in May of 1954, just nine years after the end of WWII and the height of the Cold War.

On June the 6th through the 9th, the Bilderberg Group will meet once again for their secretive power conference in Watford, Hertfordshire, England at the posh Grove Hotel. Only a month and a half ago, not a single soul knew where on Earth the Bilderbergers would meet this year. Some speculation came around that they might play with fire, meeting twice in a row at the Westfields Marriott Hotel in Chantilly, Virginia only miles from D.C. and Dulles International Airport. They've met at Westfields several times including last year where their presence was awarded with thousands of protestors demonstrating for the duration of the meeting, filming guests as they arrived and left and walked the grounds. Several were arrested for passing barricades set up for the "public's protection." Both private security and Chantilly officers provided manpower to keep the general public at bay, at taxpayer expense of course, from a supposedly open and casual three day discussion on international policy.

At least alternative media were investigating the meetings and its latest location. Low and behold, the late veteran reporter Jim Tucker, Jr. cited insider sources as to saying that Bilderberg would be meeting somewhere north of London, England. He was certainly right, and the confirmation came only several weeks ago when security forces arrived and local police leaked information that there would be a large private meeting where no unauthorized persons would be allowed in at all. Pursuing the information, investigators of the alternative press tried booking rooms before and during the conference. The days of the meeting are full for all 200 plus rooms and those who were able to book rooms for the days leading up to the conference have just been canceled, leaving many to wonder why they can't stay at the hotel, at least up to the days of the confab. Other reporters have been sent on site to collect "reconnaissance" footage as to the hotel and its grounds' layout so that protestors have a better chance at catching guests coming and going. Also to provide information so that people may be safe from being whisked away by G4S, the private security and consulting firm that will be providing a "ring of steel" around the Grove Hotel during the Bilderbergers meeting. Again, at the expense of Briton taxpayers.

Jim Tucker, Jr. was most likely the foremost in the field of investigating the Bilderberg meetings. While the information that any alternative media has produced about Bilderberg is usually disregarded as theory, Tucker made sure his sources were credible and double checked the information he received before publishing it. Not much over the years at the time of him producing guest lists and minutes from the meetings would have been regarded, or at least until what he published came true on a regional and global scale. The Bilderbergers could be just another group, and the circumstances of reporting may be broad, but the uncanny detail in which information came out about the assembly and to which activism has been aroused to protest the organizations' secret gathering, there cannot be a mistake over the truth of the information itself, even standing alone. I may not provide specifics here, but you might check out articles yourself sometime and see what I mean.

While there is still much speculation that surrounds the Bilderberg Conference, there are many questions that have never been answered about the meetings and have been consequently swept under the rug due to their controversial or supposedly conspiratorial nature. However, it is not doubted by anyone who has read even a little bit about the Bilderberg meetings and their guests, mainstream or not, that there is cause for concern due to the names that are present and the nature of the meeting itself. While so much hearsay may surround something that on the surface seems not sinister, it is the unprecedented manner in which powerful men and women, those of government, media, corporations, banks, business, and academia talk behind closed doors about things that only they know of. It might seem OK that they do something like this, but this is not some random get-together of power brokers at the Queen of the Netherlands' birthday party. It is a structured multi-day event in which they meet in secret with others to admittedly discuss world affairs. Now, I may be rusty, but when you especially have heads-of-state talking to each other about potentially major issues concerning economics or warfare or technology, I thought that was supposed to happen in the light of day, not under the cover of dark as the Bilderbergers do. Perhaps there is nothing sinister afoot. Perhaps it is nothing more than afternoon tea with the good old guys and gals. Yet perhaps it is more than that, and there will always be questions surrounding whether that is true.

Not just three years ago the Bilderberg Group acquired a website at the URL bilderbergmeetings.com. While some people or organizations may counter that this provides sufficient information on the secret cabal and the contents of their meetings, I would suggest that this is nothing more than an attempt by the group to whitewash speculation by alternative sources of media and for the mainstream to smear real news and the protesting that surround the annual confab. The site does give a fair amount of generic information pertaining to the meetings, including a brief history and recent agenda scores from the most previous meetings like those in Sitges, Spain, St. Moritz, Switzerland or Chantilly, Virginia. Unfortunately the website does little to actually quell real questions and shed light upon a 60-year-old tradition that has possibly provided the world with its most powerful leaders and a great secret sounding board to the ways corporations, governance, academia and media can all play a big game of monopoly with our lives through warfare, economy and technology.

After all, then Sen. Barack Obama was seen entering the 2008 Bilderberg Conference. The next year he was elected the United States' president. Coincidence?

Are protestors concerns baseless? Do you think that this is alright, that the Western worlds' most powerful men and women meet every year behind closed doors to discuss God knows what? Does it matter that even if it is not nefarious, that the meetings are so secret and are secured by your tax dollars, that we may never know why they even meet? When will some questions be answered? When will you start asking some questions?

Sam Ludtman is a freelance writer of local, state and national politics. You can read The Full Bilderberg Article and find out more at jcmerak2.webs.com.

http://www.mariettatimes.com/page/content.detail/id/552234/The-Bilderberg-Group-is-powerful--works-in-shadows.html?nav=5007

[marektysis]

A Bilderberg Group member is set to speak on record to the BBC in what represents an unprecedented move for the secretive organization, which is being forced to become more transparent in the face of huge protests and widespread condemnation.

In advance of an interview with Alex Jones today, a BBC reporter told Infowars that the broadcaster had approached a Bilderberg member for a television interview and although the person had refused to be on camera, a telephone interview was likely.

As we reported yesterday, a separate source close to the security operation surrounding the confab told Infowars that numerous Bilderberg Group members were aggrieved at the organization’s obsession with secrecy and wanted to see more transparency.

Campaigners are inviting Bilderberg members to come and address crowds of demonstrators and press at a specially constructed podium within the grounds of the Grove Hotel in Watford, which is where the conference is taking place behind a huge police presence.

Bilderberg’s veil of secrecy is being lifted as a result of serious mainstream media coverage – which took decades to achieve – along with a huge increase in the number of demonstrators who show up to denounce the annual confab as a shadowy lobbying network.

In addition, the establishment media hoax that Bilderberg has no influence and is merely a “talking shop” or a golfing holiday is quickly disintegrating.

The Telegraph reports today that the 2004 Bilderberg meeting in Stresa, Italy was where the head of BP Lord Browne suggested a monumental merger with Shell to create the world’s biggest oil company, a merger that many analysts still expect to see at some point.

If a Bilderberg member does agree to an interview with the BBC it would likely serve as an opportunity to downplay the significance of the group, but the mere fact that a participant of the secretive confab has been forced to speak publicly represents major progress.

It would also mark the first time a Bilderberg member went on record since Lord Healy over a decade ago.

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/bilderberg-member-set-to-speak-on-record/5337884

[marektysis]

Delegates have started arriving at The Grove hotel for the secretive Bilderberg Group meeting at the five-star resort today.

A small number of protesters heckled a black Mercedes carrying an unknown attendee and being escorted by a police outrider in the last hour.

Among the guests due to attend the conference are Chancellor George Osborne, shadow chancellor Ed Balls, cabinet minister Ken Clarke and Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF as well as the heads large corporations such as Barclays, Amazon, Google and Shell.


Activists and demonstrators have also started to congregate in a designated protest area in the grounds. They have been joined by Labour MP and outspoken critic of the Bilderberg Group, Michael Meacher.

Meanwhile a massive police operation is being mounted around the hotel using anti-terror laws to close roads and footpaths. A no-fly zone is also in effect over the grounds.

All public rights of way across the grounds of The Grove, including the towpath of the Grand Union Canal, are now suspended for the duration of the three-day conference.

Grove Mill Lane has been shut down by police to all non-residents and residents attempting to use the road will be asked to provide police with photographic ID.

Pedestrians will also be prevented from using Hempstead Road and Langleybury Lane, south of the M25 crossing.
http://www.watfordobserver.co.uk/news/10467914.Bilderberg_guests_begin_to_arrive_at_The_Grove/

[marektysis]

Delegates of a controversial private conference of top politicians and businesspeople arrived at a luxury country hotel today.
Several cars with blacked-out windows entered the gates of the Grove Hotel, near Watford, in Hertfordshire, this morning for the secretive meeting of the international Bilderberg Group.
It is thought billionaire executives from multinational companies such as Amazon and Google, high-ranking political figures including Chancellor George Osborne, and even members of royal families are among the 130 or so attendees.
Amid tight security, members of the press and more than 100 protesters gathered in a fenced-off area just inside the grounds of the hotel, but about half a mile from the redbrick hotel.
As delegates arrived for the four-day meeting from around 10.30am, protesters heckled their cars, shouting “scum”, “pay your taxes” and “shame on you” as they disappeared down the driveway.
The demonstrators, who gathered in the sunshine to wave anti-capitalist placards, play guitars and listen to speeches, were searched for alcohol and drugs as they entered the site.
Labour MP Michael Meacher spoke out against the conference to the press and protesters and called the delegates the “real top brass of Western finance capitalism”. He said he believed Mr Osborne would be attending for the sixth time this year, and named the meeting’s “steering committee” as Henri de Castries, the chairman of Axa, Peter Thiel, “a billionaire venture capitalist”, Thomas Enders from EADS, the defence manufacturing company, and Peter Sutherland, the chairman of Goldman Sachs.
Speaking in the pen near the hotel gates, he said: “They are the leaders of the biggest banks, the biggest multinational companies, people from the UN institutions like the World Bank, World Trade Organisation, several EU commissioners and several politicians from the US, Canada, the UK and the EU.
“These are people who are all in the most dominant positions in the governance of Western capitalism.
“They only meet in order to concert their plans about the future of capitalism over the immediate future period — the next year or two.
“My objection is that it’s being done in utter secrecy with the police keeping everyone else out.”
Mr Meacher said although he has no problem with powerful people meeting in private, the numbers at the Bilderberg meeting means they should be held accountable.
“When 130 of the leaders from all across the West get together, and many of these are billionaires, they are people who are immensely wealthy and immensely powerful,” he said.
“And when they all get together, it’s not just to have a chat about the latest problem, it is to concert plans for the future of capitalism in the West.
“That is on a very different scale.”
Alex Jones, the US television personality and Bilderberg researcher, drew huge crowds when he arrived in the afternoon and whipped up the protesters by speaking through a megaphone. He told the press: “It is very, very sinister.
“Not everybody who goes to Bilderberg, from my research, is a scoundrel or a villain. But there are definitely villains who are there who are basically trying to organise government and business.”
Judd Charlton, a ventriloquist from Camden in north London, said: “We are basically here to bring down the parasites who are drug dealers and bank collapsers who seem to want to destroy this world.”
PA
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/bilderberg-delegates-meet-at-luxury-english-hotel-1.1419420

[marektysis]

Bilderberg Group 2013: guest list and agenda
The Bilderberg, the secretive annual gathering of businessmen, politicians and defence officials, today meets at The Grove hotel in Watford. This is the guest list and agenda in full.

George Osborne and Christine Lagarde Photo: AP
By Matthew Holehouse9:57AM BST 06 Jun 2013

The meeting will take place from 6 to 9 June at the Grove Hotel, Hertfordshire, with 140 delegates from 21 countries. The topics for discussion are:
• Can the US and Europe grow faster and create jobs?
• Jobs, entitlement and debt
• How big data is changing almost everything
• Nationalism and populism
Related Articles
Inside the Bilderberg protest camp 06 Jun 2013
The secret world of the Bilderberg Group 06 Jun 2013
• US foreign policy
• Africa’s challenges
• Cyber warfare and the proliferation of asymmetric threats
• Major trends in medical research
• Online education: promise and impacts
• Politics of the European Union
• Developments in the Middle East
• Current affairs
Chairman: Henri de Castries, Chairman and CEO, AXA Group
Paul M. Achleitner, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Deutsche Bank AG
Josef Ackermann, Chairman of the Board, Zurich Insurance Group Ltd
Marcus Agius, Former Chairman, Barclays plc
Helen Alexander, Chairman, UBM plc
Roger C. Altman, Executive Chairman, Evercore Partners
Matti Apunen, Director, Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA
Susan Athey, Professor of Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, Columnist, Milliyet Newspaper
Ali Babacan, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister for Economic and Financial Affairs
Ed Balls, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer
Francisco Pinto Balsemão, Chairman and CEO, IMPRESA
Nicolas Barré, Managing Editor, Les Echos
José Manuel Barroso, President, European Commission
Nicolas Baverez, Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Olivier de Bavinchove, Commander, Eurocorps
John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine, University of Oxford
Franco Bernabè, Chairman and CEO, Telecom Italia S.p.A.
Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
Carl Bildt, Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs
Anders Borg, Swedish Minister for Finance
Jean François van Boxmeer, CEO, Heineken
Svein Richard Brandtzæg, President and CEO, Norsk Hydro ASA
Oscar Bronner, Publisher, Der Standard Medienwelt
Peter Carrington, Former Honorary Chairman, Bilderberg Meetings
Juan Luis Cebrián, Executive Chairman, Grupo PRISA
Edmund Clark, President and CEO, TD Bank Group
Kenneth Clarke, Cabinet Minister
Bjarne Corydon, Danish Minister of Finance
Sherard Cowper-Coles, Business Development Director, International, BAE Systems plc
Enrico Cucchiani, CEO, Intesa Sanpaolo SpA
Etienne Davignon, Belgian Minister of State; Former Chairman, Bilderberg Meetings
Ian Davis, Senior Partner Emeritus, McKinsey & Company
Robbert H. Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor, Institute for Advanced Study
Haluk Dinçer, President, Retail and Insurance Group, Sabancı Holding A.S.
Robert Dudley, Group Chief Executive, BP plc
Nicholas N. Eberstadt, Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy, American Enterprise Institute
Espen Barth Eide, Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs
Börje Ekholm, President and CEO, Investor AB
Thomas Enders, CEO, EADS
J. Michael Evans, Vice Chairman, Goldman Sachs & Co.
Ulrik Federspiel, Executive Vice President, Haldor Topsøe A/S
Martin S.Feldstein, Professor of Economics, Harvard University; President Emeritus, NBER
François Fillon, Former French Prime Minister
Mark C. Fishman, President, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research
Douglas J. Flint, Group Chairman, HSBC Holdings plc
Paul Gallagher, Senior Counsel
Timothy F Geithner, Former Secretary of the Treasury
Michael Gfoeller, US Political Consultant
Donald E. Graham, Chairman and CEO, The Washington Post Company
Ulrich Grillo, CEO, Grillo-Werke AG
Lilli Gruber, Journalist - Anchorwoman, La 7 TV
Luis de Guindos, Spanish Minister of Economy and Competitiveness
Stuart Gulliver, Group Chief Executive, HSBC Holdings plc
Felix Gutzwiller, Member of the Swiss Council of States
Victor Halberstadt, Professor of Economics, Leiden University; Former Honorary Secretary General of Bilderberg Meetings
Olli Heinonen, Senior Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Simon Henry, CFO, Royal Dutch Shell plc
Paul Hermelin, Chairman and CEO, Capgemini Group
Pablo Isla, Chairman and CEO, Inditex Group
Kenneth M. Jacobs, Chairman and CEO, Lazard
James A. Johnson, Chairman, Johnson Capital Partners
Thomas J. Jordan, Chairman of the Governing Board, Swiss National Bank
Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Managing Director, Lazard Freres & Co. LLC
Robert D. Kaplan, Chief Geopolitical Analyst, Stratfor
Alex Karp, Founder and CEO, Palantir Technologies
John Kerr, Independent Member, House of Lords
Henry A. Kissinger, Chairman, Kissinger Associates, Inc.
Klaus Kleinfeld, Chairman and CEO, Alcoa
Klaas H.W. Knot, President, De Nederlandsche Bank
Mustafa V Koç,. Chairman, Koç Holding A.S.
Roland Koch, CEO, Bilfinger SE
Henry R. Kravis, Co-Chairman and Co-CEO, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
Marie-Josée Kravis, Senior Fellow and Vice Chair, Hudson Institute
André Kudelski, Chairman and CEO, Kudelski Group
Ulysses Kyriacopoulos, Chairman, S&B Industrial Minerals S.A.
Christine Lagarde, Managing Director, International Monetary Fund
J. Kurt Lauk, Chairman of the Economic Council to the CDU, Berlin
Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School
Thomas Leysen, Chairman of the Board of Directors, KBC Group
Christian Lindner, Party Leader, Free Democratic Party (FDP NRW)
Stefan Löfven, Party Leader, Social Democratic Party (SAP)
Peter Löscher, President and CEO, Siemens AG

Peter Mandelson, Chairman, Global Counsel; Chairman, Lazard International
Jessica T. Mathews, President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Frank McKenna, Chair, Brookfield Asset Management
John Micklethwait, Editor-in-Chief, The Economist
Thierry de Montbrial, President, French Institute for International Relations
Mario Monti, Former Italian Prime Minister
Craig J. Mundie, Senior Advisor to the CEO, Microsoft Corporation
Alberto Nagel, CEO, Mediobanca
H.R.H. Princess Beatrix of The Netherlands
Andrew Y.Ng, Co-Founder, Coursera
Jorma Ollila, Chairman, Royal Dutch Shell, plc
David Omand, Visiting Professor, King's College London
George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer
Emanuele Ottolenghi, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Soli Özel, Senior Lecturer, Kadir Has University; Columnist, Habertürk Newspaper
Alexis Papahelas, Executive Editor, Kathimerini Newspaper
Şafak Pavey, Turkish MP
Valérie Pécresse, French MP
Richard N. Perle, Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
David H. Petraeus, General, U.S. Army (Retired)
Paulo Portas, Portugal Minister of State and Foreign Affairs
J. Robert S Prichard, Chair, Torys LLP
Viviane Reding, Vice President and Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, European Commission
Heather M. Reisman, CEO, Indigo Books & Music Inc.
Hélène Rey, Professor of Economics, London Business School
Simon Robertson, Partner, Robertson Robey Associates LLP; Deputy Chairman, HSBC Holdings
Gianfelice Rocca, Chairman,Techint Group
Jacek Rostowski, Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister
Robert E. Rubin, Co-Chairman, Council on Foreign Relations; Former Secretary of the Treasury
Mark Rutte, Dutch Prime Minister
Andreas Schieder, Austrian State Secretary of Finance
Eric E. Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google Inc.
Rudolf Scholten, Member of the Board of Executive Directors, Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG
António José Seguro, Secretary General, Portuguese Socialist Party
Jean-Dominique Senard, CEO, Michelin Group
Kristin Skogen Lund, Director General, Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise
Anne-Marie Slaughter, Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University
Peter D. Sutherland, Chairman, Goldman Sachs International
Martin Taylor, Former Chairman, Syngenta AG
Tidjane Thiam, Group CEO, Prudential plc
Peter A. Thiel, President, Thiel Capital

Baroness Williams (Clara Molden)
Craig B. Thompson, President and CEO, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Jakob Haldor Topsøe, Partner, AMBROX Capital A/S
Jutta Urpilainen, Finnish Minister of Finance
Daniel L. Vasella, Honorary Chairman, Novartis AG
Peter R. Voser, CEO, Royal Dutch Shell plc
Brad Wall, Premier of Saskatchewan Province, Canada
Jacob Wallenberg, Chairman, Investor AB
Kevin Warsh, Distinguished Visiting Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Galen G.Weston, Executive Chairman, Loblaw Companies Limited
Baroness Williams of Crosby, Member, House of Lords
Martin H. Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator, The Financial Times
James D. Wolfensohn, Chairman and CEO, Wolfensohn and Company
David Wright, Vice Chairman, Barclays plc
Robert B. Zoellick, Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10102170/Bilderberg-Group-2013-guest-list-and-agenda.html

[marektysis]

ExplosiveReports.Com
June 5, 2013

Bilderberg 2013 participant: “I’m honoured to have been asked to go. But it’s crazy. They [the organisers] wouldn’t tell us where we were going to stay until a couple of weeks beforehand.”

Sherard Cowper-Coles, former diplomat and current director at BAE told a reporter at the Standard that the organization’s veil of secrecy not only applies to the outside world, but also extends to those invited to participate.

The Standard reported yesterday that “even those inside the perimeter are victims of Bilderberg’s steel ring of secrecy.” Journalist Joy Lo Dico quotes the influential BAE director as saying:

“I’m honoured to have been asked to go,” he told me last night in London. “But it’s crazy. They [the organisers] wouldn’t tell us where we were going to stay until a couple of weeks beforehand,” adding with a smirk: “Some people had to book their private jets in advance.”

Cowper-Coles, who as former Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan has extensive experience guarding British interests in the Middle-East, is not the first Bilderberg participant to openly criticize the way the group’s Steering Committee upholds the veil of secrecy that has shrouded any insight into the annual confab for the last 59 years.

As Infowars reported today, there are obvious signs that some Bilderberg participants are now ventilating their discomfort with the Group’s unaccountable way of doing business, even contemplating a press-conference to appease protestors.

Paul Joseph Watson reported that “a source close to the security operation for the 2013 Bilderberg Group conference has told Infowars that numerous members of the secretive organization are aggrieved at the way it is being operated with scant regard for transparency and are lobbying for Bilderberg steering committee members to allow them to address protesters this week.”

According to Infowars’ source there are “a number” of participants involved in the meeting from tomorrow onward have criticized the meetings, even suggesting that a small delegation of Bilderberg members may come out and speak to the protesters and media set to assemble from June 6-9 at the Grove Hotel grounds. As Infowars relates today it’s very likely that the criticism is originating from the “Libertarian camp” within the group, most notably Pieter Thiel- who is set to attend this year’s conference. Alex Jones, who has had contact with two separate contacts in the US Senate in the previous months, confirms that there is a discussion waging within Bilderberg about the issue of transparency.

The latest words by this year’s participant Sherard Cowper-Coles underlines the fact that there appears to be a division within the Group, which makes it likely that the core Group may dissolve the annual meetings and retreat into other, lesser known meetings in the future.


http://explosivereports.com/2013/06/05/british-bilderberg-participant-decries-groups-secrecy/

[marektysis]

ExplosiveReports.Com
June 5, 2013

Bilderberg 2013 participant: “I’m honoured to have been asked to go. But it’s crazy. They [the organisers] wouldn’t tell us where we were going to stay until a couple of weeks beforehand.”

Sherard Cowper-Coles, former diplomat and current director at BAE told a reporter at the Standard that the organization’s veil of secrecy not only applies to the outside world, but also extends to those invited to participate.

The Standard reported yesterday that “even those inside the perimeter are victims of Bilderberg’s steel ring of secrecy.” Journalist Joy Lo Dico quotes the influential BAE director as saying:

“I’m honoured to have been asked to go,” he told me last night in London. “But it’s crazy. They [the organisers] wouldn’t tell us where we were going to stay until a couple of weeks beforehand,” adding with a smirk: “Some people had to book their private jets in advance.”

Cowper-Coles, who as former Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan has extensive experience guarding British interests in the Middle-East, is not the first Bilderberg participant to openly criticize the way the group’s Steering Committee upholds the veil of secrecy that has shrouded any insight into the annual confab for the last 59 years.

As Infowars reported today, there are obvious signs that some Bilderberg participants are now ventilating their discomfort with the Group’s unaccountable way of doing business, even contemplating a press-conference to appease protestors.

Paul Joseph Watson reported that “a source close to the security operation for the 2013 Bilderberg Group conference has told Infowars that numerous members of the secretive organization are aggrieved at the way it is being operated with scant regard for transparency and are lobbying for Bilderberg steering committee members to allow them to address protesters this week.”

According to Infowars’ source there are “a number” of participants involved in the meeting from tomorrow onward have criticized the meetings, even suggesting that a small delegation of Bilderberg members may come out and speak to the protesters and media set to assemble from June 6-9 at the Grove Hotel grounds. As Infowars relates today it’s very likely that the criticism is originating from the “Libertarian camp” within the group, most notably Pieter Thiel- who is set to attend this year’s conference. Alex Jones, who has had contact with two separate contacts in the US Senate in the previous months, confirms that there is a discussion waging within Bilderberg about the issue of transparency.

The latest words by this year’s participant Sherard Cowper-Coles underlines the fact that there appears to be a division within the Group, which makes it likely that the core Group may dissolve the annual meetings and retreat into other, lesser known meetings in the future.

prison planet

[marektysis]

Bilderberg group summit: Cameron attendance at 'cliche fest' damned
Tory MP Douglas Carswell accuses prime minister of joining 'unaccountable clique of Davos men' at luxury hotel in Watford

Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent
The Guardian, Friday 7 June 2013 19.17 BST

Demonstrators protest as delegates arrive for the Bilderberg group summit at the Grove hotel in Watford. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
David Cameron has been accused of joining the "unaccountable clique of Davos men" after he attended the secretive Bilderberg group meeting at the luxury Grove hotel in Watford, a move that raised questions about his pledge to lead Britain's most transparent government.

Douglas Carswell, the Tory MP who campaigns for transparency in government, said the prime minister was taking part in a "cliche fest" whose participants had helped crash the global financial system. Davos is the town in Switzerland which hosts an annual meeting of global political and business leaders.

Cameron came under fire after Downing Street said it was acting in an open manner by publicising his attendance at the annual Bilderberg meeting in advance. The prime minister's spokesman, who said heads of government of countries hosting the annual Bilderberg meeting were usually invited to attend, said it would be a private event and that civil servants would not accompany Cameron.

Ministers are usually expected to be accompanied by civil service note-takers when they meet business leaders. Henri de Castries, the chairman and CEO of the Axa Group, is the Bilderberg chairman.

The prime minister's spokesman said: "He will participate in a discussion around domestic and global economic issues. He feels it is an opportunity to discuss economic issues with senior ministers, businesspeople and academics."Downing Street said it would not publicise any details of the meeting: "It is a private meeting so we are not going to go into any further details."

"On a wider point the prime minister has always been clear about the importance of transparency which is why this government has taken a number of steps in terms of publishing more data, more information about meetings."

Carswell told the Guardian: "Given the dreadful state that most European countries are in – and given the appalling public policy failures that landed us in this mess – you would have thought the least our ruling elite could do is discuss these issues in public. This is only going to add to the idea that we are governed by an unaccountable clique of Davos men.

"I am sure in reality they will be recycling all the cliches you can find in the FT and the Economist. I don't think that great leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan attended the Bilderberg."

Carswell added that Eurosceptics were likely to be concerned that the prime minister was interested in hearing from a group whose steering committee included five prominent European integrationists – the former chancellor Kenneth Clarke, the Belgian aristocrat and former European commission vice-president Viscount Étienne Davignon, the former British ambassador to the EU Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, the former Irish EU commissioner Peter Sutherland and the former European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet.

Carswell said: "I am absoutely not a conspiracy theorist but it is striking that the grandees invited to this self-selecting little clique all tend to regurgitate the same failed orthodoxies. It doesn't matter whether it is the same failed orthodoxy of Europeanism or the fallacy that cheap credit and low interest rates can make us rich – they are the same washed-up ideas of the last 20 years. It is a cliche fest."

Cameron and Nick Clegg pledged when they formed the coalition to lead the most transparent government to date. The coalition agreement said: "The government believes that we need to throw open the doors of public bodies, to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account."

The ministerial code, published by the government in September 2010, said external meetings held by ministers would be published on a quarterly basis. It says: "Ministers meet many people and organisations and consider a wide range of views as part of the formulation of government policy. Departments will publish, at least quarterly, details of ministers' external meetings."

No 10 said it did not believe that civil servants would accompany the prime minister. It took Downing Street five hours to confirm this. It said that the meeting would be recorded "in the usual way".

Cameron's attendance brings to three the number of British ministers at this year's summit. George Osborne is also attending and Kenneth Clarke is a member of the steering committee. The Bilderberg group says the costs of the meeting are the responsibility of the steering group, whose members include former Barclays chairman Marcus Agius, the CEO of the defence manufacturer EADS, Thomas Enders, and the Goldman Sachs chairman, Peter Sutherland.

The group says: "There is no detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/bilderberg-group-summit-cameron-damned

[marektysis]

Bilderberg Group: Two worlds collide - in Watford
By Mark Whittaker
Presenter, World Business Report

Bilderberg opponents say the private meetings should be open to public scrutiny

In the southern English town of Watford, two entirely separate worlds and vastly different mindsets are coming into close proximity.

They might as well be a million miles apart.

Because there is not the remotest chance that the likes of Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund managing director, or Douglas Flint, HSBC's chairman, will ever rub shoulders in Watford with Controversy Clown or Judd Charlton the conspiracy ventriloquist.

Ms Lagarde, Mr Flint and a whole host of VIPs from politics, banking, business and royalty are staying in the luxurious Grove Hotel and leisure complex.

They are the Bilderberg Group, movers and shakers invited to move and shake behind closed doors.

No press, no public, no agenda, no statements, no questions: some would say no accountability.

Across a little valley there is a motley collection of non-movers and shakers.

Veterans of the protest circuit
These are activists, protesters and conspiracy theorists, some dressed as clowns, who have gathered in a field to demonstrate their displeasure with the private deliberations going on at the Grove.

What is the Bilderberg Group?


An annual conference founded in 1954 aimed at fostering dialogue between Europe and North America
Bilderberg is the name of the Dutch hotel at Oosterbeek, near Arnhem, where the first meeting was held
About 120 to 150 political and business leaders as well as academics and media experts attend
It is described as an informal, off-the-record forum on major world issues
There is no detailed agenda and no policy statements are issued
Source: The Bilderberg Meetings

They are the Bilderberg Fringe.

Less than half a mile separates Bilderberg Group and Fringe.

But a fence has been erected, and the hotel golf course, patrolled by police and security guards, acts as a cordon sanitaire between the two.

The drone of helicopters overhead is met with shouts of derision: the movement of police patrols by sarcastic renditions of the theme from Dad's Army or Laurel and Hardy.

But the mood among Fringe-goers is good-natured. They have come from all over Britain, and some from abroad.

Many of them know each other. They are veterans of the protest circuit.

And this is the nearest they have ever got to Bilderberg. Previously the event has been almost secret.

Now at least they have a field in which to protest.

'The ultimate conspiracy'
The stated aim of the Bilderberg Group is to provide an opportunity for leaders to discuss the challenges facing Europe and the United States, free from the constraints of office.


Bilderberg is part of a shadowy world government, says Alex Jones
But for the protesters the Bilderberg Group is perhaps the ultimate conspiracy.

It is where the bosses of multinational companies and banking corporations get to bend the ear of politicians and decision makers.

The protesters see it not so much as a discussion forum, but the place where real decisions are made, without anyone on the outside being any the wiser.

Many of the Bilderberg delegates arrive at the Grove by private helicopter.

Those who are chauffeur-driven through the gates prefer to hide behind darkened windows and unfurled newspapers.

They are greeted by cat calls and questions about their parentage in a fleeting moment of discomfort as they are whisked up the hotel drive, and it provides a little flash of excitement for Fringe-goers.


The picture says it all
'Filthy parasites'
But the main hullaballoo is reserved for the Fringers' own version of VIP.

Alex Jones is a syndicated radio host in the US, who is based in Austin, Texas.


Who is at Bilderberg this year?


Ed Balls, UK shadow chancellor
Jose Barroso, European Commission President
Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO
Robert Dudley, BP CEO
Douglas Flint, HSBC chairman
Timothy Geithner, former US Treasury Secretary
Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State
Christine Lagarde, IMF managing director
Eric Schmidt, Google chairman
Peter Voser, Royal Dutch Shell CEO
Source: The Bilderberg Meetings

He is the man who helped organise the infamous online petition to have Piers Morgan deported from the US because of the Briton's call for gun control laws after the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre.

His appearance on Morgan's TV show - a one-man shoutfest - was an internet sensation that enthralled and appalled millions.

Jones is the conspiracy theorists' all-purpose shock jock. And he has come to Watford with all guns blazing: Nazi plots, the new world order, you name it.

"I have come to expose one of the most powerful structures in the corporate shadow world government," he told BBC World Service's World Business Report.

"We know what goes on inside of there. Policy is being set in these meetings.

"This is a real global shadow government that they tried to deny.

"Now we have forced everybody to admit that it is going on," he says.

Jones rails against the "filthy parasites" assembled in their luxury hotel; against the "massive ring of steel patrolled by taxpayer-funded police"; against the "Bilderberg police state", and Britain's "German" Royal Family.

"Basically the United States established Bilderberg with the CIA at the helm in 1954, with the UK power structure and what was left of the European power structure, under the Marshall Act, to merge it all under a corporate governance structure."

Jones knows how to pull a crowd.

A message for the VIPs - but not yet
By comparison Judd Charlton the conspiracy ventriloquist and Controversy Clown are both rather understated.


Judd Charlton says the protesters are superheroes fighting "evil gangsters"
You can see Judd's lips move as his puppet partner Phyllis Meadowsweet lambasts the Bilderberg "gangsters".

Phyllis says: "We've basically come to bring chaos to this new world order of theirs, because we combat evil. We're superheroes."

But Judd insists he is off-duty because this is not television, and says he is really a good ventriloquist, as well as a first-rate conspiracy theorist.

Controversy relies on pathos.

Sweating in his clown's costume, his red nose begins to slide off as he stares wistfully at the luxury hotel on the hill.

"Something is wrong. Look around us, what's going on? Bilderberg is just the icing on the cake."

Controversy says he has a message for the Bilderberg VIPs - for the likes of Henry Kissinger, General David Petraeus, George Osborne, Timothy Geithner et al. But he's not quite sure yet what it is.

Which is sort of controversial.

More on This Story
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22806891

[marektysis]

Bilderberg Group: David Cameron attends 'private' talks
David Cameron will attend the secretive Bilderberg Group meeting of some of the world's most powerful politicians and businessmen, Downing Street has announced.

David Cameron is attending the Bilderberg Group meeting but will not disclose details of his secret talks. Photo: AP
By Tim Ross, Political Correspondent12:21PM BST 07 Jun 2013154 Comments
The three-day event is being held at a luxury hotel near Watford and the Prime Minister has been invited as head of the host nation’s government, a Number 10 spokesman said.
However, despite promising to lead “the most open and transparent government ever”, Mr Cameron will not disclose any details of who he meets on Friday, or what he discusses while he is there.
It is believed to be the first time that Mr Cameron has attended the controversial annual gathering of 140 delegates from 21 countries.
A spokesman for the Prime Minister said: “It is a private meeting. He has been invited as head of the government here.
“The Prime Minister views this as an opportunity to discuss important issues with senior ministers, business people and academics. He will be discussing a range of issues. There won’t be a read-out.”

Mr Cameron has been committed to promoting “transparency” in government and has made available more information and details of meetings between ministers and external organisations, the spokesman said.
"The Prime Minister has always been clear about the importance of transparency. The Prime Minister has meetings with key ministers from other countries and with business people as part of his job but that doesn't mean that he's not determined to lead the most transparent government," the spokesman said.
However, Downing Street is expected to face calls to explain how the meeting can be regarded as “private” when Mr Cameron is attending in his official capacity as Prime Minister.
Calls for more details to be given of Mr Cameron’s contacts at the event are likely to intensify as the guest list also includes George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Kenneth Clarke, another senior Tory minister.
The meetings began in 1954 as a forum to bring together the leaders of Western Europe and the United States to address the threat from the Soviet Union.
All discussions are held on strictly confidential terms and security at the meetings is notoriously tight.
Previous gatherings have attracted angry demonstrations and protesters. Downing St declined to give details over whether taxpayers would pay the bill for policing the meeting in Hertfordshire.
Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor, is also attending, along with Lord Mandelson, the former Labour Cabinet minister.
Other guests include Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, and Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/10105856/Bilderberg-Group-David-Cameron-attends-private-talks.html

[marektysis]

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2013/06/07/Bilderberg-Group-meeting-draws-protesters-to-London-suburb/UPI-12601370581380/