The Bilderberg Group: fact and fantasy

[Twisted Titan]

Nothing to see here ...........just move along


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/7804197/The-Bilderberg-Group-fact-and-fantasy.html

I have just discovered that a shadowy cabal of global luminaries, including Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Prince Charles, Peter Mandelson, Lord Carrington, David Cameron, Queen Beatrix of Holland and the chairman of Barclays Bank, have been plotting to overthrow national governments and form a fascist one-world empire.

Going by the name of the Bilderberg Group, these puppet-masters made and broke the career of Margaret Thatcher, triggered the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic and, this year, are planning to bomb Iran.

Quite a big story, don’t you think? And yet no one here will take me seriously. Perhaps, as representatives of the capitalist media, they’re too busy planning world domination at Bilderberg’s annual conference, which is taking place this weekend at Hotel Dolce in Sitges, one of Spain’s most exclusive (and, incidentally, gayest) resorts. Watch our cryptic crossword for clues; the swallows are flying south for winter.

Dan Brown aside, conspiracy theories don’t come much bigger than this. Here are some “facts� the establishment would have you believe. The Bilderberg Group (named after the Dutch hotel where they first met) was founded in 1954 by Denis Healey, Joseph Retinger, David Rockefeller and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, with the aim of bringing together financiers, industrialists, politicians and opinion formers. Every year around 120 of them meet, by invitation of the steering committee, away from the intrusive eyes of the press. They network, eat, drink, play golf and go home again.

“Bilderberg does not try to reach conclusions,� Viscount Davignon, the chairman, told the BBC in 2005. “It’s not that business contests the right of democratically elected leaders to lead.�

But he would say that, wouldn’t he? And where’s the fun in believing something perfectly logical when you can instead invent lurid theories that this covert liberal / Zionist / fascist (delete as appropriate) empire can trace its string-pulling roots back 800 years to the Venetian Black Nobility?

Part of the lure to conspiracy theorists is that the group wasn’t properly reported in the mainstream media until very recently. This was like a red rag to the bullish Jim Tucker, a former sports journalist on a Washington newspaper, who left his job in 1975 to investigate the Bilderberg Group.

He was able, he claimed, to write an “advance story� of Mrs Thatcher’s downfall. “She had attended one meeting of the Bilderbergs,� he recalled, “but she had nothing to say and she didn’t like it. The Bilderberg boys said they had to get rid of her and they replaced her with a trapeze artist [John Major’s father worked in a circus] from the same party.�

Jon Ronson, an investigative journalist whose books include The Men Who Stare At Goats and Them: Adventures with Extremists, spent a hilarious week with Tucker in 1999 in Portugal attempting to infiltrate a Bilderberg meeting. Tucker, who called a friend in the States every day to announce that he hadn’t been assassinated yet, led Ronson to an English expat journalist, also hot on the trail, who declared: “Maybe my head’s gone, but the Book of Revelation speaks of a one-world order, one financial order, a one-world religion. There’ll be a sense of disorder, of children not respecting their parents, and then a very powerful group will form. So it does all fit together.�

The reality, Ronson discovered, was a little less apocalyptic. After he’d returned home, Healey invited him round for a chat. “Bilderberg is the most useful international group I ever attended,� he told him. “The confidentiality enabled people to speak honestly without fear of repercussions.�

Other members of the group spoke to Ronson on condition of anonymity, furiously denying that they secretly ruled the world. In 2005 Viscount Davignon, a former European Commssioner, gave his interview to the BBC, pointing out that it was entirely natural for people of influence to speak to like-minded people. When George Osborne, now the Chancellor, went last year he registered it in the parliamentary register of members’ interests.

None of this has stopped the loons, though. “Bilderberg has all the ingredients for the kind of shadowy conspiracy people like,� Ronson tells me.

This weekend around a hundred protesters and investigators have gathered in Sitges, creating something of a carnival atmosphere. Tucker is believed to be there. He has written a book, Jim Tucker’s Bilderberg Diary: One Reporter’s 25-year Battle to Shine the Light on the World Shadow Government, the proceeds of which go towards his travel costs.

I can’t get hold of Tucker, but I do get through to Daniel Estulin, author of The True Story of the Bilderberg Group, which has sold 3.5 million copies worldwide (but wasn’t touched by a British publisher).

“How can you call me a conspiracy theorist?� he says. “I was invited to speak to the European Parliament earlier this week.�

I find a YouTube clip of his speech to that other shadowy organisation. Bilderberg’s goal, he claims, is “the creation of a global network of giant cartels, more powerful than any nation on Earth, destined to control the necessities of life of the rest of humanity, obviously from their vantage point, for our own good and in our benefit – the great unwashed as they call us.�

Other activists in Sitges this weekend include Trilever, a group calling for greater transparency, who are staking out positions in the surrounding hills, “avoiding the snipers�, while they try to spot this year’s attendees – thought to include Angela Merkel, Josef Ackermann, CEO of Deutsche Bank, Richard Holbrooke, Barack Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan, and Gustavo A Cisneros Rendiles, a Venezuelan media mogul.

An activist with another organisation, EcoXarxa Montseny, told a reporter: “It’s so frightening that people can’t even believe that it’s real. Some people theorise that they want to kill off half the world; others believe they’re directing the world’s finances. But we’re here to say it is real, it is happening.�

It is difficult to think of anything less real – or indeed less happening. The reality of these conferences appears to boil down to a group of willy-waggling old men comparing their security details and dreaming of past glories. Admittedly, they are efficient talent-spotters, inviting Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton before they were household names (and thereby fuelling further conspiracies). Bilderberg is also credited with helping to influence world opinion during the Falklands War when David Owen gave a barnstorming speech in favour of sanctions.

But surely it is beginning to lose some of its allure now that it is so widely known – a smaller, summer version of Davos. Can an organisation that invited Ed Balls in 2007 seriously be pulling the strings of world power? Last year the Finnish Prime Minister was so pleased to be invited that he put a press release on his website. It’s hardly Smersh, James Bond’s evil nemesis. Last summer’s conference was in Athens, and look what happened to Greece shortly afterwards.

As Viscount Davignon put it: “When people say this is a secret government of the world I say that if we were a secret government of the world, we should be bloody ashamed of ourselves.�

[Twisted Titan]

“When people say this is a secret government of the world I say that if we were a secret government of the world, we should be bloody ashamed of ourselves.�



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl0H1EUQ_38&feature=related

[MNeagle]

Bilderberg 2010: Between the sword and the wall

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/6/5/1275754387609
Policing Bilderberg: beneath the uniforms beat human hearts Photograph: Charlie Skelton for the Guardian


The enormous bald detective in beach shorts took the camera from my wife. "Let me see." He scrolled through the photographs, just taken, of me being detained at the campsite gates. He scrolled past, to see a photo of a limousine convoy, whooshing up the hill to Bilderberg. "I don't like this," he said, and waved a huge, disgruntled hand towards the conference hotel.

"Do you know how much this is costing?" asked Hannah. "Do you think the Spanish economy can afford all this?" Grimly, the enormous bald detective started deleting images of his comrades with his giant thumb. "Your opinion," he growled, "is right."

He handed the camera back to Hannah. "But you've deleted my best shots!" The detective whistled to his comrades, who were busy sniffing a jar of salted olives they had found in my car boot. He had them turn around, facing away from the camera. "Go head," he rumbled. "Take photographs."

What a difference a year makes. Last year in Vouliagmeni when I tried covering the 2009 Bilderberg meeting, I had Greek policemen yelling "No fotografia!" at me at every turn. I was arrested, tailed, harassed, rearrested, yelled at, bundled into squad cars, lied to, intimidated, wrestled with and hounded round Athens like I was John Dillinger.

This year, the police have been deployed in the same extraordinary numbers, but they are smiling, rolling their eyes at the rigmarole; the riot police are giving the thumbs-up to protesters and honking their horns as they come round the "awareness roundabout" at the foot of the hotel.

"The police have been laughing and chatting," says Daniel Turon, a Spanish psycho-sociologist, here in Sitges to psycho-sociologise Bilderberg. "One of them said he had read a book about Bilderberg; another said, 'Yes, we understand.'" The Catalan police, he says, "have a different sensibility" from what you may expect. "They are Catalan. Their minds are independent."

Their minds, perhaps, have been focused by recent pay disputes. Two days ago, the police were on strike in Barcelona: they are facing a pay cut next month, as part of Spain's "austerity measures" (what the IMF calls "fiscal consolidation") – and disgruntlement abounds.

Yesterday, the Spanish newspaper El Público quoted the Catalan police union's estimate, that "the mere deployment of the Mossos d'Esquadra entails costs of €150,000 for each of the four days of the Bilderberg meeting". This union has lodged a formal complaint about the misuse of resources in guarding Bilderberg.

El Público shares the union's concern: "The members of the Bilderberg club have not been elected by the citizens [of this country] in a democratic process, but the costs of the meeting is being met by them."

Ageing Bilderberg sleuth, Jim Tucker, says the Bilderberg group always reimburses the host nation for costs incurred. But if that's the case, the police are simply an army for hire.

Turon is keen to humanise the officers facing him: "Look at the eyes of the police," he says. "Look at the person who is there. They want to be with us."

"Your position is hyper-naive," laughs his friend, one of the organisers of the Spanish protests, DÃÂ*dac S.-Costa. "They are puppets. They are nothing. They are a distraction. They are the cashiers at the supermarket; we need to confront the supermarket itself. This is a systemic problem." DÃÂ*dac is a sociologist.

"We need to use the tools of the system against it. We need a brave judge, a brave lawyer. We need another Garzón" (Baltasar Garzón is the Spanish judge who issued the extradition request for General Pinochet). "We need to use the legal weapons at our disposal; to find a way, as the Spanish say, between the sword and the wall."

Ivan Torres, from Maresme (whom we met yesterday, near his roundabout bed), found himself caught last night between the sword and the wall, up in the hills above the Hotel Dolce Sitges. He was out with Rafa Palacios, the founder of the Stop Secrets Movement, trying to stop some secrets. A spotter on the hotel roof saw them crawling along; minutes later a police helicopter arrived, and officers swarmed the hills to arrest them. The policemen looked at the cameras, looked at the footage, then handed it back undeleted.

Ivan and Rafa were brought before the comisario of the Sitges police. The comisario told them frankly what he thought of them. "We admire you," he said. "We are really sad because we don't want to have a confrontation here." And, like his giant bald underling from earlier, he gestured to the hotel. "I don't like these people. All I want is a smooth operation in Sitges. The people up there," said the comisario, "I really don't like."

Rafa says that on Thursday, as police and activists squared off for the first time and as Rafa took the megaphone, it was this same comisario who stood in front of the cordon. "You have a heart under your badge", cried Rafa, "you have a brain under your hat. You are the ones we will be drinking with after the football, not the ones up the hill!"

Rafa reached out his hands towards the cordon. People who witnessed his speech say this moment defined the subsequent dynamic between the protesters and the police. "You should be protecting us, not them!" Rafa implored. "We are the people. You are the people. You are one of us!"

Rafa says he spoke directly to the comisario when he said: "A time is coming when you may be asked to use violence against us. A time is coming when you will have to choose sides. You will have to decide." And Rafa says he saw tears in the eyes of the comisario.

"I think, my friend, that I touched his heart."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/05/bilderberg-2010-charlie-skelton

[messianicdruid]

For the first time in 50 plus years many of the invited participants to the annual Bilderberg meeting, which opened today in Spain, did not show up partly out of fear of being stormed and overrun by an outraged public and partly because of pressure and outrage which they invariably face from voters upon return from such meetings to their respective countries. That's right attendance is down, noticeably. You know it is bad when Bill Gates puts out false information that he will be attending another meeting, and then tries to sneak into the Bilderberg meeting.

In addition, the elites are split, and fighting among themselves over whether or not to start another world war, which is desperately needed as a cover for the imploding sovereign global debt currencies.

The elites feel compelled to defend the collapsing Euro, even though it is becoming an ever more difficult task as the Euro turns into a gigantic wealth-sucking sponge raveling even their ability to keep pace. Nevertheless the Euro is the elite's show piece currency and a visual demonstration of how to organize a one world government. The loss of the Euro is viewed as, not only as a defeat, but a demonstration of New World Order vulnerability.

The damage done by internet talk radio talk shows is so great that the consensus of opinion is that the elites must, some how, shut them all down. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, in an April, 2010 address to his fellow elites, for the first time in history the world knows what is going on and exactly what the elite is doing.

http://www.gods-kingdom-ministries.org/weblog/WebPosting.cfm?LogID=2117

[keehah]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN9eiicrm8M

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19527

The Bilderberg group will convene in Sitges, Spain, a resort community 30 km from Barcelona, on June 4-7. As usual, the information is supplied by James Tucker and Daniel Estulin who revealed that this year the issues topping the agenda of the club's meeting will be the global recession and the approaches to provoking such economic breakdowns that can help justify the establishment of a full-scale world economic governance.

Intending to prolong the global economic downturn for at least another year, the Bilderberg group hopes to take advantage of the situation to set up a “global ministry of finance� as a part of the UN. Though the decision was actually made at the group's meeting in Greece last year, according to Tucker the plan was torpedoed by US and European “nationalists� (for the Bilderberg group, “nationalists� is a generic term for all nationally-oriented forces espousing national sovereignty and statehood).

All year since the last meeting, representatives of the global executive management have been convincing the public across the world to embrace a “new financial order�. The idea recurred in the statements made by N. Sarkozy, G. Brown, and the freshly elected European Council President H. Van Rompuy, but – against the backdrop of a relatively harmless phase of the crisis - the activity remained limited to psychological conditioning and no practical steps have been taken. As Jacques Attali wrote quite reasonably in his After the Crisis, Europe has no right to demand a reform of the global financial architecture as long as it can't organize the institutions that would meet its own needs.

The debt crisis in Greece that currently puts in jeopardy the entire European financial system provides a pretext for drastic measures, and both the crisis and the measures are vivid illustrations of the strategy that employs chaos to reorder the existing arrangements. The deliberately generated chaos is tightly controlled by financial institutions, major banks, and hedge funds and serves as an efficient mechanism of governance and social restructuring.

The financial attack against Greece promptly evolved into onslaught on Euro and – as it became clear – the developments correlated marginally with the structural shortcomings of the Greek economy. The intensity of the crisis that momentarily posed a threat to the economic and even political integrity of the EU cannot be explained solely by the appetites of faceless financial players. There had to be more serious reasons behind the situation, and to an extent the objectives pursued by those who shaped it can be understood from the statements made by G. Soros. He maintains that the EU owes its current difficulties to the European (especially German) politicians' reluctance to move on, that huge problems await Europe unless it starts developing, and that a kind of a European Monetary Fund helping fight budget deficit must be created. In other words, Europeans are forced to choose between the collapse of the Eurozone and governance centralization.

Jacques Attali laid out a specific centralization plan. It is suggested that the EU countries create their own institutions to monitor the activities of financial operators. It is also proposed that they should set up a European creditor of a new formation that – while not being linked to Europe's central and investment banks or governments - would guarantee assistance to viable local financial institutions, buy into their assets, and extend loans under specific terms. Attali further advocates the formation of a European ministry of finance that would immediately be empowered to hand out loans from the name of the EU, and the creation of a European Budget Fund with a mandate to oversee the budgets of the countries whose cumulative dept totals over 85% of the GDP. He warns that an even severer crisis should be expected otherwise.

Under the US pressure, A. Merkel finally consented to tough measures (purportedly, Sarkozy even threatened that France would revert to national currency in case she held her own), and early last May EU finance and economy ministers signed an agreement on the mechanisms of budgetary stabilization in the Euro zone, which envisaged the establishment of a Euro 60b safety pillow fund to urgently rescue countries battling with their public finances and the allocation of Euro 440b in guaranteed loans. The IMF also pledged Euro 250b in the case of need. The money is meant for sovereign debt bailouts in the Eurozone, a mission which – for the first time in its entire history – the European central bank will also undertake. Steps facilitating financial transactions were announced by central banks across the world including the US Federal Reserve which will urgently inject US dollars into the European Central Bank as well as into British and Swiss banks.

The above can be regarded as the first phase of progress towards centralized European monetary administration. It is unclear so far how exactly the “grand architects� see the world financial governance and what role they plan to give to existing financial institutions like the IMF. The options on the table range from building totally new institutions to – as, for example, suggested by Attali – using the IMF as an authorized supranational regulation center run by a G-24 board.

Importantly, once again we are witnessing the creation of mechanisms of centralized supranational control over national economies, and the crisis acts as a catalyst for a guided fast transition to tighter integration within the EU, which is necessary to build a close-knit Western bloc...

[FunnyMoney]

...

The damage done by internet talk radio talk shows is so great that the consensus of opinion is that the elites must, some how, shut them all down. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, in an April, 2010 address to his fellow elites, for the first time in history the world knows what is going on and exactly what the elite is doing.

http://www.gods-kingdom-ministries.org/weblog/WebPosting.cfm?LogID=2117



Now that the Financial Sense news radio program has Gerald Celente on nearly every other week, they have a point. I believe that shutting down the warning calls is going to be pretty difficult for the elite, without turning much of the globe into something like North Korea.

That said, it doesn't mean that most people can understand it or are paying attention. In addition, TPTB still have firm control over all the mechanisms. Not only will vast numbers of additional "beyond the matrix" thinkers be required, but wresting these control mechansims away from TPTB will be a formidable challenge.

[Quantum]

Some people believe the Bilderbergers or the Trilateralists are "the top." They are NOT "the top."

"The Top" are never seen by us. They give orders to the Bilderbergers, the Trilateralists, the CFRers, and usually directly to government officials.

Who are "The Top"? The same individuals referred to as the "Learned Elders of Zion."