*
<http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/911-billionaire-britain>Billionaire
Britain =>12 May 2014
*
<http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/909-who-really-owns-the-uk>Who
really owns the UK? => 9 May 2014
Bilderberg And Transatlantic Trade: A Lobbying Scandal Waiting To Happen
http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/917-bilderberg-and-transatlantic-trade-a-lobbying-scandal-waiting-to-happen
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=167308#167308
http://www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=19369#19369
Charlie Skelton is a writer on Have I Got News
For You. He will be covering the conference for
the Guardian, and tweeting on
<http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/https://twitter.com/deYook>@deYook.
He has helped put together a guide to the
Bilderberg Conference at
<http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/http://www.bilderbergmeetings.co.uk/>www.bilderbergmeetings.co.uk
Next week, at the Marriott Hotel in Copenhagen,
the annual trade and policy summit held by the
Bilderberg Group will throw open its doors for
three days of top level talks, from May 29th to
June 1st. I say "throw open its doors"... the
doors will remain, as ever, firmly closed to the
public and press. Unless you happen to own a
newspaper, or run a publishing conglomerate, or
be the Executive Chairman of Google, chances are you're not going.
It's remarkable how many bank bosses and
corporate CEOs manage to clear their diary, every
year, for a full three days of conferencing at
Bilderberg. Last year, BP sent its Group Chief
Executive, the Michelin Group sent its CEO, while
HSBC was represented by both the Group Chairman
and the Vice Chairman. From Goldman Sachs came
two board members, including their Vice Chairman.
And Royal Dutch Shell left a skeleton crew back
at headquarters: the company sent its Chairman,
CEO, and CFO - and in case that wasn't enough,
they also sent along a director, Josef Ackermann.
Who's also on the board of Investor AB, the £20
billion asset management company. Which also sent
its CEO and Chairman. You get the picture.
All this corporate brass spending three days
conferencing with media moguls and billionaire
investors wouldn't matter so much, but for the
fact that quite a few of the participants who get
locked away with them are politicians. And senior politicians at that.
In 2013, the Bilderberg conference was
<http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/http://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/participants2013.html>attended
by seven Finance Ministers, three Foreign
Ministers, two deputy Prime Ministers, and two
serving Prime Ministers: Mark Rutte, the PM of
Holland, and our very own David Cameron. With
them: the President of the European Commission,
José Manuel Barroso; EU Commissioner, Viviane
Reding; the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde;
and various other politicians and policymakers.
Now, if you're in charge of HSBC, or Telecom
Italia - or if you're Henry Kravis, running the
famously aggressive $40 billion private equity
firm KKR - then you might well regard such a
luxurious length of private access to this many
senior policymakers as something of a boon. Three
days worth clearing your diary for.
People often wonder what Bilderberg "is". And the
simplest answer is: a gigantic
<http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robert-barrington/the-lobbying-bill-a-misse_b_3638508.html>lobbying
opportunity. A fair few of the corporate
commandants who attend the conference also hold,
besides their various executive roles and
directorships, senior positions in large and
influential trade associations and lobby groups -
groups with snappy names like the European Round
Table of Industrialists, the Foreign Investment
Advisory Council, and the European Financial Services Round Table.
One example: the current chairman of Bilderberg's
Steering Committee, which is the group's
governing body - Henri de Castries. Besides being
the Chairman and CEO of the investment and
insurance giant AXA, and the head of Bilderberg,
he's also a member of the aforementioned European
Financial Services Round Table. And in his spare
time he's on the board of Nestlé. This is
typical: pretty much everyone at Bilderberg wears
a dozen different hats. The queue at the cloakroom after dinner is a nightmare.
One of the best represented lobbying
organisations at Bilderberg is
<http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/http://www.babinc.org/>BritishAmerican
Business (BAB), a transatlantic, big business
advocacy group, which boasts of being able to
exert "regulatory influence" through "high-level
representation to Government on policy issues".
At last year's Bilderberg conference, there were
six members of BAB's International Advisory Board:
* Ian Davis, Chairman, Rolls-Royce
* Robert Dudley, CEO, BP (at time of meeting)
* Douglas J Flint, Group Chairman, HSBC
* John Micklethwait, Editor-in-Chief, the Economist
* Peter Sutherland KPMG, Chairman, Goldman Sachs International
* Peter Voser, CEO, Shell (at time of meeting)
No wonder BAB's Chairman is able to say:
"Access - to the right connections, audiences,
influence and intelligence - is key to business
success. And high-quality access is at the heart
of the business advantage we offer on both sides of the Atlantic."
For lobby groups like BritishAmerican Business,
Bilderberg is Wimbledon, the Champions League and
Christmas rolled into one. It's the Holy Grail of
"access". Never mind having to loiter around a
lobby trying to flag down a passing politician,
this is one lobby the politicians travel to
themselves. Generally on a flight paid for by the taxpayer.
Of course, none of the lobby groups or trade
associations whose members are at Bilderberg are
officially "there". But membership of a lobby
group is not something you take off like a
raincoat at the door of the hotel. Douglas Flint
doesn't magically stop being a member of
BritishAmerican Business's International Advisory
Board when he sits down for breakfast opposite
George Osborne, any more than he stops being the
Group Chairman of HSBC when he's playing late
night billiards with Christine Lagarde.
To see how Bilderberg creates such a perfect
storm of lobbying, it pays to look closer at how
an individual policy might be promoted there. One
of the key
<http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/http://www.babinc.org/policy>policies
currently being pushed by BritishAmerican
Business, for example, is the giant TTIP free
trade deal between the EU and the US - a policy
that chimes with Bilderberg's peculiarly
transatlantic vision. BAB has been playing:
"a leadership role, with government and the
business community, in promoting the prospective
EU-US Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP)."
Of course, BAB is just one of the business lobby
groups currently banging the drum for TTIP. For
example, the European Round Table of
Industrialists (which is well represented at
Bilderberg) is part of the "Business Alliance for
TTIP", the sole aim of which is to "advocate for
the successful conclusion of TTIP".
Bilderberg grants these pro-TTIP advocates
untrammelled access to the very people they're
advocating to: the politicians and trade
negotiators. Present at the 2013 Bilderberg
meeting was Kenneth Clarke, one of the
government's key TTIP negotiators. Not to mention
the seven Finance Ministers, and other assorted
economic policymakers (see Lord Mandelson to your right).
Alongside them was José Manuel Barroso, President
of the European Commission - which is negotiating
TTIP with the US on behalf of the EU and its
Member States. And
<http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/07/david-cameron-attend-bilderberg-group>David
Cameron, who turned up to take part in what
Downing Street described as "a discussion around
domestic and global economic issues."
Cameron, of course, is the UK's representative at
the European Council, which will, when the time
comes, examine the negotiated trade deal and either pass it or reject it.
So, you've got TTIP negotiators, TTIP lobbyists
and TTIP arbiters, locked away together for three
days, with no press oversight. It's a heady mix.
And considering that TTIP was top of the
conference agenda (under the heading "Can the US
and Europe grow faster and create jobs?") it's
hard not to see the conference itself as just
another phase of the notoriously
<http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ttip-how-new-secret-trade-treaty-could-put-worlds-biggest-firms-beyond-government-control-1432405>untransparent
TTIP negotiations.
In all of this, it's pointless looking to the
lobbyists for greater transparency: it's entirely
in their interests to keep the process out of the
public eye. It would be like asking a fox to come
up with ways to improve chicken shed security.
Likewise, there's no particular reason why the
various CEOs and investment fund billionaires at
Bilderberg are going to want the press snooping
around these discussions. They prefer to
glad-hand EU Commissioners and schmooze Prime Ministers behind closed doors.
As for the Bilderberg Group itself, it's a
private organisation, with a 60-year history of
holding intensely private meetings: transparency
doesn't tend to make it onto their agenda. With
so many politicians present, it would be nice to
see some proper minutes of these meetings
published, but that's not going to happen unless
the press and public push for it.
For now, if we want transparency at Bilderberg,
it's going to have to be provided by the
politicians. Luckily, many of them who go to
Bilderberg are avowed champions of
<http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/775-the-start-of-a-qtransparency-revolutionq>transparency.
Like David Cameron (Bilderberg 2008, 2013) who
launched a war on out-of-control lobbying in a
speech back in 2010, when he attacked the
"far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money".
In that
<http://www.transparency.org.uk/news-room/blog/12-blog/http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/lobbying/item/5579-the-next-big-scandal-cameron-s-lobbying-speech>speech,
Cameron described lobbying as "the next big
scandal waiting to happen." At Bilderberg, that
scandal happens every year. This year, it's
happening in Copenhagen, at the Marriott Hotel, from May 29th to June 1st.
See you there!
--
--
Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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