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Who really runs the western world?


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This topic is often associated with conspiracy......the group is real and they do meet every year.  They shape the economy and who rises to the top politically.

GLOBAL POWER PROJECT: MEET THE BILDERBERG GROUP, HIGH PRIESTS OF GLOBALIZATION

WED, 11/19/2014 - BY ANDREW GAVIN MARSHALL
 
 

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This is the first installment in a series examining the activities and individuals behind the Bilderberg Group.

Meet the Bilderberg Group – an annual gathering of 130 of the Western world’s top financial, corporate, political, academic, media, military and policy elites, held every year since 1954.

They meet behind closed doors, at five-star hotels, where participants are encouraged to speak frankly – meaning "off the record" and away from the prying eyes and piercing ears of the public. Some journalists and media executives are invited, but they don’t actually cover the meetings: they simply attend them as guests.

The famous exclusivity and secrecy of the Bilderberg Group, we are told, is designed to encourage frank and open discussions among some of the most influential people in North America and Western Europe. But unlike its portrayal as a place where powerful people simply "talk shop," critics for years have considered the meetings a form of secret world government, and a shadowy cabal.

The truth, as it often is, rests somewhere between these extremes.

Bilderberg is a meeting of the movers and shakers, the managers and policy-makers, the plutocrats, technocrats, financiers and imperialists of the North Atlantic powers. Its original purpose was to provide a forum where Western European elites could meet in private with American officials to encourage the strengthening of the "Atlantic Alliance." The forum has provided the geopolitical and economic framework for behind-the-scenes collaboration and cooperation between the major NATO powers.

Founding members of the group in 1954 included Joseph Retinger, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and David Rockefeller of the United States. Named after the Hotel de Bilderberg in the Netherlands, where the first conference took place, attendees decided to hold a conference annually with locations rotating between Europe and North America. In its early years, much of the funding for the group came from the CIA and American philanthropic foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

These institutions, along with the CIA, other major foundations and the Bilderberg conference itself, were pivotal in the early process of post-WWII European integration, laying the groundwork for what decades later would become the European Union.

In the 1955 meeting of the Bilderberg Group, the topic of “European Unity” was a major discussion point, with attendees articulating the need to eventually create a “common currency” and “a central political authority” in Europe. One American participant reportedly encouraged the European attendees “to be practical and work fast.” Within two years, the Treaty of Rome was signed, establishing the European Economic Community (EEC).

A New York Times article from 1957 noted that the first Bilderberg meeting to take place on U.S. soil represented “an unpublicized backdoor approach to better relations among nations” of NATO, and noted that U.S. State Department officials were “meeting in secret for three days for an unofficial but frank exchange of views.” Among the American participants were former Ambassador to the Soviet Union (and architect of America's "containment" policy) George F. Kennan; World Bank President Eugene R. Black, and Gabriel Hauge, an economic adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The issue of European integration remained important to attendees at Bilderberg, as a Reuters article noted in 1965, when a communiqué was issued confirming that the meeting’s participants “believed that only a united Europe could join the United States in effective direction of the Atlantic alliance.”

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How It Works and Who Is Involved

Bilderberg is run by its Steering Committee of roughly 40 members whose responsibility is to organize the annual meetings and invite guests from their respective countries, bringing the average yearly attendance to roughly 130 people.

Participants and Steering Committee members come from the largest banks, corporations and think tanks; they run media empires, military and intelligence agencies. They include European royalty and representatives from some of the world’s most prominent financial and corporate dynasties, including the Rockefellers of the U.S., the Rothschilds of Europe, the Agnellis of Italy, the Wallenbergs of Sweden, the Desmarais of Canada, and the Koc family of Turkey, among others.

These elites meet together with top foreign and economic policy makers from North American and European nations, as well as up-and-coming politicians being groomed for high office and the heads of major international and regional organizations including NATO, the European Union, IMF, World Bank, WTO and some of the world’s most powerful central banks.

Still, its members and leadership contend that there is nothing the public needs to worry about when all these people get together in secret meetings to discuss the major geopolitical and economic issues of the day. Etienne Davignon, one of the chief architects of European integration in recent decades, has been a long-time Bilderberg member and was, until recently, the chairman of the steering committee. In 2005, Davignon was quoted by the Financial Times saying that the meeting is “not a capitalist plot to run the world... If we really believed we were running the world, we would immediately resign in complete despair.” In 2009, Davignon acknowledgedthat the formation of the euro was debated and promoted in annual Bilderberg meetings.

A decade ago, The New York Times wrote that the guest list of Bilderberg meetings “would more or less overlap with the ‘Wanted’ posters of anti-globalization protesters,” noting that a former participant, Will Hutton, once referred to the Bilderberg members and participants as the “high priests of globalization.”

More recently, a 2013 article from the Daily Telegraph asserted that while many members contend the group “is still merely a debating society,” interviews with past guests and steering committee members referred to the conference as among “the most important events they ever went to,” where “the discussions that took place decisively shaped modern Europe.”

Referring to the group as “a club for life’s winners,” the article noted that former steering committee member Denis Healey said he debated the Vietnam War with Henry Kissinger, and that the group brought “the architects of the European integration... together for open-ended discussions with bankers and economists about how the European monetary system might work.” Healey was quoted saying: “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... People could talk very freely, much more freely than they would at home.”

Other former participants noted that it was at Bilderberg meetings where they first heard of the intentions of the West Germans to unify Germany, and where British policymakers convinced other nations in attendance to apply sanctions on Argentina during the Falklands War. As Denis Healey explained: “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... Bilderberg was the most useful of the lot.”

Indeed, in a June 1974 Argus-Press article, the then-Chairman of Bilderberg, and one of its founding members, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, explained that “the purpose of the conference... is that eminent persons in every field get the opportunity to speak freely without being hindered by the knowledge that their words and ideas will be analyzed, commented upon and eventually criticized in the press.”

Gerald Ford, who attended two Bilderberg meetings long before becoming vice president and president of the United States, was quoted in 1965 saying: “You don’t really belong to the organization: one gets an invitation from the prince,” referring to Bernhard.

It should be noted, however, that there was one year in which the annual meeting was cancelled – 1976 – due to revelations of corruption involving bribes between the Lockheed military contractor and Prince Bernhard, leading to his resignation as chairman of the group.

In 2005, the BBC quoted then-chairman Etienne Davignon as saying: “I don’t think (we are) a global ruling class because I don’t think a global ruling class exists. I simply think it’s people who have influence interested to speak to other people who have influence... Bilderberg does not try to reach conclusions – it does not try to say ‘what we should do’... Business influences society and politics influence society – that’s purely common sense. It’s not that business contests the right of democratically-elected leaders to lead."

Will Hutton, who attended a 1997 meeting, explained: “On every issue that might influence your business you will hear first-hand the people who are actually making those decisions and you will play a part in helping them to make those decisions and formulating the common sense.”

Former NATO Secretary-General and Bilderberg participant, Willy Claes, said in a 2010 interview with a Belgian radio program, “Well look, it’s not all that secret really. There is an agenda for the day with the most pressing problems the world is confronted with... that is discussed... there is never a vote, no resolutions are being put to paper.” However, he added, “naturally... the rapporteur always tries to draw up a synthesis, and everyone is assumed to make use of these conclusions in the circles where he has influence.”

An anonymous former participant in Bilderberg meetings was quoted by the Financial Times in 2013 saying: “The reason it’s perceived as sinister is because it brings together big international institutions – the IMF, the World Bank and the European Union – with heads of state, royalty and corporate leaders, and they don’t produce a statement at the end of it.”

In 2001, founding member Denis Healey told the Guardian in an interview, “We aren’t secret... We’re private.” Speaking of the meeting’s critics who contend that the member of the conference aim to achieve a type of "global government," Healey told journalist Jon Ronson: “To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair. 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.”

The key issue, however, is that the world which Bilderberg is helping to shape and support is one in which financiers and industrialists are the key beneficiaries – one in which democratically-elected politicians engage with their real constituents behind closed doors, in “private” conversations that have profound and real effects upon policy and thus upon entire populations who are given no such access to public officials.

Elected leaders and policy-makers don't meet in secret with the world’s major financiers and industrialists so they can discuss the best ways to serve the interests of the public, or populations, of their respective nations. They meet to serve their own collective and individual interests. It is not a conspiracy: it is a forum in which leaders from the upper echelons of Western power structures aim to establish consensus on priorities and policies for major political and economic issues.

Bilderberg contributes to directly undermining democracy, while further institutionalizing technocracy – the “rule by experts” – at the national and international level. This series of the Global Power Project aims to examine and further bring to light the activities and individuals behind the Bilderberg Group. Stay tuned for the second installment next week.

Andrew Gavin Marshall is a researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada. He is project manager of The People’s Book Project, chair of the geopolitics division of The Hampton Institute, research director for Occupy.com’s Global Power Project and World of Resistance (WoR) Report, and hosts a weekly podcast show with BoilingFrogsPost.

- See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/global-power-project-meet-bilderberg-group-high-priests-globalization#sthash.LVt5ngrW.dpuf

 

GLOBAL POWER PROJECT: IS THE BILDERBERG GROUP PICKING OUR POLITICIANS?

WED, 11/26/2014 - BY ANDREW GAVIN MARSHALL
 
 4340  13 reddit3  67 
 
 

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This is the second installment in a series examining the little known activities and individuals behind the Bilderberg Group. Read the first part here.

When it comes to the secretive meetings of the world’s financial, corporate, political and technocratic elites at the annual Bilderberg conferences, a common criticism from conspiracy theorists and others is that the group pre-selects major politicians – choosing presidents and prime ministers in private before populations have a chance to vote themselves.

Bilderberg participants contest this framing, suggesting that Bilderberg participants simply invite up-and-coming politicians who appear to have a bright future ahead of them.

The truth is that it’s a bit of both. Bilderberg invites politicians who appear to have an influential future in their respective nations, but their attendance at the meetings (depending on their ability to impress Bilderberg members and participants) can itself have a very significant influence on their political futures. This is because the industrialists, bankers and media moguls in attendance hold significant individual and collective power over the political processes across much of the Western world.

The main ideologies that pervade the group are an undeterred commitment to corporate and financial globalization, support of a Western-led world order, and the advancement and further institutionalization of global governance. Politicians who share similar views are more likely to be invited. As former Bilderberg chairman Etienne Davignon explained, “automatically around the table [at meetings] you have internationalists” who support European integration, the WTO and trans-Atlantic cooperation.

The result: invited politicians who impress the attended members and guests through speeches or contributions to debates are likely to gain the support of some of the world’s most powerful individuals and institutions. This is no absolute guarantee of political success for higher office, but there are numerous examples of politicians whose attendance may have provided supportive – or even pivotal – influence in their reaching higher office.

As Bilderberg's former Steering Committee member Denis Healey explained in an interview with the Guardian, “Bilderberg is a way of bringing together politicians, industrialists, financiers and journalists. Politics should involve people who aren’t politicians. We make a point of getting along younger politicians who are obviously rising, to bring them together with financiers and industrialists who offer them wise words. It increases the chance of having a sensible global policy.”

Of course, the notion of what is “sensible” is clearly biased toward policies that benefit the interests and objectives of financiers and industrialists.

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The Thatcher and Clinton Factors

One good example of this is the rise of Margaret Thatcher. In 1975, when Thatcher became the leader of the opposition in British Parliament, she was invited to that year’s Bilderberg conference. A Financial Times article that year by C. Gordon Tether noted that Thatcher and other British participants “were engaging – in company with a handful of British banking and industrial chiefs – in ‘completely private talks on world problems’ with the top-most brass of the international business community – the super-capitalists.”

The article noted that “if Bilderberg is not a conspiracy, it is conducted in such a way as to give a remarkably good imitation of one.”

Jon Ronson interviewed the member of Bilderberg (who remained anonymous) that had invited Thatcher to the meeting. The former Bilderberg member recalled that Thatcher had sat in silence for the first two days of the meeting, leading to some participants “grumbling” about this lady who “hasn’t said a word.” So the Bilderberg member spoke with Thatcher, and then, “the next day she suddenly stood up and launched into a three-minute Thatcher special... The room was stunned. Here’s something for your conspiracy theorists. As a result of that speech, David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger and the other Americans fell in love with her. They brought her over to America, took her around in limousines, and introduced her to everyone.” Four years later, Thatcher was Prime Minister, and her reign left a legacy of privatizations, neoliberalism and profit for the powerful.

But Thatcher is not the only politician who reached great heights after attending a Bilderberg meeting. Bill Clinton was invited to a 1991 meeting in Germany when he was the Governor of Arkansas. Two years later he would be the U.S. president. Clinton was invited by his friend and Bilderberg Steering Committee member Vernon E. Jordan Jr., a major corporate figure in America who later became known as President Clinton’s “closest confidant.”

As the Washington Post reported in 1998: “Plenty of governors try to make that scene; only Clinton got taken seriously at that meeting, because Vernon Jordan said he was okay.”

Vernon Jordan later recalled that after Bill Clinton won the presidential election and became president, “the steering committee of Bilderberg came to Washington in January, and I called the president up and said ‘Mr. President, they’re here’ – and he came to the Four Seasons hotel, and the Europeans felt like they owned them because they met him when he was totally unknown.”

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Shaping Canada, America, the U.K. and beyond

Among the Canadian politicians who attended Bilderberg meetings before they became prime ministers were Pierre Trudeau, Paul Martin, Jean Chrétien and Stephen Harper. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair had also attendedbefore becoming prime minister of the UK. Virtually all presidents of the European Commission attended Bilderberg meetings before being appointed to office.

In 2004, as John Kerry was running for president against George W. Bush, a potential running mate, John Edwards, was invited to speak at that year’s Bilderberg meeting. According to a report in the New York Times, John Edwards “spoke so well in a debate on American politics... that participants broke Bilderberg rules to clap before the end of the session.” A friend of John Kerry’s who had attended that meeting recalled that the speech by John Edwards “was important... I have no doubt the word got back to Mr. Kerry about how well he did.” Shortly after, Edwards was selected as Kerry’s running mate (though they clearly did not win the more important election that year).

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Bilderberg's Influence on Obama

In fact, it was a Bilderberg member, James A. Johnson, a prominent American corporate executive, who John Kerry tapped for choosing a running mate. And in 2008, that same Johnson “was tasked with spearheading Barack Obama’s 2008 search for a running mate.” As the Financial Times reported in May of 2008, James Johnson was appointed “to head a secret committee to produce a shortlist for [Obama’s] vice-presidential running mate,” though the Obama campaign refused to comment “on this process.”

From June 5 to 8 of 2008, Bilderberg was meeting in Chantilly, Virginia, just as the campaign to win the presidential nomination was heating up between Barack Obama and Hillarious Clinton. As is typical during campaign season, the candidates traveled with a regular entourage of journalists. But on the night of June 5, following a campaign rally in Bristow, Virginia, Obama’s press entourage was “whisked away to Dulles Airport outside of Washington, D.C., to board a flight to Chicago,” as CBS reported.

The press waited on the plane for Obama, who was said to be doing interviews with local reporters. After an hour of waiting, the pilot informed the press that the plane was about to take off, without Obama on board, leading many journalists to feel that they “had all been duped.” Robert Gibbs, Obama’s communications director (and later press secretary) informed the reporters on the plane that Obama decided to stay behind in Washington for “meetings,” though he refused to say whom the meetings were with. Gibbs explained: “It wasn’t an attempt to deceive in any way, it’s just private meetings.” Shortly after the plane landed in Chicago, Gibbs informed the press that Obama had gone to meet with Hillarious Clinton, though provided no details of the meeting or where it took place.

At the time, there was speculation that both Obama and Clinton had gone to attend the Bilderberg meeting taking place nearby. Though never confirmed, the question remains, and two days after the “private meetings,” Hillarious withdrew from the race and Obama became the presidential nominee. Later, as president, Obama gave Clinton the role of Secretary of State.

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In the summer of 2012, John Kerry attended the Bilderberg meeting, and he went on to replace Hillarious Clinton as Obama’s Secretary of State for the second term. Forbes noted that Kerry’s attendance at the Bilderberg meeting may have helped his selection as secretary – also noting that Canadian Mark Carney had attended his first Bilderberg meeting in 2011 when he was Governor of the Bank of Canada, and was invited back in 2012 when he attended alongside British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne. Within a couple months of the meeting, Osborne announced Carney’s appointment as the Governor of the Bank of England – the first time a non-British citizen was appointed to head the institution.

Just prior to being appointed as President of the European Council in 2009, Belgian politician Herman Van Rompuy attended a “secret dinner” of the Bilderberg group’s Steering Committee in order “to promote his candidacy.” He was invited by then-Bilderberg chairman Etienne Davignon, and attending members included other leading industrialists and financiers as well as influential figures like Henry Kissinger. Van Rompuy impressed the audience. He later served as President of the European Council from 2009 to 2014.

Attending Bilderberg is not a guarantee of higher office, but it can often support a rapid rise to state power for politicians who impress the members and guests at the annual meetings. As Etienne Davignon explained, Bilderberg’s Steering Committee “does its best assessment of who are the bright new boys or girls in the beginning phase of their career who would like to get known.”

Andrew Gavin Marshall is a researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada. He is project manager of The People’s Book Project, chair of the geopolitics division of The Hampton Institute, research director for Occupy.com’s Global Power Project and World of Resistance (WoR) Report, and hosts a weekly podcast show with BoilingFrogsPost.

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- See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/global-power-project-bilderberg-group-picking-our-politicians#sthash.492wyL0C.bumknDul.dpuf

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  • 2 weeks later...

This is what we've been trying to explain here forever ! :facepalm1:

And have had to endure the slings n' arrows of naysayers ! <_<

Thank you for bringing in a comprehensive map of this evil for all to witness !

Now ya'll have a better view of what we're ALL up against !

That's why it peeves us to no end to see some here defending it !

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