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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsForget the G7 summit – Bilderberg is where the big guns go
Last edited Wed Jun 10, 2015, 05:44 PM - Edit history (1)
Covering issues from Europe to terrorism and IT, the lesser known Bilderberg policy conference includes prime ministers, CEOs from banks, airlines, oil and the arms industry, and even George Osborne
Angelika Warmuth/EPA
As one summit closes, another opens. Thursday sees the start of the influential Bilderberg policy conference, which this year is being held in Austria, just 16 miles south of the G7 summit, and in a similarly inaccessible luxury alpine resort. The participant list for the conference has just been released by the organisation, and some big names leap off the page.
No fewer than three serving European prime ministers will be attending, from the Netherlands, Finland and Belgium. They will be discussing European strategy with the head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, and the president of Austria, Heinz Fischer. Two European finance ministers are on the list: one Dutch, the other George Osborne. The UK chancellor is a regular attendee of the Bilderberg summit, and this year he will be showing off his post-election glow. Unlike that other Bilderberg regular, Ed Balls, who is being invited back despite having by some considerable distance the weakest job title on the list: former shadow chancellor of the exchequer.
Bilderberg 2014: George Osborne and the man at the centre of everything
Europes hottest financial potato, Greece, is on the conference agenda, and its good to know Benoît Coeuré, a member of the executive board of the European Central Bank, will be there to discuss it in strictest privacy with interested parties, such as the heads of Deutsche Bank, Lazard, Banco Santander and HSBC.
READ MORE: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/08/bilderberg-summit-forget-the-g7?CMP=fb_us
ghostsinthemachine
(3,569 posts)Will Hillary make an appearance? Bill did.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)The following, written before 1999, details the history and hidden operations of the Class War:
The Origins of the Overclass
By Steve Kangas
Liberal Resurgent
The wealthy have always used many methods to accumulate wealth, but it was not until the mid-1970s that these methods coalesced into a superbly organized, cohesive and efficient machine. After 1975, it became greater than the sum of its parts, a smooth flowing organization of advocacy groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations, and PR firms that hurtled the richest 1 percent into the stratosphere.
The origins of this machine, interestingly enough, can be traced back to the CIA. This is not to say the machine is a formal CIA operation, complete with code name and signed documents. (Although such evidence may yet surface and previously unthinkable domestic operations such as MK-ULTRA, CHAOS and MOCKINGBIRD show this to be a distinct possibility.) But what we do know already indicts the CIA strongly enough. Its principle creators were Irving Kristol, Paul Weyrich, William Simon, Richard Mellon Scaife, Frank Shakespeare, William F. Buckley, Jr., the Rockefeller family, and more. Almost all the machine's creators had CIA backgrounds.
During the 1970s, these men would take the propaganda and operational techniques they had learned in the Cold War and apply them to the Class War. Therefore it is no surprise that the American version of the machine bears an uncanny resemblance to the foreign versions designed to fight communism. The CIA's expert and comprehensive organization of the business class would succeed beyond their wildest dreams. In 1975, the richest 1 percent owned 22 percent of Americas wealth. By 1992, they would nearly double that, to 42 percent the highest level of inequality in the 20th century.
How did this alliance start? The CIA has always recruited the nations elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street brokers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars. During World War II, General "Wild Bill" Donovan became chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Donovan recruited so exclusively from the nations rich and powerful that members eventually came to joke that "OSS" stood for "Oh, so social!"
Another early elite was Allen Dulles, who served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles was a senior partner at the Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Rockefeller empire and other mammoth trusts, corporations and cartels. He was also a board member of the J. Henry Schroeder Bank, with offices in Wall Street, London, Zurich and Hamburg. His financial interests across the world would become a conflict of interest when he became head of the CIA. Like Donavan, he would recruit exclusively from societys elite.
CONTINUED...
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-overclass.html
What we've learned since then only reinforces Kangas: The 1-percent (especially the the 1-percent of 1-percent) use their ever-increasing wealth to condition, command and control the 99-percent of We the People.
PS: Steve Kangas died of a gunshot wound to the head outside the offices of Richard Mellon Scaife in Pittsburgh in 1999. His death was ruled a suicide. Tragic, especially considering that he was connecting the dots between the rabid right and the assault on President Clinton, mass media, Big Finance, etc. online and in a big way.
Original DU Thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3807643
Thank for bringing this report from the Guardian up, ghostsinthemachine. These times are more dangerous for democracy than World War II. Then, we had FDR and the New Deal. Today, we got TPP and austerity.
ghostsinthemachine
(3,569 posts)Times right now are very dangerous. Very dangerous.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)In the last six years he has accepted free items valued at $42,200, the most on the high court.
December 31, 2004|Richard A. Serrano and David G. Savage | Times Staff Writers
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted tens of thousands of dollars worth of gifts since joining the high court, including $1,200 worth of tires, valuable historical items and a $5,000 personal check to help pay a relative's education expenses.
SNIP...
He also took a free trip aboard a private jet to the exclusive Bohemian Grove club in Northern California -- arranged by a wealthy Texas real estate investor who helped run an advocacy group that filed briefs with the Supreme Court.
Those and other gifts were disclosed by Thomas under a 1978 federal ethics law that requires high-ranking government officials, including the nine Supreme Court justices, to file a report each year that lists gifts, money and other items they have received.
Thomas has reported accepting much more valuable gifts than his Supreme Court colleagues over the last six years, according to their disclosure forms on file at the court.
CONTINUED...
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/dec/31/nation/na-gifts31
Wanna bet that's just the tip of the 5-4 iceberg, those gifts?
Baclava
(12,047 posts)The key topics for discussion this year include:
Artificial Intelligence
Cybersecurity
Chemical Weapons Threats
Current Economic Issues
European Strategy
Globalisation
Greece
Iran
Middle East
NATO
Russia
Terrorism
United Kingdom
USA
US Elections
http://bilderbergmeetings.org/meeting_2015.html
ghostsinthemachine
(3,569 posts)Something wrong with the picture......
MineralMan
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