This year’s Bilderberg Meeting is taking place from May 30th – June 2nd 2019 at the Fairmont Montreux Palace in Montreux, Switzerland.
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Democracy dies in darkness
In an unlikely side excursion, [Mike] Pompeo also will swing by an exclusive meeting in Montreux, where royalty, government officials and business executives are gathering to discuss U.S.-European issues in sessions so secretive that participants must vow never to divulge who says what.
This is according to a report published in yesterday’s Washington Post, which continues:
At some point, he will head to the town of Montreux at the foot of the Alps, where the exclusive Bilderberg Meeting will already be underway. A State Department official confirmed Pompeo will attend briefly to make a few remarks and answer questions. 1
The same article under the hush-hush heading, “Pompeo to discuss Iran in Europe and make a side trip to a secretive conference in the Alps”, adds that:
The clandestine nature of the group has led to a raft of conspiracy theories that the group is plotting a new world order. But the group publicly releases a list of participants and the general agenda.
This is true, of course, although curiously US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo does not appear on the (reliably incomplete) list of attendees as anyone who actually bothers to follow the link will immediately realise.
The motto of The Washington Post is “democracy dies in darkness” which obviously better fits the Bilderberg Group itself. Because as the mainstream media wilfully disregards, or else glosses over, or alternatively, as here, pussyfoots its opinions about (to quote again) this “clandestine” and “exclusive meeting… where royalty, government officials and business executives are gathering to discuss U.S.-European issues in sessions so secretive that participants must vow never to divulge who says what”, such a lack of basic journalistic integrity serves only to plunge democracy in greater darkness. In fact, the biggest, blackest joke is that Bilderberg issues any press release at all. Who is it for? Mainstream reporters, including the Washington Post’s own Megan McArdle, are on the inside already and it is certain not a peep will be heard from any of them.
Click here to read the full Washington Post article.
Other “journalists” who will also not be reporting from this year’s Bilderberg are regular attendees John Micklethwait, Editor-in-Chief of Bloomberg LP; Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist; and Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times. Newcomers include David E. Sanger, National Security Correspondent, The New York Times; Isabel Albers, Editorial Director of Belgian business newspaper, De Tijd / L’Echo; Stefano Feltri, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano; Dominique Nora, Managing Editor of weekly news magazine L’Obs; Claire McCaskill, former Senator and current political analyst for MSNBC and NBC News; and Polish news anchor, Jolanta Pienkowska.
Such a tight lid has been kept on preparations that in contrast to last year, and a few earlier occasions, no information regarding dates or location leaked in advance. Even clues to the chosen country have remained an extremely closely guarded secret. News that the conference was booked into the Fairmont Montreux Palace was eventually reported by Swiss news outlet 24 heures2, a publication owned by Tamedia Group whose chairman Pietro Supino is – perhaps unsurprisingly – a participant this year, as he was in 2012 when Bilderberg met in Chantilly, Virginia.
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Who’s who at Montreux
There are a quite number of standout names on this year’s guest list and the one that jumps right off the page is Trump’s son-in-law and Senior Advisor to the President, Jared Kushner. Only those gullible enough to put faith in any billionare man-of-the-people, or the still more deluded QAnon adherents, can fail to join the dots.
Another notable political figure is Stacey Abrams, a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), she is touted to run as Democrat presidential candidate in 2020 3.
Amongst other familiar faces there is Bilderberg grandee and notorious war criminal, Henry Kissinger; co-founder of global investment firm KKR & Co, Henry R. Kravis. Kravis is joined by his right-hand man and former CIA Director, General (rtd) David Petraeus, who is Chairman of KKR Global Institute, and by wife Marie-Josée who happens to sit on the board of Bilderberg and is also President of American Friends of Bilderberg Inc.
Eric Schmidt, Peter Thiel, Michael O’Leary and Alex Karp are back again too, as is Niall Ferguson, to take up seats alongside compadres Tim Garton Ash, Tim Snyder, the King of the Netherlands and the President of Switzerland, Ulrich “Ueli” Maurer!
Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, makes his traditional appearance. There is also Jeremy Fleming, former Deputy Director-General of MI5, and current Director of GCHQ, mixing with Lars Findsen, who is Director of Danish Defence Intelligence Service. Both will no doubt find plenty to share with former Chief of MI6 John Sawers, a regular Bilderberg attendee and member of the Steering Committee as well as Senior Associate Fellow of RUSI.
Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, also makes a return, as does former US Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, the Co-Chairman Emeritus of the CFR. Germany’s Minister of Defence, Ursula von der Leyen is another regular, as is Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte.
This year they are joined by President of the World Economic Forum, Børge Brende; Deputy Secretary-General of OECD, Ulrik Vestergaard Knudsen; and Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO.
Other politicians include:
from Germany, Linda Teuteberg, General Secretary of Free Democratic Party;
from France, Minister of Finance, Bruno Le Maire;
from Spain, Pablo Casado, President of Partido Popular; and Inés Arrimadas, Party Leader of Ciudadanos;
from Portugal, Mayor of Lisbon, Fernando Medina; and former Prime Minister of Portugal and 11th President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, who is currently the Chairman of Goldman Sachs International;
from Italy, former Prime Minister (Feb 2014 — Dec 2016), Matteo Renzi, who became a member of the Italian Senate in March 2018;
from Sweden, Ulf Kristersson, Leader of the Moderate Party;
from Poland, Mayor of Warsaw, Rafal Trzaskowski; and Radosław Sikorski, former Minister of Foreign Affairs who served in Donald Tusk’s cabinet, and is married to Anne Applebaum;
from the Netherlands, Green Party MP, Kathalijne Buitenweg;
from Turkey, Ahmet Ünal Ceviköz, MP of the Republican People’s Party (CHP);
And finally from UK there is Lords Adonis spending time with Conservative Member of Parliament for Tonbridge and Malling, Tom Tugendhat, who as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee proclaimed the Salisbury attack was “if not an act of war … certainly a warlike act…” 4
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Final notes
Due to this year’s very late announcement, I have not had time to put together anything more than this introductory piece for which I am constrained to focus on the published list of participants and Bilderberg’s other ritual tease that takes the form of its “key topics for discussion” – all of which was uploaded on the official website with only 48 hours to go.
I hope to produce a more extended review of events – something I have done for each and every meeting since I first started writing the blog in 2011 – as and when news trickles out courtesy of a handful of dedicated reporters who are now doorstepping the conference and who can expect to face the usual harassment by private security and the intimidation of the local police. This year is no exception:
As always, I encourage whoever is able to get along to join in with protests, just as I did when, in 2013, Bilderberg hid behind the high and distant fences at Watford.
Charlie Skelton and the late Michael Meacher (Labour MP) at the Bilderberg protests in Watford addressing the crowds on Saturday 8th June 2013:
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1 From an article entitled “Pompeo to discuss Iran in Europe and make a side trip to a secretive conference in the Alps” written by Carol Morello, published in The Washington Post on May 29, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pompeo-to-discuss-iran-in-europe-and-make-a-side-trip-to-a-secretive-conference-in-the-alps/2019/05/29/d6cae72e-821c-11e9-bce7-40b4105f7ca0_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.95fc635cfc8d
No need to try to book a room at the Fairmont Montreux Palace. It is complete. Required by the Bilderberg Conference, a private summit that will bring together 130 high-level participants.
From an article entitled “Montreaux accueille la reunioin secrete de Bilderberg” published by 24 heures. https://www.24heures.ch/economie/montreux-accueille-reunion-secrete-bilderberg/story/14134856
Stacey Abrams announced on Tuesday that she would not run for Senate in 2020, denying Democrats their favored recruit for the race in Georgia. She did not say if she planned to run for president, which she has also been considering doing.
From an article entitled “Stacy Abrams Will Not Run for Senate in 2020, written by Alexander Burns, published in The New York Times on April 30, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/us/politics/stacey-abrams-2020.html
4 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/12/russia-highly-likely-to-be-behind-poisoning-of-spy-says-theresa-may
wall of controversy 