WHO CONTROLS THE WORLD

Bilderberg Group

The Bilderberg Group is a group of influential people, mostly politicians and business people, whose existence and activities are private, and due to its secretive nature is the subject of numerous conspiracy theories. The group meets annually at five-star resorts throughout the world, normally in Europe, although sometimes in America or Canada . It has an office in Leiden , South Holland .

Although the group has no official name, the "Bilderberg Group" title comes from what is generally recognized to be the location of its first official meeting in 1954: the Bilderberg Hotel in Arnhem , the Netherlands .

The group has been depicted as an international cabal of the influental and the affluent: politicians, financiers, and media and business moguls; the elite of the elite. Some believe that they have dictated national policies, rigged (or outright stolen) national elections, caused wars, recessions, and ordered murders and ousters of world leaders such as American president John F. Kennedy and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The original intention of the Bilderberg group was to further the understanding between Western Europe and North America through informal meetings between powerful individuals. Each year, a "steering committee" devises a selected invitation list with a maximum of 100 names; invitations are only extended to residents of Europe and North America . The location of their annual meeting is not secret, and the agenda and list of participants are openly available to the public, but the topics of the meetings are kept secret: they are not published, and attendees pledge not to divulge what was discussed. The official stance of the Bilderberg Group is that their secrecy prevents these individuals' discussions from being manipulated by the media. However, social class-related exclusivity is considered by many to be the primary motive. Security is managed by military intelligence.

Perspectives on the nature of the group
The stated reason for the group's secrecy is that it enables people to speak freely without the need to carefully consider how every word might be interpreted by the mass media. However, as many of the attendees have gained their power through the democratic process, it is debatable if it is morally desirable for them to exercise their power off the record. This secrecy has led conspiracy researchers to claim that the meetings have a sinister purpose; that they are merely a front for the Round table groups, or even a semi-public front for the Illuminati or assorted other secret societies.


The Bilderberg Group has been described as:
· A "discussion group" of politicians, media moguls, academics and business leaders

· An exclusive international lobby of the power elite of Europe and North America , capable of influencing international policy

· A capitalist secret society operating entirely through self-interest.
Attendees of Bilderberg include central bankers, defense experts, mass media press barons, government ministers, prime ministers, royalty, international financiers and political leaders from Europe and America.Some of the Western world's leading financiers and foreign policy strategists attend Bilderberg. Donald Rumsfeld is an active Bilderberger - so is Peter Sutherland from Ireland, a former European Union commissioner and chairman of Goldman Sachs and of BP. Rumsfeld and Sutherland served together in 2000 on the board of the Swedish/Swiss energy company ABB. Former US Deputy Defense Secretary and current World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz is also a member, as is Roger Boothe, Jr. The group's current chairman is Étienne Davignon, the Belgian politician and businessman.

Wikipedia
In the News ....

2005
Inside the secretive Bilderberg Group BBC - October 7, 2005
Bilderberg's head Viscount Davignon plays down the group's role in setting the international agenda.

How much influence do private networks of the rich and powerful have on government policies and international relations? One group, the Bilderberg, has often attracted speculation that it forms a shadowy global government. As part of the BBC's Who Runs Your World? series, Bill Hayton tries to find out more.

Every year since 1954, a small network of rich and powerful people have held a discussion meeting about the state of the trans-Atlantic alliance and the problems facing Europe and the US .

Organised by a steering committee of two people from each of about 18 countries, the Bilderberg Group (named after the Dutch hotel in which it held its first meeting) brings together about 120 leading business people and politicians.

At this year's meeting in Germany , the audience included the heads of the World Bank and European Central Bank, Chairmen or Chief Executives from Nokia, BP, Unilever, DaimlerChrysler and Pepsi - among other multi-national corporations, editors from five major newspapers, members of parliament, ministers, European commissioners, the crown prince of Belgium and the queen of the Netherlands .

"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," Viscount Davignon says.

"Bilderberg does not try to reach conclusions - it does not try to say 'what we should do'. Everyone goes away with their own feeling and that allows the debate to be completely open, quite frank - and to see what the differences are.

"Business influences society and politics influences society - that's purely common sense. It's not that business contests the right of democratically-elected leaders to lead".

For Bilderberg's critics the fact that there is almost no publicity about the annual meetings is proof that they are up to no good. Jim Tucker, editor of a right-wing newspaper, the American Free Press for example, alleges they organise wars and elect and depose political leaders. He describes the group as simply 'evil'. So where does the truth lie?

Professor Kees van der Pijl of Sussex University in Britain says such private networks of corporate and political leaders play an informal but crucial role in the modern world.

"There need to be places where these people can think about the main challenges ahead, co-ordinate where policies should be going, and find out where there could be a consensus."
'Common sense'

Will Hutton, an economic analyst and former newspaper editor who attended a Bilderberg meeting in 1997, says people take part in these networks in order to influence the way the world works, to create what he calls "the international common sense" about policy.
"On every issue that might influence your business you will hear at 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," he says.

And that "common sense" is one which supports the interests of Bilderberg's main participants - in particular free trade. Viscount Davignon says that at the annual meetings, "automatically around the table you have internationalists" - people who support the work of the World Trade Organisation, trans-Atlantic co-operation and European integration.
Bilderberg meetings often feature future political leaders shortly before they become household names. Bill Clinton went in 1991 while still governor of Arkansas , Tony Blair was there two years later while still an opposition MP. All the recent presidents of the European Commission attended Bilderberg meetings before they were appointed.

'Secret Government'
This has led to accusations that the group pushes its favoured politicians into high office. But Viscount Davignon says his steering committee are simply excellent talent spotters. The 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."

"It's not a total accident, but it's not a forecast and if they go places it's not because of Bilderberg, it's because of themselves," Viscount Davignon says.

But its critics say Bilderberg's selection process gives an extra boost to aspiring politicians whose views are friendly to big business. None of this, however, is easy to prove - or disprove.
Observers like Will Hutton argue that such private networks have both good and bad sides. They are unaccountable to voters but, at the same time, they do keep the international system functioning. And there are limits to their power - a point which Bilderberg chairman was keen to stress, "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."

Informal and private networks like Bilderberg have helped to oil the wheels of global politics and globalisation for the past half a century. In the eyes of critics they have undermined democracy, but their supporters believe they are crucial to modern democracy's success. And so long as business and politics remain mutually dependent, they will continue to thrive.

2004
The Ultimate Conspiracry - 50th anniversary
June 3, 2004 - BBC
The Bilderberg group, an elite coterie of Western thinkers and power-brokers, has been accused of fixing the fate of the world behind closed doors. As the organisation marks its 50th anniversary, rumours are more rife than ever.

Given its reputation as perhaps the most powerful organisation in the world, the Bilderberg group doesn't go a bundle on its switchboard operations.

Telephone inquiries are met with an impersonal female voice - the Dutch equivalent of the BT Callminder woman - reciting back the number and inviting callers to "leave a message after the tone".

Anyone who accidentally dialled the number would probably think they had stumbled on just another residential answer machine.

Leiden in Holland, the inauspicious base of the Bilderberg group
But behind this ultra-modest façade lies one of the most controversial and hotly-debated alliances of our times.

On Thursday the Bilderberg group marks its 50th anniversary with the start of its yearly meeting.
For four days some of the West's chief political movers, business leaders, bankers, industrialists and strategic thinkers will hunker down in a five-star hotel in northern Italy to talk about global issues.

What sets Bilderberg apart from other high-powered get-togethers, such as the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), is its mystique.

Not a word of what is said at Bilderberg meetings can be breathed outside. No reporters are invited in and while confidential minutes of meetings are taken, names are not noted.

The shadowy aura extends further - the anonymous answerphone message, for example; the fact that conference venues are kept secret. The group, which includes luminaries such as Henry Kissinger and former UK chancellor Kenneth Clarke, does not even have a website.

In the void created by such aloofness, an extraordinary conspiracy theory has grown up around the group that alleges the fate of the world is largely decided by Bilderberg.

In Yugoslavia , leading Serbs have blamed Bilderberg for triggering the war which led to the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic. The Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the London nail-bomber David Copeland and Osama Bin Laden are all said to have bought into the theory that Bilderberg pulls the strings with which national governments dance.

And while hardline right-wingers and libertarians accuse Bilderberg of being a liberal Zionist plot, leftists such as activist Tony Gosling are equally critical.
A former journalist, Mr Gosling runs a campaign against the group from his home in Bristol , UK .

"My main problem is the secrecy. When so many people with so much power get together in one place I think we are owed an explanation of what is going on.

Mr Gosling seizes on a quote from Will Hutton, the British economist and a former Bilderberg delegate, who likened it to the annual WEF gathering where "the consensus established is the backdrop against which policy is made worldwide".

"One of the first places I heard about the determination of US forces to attack Iraq was from leaks that came out of the 2002 Bilderberg meeting," says Mr Gosling.

But "privacy, rather than secrecy", is key to such a meeting says Financial Times journalist Martin Wolf, who has been invited several times in a non-reporting role.

"The idea that such meetings cannot be held in private is fundamentally totalitarian," he says. "It's not an executive body; no decisions are taken there."

As an up-and-coming statesmen in the 1950s, Denis Healey, who went on to become a Labour chancellor, was one of the four founding members of Bilderberg (which was named after the hotel in Holland where the first meeting was held in 1954).

His response to claims that Bilderberg exerts a shadowy hand on the global tiller is met with characteristic bluntness. "Crap!"

"There's absolutely nothing in it. We never sought to reach a consensus on the big issues at Bilderberg. It's simply a place for discussion," says Lord Healey.

Formed in the spirit of post-war trans-Atlantic co-operation, the idea behind Bilderberg was that future wars could be prevented by bringing power-brokers together in an informal setting away from prying eyes.

"Bilderberg is the most useful international group I ever attended. The confidentiality enabled people to speak honestly without fear of repercussions.

"In my experience the most useful meetings are those when one is free to speak openly and honestly. It's not unusual at all. Cabinet meetings in all countries are held behind closed doors and the minutes are not published."

That activists have seized on Bilderberg is no surprise to Alasdair Spark, an expert in conspiracy theories.

"The idea that a shadowy clique is running the world is nothing new. For hundreds of years people have believed the world is governed by a cabal of Jews.

"Shouldn't we expect that the rich and powerful organize things in their own interests. It's called capitalism."


Who runs the world and why you need to know immediately, By Carolyn Baker, Online Journal, Nov 21, 2007.

Book Review

The True Story of the Bilderberg Group
By Daniel Estulin
TrineDay
ISBN-10: 0977795349

It is difficult to re-educate people who have been brought up on nationalism to the idea of relinquishing part of their sovereignty to a supra-national body. --Bilderberg Group founder, Prince Bernhard

As a rhetorical question, can someone please explain to me how it is that progressive liberals such as John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, as well as do-gooder humanitarians with multiple social projects ongoing such as the Rockefellers and every Royal House in Europe, can perennially attend Bilderberg meetings apparently knowing that the final objective of this despicable group of hoodlums is a fascist One World Empire? --Daniel Estulin (P.318)

Daniel Estulin is a Madrid-based journalist and an investigative reporter who took on the daunting and dangerous task of researching the Bildeberg Group, and who offers his findings in The True Story Of The Bilderberg Group, recently published by TrineDay.

Equally intriguing as his harrowing tales of being followed and nearly killed on a couple of occasions while working on the book, is the manner in which Estulin connects the dots between the Bilderberg Group, world events, notable politicians and corporate tycoons and the two other secretive monsters of the ruling elite, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (TC). The project lasted 15 years and was motivated by Estulin's curiosity about how it is that the mainstream media have never covered in depth the meetings of the Bilderberg Group whose combined wealth exceeds the combined wealth of all U.S. citizens.

What Estulin's book makes clear is that the group, along with the CFR and TC, has become a shadow government whose top priority is to erase the sovereignty of all nation-states and supplant them with global corporate control of their economies under the surveillance of "an electronic global police state." [xv]

The author emphasizes that not all members of the group are "bad" people, and he implies that membership is structured somewhat like concentric circles in a target scheme with an inner core and various levels of relationship between that core and the outer circles of membership. Almost every famous player in politics and finance in the world is a member of one of the three organizations above mentioned, and their political affiliations range from liberal to conservative, for example, George W. Bush, George Soros, Gerald Ford, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter.

Of this private club, Estulin says: "This parallel world remains unseen in the daily struggles of most of humanity, but, believe me, it is there: a cesspool of duplicity and lies and double-speak and innuendo and blackmail and bribery. It is a surreal world of double and triple agents, of changing loyalties, of professional psychotic assassins, brainwashed black ops agents, soldiers of fortune and mercenaries, whose primary sources of income are the dirtiest and most despicable government-run subversive missions -- the kind that can never be exposed." [1]


This world, according to Estulin, is so perverse and evil that "it has left an indelible mark on my soul". [16] How not? Because the Bilderberg Group and its two other triplets, the CFR and the TC have set about to loot the entire planet. Their members run the central banks of the world and are poised to control discount rates, money-supply, interest rates, gold prices, and which countries receive or do not receive loans. Membership is by invitation only, many of the earliest members being handpicked, not from right-wing groups but from among none other than the Fabian Socialists who ultimately supported global government."

Another chilling quote Estulin includes is from William Shannon: "The Bilderbergers are searching for the age of post-nationalism: when we won't have countries, but rather regions of the Earth surrounded by universal values. That is to say, a global economy; one world government (selected rather than elected) and a universal religion.

To assure themselves of reaching these objectives, the Bilderbergers focus on a ‘greater technical approach' and less awareness on behalf of the general public."

The Bilderbergbaptism of Bill Clinton

In 1991 Bill Clinton attended the Bilderberg Conference in Baden-Baden, Germany, where Estulin asserts that he was "anointed" to the U.S. presidency, and shortly thereafter he took an unexpected, unannounced trip to Moscow. It appears, says Estulin, that he was sent there to get his KGB student-era, anti-Vietnam war files "buried" before he announced his candidacy for president which happened some two-and-a-half months later.

Today, Clinton is a member of all three groups: Bilderberg, CFR, and TC. Hillary Clinton is a member of the Bilderberg Group.

Estulin points out that "almost all of the presidential candidates for both parties have belonged to at least one of these organizations, many of the U.S. congressmen and senators, most major policy-making positions, especially in the field of foreign relations, much of the press, most of the leadership of the CIA, FBI, IRS, and many of the remaining governmental organizations in Washington. CFR members occupy nearly all White House cabinet positions."(80) When one considers that most prominent members of mainstream media are also members of what Edith Kermit Roosevelt, granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt called "this legitimate Mafia", how can we assert that Americans obtain their news from independent sources?

For example, The News Hour with Jim Leher is the cornerstone of PBS's programming. Leher is a CFR member, and when one examines the funding of the news hour by Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), whose chairman. Dwayne Andreas. was a member of the Trilateral Commission; Pepsico, whose CEO, Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi, is a Bilderberger and TC Executive Committee member; and Smith Barney which is interlocked with Citigroup, a global financial services company that is a member of the Bilderberg Group, the CFR, and the TC, what kind of "news" should one expect from Leher's News Hour? Consider also that many of the journalists on the News Hour: Paul Gigot, David Gergen, William Kristol, and William Safire are members of one or more of the three groups. [153]

Likewise, when we consider the membership in one or more of these groups of almost every American president since the inception of these organizations, we can no longer pretend that any Democratic or Republican presidential candidate offers the American people an alternative to ruling elite global hegemony.

In fact, Estulin's research reveals that "the Council on Foreign Relations creates and delivers psycho-political operations by manipulating people's reality through a ‘tactic of deception,' placing Council members on both sides of an issue. The deception is complete when the public is led to believe that its own best interests are being served while the CFR policy is being carried out." [117]

And what happens if the "anointed ones" become too autonomous? One chapter in the book, "The Watergate Con-Game", answers that question. In it Estulin suggests that Richard Nixon was set up by the Council on Foreign Relations of which he was a member because of his insubordination and unwillingness to submit to the shadow government. Presumably, Nixon's demise was carefully crafted to demonstrate to subsequent chief executives the price they would pay for disregarding the agenda of those who anointed them.
That was then,this is now

In the book's final pages, Estulin's research waxes increasingly relevant to the present moment in history. He asks: "Why would David Rockefeller and other U.S. Trilateralists, Bilderbergers and the CFR members want to dismantle the industrial might of the United States?" [184] He then launches into a summary of the economic history of the twentieth century and makes one of the most powerful statements of the entire book: "What we have witnessed from this ‘cabal' is the gradual collapsing of the U.S. economy that began in the 1980s." [187]

In case you haven't noticed, this "gradual collapse of the U.S. economy" is no longer gradual, and what Estulin is asserting confirms a great deal of the assertions made by Catherine Austin Fitts that the current housing bubble explosion/credit crunch/mortgage meltdown has its roots in the 1980s. James Howard Kunstler has also recently written an article on his blog, entitled "Shock and Awe," that the great American yard sale has begun. In other words, as an engineered economic meltdown drives hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of businesses and individuals into bankruptcy, key players in the Big Three ruling elite organizations can buy up the train wreck left behind for pennies on the dollar -- a brilliant fast-track strategy for owning the world.

In the final months of 2007, we are witnessing the stupendous success of the Big Three's strategy for planetary economic hegemony as the cacophony of their carefully engineered global economic cataclysm reverberates across America and around the world. It was never about buyers who didn't read the fine print when taking out liar loans. It was always about silver-tongued, ruling elite politicians and central bankers, anointed by the shadow government, who ultimately and skillfully stole and continue to steal governments from people and replace them with transnational corporations.

No one could have said it better than David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, a Bilderberg member and board member of the Council On Foreign Relations in his Memoirs: "Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure-one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."

If you want to know who really runs the world and the lengths to which they will go to establish their globalist hegemony, you must read Estulin's well-documented The True Story of The Bilderberg Group.

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., is the author of Coming out of Fundamentalist Christianity and U.S. U.S. History Uncensored: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You .Her website is www.carolynbaker.org where she may be contacted.