Photo by Andrew Harnik, Washington Times
The annual Bilderberg Group meeting ended last week in Chantilly, Va., marked by the largest protests since the meetings were first held in 1954. The protests were led by independent radio/web journalist Alex Jones, often accused of wild conspiracy mongering by the same mainstream media (MSM) organs that have never covered, or even mentioned, the Bilderberg confabs once in 58 years.
That's certainly a curiosity, considering that 140 of the world's most powerful movers and shakers convene to do more than play bridge and frolic in the pool, presumably. If there is a conspiracy involved, it seems to be a conspiracy of silence among the MSM to pretend Bilderberg doesn't even exist.
A general rule about conspiracy theories: They flourish when governments and powerful organizations operate in secrecy, breeding speculation in the absence of any public record of what is really going on. Sometimes that speculation is merely paranoid, and sometimes it's closer to the mark. The cure for paranoid conspiracy theories is the disinfectant of sunlight: Open the books, declassify the files (an estimated 50,000 JFK assassination files are still classified), and at least issue some kind of official report or accounting.
The more suspicious perspective on Bilderberg suggests that it, along with other secretive clubs like the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and Royal Institute of International Affairs, is trying to engineer a world government. Whether you believe that could be a good thing, or would be evil incarnate, determines whether you define Bilderberg as a conference or a conspiracy.
The European Union was conceived and nurtured into being largely in Bilderberg meetings and the E.U. is supposedly the foundation for other political consolidations that will overcome old patriotisms and animosities to form some kind of global union beyond the U.N. So far, it doesn't seem to be working very well — the whole E.U. looks ready to implode soon.
The era of market globalization has already led to a diminution of national sovereignty as multinational corporations enforced trade regulations that ran roughshod over national labor, environmental and tariff laws, spurring protests like the 1999 Battle of Seattle against the WTO. If a democratically governed people chooses to prohibit GM (genetically modified) crops in their land, that decision should stand without Monsanto and allies dictating otherwise.
Globalization and multinational corporations have given rise to a new “superclass” of billionaires whose main allegiance is to their network of political and business allies over their country of origin (see David Rothkopf's excellent book, “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making”). Rothkopf concludes: “That doesn't mean we need a world government. What it means is that we need multilateral institutions and mechanisms to ensure that the minimum basic protections we expect in our national homes are not undercut while the world's most powerful pursue their narrow self-interests in the no-country's land of the global marketplace.”
And then we have Carroll Quigley, a former Georgetown University professor and Bill Clinton's “mentor” stating in his suppressed 1966 book “Tragedy and Hope”: “... the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.”
That could certainly be construed as a conspiracy of sorts. The Bilderberg conference does release a list of attendees, notable for a preponderance of bankers. This year's list includes some notorious characters: Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary under Clinton and architect of financial deregulation that led to the current crisis; Peter Orszag, Obama's former OMB director and chief consultant to the Central Bank of Iceland before it went bankrupt; William Lynn, former Deputy Secretary of Defense under Bush when the Pentagon “lost” $2.3 trillion; Anatoly Chubais, privatization czar under Boris Yeltsin who oversaw a $240 billion rape of Russia; several Goldman-Sachs executives from around the world; and last but not least, Richard Perle, “Prince of Darkness” and principle driver of the Iraq invasion; and the guest of honor, war criminal Henry Kissinger (see Christopher Hitchen's “The Trial of Henry Kissinger”).
A strong case could be made that an Interpol SWAT team should have descended on the Marriott hotel in Chantilly and arrested a lot of these people. The bottom line is that while most of the world is now reeling under chronic depression, unemployment, austerity and riots, this superclass of “feudalist” capitalism is growing ever richer and more powerful.
The Marriott hotel staff complained to Alex Jones and others that, despite the fabulous wealth of the attendees, they tipped abysmally or not at all. Perhaps more than any expansive screed, that speaks volumes about the Bilderberg crowd.
Some may say that I'm simply bitter because I wasn't invited to the big pow-wow. OK, it's true, dammit, because I was really looking forward to the “Eyes Wide Shut” orgy with all those hot Illuminati babes! This first appeared in the Grand Junction Free Press.
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