I am very sorry to announce that Bilderberg is back on the globalist schedule. Following a three year time-out since its previous meet up during June 2019 in Montreux, Switzerland – an event I covered in extensive detail over a series of seven articles – and on the back of last month’s reconvened WEF Davos conference, Bilderberg gathered for a 66th year; its newest location, the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington D.C.
Encamped about a mile to the south of the White House, a short ride from CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia and a just hop across the Potomac River from The Pentagon, this more shadowy sister summit to Davos had arrived in the capital with plenty to discuss. And with so much going on around the world, Bilderberg conspicuously extended its regular list of ‘key topics’ from the usual ten to a far more impressive fourteen. Although in truth there are basically just three major issues preoccupying the transatlanticist ruling class and all involve wars of one kind or another.
The schematic above is my reinterpretation of this year’s official Bilderberg agenda in the form of a Venn diagram.
With the faltering collapse of US global hegemony, top of their published list are the interrelated concerns over what to do to halt the re-emergence of competing superpowers Russia and China. I wrote an extended article on the subject of escalation against both China and Russia last December entitled “the coming wars with Russia, China and Iran – why the stakes are raised in the last days of the unipolar order” in which I made the following concluding points:
America’s long-term geostrategic repositioning through the stealth expansion of Nato directly up to the borders of Russia and China is now combined with its ever more bellicose political posturing. Repeatedly under the threat of attack, loose defensive alliances have tightened between Russia, China and Iran, so a coordinated response becomes all the more likely. Should the West or Israel (with US consent) take the decision to declare “pre-emptive” war against any one of the three sovereign powers, the realistic expectation is wider war. Given the probable magnitude of a three-pronged retaliation and the genuine potential for a thermonuclear exchange, the prospect of wars against Russia, China and Iran is therefore absolutely unthinkable.
A century ago a detached and callous ruling class led a largely innocent and unwitting generation into the bloody technological hellhole of no-man’s land to slaughter one another for the glory of king and country and, importantly, for the sake of empire. Back then and ever since, we have rightly talked of “lions led by donkeys”. Astonishingly, the donkeys are back in charge again, except that this time around besides an imbecilic and unprincipled political class, we also have an atrophied antiwar opposition, a moribund fourth estate and an endlessly diverted populous, so the worry is that we may be dealing with donkeys virtually all the way down.
So forgive me when I hammer this point: war is in the air again, and not just any old war. WAR with Russia! WAR with Iran! WAR with China! WAR with all three simultaneously!
I make no apologies for my vulgar use of capitals. We all need to shout about this. What’s the alternative?
When Russia illegally invaded Ukraine in February, the stakes were immediately raised of course. In the months that have followed and with the imposition of tough sanctions we have also seen the schism between the West and the rest of the world widen and widen. Furthermore, as the sanctions predictably backfired, the situation for the West (and Europe especially) looks increasingly shambolic with already raging inflation and the likely prospect of fuel shortages. In fact to ameliorate the self-imposed economic damage being caused by its sanctions regime, Europe has quietly sought ways to circumvent their own blockade – this would be laughable were it not for the seriousness.
During this same period events on the ground have also been going badly for Ukraine as the mainstream media is finally starting to confirm, and in response, we are now seeing moves to switch attention and geostrategic policy away from Russia and back on to China; the White House once again stirring up tensions over its longstanding dispute with Taiwan – something I also addressed in greater depth in December’s post.
We must keep in mind that the US is the most militarised power on Earth. It spends more on “defence” than the next ten nations combined! (Far more than both Russia and China together.) Having very recently pulled an occupying force out of Afghanistan, at the present time it remains deeply embroiled in the Saudi war against Yemen, in Somalia and, by proxy, in aiding Ukraine with weapons supplies, training and intelligence. The US also illegally occupies approximately a third of the oil-rich north-eastern territory of Syria. Worldwide there are at least 750 US military bases occupying zones in over 80 countries: a network spanning the Indian and Pacific Ocean and extending into South Korea, Japan and the Philippines.
In 2016, investigative reporter and independent filmmaker John Pilger released a new documentary entitled The Coming War on China saying “The aim of this film is to break a silence: the United States and China may well be on the road to war, and nuclear war is no longer unthinkable”:
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of 6 August, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, unforgettably. When I returned many years later, it was gone: taken away, ‘disappeared’, a political embarrassment.
Another shadow now looms over all of us. This film, The Coming War on China, is a warning that nuclear war is not only imaginable, but a ‘contingency’, says the Pentagon. The greatest build-up of Nato military forces since the Second World War is under way on the western borders of Russia. On the other side of the world, the rise of China as the world’s second economic power is viewed in Washington as another ‘threat’ to American dominance.
To counter this, in 2011, President Obama announced a ‘pivot to Asia’, which meant that almost two-thirds of all US naval forces would be transferred to Asia and the Pacific, their weapons aimed at China.
Today, some 400 American military bases encircle China with missiles, bombers, warships and nuclear weapons. They form an arc from Australia north through the Pacific to Japan, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. It is, says one US strategist, ‘the perfect noose’.
As the crisis in Ukraine consumes public attention, geopolitical analyst and East Asian specialist Brian Berletic highlights other events unfolding in the background that are potentially leading to a much worse crisis:
*
Meantime, the ruling class has opened up its third front on the domestic populations of the West under the guise of the most open of open ‘conspiracy theories’ – a conspiracy that proudly announces itself on an official WEF website and that brazenly dares to speak its own name: “The Great Reset”.
This blueprint for a hi-tech future that ensures perpetual austerity and mass surveillance is today proselytised and peddled on the basis of ‘fairness’ and ‘sustainability’. As independent researcher and activist Alison McDowell writes:
We’re living in tumultuous times with polarizing political theater and pandemic providing ample cover for the roll out of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. From the World Economic Forum’s outpost at San Francisco’s Presidio, the tentacles of dispossession triggered by Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset” are rapidly encircling the globe.
We are witnessing the culmination of a century of machinations by western social engineers. We see predatory philanthropy using such euphemistic framing as “Living Cities,” “Healthy Cities,” “Resilient Cities,” and “Build Back Better” to package the profoundly anti-human and anti-life initiatives coming out of Davos as aspirational goals for “smart” living.
The oligarch class asks us to play along and overlook the fact that all of this smartness rests on a foundation of continued growth, fossil-fuel expansion, child labor, toxic waste, and space pollution. They demand we overlook the insatiable energy requirements needed to run the augmented reality Internet of Things illusion. That we put out of our minds the existence of vast data centers cooled 24/7 with the water of a thirsty, poisoned world.
They’ve outdone themselves propagandizing youth to cheer on transnational global capital’s plans to implement a final “green” solution. Though my hope is after months of digital alienation people’s spirits will stir in time to derail the intentions of this cruel biocapitalist regime to push us away from our rightful connection to natural systems and one another and into isolated virtual realms. The spell of faux ICT sustainability must be broken.
Alison McDowell’s presentation embedded above was part of an online forum, “Politics In And Out Of Europe”, hosted by Rutgers University’s Center for European Studies on Monday October 26th 2020. There were two panels followed by an hour of discussion. Alison McDowell was the second presenter, and framing remarks and response was provided by Naomi Klein.
Click here to read the same article interspersed with slides from the full presentation and comments published on Alison Hawver McDowell’s official website Wrench in the Gears on October 27th 2020.
*
At Montreux three years ago, China and Russia were already in the Bilderberg crosshairs (listed third and fourth respectively of the ten ‘key topics’), but away from the Alps this year’s backdrop has significantly darkened. From 2019’s rather optimistic tone of “A Stable Strategic Order” and “What Next for Europe?” we move instead to talk of “Geopolitical Realignments”, “Disruption of the Global Financial System” and “NATO Challenges” for which we are impelled to read more straightforwardly “sanctions and war”. This is what happens when empires fall, the Anglo-American oligarchs now desperate to prop up theirs by any means necessary.
As spectacular evidence of the rapid decline in US regional power, this week leaders across Latin America boycotted the ninth Summit of the Americas that was held in Los Angeles. Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said the move was in solidarity with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua who were not invited to attend:
*
Yet arguably the most striking item in this year’s ‘key topics’ is literally tucked away at the very heart of their list: number 7: “Continuity of Government and the Economy”. For those unfamiliar with the term ‘continuity of government’ (COG) I have supplied a description below which is actually the opening paragraph to the current Wikipedia entry on the subject:
Continuity of government (COG) is the principle of establishing defined procedures that allow a government to continue its essential operations in case of a catastrophic event such as nuclear war. [highlight retained]
It seems Bilderberg are surreptitiously warning that the lights are blinking red. And sooner than we might suppose, as the crises start to pile up, and people across the entire world (including the most prosperous regions in Europe and North America) are made desperate for food and energy, drastic contingency measures will need to be instituted. States of emergency. Martial law. Or worse. How else do we translate this most central item on last weekend’s Bilderberg agenda?
***
A council of war
This year’s press release is characteristically terse and last minute (doubtless to keep the crowds at bay) and reliably the corporate media with so many close ties to Bilderberg have mostly failed to mention any of it. In fact this year’s British media cohort included Bilderberg stalwart Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist accompanied by colleague and defence editor, Shashank Joshi as well as Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator at The Financial Times. One reliable exception to the general rule of media silence was maverick journalist Charlie Skelton, and he trotted out a brief report smuggled inside the Guardian. Writing on Saturday [June 4th] as the meeting kicked off, Skelton begins:
Bilderberg is back with a vengeance. After a pandemic gap of two years, the elite global summit is being rebooted in a security-drenched hotel in Washington DC, with a high-powered guest list that includes the heads of Nato, the CIA, GCHQ, the US national security council, two European prime ministers, a healthy sprinkle of tech billionaires, and Henry Kissinger.
Skelton’s tidy overview of this year’s list of participants is worth fleshing out a little bit more. For instance, the two aforementioned European PMs were Mark Rutte of the Netherlands (a perennial Bilderberg attendee) and, more noteworthy, Sanna Marin of Finland. Strictly off-the-record, devoid of public oversight or media scrutiny, Marin was doubtless engaged in frequent discussions with head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg about the terms and conditions for membership (generally about 3% of GDP channelled into weapons procurement). This is how open democracy functions today in Finland as in the rest of the western world.
Skelton writes:
The summit is heaving with experts in Russia and Ukraine, including the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Celeste Wallander, and ex-deputy national security adviser Nadia Schadlow, who has a seat on the elite steering committee of Bilderberg.
The conference room is rigged up with video screens for shy dignitaries to make a virtual attendance, and it’s highly likely that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will Zoom in for a T-shirted contribution to the talks. Just a few days beforehand, Zelenskiy met with a Bilderberg and US intelligence representative Alex Karp, who runs Palantir, the infamous CIA-funded surveillance and data analysis company.
Palantir, which was set up by billionaire Bilderberg insider Peter Thiel, has agreed to give “digital support” to the Ukrainian army, according to a tweet by the country’s deputy prime minister.
The participant list is rife with military advisers, one of which is a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and some hefty cogs from the Washington war machine. Among the heftiest is James Baker, head of the ominous sounding office of net assessment.
Another very high profile politician on the list is Canadian Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, a member of the WEF’s Board of Trustees and a person many see as the power behind the throne of the Trudeau government. The granddaughter of a prominent Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, Freeland was banned by Moscow in 2014. Given her background it isn’t very hard to understand Freeland’s virulent Russophobia or why she was behind the organisation of the so-called Lima Group with its goal of overthrowing Venezuela’s socialist president Nicolas Maduro. At Bilderberg she came to rub elbows with Ukrainian ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova, and the CEO of Naftogaz, the state-owned Ukrainian oil and gas company.
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal spoke with comedian Jimmy Dore about his own attempt to investigate last weekend’s meeting in Washington DC:
*
Within the ranks of this year’s participants there were also three senior politicians from the UK. With Boris Johnson days numbered (as I predicted as far back as December 2020!), and Bilderberg’s prodigious historic record as kingmakers (something I have previously documented – a summary also provided below), could it be that Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, Tom Tugendhat who marks his second appearance at Bilderberg is finally being groomed for higher office? It is also curious that Michael Gove made a Bilderberg debut. Gove memorably stabbed Boris Johnson in the back in a bid for power during the 2016 Tory leadership contest that he eventually lost to Theresa May. So are we about to see him throw his hat into the ring once again?
Less high profile was the attendance of Labour’s David Lammy. Nominally on the left of the party, his Bilderberg appearance coincides with an invitation of the no less outwardly progressive Democrat Senator, Kyrsten Sinema as well as the reappearance of Mary Kay Henry, who by day is the international president of Service Employees International Union.
We must be aware that Bilderberg (and Davos too) functions along cross-party lines, seeking constantly to straddle some kind of dreamed up political ‘centre’. The ruling class is able to do this by being reactionary and progressive at one and the same time: reactionary in promoting their special interests and protecting the status quo, yet genuinely progressive not only by adapting to the times but in quite deliberately shaping our collective future.
For this secondary reason, a burgeoning contingent go there as representatives of the ever-more powerful tech sector; this year’s roll call featured Bilderberg everpresents Eric Schmidt (chairman of Google), Reid Hoffman (co-founder of Inflection AI and partner of Greylock), and Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies), who were also joined by Yann LeCun (vice-president and chief AI scientist at Facebook); Demis Hassabis (CEO and founder of DeepMind) and Kevin Scott (chief technology officer at Microsoft Corporation)
Of course, the crises we face are a direct consequence of comparatively recent policies. The stagflation was caused by economic mismanagement that stems from the bailouts and misguided policy of QE that was used to tackle the 2008 financial collapse and then pursued more vigorously since the lockdowns and additional bailouts following the covid pandemic. However neoliberal failures can actually be traced further back to the deindustrialisation of western societies.
Meanwhile, the looming prospect of energy and (potentially) food shortages is mostly due to the geopolitical boomerang of sanctions that were intended to cause a regime change in Moscow – sanctions that have evidently failed in every regard. Leaving such details aside, however, late-stage capitalism has been in crisis for at least three decades and the plutocrats at Davos and Bilderberg are perfectly well aware of this fact. So the underlying purpose of WEF’s “Great Reset” is to manage the technologically-driven socioeconomic changes, accepting that change is unavoidable, in order to ensure maximal benefit for the corporations and the oligarchs who own them.
Reminding us of the close ties between Bilderberg and Davos, Skelton points to this matter succinctly:
Bilderberg is sometimes dismissed as a talking shop or crazed imagining of conspiracy theorists. But in reality it is a major diplomatic summit, attended this year as ever by extremely senior transatlantic politicians, from the US commerce secretary to the president of the European Council.
Many consider it an older, less flashy Davos, staged annually by the World Economic Fund. The two events have a good bit in common: namely, three WEF trustees at this year’s conference, and Klaus Schwab, the grisly head of Davos, is a former member of Bilderberg’s steering committee. His “Great Reset” looms large over the Washington conference, with “Disruption of the Global Financial System” at the heart of the agenda.
Concluding his article:
[H]olding court at the hotel bar will be Klaus Schwab’s mentor, Henry Kissinger.
Incredibly, Kissinger, 99, has been attending Bilderbergs since 1957.
The prince of realpolitik has been the ideological godfather of Bilderberg for as long as anyone can remember. And he’s recently co-authored a book, The Age of AI, with Bilderberg steering committee member Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google, and this year’s Washington conference is noticeably rammed with AI luminaries, from Facebook’s Yann LeCun to DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis.
Bilderberg knows that however the global realignments play out, and whatever a reset global financial system looks like, the shape of the world will be determined by big tech. And if the endgame is “Continuity of Government”, as the agenda suggests, that continuity will be powered by AI.
Whatever billionaire ends up making the software that runs the world, Bilderberg aims to make damned sure that it has its hand on the mouse.
Click here to read Charlie Skelton’s full article entitled “Bilderberg reconvenes in person after two-year pandemic gap: The Washington conference, a high-level council of war, will be headlined by Jen Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary general” published in the Guardian on June 4th.
*
As a further insight into the comings and goings at this year’s meeting, here is my categorised guide to the more mentionable delegates:
First, the three intelligence chiefs alluded to in Skelton’s article are Jake Sullivan, director of National Security Council; William Burns, director of CIA; and Jeremy Fleming, director of GCHQ. They were joined by the director of France’s external intelligence agency, General Directorate for External Security (DGSE), Bernard Émié; Jen Easterly, the director of US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and seasoned Bilderberger, the former chief of MI6 (2009–2014), John Sawers.
Beside the Prime Ministers of Finland and the Netherlands, the political contingent also included Dutch minister of foreign affairs, Wopke Hoekstra; Belgian minister for energy, Tinne Van der Straeten, alongside Polish MEP, Radoslaw Sikorski, the husband of fellow attendee, Anne Applebaum, member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a rabid neo-con commentator who routinely calls for war on Russia in her columns for the Washington Post and The Atlantic magazine. In addition there were two top level EU representatives: vice-president of European Commission, Margaritis Schinas and president of European Council, Charles Michel, who is Bilderberg returnee – first invited in 2018 when he was Belgian Prime Minister.
Lastly, a mention to a handful of the usual suspects in attendance: Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis and their close associate David Petraeus (chairman of KKR Global Institute); the chairman of Goldman Sachs International, José Manuel Barroso (no globalist shindig runs without top-level representation from ‘the squid’)… oh, and also just along for the craic, the one and only (presumably) King of the Netherlands!
Click here to read the reliably incomplete official list of participants as published on the Bilderberg website.
Correction:
In the original version it was incorrectly stated that the CIA HQ is at Arlington, Virginia when the correct location is a few miles north at Langley, Virginia.
*
List of western leaders previously groomed by Bilderberg:
Gerald Ford attended Bilderberg 1964, 1966 appointed as US President 1974
Margaret Thatcher attended Bilderberg (at least 1975, 1977, 1986) became Prime Minister 1979
Bill Clinton attended Bilderberg 1991 became US President 1993
Tony Blair attended Bilderberg 1993 became Prime Minister 1997
Paul Martin attended Bilderberg 1996 became Prime Minister of Canada 2003
Stephen Harper attended Bilderberg 2003 became Prime Minister of Canada 2006
Angela Merkel attended Bilderberg 2005 became Chancellor of Germany (Nov) 2005
Emmanuel Macron attended Bilderberg 2014 became President 2017 *
Important note:As we approach the period spanning the end of May and beginning of June when Bilderberg meetings are ordinarily scheduled, it should be observed that the home page of the official Bilderberg website currently declares in bold capitals:
THE MEETING 2020 IS POSTPONED.
It does not say for how long.
*
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you
This is the fourth of a sequence of articles based around the ‘key topics’ at last year’s Bilderberg conference discussed here in relation to the prevailing political agenda and placed within the immediate historical context.
This piece focuses on issues relating to the weaponsation of social media and cyber threats:
A schematically enhanced version of last year’s ‘key topics’
*
Trolls R’ Us
JTRIG was in the business of discrediting companies, by passing “confidential information to the press through blogs etc.”, and by posting negative information on internet forums. They could change someone’s social media photos (“can take ‘paranoia’ to a whole new level”, a slide read.) They could use masquerade-type techniques – that is: placing “secret” information on a compromised computer. They could bombard someone’s phone with text messages or calls.
JTRIG also boasted an arsenal of 200 info-weapons, ranging from in-development to fully operational. A tool dubbed “Badger” allowed the mass delivery of email. Another, called “Burlesque”, spoofed SMS messages. “Clean Sweep” would impersonate Facebook wall posts for individuals or entire countries. “Gateway” gave the ability to “artificially increase traffic to a website”. “Underpass” was a way to change the outcome of online polls.
The Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) is a unit attached to Britain’s GCHQ. The summary above is based on a slides leaked by Edward Snowden. It outlines the sorts of disinformation tactics being deployed against targets across the world (including domestic ones) as far back as 2013. Of course, this is long before mainstream reports of Russian troll farms and the consequent calls for active internet censorship to save us from the ever-present threat of “fake news”.
Entitled “Inside the British Army’s secret information warfare machine”, the same Wired report devotes its main attention to the slightly better known UK disinfo operation, the 77th Brigade, that was founded officially in January 2015, although its establishment had in actuality involved the rebranding of a different agency formerly known as the “Security Assistance Group” 2:
Walking through the headquarters of the 77th, the strange new reality of warfare was on display. We’ve all heard a lot about “cyberwarfare” – about how states could attack their enemies through computer networks, damaging their infrastructure or stealing their secrets. But that wasn’t what was going on here. Emerging here in the 77th Brigade was a warfare of storyboards and narratives, videos and social media. An engagement now doesn’t just happen on the battlefield, but also in the media and online. A victory is won as much in the eyes of the watching public as between opposing armies on the battlefield. Warfare in the information age is a warfare over information itself.
A few paragraphs down, we also learn that:
Inside the base of the 77th, everything was in motion. Flooring was being laid, work units installed; desks – empty of possessions – formed neat lines in offices still covered in plastic, tape and sawdust. The unit was formed in a hurry in 2015 from various older parts of the British Army – a Media Operations Group, a Military Stabilisation Support Group, a Psychological Operations Group. It has been rapidly expanding ever since.
In 2014, a year before the 77th was established, a memo entitled “Warfare in the Information Age” flashed across the British military. “We are now in the foothills of the Information Age” the memo announced. It argued that the British Army needed to fight a new kind of war, one that “will have information at its core”. The Army needed to be out on social media, on the internet, and in the press, engaged, as the memo put it, “in the reciprocal, real-time business of being first with the truth, countering the narratives of others, and if necessary manipulating the opinion of thousands concurrently in support of combat operations.” 3
Click here to read the full article in Wired magazine.
In March 2018, James Corbett foreshadowed the Bilderberg group with a broadcast of his own show entitled “The Weaponization of Social Media”:
*
New America
The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left and helped Google shape those debates.
According to a New York Times article from August 2017 entitled “Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant”. The critic in question was a scholar working for New America called Barry Lynn who posted a statement on the think tank’s website applauding European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager for levying a fine of 2.4 billion euros against Google for breaching EU antitrust laws.
“New America financial supporters have no influence or control over the research design, methodology, analysis or findings of New America research projects, nor do they have influence or control over the content of educational programs and communications efforts,” [New America’s executive vice president] Ms. [Tyra] Mariani said. She added that Mr. Lynn’s statement praising the European Union’s sanctions against Google had been temporarily removed from New America’s website because of “an unintentional internal issue” unrelated to Google or Mr. [Eric] Schmidt.
Ms. Mariani and Ms. [Riva] Sciuto [a Google spokeswoman] said Google is continuing to fund New America.
Hours after this article was published online Wednesday morning, Ms. [Anne-Marie] Slaughter announced that the think tank had fired Mr. Lynn on Wednesday for “his repeated refusal to adhere to New America’s standards of openness and institutional collegiality.”
Ms. Slaughter also wrote on Twitter that the article was “false,” but was unable to cite any errors. New America would not make Ms. Slaughter available for an interview. 4
So what? Why am I writing about this hand-in-glove relationship between tech giant Google and the Executive Chairman of its parent company Alphabet Inc., Eric Schmidt, with a think tank formerly known as New America Foundation but since renamed simply New America? The short answer is one man: Peter Warren Singer.
A strategist for America Foundation, P.W. Singer specialises in 21st century warfare. In a few years he has published nothing short of a small library of books on related topics ranging from the post-9/11 rise of the mercenary armies, child soldiers, military robotics, cybersecurity and cyberwarfare. Amongst his most recent publications, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (2018) is already regarded as a seminal work.
If “CyberWar” is about hacking networks, “LikeWar” is about hacking the people on the networks, driving ideas viral through a mix of “likes” and lies. And in these battles for virality, which can generate real world power, generating a sense of authenticity has become an important milestone for any online operation, be it selling an album, a political campaign, or an information warfare operation designed to cause your enemies army to run away (as in the #AllEyesOnISIS operation). 5
From an article by P.W. Singer and co-author Emerson Brooking entitled “What Taylor Swift Teaches Us About Online War” published around the time of the book launch by Defense One in October 2018.
Funnily enough, and only a few months later, Singer was invited to the 2019 Bilderberg gathering in Montreux, when one of the key topics happened to be “The weaponisation of social media”.
I wonder whether he contributed to the discussion at all, and found the time to chew the cud with Bilderberg warhorse and his New America Foundation benefactor and Chairman Emeritus, Eric Schmidt.
The pattern of military hardware silhouettes above welcomes visitors to P.W. Singer’s official website. To judge from his CV, he very probably has the same wallpaper up in his bedroom.
In a recent interview he told Lauren Hepler:
Social media is not just a communication space and a marketplace. It’s also a battle space. You have sides that go back and forth. They use tactics and strategies to achieve their goals. We’ve seen its weaponization to target elections, to target military units. We’ve seen it used to target corporations to try to sabotage their share price, to harm the rollout of a new product. We’ve also seen it have a real and very sad impact on public health.
This is now a matter of life and death. The deliberate spread of misinformation on coronavirus didn’t just shape a laggard Trump administration response, but also shaped individual-level decisions that were irresponsible and dangerous. It cost lives.
Singer calls a response at all levels: individual, governmental and, importantly, corporate:
Then we had coronavirus breakout, and all of them [‘the platform companies’] again implemented things [forms of censorship] that were unthinkable, impossible for them to do just a few months earlier. They should be applauded for doing it, but as they take on more and more of a political role, they are forced to play politics. For example, when someone posts information about a medical treatment that is not effective and maybe even dangerous, they knocked offline certain individuals for doing that, but not others because they’re a little bit too prominent, and if we do, then it will look like we’re playing politics.
Singer’s view is that playing politics is fine, indeed something the tech giants “should be applauded for doing”, however in western democracies, maintaining appearances is of the utmost importance. He continues:
I’m incredibly empathetic toward these companies, because they’re being forced to play this role in the U.S. essentially because we have not updated our election rules. In other nations, the companies have more guidance.
Incredibly empathetic… well, you’re hardly going to bite the hand that feeds you! But what is Singer’s role here? As a former Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute and current Strategist for New America, whose major donors besides Eric and Wendy Schmidt also include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the US State Department, Singer is clearly in the business of shaping US government policy on behalf of corporate interests. In this instance, enjoining the government to issue “guidance” on censorship such that the tech giants are then able to distance themselves from policies deliberately brought in to marginalise dissident voices.
A Washington Post article published in late 2016 entitled “Why Facebook and Google are struggling to purge fake news” made the matter plain:
Facebook, Google and other Web companies have sought to walk a fine line: They don’t want to get into the practice of hiring human editors, which they believe would make them vulnerable to criticisms of partisan bias and stray from their core business of building software. Yet outsiders, as well as some within Silicon Valley, are increasingly clamoring for technology giants to take a more active role in policing the spread of deceptive information.
“It is very difficult for Facebook to say they are not a gatekeeper when they drive such an enormous share of the attention of most news consumers across the world,” said Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. “They need to figure out some editorial mechanism; with their scale comes responsibility.” 6
Singer admits:
A few weeks ago, there was a blast of kind-of-weird content moderation happening. It was because the platform companies had to send many of their people home, and they were using more and more AI that was understandably squirrelly. People were looking for conspiracy, when it was just AI doing its thing. 7
As an esteemed expert in his field Singer must know very well, of course, that this excuse of ‘squirrelly AI’ is actually a red herring. After all, the internet clampdown and “kind-of-weird content moderation” didn’t spring forth inadvertently on the back of the coronavirus lockdown a few weeks ago, but has been incrementally ratcheted up even before the first stirrings of the “Russiagate” hoax four years ago. As I pointed out in an earlier piece, fears of the fabled internet “kill switch” are a distraction, as the volume of dissident voices is being steadily turned down and the internet is slowly shut down by stealth.
*
Project Birmingham: Alabama’s ‘fake news’ false flag
At least 1,100 Russian-language accounts followed Republican U.S. Senate nominee Roy Moore’s Twitter account over the past few days. Moore’s team says they want to know why.
So begins an article in local newspaper the Montgomery Advertiser entitled “Russian invasion? Roy Moore sees spike in Twitter followers from land of Putin”
Caption retained: A screen cap of Republican U.S. Senate nominee Roy Moore’s Twitter followers on Monday, Oct. 16, 2017. Moore’s campaign accounts was followed by thousands of Cyrillic-language accounts in the days prior. The Moore campaign says they have asked Twitter to investigate. (Photo: Twitter)
Beneath a composite image showing just a few examples of this huge army of Russian Twitter bots (see above), the same report into the stormy Alabama 2017 senate race between Republican Roy Moore and rival Democrat Doug Jones continues:
“We had absolutely nothing to do with this,” said Drew Messer, a spokesman for the campaign, on Monday. “We’ve never purchased followers or dummy ads on Twitter. We’ve asked Twitter to look into this.”
The increase helped push Moore’s following on Twitter from about 27,000 accounts on Friday to over 47,000, ahead of Democratic nominee Doug Jones, who has about 39,000 followers on Twitter.
Adding:
The Jones campaign Monday evening said Moore was “embarrassing the people of Alabama with another disgusting and pathetic lie.”
“Maybe Moore should check with Vladimir Putin, who shares his views on depriving people of their civil rights,” the statement said. 8
Although Moore had been leading in the polls by six to eight points, it was finally Democrat Jones who went on to win the election. So had the disclosure of Russian influence during the campaign finally affected the result? Very possibly, although in the fullness of time something more extraordinary was revealed by an internal report. Those thousands of bots meddling in the campaign had not been Russian at all and had no connection whatsoever to Putin. Instead they were part of “an experiment”:
One participant in the Alabama project [aka ‘Project Birmingham’], Jonathon Morgan, is the chief executive of New Knowledge, a small cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia’s social media operations in the 2016 election that was released this week by the Senate Intelligence Committee. […]
The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.
“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.
The same piece includes a number of statements for Morgan, including this explanation:
Mr. Morgan said in an interview that the Russian botnet ruse “does not ring a bell,” adding that others had worked on the effort and had written the report. He said he saw the project as “a small experiment” designed to explore how certain online tactics worked, not to affect the election.
“The research project was intended to help us understand how these kind of campaigns operated,” said Mr. Morgan. “We thought it was useful to work in the context of a real election but design it to have almost no impact.” 9
Click here to read the full New York Times article published in December 2018 entitled “Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate Race Imitated Russian Tactics”.
Jonathan Morgan’s New Knowledge is a Texas-based cybersecurity firm, and behind it we find far larger concerns in the shape of American Engagement Technologies (AET) and for-profit investment management firm Investing In US. This is a trail I shall return to below.
However, it turns out that this phoney Russiagate operation was only part of the information warfare strategy. A separate effort had involved an elaborate fake campaign intended to convince voters of Republican candidate Moore’s supposed plans to reintroduce alcohol prohibition:
The “Dry Alabama” Facebook page, illustrated with stark images of car wrecks and videos of families ruined by drink, had a blunt message: Alcohol is the devil’s work, and the state should ban it entirely.
Along with a companion Twitter feed, the Facebook page appeared to be the work of Baptist teetotalers who supported the Republican, Roy S. Moore, in the 2017 Alabama Senate race. “Pray for Roy Moore,” one tweet exhorted.
In fact, the Dry Alabama campaign, not previously reported, was the stealth creation of progressive Democrats who were out to defeat Mr. Moore — the second such secret effort to be unmasked.
So who was behind these disinformation campaigns? The same NYT piece continues:
The revelations about the first project, run in part by a cybersecurity company called New Knowledge, led Facebook to shut down five accounts that it said had violated its rules, and prompted Senator [Doug] Jones to call for a federal investigation. There is no evidence that Jones encouraged or knew of either of the deceptive social media projects. His spokeswoman, Heather Fluit, said his legal advisers were preparing to file a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission. […]
The first of the Alabama efforts was funded by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who apologized and said he had been unaware of the project and did not approve of the underhanded methods. The second was funded by two Virginia donors who wanted to defeat Mr. Moore — a former judge accused of pursuing sexual relationships with underage girls — according to a participant who would speak about the secret project only on the condition of anonymity and who declined to name the funders.
The two projects each received $100,000, funneled in both cases through the same organization: Investing in Us, which finances political operations in support of progressive causes. Dmitri Mehlhorn, the group’s managing partner, declined to comment on whether he approved of the tactics he had helped pay for. 10
For the record, Investing in US was co-founded by Reid Hoffman and Dmitri Mehlhorn, a former senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.
Click here to read the full NYT report entitled “Democrats Faked Online Push to Outlaw Alcohol in Alabama Race”.
*
Pulling the strings back at Bilderberg
Reid Hoffman may be a name that is unfamiliar to you, even though he was co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn. As we learn from a NYT puff piece from 2011, after a shaky start, Hoffman was fortunate enough to have some well-connected associates:
In 1985, Mr. Hoffman enrolled at Stanford, where he majored in symbolic systems, the study of the relationship between computing and human intelligence. He soon befriended a fellow student, Peter Thiel, who would go on to found PayPal.
When his own social media start-up SocialNet flopped, Hoffman was invited to rejoin his old pal as Thiel was setting up PayPal:
As an executive vice president, it was up to Mr. Hoffman to manage external relations. “He was the firefighter in chief at PayPal,” Mr. Thiel says. “Though that diminishes his role because there were many, many fires.” 11
Click here to read the full NYT article entitled “A King of Connections Is Tech’s Go-To Guy”
Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman today sit at the high table as Bilderberg regulars alongside Eric Schmidt – the trio of techies have each attended every conference during the last four years: Thiel going under the title President of Thiel Capital; Hoffman more self-effacingly as a ‘Partner’ at Greylock Partners; and Schmidt, evidently the most modest of the three, declaring himself a mere ‘Technical Advisor’ to Alphabet Inc.
*
Please note: I started constructing this article as part of a larger review (that was subsequently broken down into this series of smaller pieces) many months prior to the current coronavirus crisis and lockdown.
1 Though it is not referenced by Wikiquote, there are a wide variety of sources including articles published by the Guardian and The Atlantic magazine that have attributed Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 as the original source of this quote. Variations of the same quote are also misattributed to American singer, songwriter, and musician, best known as the guitarist and frontman of the rock band Nirvana, Kurt Cobain.
The InterAlpen Hotel is vast pyramidal complex that soars atop the pine forests close to the ski resort of Seefeld and brings to mind Hitler’s magnificent “Eagle’s Nest” (Kehlsteinhaus) retreat perched high in the mountains above Obersalzberg, approximately one hundred kilometers east along the same northern border of Austria (as the eagle flies). Gathered there above the mists for their annual “private” meeting last weekend, the attendees of the Bilderberg group came for what purpose?
InterAlpen Hotel nr Seefeld, Austria
Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest”
To begin to answer this question we must straightaway acknowledge two points. Firstly, that Bilderberg is just part (presumably a key part) of an extensive network of private groups, institutes, ‘think tanks’ and other meetings that include, in descending order of secrecy, the Trilateral Commission, the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), its UK cousin the Royal Institute of International Affairs (better known as Chatham House), and the World Economic Forum in Davos. Bilderberg is the most prestigious and certainly the most “private” of all these.
Secondly, each of these Anglo-American establishment organisations is structured around its own internal hierarchy. At the head of Bilderberg, we have its Steering Committee, and so, for the newbies and the underlings turning up in Austria, the motivation is likely to be rather different than for the true movers and shakers.
To the parvenus, invitation opens the door to what is surely the world’s premier networking event. And between the frenetic bouts of lobbying, we should imagine there is time enough for altogether more obsequious displays of bowing and scraping. But what about the old guard? Do they too set aside this blank space in their busy diaries just to go and fawn over one another whilst marshalling the initiation of the latest cohort of Bilderberg fags.* For if Bilderberg is really as innocuous as its members claim, then this must be all that ever happens inside its cloistered halls.
Or put differently, we might respectfully ask: for what reasons was Bilderberg founded? What was and is its raison d’être?
*Note of clarification: ‘fag’ in this context is simply English public school-ese for a freshman.
*
There are no eyes here
Once upon a time there was no such creature as the Bilderberg club. It was rumoured to exist, but the rumours were evidently nonsensical. How could any such meeting of the world’s richest and most powerful people be kept a secret? Furthermore, since the only person who claimed proof of the group’s existence, a man by the name of Jim Tucker (self-described as a journalist) had nothing substantial to show us, he was plainly delusional. Decades spent shinning up drainpipes and clambering around the bushes of faraway five-star hotels in the forlorn hope of seeing just a glimpse of this imaginary band of furtive elites had clearly taken its toll. “Big Jim” would write reports to the effect that he had personally tracked Bilderberg down to locations all over the western world, but the serious media sensibly kept a wide berth. “Big Jim” was totally paranoid. They knew there was nothing to see.
Then in 2001, along came oddball human interest reporter Jon Ronson. He had heard about Jim Tucker and fancied going along on one of his legendary wild goose chases. A trail that soon led them to a remote hotel in Portugal where bewitched by Tucker’s stories, Ronson fell under his spell and began seeing the scurrying politicians and plutocrats for himself: a figure very like Peter Mandelson peering out of the tinted windows of a coach, and there were major league corporate bosses too, as well as billionaires such as the wrathlike David Rockefeller, all sneaking through the hotel gates in the backseats of limousines and taxi cabs. Sheer madness.
The tale of Ronson’s adventure in Portugal featured as the fifth and final part of the Channel 4 documentary series The Secret Rulers of the World. The fantasy of the late Jim Tucker, vindicated as strange fact, with Ronson finally shifting the focus to ask what really does go on at the clandestine gatherings of Bilderberg? He called upon a couple of attendees to speak on Bilderberg’s behalf, one being former Labour bigwig Denis Healey, but apparently there was nothing worth speaking about. Schmoozing. High security schmoozing. Nothing more.
Jon Ronson was later interviewed by Neil Davenport, a freelance TV and film critic:
‘What I’m trying to say with these programmes’, says Ronson, ‘is that the crazy people are on to something, but what they’re on to is very different to what they imagined it to be’.
However Ronson is much too quick in leaping to his own conclusions, and especially when he explains to Davenport that:
‘They [conspiracy theorists] believe that businessmen or judges should be making decisions, as they’re not corrupt. But by taking power away from politicians, they want to take power away from the electorate too.’ 1
I wonder who he imagines he is speaking for. For Bilderberg is what it is. A private meeting place for a clique of corporate privateers (including convicted felons) evidently intent upon “taking power away from the electorate” (as Ronson puts it) and into the crooked hands of political lackeys. The elected politicians who do go there, go to swap notes, and most certainly not to dictate policy:
It is very easy to write off the Bilderberg Group, which met in utter secrecy in Watford a week ago, as just a private get-together of high-powered colleagues from across the Western world which regularly meets to exchange views. That was the view peddled by Ken Clarke amid much buffoonery and mockery in the Commons. It is equally easy, as the BBC did the day before, to get a ranter of dubious credibility [viz. Alex Jones] to go over the top in portraying Bilderberg as a secretive worldwide conspiracy. Neither of these presentations stand up to any serious scrutiny, but establishing the realities is difficult partly because of the secrecy in which the whole operation is shrouded. But there are some significant leads.
So wrote Labour MP Michael Meacher after the group came to England in 2013. Meacher was the single British Member of Parliament bold enough to make a speech to the thousands who went to protest. I was there and videoed his speech (posted on youtube and embedded in an earlier post).
In the same article, Meacher delves a little deeper, starting with the group’s extremely unsavoury post-war origins:
Bilderberg was founded in 1954 by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. He was a Nazi party member from 1933-37 who resigned one day after his controversial marriage to the future Queen of the Netherlands. In 1934 he was the subject of a report by a US Congress committee which identified him as an SS officer attached to the Nazi government’s principal industrial ally, IG Farben. The minutes of the first Bilderberg meeting declared their aim as “to evolve an international order which would look beyond the present day crisis. When the time is ripe our present concepts of world affairs should be extended to the whole world”. 2
Click here to read Michael Meacher’s full article “The Bilderberg smell still lingers”.
This stated aim, “to evolve an international order”, sounds oddly like the rather more paranoid sounding claim: that Bilderberg is out to construct a “new world order”. But the very term “new world order”, which has been used by such luminaries as George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Henry Kissinger, adds a lot more heat than light. For what do they mean by it? And coming back to Bilderberg (where all five of the aforementioned have attended) how could such an ambitious goal be realisable given that its membership, although highly exclusive, is constantly evolving? Isn’t it only Bond villains who dream of such world domination…
Yet members of Bilderberg rarely deny, at least, when cornered on the subject, that they are striving in part for the formation of a fully-functioning world government. It is most urgent, they say, if we are ever to bring about peace and prosperity, adding that these can only be achieved through effective ‘global governance’ and ‘internationalism’. But this is deceptive, of course – deliberately so – since aside from being composed of warmongers of the first degree (and I shall list further attendees as we proceed), the globalists who head Bilderberg are clearly not very serious when it comes to fostering good relations between all nations. Rather, they would prefer that the nation state wither away altogether, to be replaced by supranational bodies.
More honestly stated Bilderberg (headed by a mix of international financiers, corporate bosses and, perhaps more surprisingly, a number of European monarchs) alongside its affiliated Anglo-American institutions and bodies (mentioned above) are primarily intent to expand their already well-established corporate empire. They prefer to do this by a steady process of transformation rather than forcing an abrupt revolution; taking baby steps as they set about reforming international relations and recreating a world without borders, hence “global”. The latest moves include the introduction of TPP and TTIP – “free trade agreements” that will further dismantle national sovereignty.
So if you were to sum up their admitted goal in just three words then ‘globalist corporate hegemony’ fits perfectly. Alternatively, you might sum up the organisation with these three instead: organised crime syndicate. Frankly, if they didn’t own half the world already, including the major media outlets, don’t you think they would be behind bars by now?
Jim Tucker’s exposure of Bilderberg took tenacity and great courage. Not only did his investigations put him in immediate danger, but penetrating Bilderberg meant trusting his instincts and believing his own eyes. It is easy to mock “Big Jim”, as Ronson does gently throughout the documentary, and right to question his judgment in other ways (for instance, his dewy-eyed weakness for Margaret Thatcher). Nevertheless, Tucker was also a trailblazer.
*
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech
Although the group cloaks itself in secrecy, it does have a spokesman who, not surprisingly, asked not to be named. He said Bilderbergoperates in private to foster meaningful debate on the big issues of the day.
“While we understand and generally welcome the general interest in the conference, we simply cannot provide the levels of access or transparency that certain individuals or groups would like to see,” the spokesman said in an email. “To encourage the highest level of openness and dialogue among the participants, and to keep the private character of the meetings, all participants respect the Chatham House Rule.” 4
This comes from an article published in the Washington Times on the eve of the meeting [Thurs 11th].
It came as a surprise to many, myself included, that a group which had feigned its own nonexistence until about a decade ago, now employs a spokesman, albeit an entirely anonymous one. More surprising again, is his/her claim that the Bilderberg group “welcome the general interest in the conference”, especially since this was not what the handful of reporters on the ground had been saying. But then, if Bilderberg was suddenly so open to outside interest why is there any “news blackout” (as the story’s own headline puts it) at all? In fact, why didn’t the Washington Times dispatch some of its own reporters directly to Austria? Charlie Skelton, who was there on the ground and reporting for the Guardian (although not the front page of course), supplies part of the answer:
The clock has struck midnight. The dream is over. Back at the G7 summit, barely a day and 20 miles from here, I was treated like a prince. I was one of the chosen 3,000 journalists who were primped, pampered, fed and burped, given free T-shirts, gallons of goulash, buckets of booze, and all the cheesy footage of world leaders we could swallow. We lay back on our branded beanbags and were tickled silly by the gentle fist of the G7 PR machine. But not any more. The beanbag has burst.
That was Wednesday [June 10th] and the latest crop of the hundred and more attendees hadn’t even arrived at this year’s luxury venue in the Alps. Skelton was one of just a tiny handful of journalists (the mainstream media’s sole reporter), but security was already firmly locked down, and about to tighten:
“Step out of the vehicle and show me your identification!” A group of Austrian police officers took up position round my car. I pulled on the handbrake and opened the door. I swear to God one young officer shifted his hand to the butt of his sidearm, like I was about to rush them. All 12 of them. All armed. Maybe if there had only been 10 I might have taken them down using a slingshot improvised from my shoelaces, but not 12. I might be crazy but I’m not nuts. 5
Some 2,000 Austrian police including “Cobra” special forces had been drafted to guard the hotel and surrounding woods. There to patrol exclusion zones that extended quite literally miles, with military helicopters circling overhead, as well as the Bilderberg’s own anti-aircraft radar system. 6Checkpoints into the neighbouring village of Telfs sent a stark message to both public and press alike to keep away:
Charlie Skelton compared the manner in which these very same security services, so courteous at G7 (to the press, at least – G7 was locked down to exclude public protests), were suddenly acting in a far more provocative manner. And later that night, his personal experience of police harassment was to intensify considerably:
I had three Austrian policemen in my hotel room last night. They stood there all grim faced with their fluorescent bibs, torches and sidearms. It was like the worst ever fancy dress party. I offered them a pilsner. They declined. They were too busy checking my ID that had been carefully checked 10 minutes prior at a police checkpoint. And carefully checked two minutes prior to that, at another police checkpoint.
This was his report from Thursday [June 11th]. The conference still yet to begin, but police and security services going out of their way to be as unaccommodating to journalists as possible. Once again, Skelton draws comparison to what he had experienced at the G7 only days earlier:
In my trouser pocket I found a “Medienhandbuch” from the G7, which I was given in my goodie bag when I was accredited there. By the light of a police searchlight, which was trained on me like I was trying to escape Stalag 17, I read out passages to my guards to pass the time. “Experienced staff from the Federal Government will be happy to help you with your work …” An officer interrupted. “Your address please.” It was on my driving licence in his hand. This was getting silly.7
Silly, yes, but Skelton knows very well why he had become such a centre of attention. This was not the first time he found himself on the wrong side of the Bilderberg cordons:
The thing is, I never really came here to “cover” Bilderberg. I just thought it would be funny to hang out at the cordon and wear T-shirts saying things like “NOBILIZATION!”. It’s really very peculiar to look back at my first report and watch myself pretending to dodge spooks on dark streets. Ha ha ha. And now? I’ve hidden twice in the same stairwell in Athens to try to shake off the men following me. I have a favourite bolthole in Athens city centre. That’s how much my life has changed.
I’ve grappled with men in a Metro station; I’ve screamed for help in Omonoia Square; I’ve shouted “You’re lying to me!” at detectives in an Athens police station; I’ve grabbed a man riding off on a motorbike and begged him – almost in tears – to “leave me alone”; I’ve been yelled at, arrested, followed, searched, shoved, maligned, intimidated, doubted and lied to. So many lies.
This was Skelton’s personal initiation to Bilderberg when the group met near Athens in May 2009. The way he was treated freaked him out big time, just as it had freaked out Jon Ronson when he was chased by security during the Portuguese meeting in Sintra of 1999.
As Skelton concluded in the same Guardian article:
I’ve told the truth about what has happened to me this week. I wonder if the various British politicians who have attended Bilderberg 2009 could bring themselves to tell the truth about how they spent their time. I wonder if someone better than me, a better reporter, a more powerful voice, a politician even, could ask them. Anyone?
My dispatches on the 2009 conference, if they mean anything at all, represent nothing more acutely than the absence of thorough mainstream reporting. I am pretty much the opposite of what’s needed. I am a joke. These dispatches are a travesty. A travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham. A disgrace to the good name of journalism. I should be ashamed. 8
Click here to read Charlie Skelton’s full article.
And as he pointed out in his first report for this year’s “Bilderblog”, entitled “Forget the G7 summit – Bilderberg is where the big guns go”:
Bilderberg 2015 has an extremely high-powered participant list, featuring a large number of senior politicians and public figures. With participants this powerful, and an agenda containing this many hot topics, the Telfs policy conference is sure to be covered in depth by the world’s press. And by “sure to be”, I mean probably won’t be. For reasons that, as ever, escape me. 9
A comment beneath his article reads:
“For reasons that, as ever, escape me.”
“Reason, as ever, escapes me.” There you go, Charlie. Fixed it for you.
A second added:
Oh, there you are…. Every year, like clock work, to spread your move along- nothing to see here- cheer….
Anticipation for what you might add to the discussion is ever hopeful!
But the reasons don’t escape Skelton. He knows the score too and these comments are unfair. Skelton is as much humourist as journalist (very much like Jon Ronson in this regard), and his understated, laconic delivery presumably helps persuade his vacillating editor that it’s safe to send him back to the Bilderberg frontline. Skelton knows – since we all know – that the reason the press coverage is scant (to say the least) is not because the press is disinterested, but because they are hugely compromised.
For every mainstream outlet has close, whether direct or indirect, associations with Bilderberg. For instance, the Guardian’s former editor Alan Rusbridger, who is still on the board of the Scott Trust which owns the Guardian and the Observer, is a former governor of the Ditchley Foundation , whose current governors also include (to offer a flavour) Lord Aldington, former Chairman of Deutsche Bank London, Robert Conway, Senior Director of Goldman Sachs International, Constanze Stelzenmüller senior fellow of the Brookings Institution, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, both former diplomat and former Director of the Ditchley Foundation, as well as, John Sawers, ex-Chief of MI6. In short, Ditchley is a mini-Bilderberg group. Indeed, membership crosses over between the groups: so, for instance, John Sawers was at last year’s Bilderberg meeting in Copenhagen as well as this year’s meeting in Telfs-Buchen.
Others on this year’s official list (which is reliably incomplete) included Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist; Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator at The Financial Times; John Micklethwait, Editor-in-Chief of Bloomberg LP; Merete Eldrup, CEO of TV 2 Danmark A/S (a publicly owned Danish television station), and perhaps more surprisingly, Rona Fairhead, Chairman of the BBC Trust. The media are, as always, exceedingly well represented. Because, if you wish to silence the press, you need to involve them.
Charlie Skelton’s final “Bilderblog” report of 2015 expands on the same theme. Apparently it wasn’t just the press keeping schtum about events in Austria:
Weaving down the alp came the Bilderbus, taking delegates on a whistlestop tour of the Tyrol. Buzzing along above it, at a crazy height, was its helicopter escort. I swear I could have bounced a euro off the roof of the coach and into the blades. If I’d wanted to have been dropped by an NSA sniper.
In the coach below it must have been like being in a washing machine. No wonder the delegates on board looked grumpy. Sitting up front, Jessica T Mathews had a face like thunder. Although maybe the cause of her headache wasn’t the helicopter, but rather the howling contradiction of being on the steering committee of the world’s most secretive policy summit and also on the advisory council of Transparency International USA.
Also on the bus was James Wolfensohn. A fellow member of TI-USA’s advisory council, Wolfensohn was the joint winner of their 2014 “integrity award”, an honour he shared with that other famous transparency campaigner, and the world’s fourth-biggest arms company, Raytheon. Previous winners of the integrity award include (and I kid you not) Coca-Cola, General Electric and the then secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton. The great email deleter herself. I think someone should tell TI-USA what “transparency” means. There may have been a mix-up somewhere down the line.
When it comes to transparency, this year’s Bilderberg summit fails in every way imaginable. Three prime ministers, two foreign ministers, one president, no press conference. No public oversight. Just a bunch of senior policymakers locked away for three days with some incredibly powerful corporate lobbyists, discussing subjects intimately related to public policy. Subjects such as “globalisation” and “current economic issues”, which in practical terms mean the giant trade deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
Click hereto read more from Charlie Skelton’s excellent “Bilderblog”
Where once there was a deadening silence over Bilderberg, at least there is a little more coverage across the European media these days. But now that Bilderberg officially exists, they would prefer us to simply yawn-yawn about the jaw-jaw. Nothing to hear here.
*
Rats’ feet over broken glass
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied — as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels — that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani [“enemy of mankind”], commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong. 10
So wrote Hannah Arendt after she had watched Adolf Eichmann testify during his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. What shocked her most of all was how this evil and powerful man (relatively speaking) could be so dull, so mediocre, and so absolutely unrepentant. Arendt was searching for a philosophical explanation for this, but is there one? Or even a psychological account?
Arendt perhaps is better known for coining the phrase “the banality of evil”, which she repeats on a number of occasions throughout her works, although she never precisely defines what she means by it. One approximate definition she did give goes along the lines that ‘the banality of evil wasn’t the presence of something, but its absence – something you expected to be there, but just isn’t’ 11
Today we might talk about the sociopath and the psychopath (Arendt does not speculate much in this regard), which is another subject journalist Jon Ronson went on to explore in his more recent study, The Psychopath Test.
Ever the gentle persuader, in a few hundred pages, Ronson conveys the opinion that psychopathy is under-diagnosed even more frequently than it is over-diagnosed, being very nearly as difficult to identify, as it is impossible to treat (according to current wisdom). He also points to how psychopaths and sociopaths tend to see themselves as respectable and normal, and importantly, how they possess character traits enabling them to become highly successful:
It wasn’t only Bob [Hare – author of the Psychopathy Checklist] who believed that a disproportionate number of psychopaths can be found in high places. In the days after Essi Viding had first mentioned the theory to me I spoke to scores of psychologists who all said exactly the same. One was Martha Stout from the Harvard Medical School and author of The Sociopath Next Door. (You may be wondering what the difference is between a psychopath and a sociopath, and the answer is, there really isn’t one. Psychologists and psychiatrists around the world tend to use the terms interchangeably.) They are everywhere, she said. They are in the crowded restaurant where you have your lunch. They are in your open-plan office. […]
‘Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain there’s not much left except the will to win.’
‘Which means you’ll find a preponderance of them at the top of the tree?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘The higher you go up the ladder the greater the number of sociopaths you’ll find there.’ 12
Henry Kissinger was attending this year’s Bilderberg confab just as he attends nearly every Bilderberg meeting. He has been an insider since its inception and there are few, if any, Bilderberg insiders more powerful or sociopathic than Kissinger. This superstar of Bilderberg holds the accolade for being both a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the single greatest war criminal alive. So did those sharing a glass of wine with him at the InterAlpen Hotel stop to ask about his involvement in the overthrow of elected governments across Latin America, about the death squads and the torture rooms, or about the napalm raining down on the children of Indochina? We can only guess.
As Martha Stout explained to Ronson, those with psychopathic leaning tend to doubt that such a thing as conscience really exists in any case, or alternatively, believe that the rest of us are too restrained by it, and should instead be more relaxed in their morals like they are. A big reason, of course, why being psychopathic helps one to get ahead.
*
Aside from the official list of participants (always incomplete, but indicative nonetheless) there are a few other clues posted on the Bilderberg official website (up since 2010) that offer a glimpse of what might laughingly be described as this year’s ‘agenda’:
Back in the 1950s, when Bernhard sent out the invitations, it was to discuss “a number of problems facing western civilization”. These days, the Bilderberg Group prefers to call them “megatrends”. The megatrends on this year’s agenda include: “What next for Europe?”, “Ukraine”, “Intelligence sharing” and “Does privacy exist?”
That comes from another Charlie Skelton report but on last year’s 60th anniversary meeting in Copenhagen, when Bilderberg first officially posted its ‘agenda’. As Skelton points out:
That’s an exquisite irony: the world’s most secretive conference discussing whether privacy exists. Certainly for some it does. It’s not just birthday bunting that’s gone up in Copenhagen: there’s also a double ring of three-metre (10ft) high security fencing. The hotel is teeming with security: lithe gentlemen in loose slacks and dark glasses, trying not to kill the birthday vibe. Or anyone else. 13
This year’s “megatrends” had become fifteen “key topics for discussion”. 14Bullet points again, no details. So we are left to interpret as we might do the silently drifting spots on a radar screen. Or, after dark, upon hearing the clink of empty bottles and the unseen rustle of rummaging about the dustbin…
That ‘Greece’ floats high amongst the fifteen items hardly comes as a surprise. Nor was it surprising to learn that no actual representatives of the Greek government were invited to attend the meeting. Syriza were never any part of the Bilderberg set.
According to the list, discussion also ventured into matters concerning the ‘United Kingdom’ and ‘European Strategy’. While other “key topics for discussion” dealt with the ‘Middle East’, ‘Iran’, ‘Russia’, ‘Terrorism’, ‘Chemical Weapons Threats’ and ‘NATO’. So what can we make of these bullet points, aside from discerning the contempt which Bilderberg holds for the general public, teasing us by withholding all but this shopping list of its secret dealings, whilst making a pretence of greater openness.
Well, the consensus at Bilderberg – shared by both top globalist elites and their flunkeys alike (you only get an invite if you fit one of these categories) – consists in two main parts: a zealotry for neo-liberal economics and a partial taste (at the very least) for neo-conservative foreign policy. Of course, neo-liberalism was normalised long ago, and very much thanks to ex-Bilderberger Margaret Thatcher. For is there any self-respecting politician or media hack who is not a devout neo-liberalist these days? By contrast, neo-conservatism lost what little allure it ever held once Bush and Blair had wrung out the last drops of post-9/11 sympathy to legitimise their retaliatory slaughter of farmers in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But after Bush and Blair left office, rather than signalling an end to the bloodletting, the foreign adventuring continued unabated, initially by means of Obama’s expansion into drone warfare, and subsequently with Nato’s “kinetic action” which brought “shock and awe” first to Libya, and then thanks to covert support for our Islamist proxies, spread the ensuing chaos to Syria and into Iraq (yet again). These endless wars are now sanctioned by a new breed of ‘humanitarian bombers’ though they were mostly instigated by such avowed neo-cons as Richard Perle and David Petraeus (the convicted felon whose role was so central to the fall of Libya), both of whom were back at Bilderberg this year.
It is according to such ideologies that ordinary people are either crushed by the market’s ‘invisible hand’, or else, in more distant places, flayed by the neo-imperialist sword of “intervention”. Neo-liberalism translating into ceaseless cuts to public services and the never-ending sell-off of national assets, yet always set against the need for additional tax monies to be redirected to fund drone strikes and bombing raids against the insurgents/terrorists/despotic regimes – a single airstrike costing as much as £1 million.
Returning more specifically to consider Bilderberg’s list of fifteen items under discussion, and Greece is perhaps their most urgent priority: Syriza’s resoluteness causing a tremendous headache for the bankers and their political cronies (who make up the bigger half of every Bilderberg conference). For though Syriza refuses to sever its financial ties with Europe (for perfectly sound economic reasons), it equally refuses to submit to further punishment in the form of continuing “austerity”. Worst of all, it is gaining in popularity.
As a number establishment figures have candidly announced, it is of paramount importance that the Greeks are seen to lose in their fight against “austerity”. For a reversal would possibly trigger a domino effect: an extraordinary political realignment with the rise of genuine ‘pro-democracy’ parties across the Mediterranean. Greece is therefore a powder keg for the powers-that-be, and so ‘Grexit’, although destabilising the broader European project, appears to have become a preferred option for those who see repayment of debts as sacrosanct. What comes next for Greece, if they do not fall into line? Wasn’t this the real question behind the Bilderberg bullet point…?
Meanwhile, the ‘United Kingdom’ now presents a problem of a related but diametrically opposite kind. The danger that one of Europe’s largest economies (on paper at least) might soon vote to exit the European Union is hardly a step forward in any grander visions of globalisation. So ‘Brexit’, as it is already being called, is unlikely to be viewed so favourably as ‘Grexit’.
Otherwise, given the familiar Bilderberg mix of delegates, liberally spiced with neo-cons and military top brass, compounded by such a stack of the old enemies piled up on that list of “key topics for discussion”, oughtn’t we to presume a further push for war? Since no-one at Bilderberg is telling, we are, as always, left to conjecture (or else to think nothing more about any of it).
‘It is a frightening and huge thought,’ I [Jon Ronson] said, ‘that the ninety-nine per cent of us wandering around down here are having our lives pushed and pulled around by that psychopathic fraction up there.’
‘It is a large thought,’ she [Martha Stout] said. ‘It is a thought people don’t have very often. Because we’re raised to believe that deep down everyone has conscience.’ 15
Click here to read the full press release on the Bilderberg official website.
*
Oddly, this year’s official list of attendees was also reprinted by the Daily Mail in an article entitled “Revealed: Guestlist for secretive Bilderberg includes Osborne, Balls, BBC Trust chief, spies, bankers and royalty”. A headline which rather succinctly encapsulates who really runs the show – with Ed Balls serving the coffee apparently:
Those on the guest list this week include the heads of banking and financial giants including Deutsche Bank, Santander, AXA Group, JP Morgan, HSBC, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs.
Senior figures from Royal Dutch Shell, BP, AXA Group, Google, Airbus, Fiat Chrysler, LinkedIn, Siemens and Ryanair are also expected.[…]
Senior figures from around the world include Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, the President of Austria Heinz Fischer, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel and ministers from Sweden, the US, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
Jim Messina, a former Obama adviser who worked on David Cameron’s election winning campaign in Britain, is also on the list. [further thoughts at the end]
Guests also include Thomas Ahrenkiel, director of the Danish Intelligence Service, former European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and Nato General Secretary Jens Stolberg. [all emphasis added]
But still The Mail can’t resist the worn-out distraction about “conspiracy theorists”, adding:
Conspiracy theorists believe this is where leaders plot world domination. 16
As one of the comments posted beneath read:
There is no conspiring going on here. Just folks getting together to discuss how best to run the world for their own benefit. 17
You can read earlier reports about the previous four Bilderberg meetings in St Moritz 2011, Chantilly 2012, Watford 2013 (where I personally joined the protests) and Copenhagen 2014 by clicking on the Bilderberg tag below.
*
Additional: ‘US elections’
American political adviser Jim Messina is getting credit for leading conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron to an overwhelming, if surprising victory, but he said Friday that once he comes back to the United States, he’s Hillary Clinton “all the time.”
“I’m coming home tomorrow and it’s whatever it will take to get Hillary [elected],” Messina said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program.
Bilderberg has a long history of inviting future Prime Ministers and Presidents to its conference. Thatcher in 1975 and Clinton in 1991 are the two best known examples, but there are many others. Before being elected as Canadian Prime Ministers, Pierre Trudeau (1968), Paul Martin (1996), Jean Chrétien (also 1996) and current PM Stephen Harper (2003) had all attended Bilderberg meetings, as did US President Gerald Ford (1964, 1966) and British PMs Tony Blair (1993) and Gordon Brown (1991).
This time around we have instead an election advisor, Jim Messina, who helped the Tories to victory in last month’s General Election and is suddenly linked to one of the forerunners in the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton. Added to which we know that the last item of Bilderberg’s stated fifteen “key topics for discussion” was ‘US Elections’. Not that Hillary is new to Bilderberg…
But we should keep in mind that Bilderberg is a cross-party event, so why put all of its eggs into one party political basket? If Hillary is the preferred choice for Democratic nomination (as it appears), then who might they choose for the red corner?
In his first major international appearance since signaling his readiness to run for office, the former governor of Florida acknowledged that some might question the setting of his speech. “One possible question which might be asked is: why is an American politician who might run for president in Berlin, Germany? And not in places like Berlin, New Hampshire, or Berlin, Iowa?
“The short answer is, this journey has other purposes.
That is taken from a Guardian report on Jeb Bush’s recent visit to Germany and his appearance in Berlin shortly after the G7 summit. It continues (a little further on):
His address to business leaders was the highlight of a visit which included discussions with politicians and policy makers. The trip was organised by a Bush family friend, former World Bank chief Robert Zoellick, who was also involved in reunification negotiations as the elder Bush’s White House adviser. 18
Two days later, his friend Robert Zoellick, now of Goldman Sachs, was at the meeting in Telfs. Zoellick holds a seat on the Bilderberg steering committee. Rumour has it that Jeb may have quietly followed him up there.
Another regular Bilderberg attendee in Telfs was Peter Thiel. Thiel, a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager, was a co-founder of PayPal and is also a major investor in Facebook. During the 2008 US Presidential elections, Thiel had endorsed Ron Paul, and then again during the 2012 elections, Thiel and the other PayPal co-founders, Luke Nosek and Scott Banister, “put their support behind the Endorse Liberty Super PAC” to elect Ron Paul. 19
Since then, Peter Thiel has switched his allegiance to Ron Paul’s son Rand:
In his Playbook newsletter Sunday, Politico’s Mike Allen reported Paul, who is considering a presidential bid in 2016, “had private sit-downs with the investor Peter Thiel and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg” while at the conference. Allen described Paul’s presence at the confab as “another sign of how far he has come since his insurgent victory as a Tea Party torch-bearer.” 20
Rand Paul, who back on April 7th announced he was running for President, is mistaken by many, especially libertarians, as a political outsider, when in fact he has been and continues to be openly backed by Peter Thiel who sits alongside José Barroso, Jean-Claude Trichet, Richard Perle, Robert Zoellick, and others, also on the Bilderberg steering committee 21.
*
Update: before, during and after Telfs 2015
On the eve of the meeting, Luke Rudkowski spoke with veteran Bilderberg reporter Mark Anderson – a very informative and insightful discussion:
Luke Rudkowski covers the high security at Telfs (including scrambled jets) and the street protests:
On the way home, Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis were confronted by Press for Truth reporter, Dan Dicks, at Innsbruck airport security checks.
Henry Kravis, the co-founder of private equity firm KKR (or Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.), is one of the wealthiest people on earth. He is a trustee of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and has been a political sponsor of both George Bush Sr. and John McCain. His wife Marie-Josée serves on the international advisory board of the Federal Reserve.
In May 2013, Henry Kravis, a member of the Steering Committee, had appointed David Petraeus as Chairman of KKR Global Institute saying, “I have long known and respected General Petraeus”:
Meanwhile, also spotted in Innsbruck was James Wolfensohn, former President of the World Bank, an honorary trustee of the Brookings Institute, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, who supposedly wasn’t there at all!
Finally, here are Dan Dicks, Luke Rudkowski and Jeff Berwick comparing the treatment they received at G7 with that at Bilderberg:
Some 2,100 extra police will be on duty over the coming days, with protesters planning to stage a demonstration on Saturday, and the only road leading to the hotel is blocked.
And for good measure, the Kronen-Zeitung tabloid cited the military as saying a “special low-altitude radar is in position and Kiowa helicopters armed with machine guns are carrying out patrols”.
10 From the Epilogue of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the Banality of Evil written by Hannah Arendt, published in 1963.
11Taken from an interview given by Errol Morris, director of the documentary “The Unknown Known” about Donald Rumsfeld, in which he discusses what was satisfying about making the film. Morris says he has always been fascinated by one of Hannah Arendt’s definitions of the phrase “The Banality of Evil,” even before her article “Eichmann in Jerusalem”:
She said that the banality of evil wasn’t the presence of something. It’s the absence of something. Something that you would expect to be there, but just isn’t. And maybe, that’s what this film is about.
12 Taken from The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry,Ch4, pp117–9, by Jon Ronson, published by Picador, 2011.
17 Another, very much in the spirit of the late, great Bill Hicks, reads:
“I figured this out. They are having these secret meetings because they planning to bestow us with a wonderful surprise. They don’t want us to know what it is or the surprise shall [be] ruined.”
Endorse Liberty founders have so far reported spending about $3.3 million promoting [Ron] Paul by setting up two YouTube channels, constantly buying ads from Google and Facebook and StumbleUpon and building up a presence on the Web.
Full list of current Bilderberg steering committee members from official website:
Henri de Castries Chairman and CEO, AXA Group
DEU Achleitner, Paul Chairman Supervisory Board, Deutsche Bank AG
GBR Agius, Marcus Non-Executive Chairman, PA Consulting Group
USA Altman, Roger C. Executive Chairman, Evercore
FIN Apunen, Matti Director, Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA
PRT Barroso, José M. Durão Former President of the European Commission
FRA Baverez, Nicolas Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
ITA Bernabè, Franco Chairman, FB Group SRL
NOR Brandtzæg, Svein Richard President and CEO, Norsk Hydro ASA
ESP Cebrián, Juan Luis Executive Chairman, Grupo PRISA
CAN Clark, W. Edmund Group President and CEO, TD Bank Group
DEU Enders, Thomas CEO, Airbus Group
DNK Federspiel, Ulrik Executive Vice President, Haldor Topsøe A/S
NLD Halberstadt, Victor Professor of Public Economics, Leiden University
USA Jacobs, Kenneth M. Chairman and CEO, Lazard
USA Johnson, James A. Chairman, Johnson Capital Partners
USA Karp, Alex CEO, Palantir Technologies
GBR Kerr, John Deputy Chairman, Scottish Power
USA Kleinfeld, Klaus Chairman and CEO, Alcoa
TUR Koç, Mustafa V. Chairman, Koç Holding A.S.
USA Kravis, Marie-Josée Senior Fellow and Vice Chair, Hudson Institute
CHE Kudelski, André Chairman and CEO, Kudelski Group
BEL Leysen, Thomas Chairman, KBC Group
USA Mathews, Jessica T. President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
ITA Monti, Mario Senator-for-life; President, Bocconi University
USA Mundie, Craig J. Senior Advisor to the CEO, Microsoft Corporation
USA Perle, Richard N. Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
CAN Reisman, Heather M. Chair and CEO, Indigo Books & Music Inc.
AUT Scholten, Rudolf CEO, Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG
USA Thiel, Peter A. President, Thiel Capital
INT Trichet, Jean-Claude Honorary Governor, Banque de France; Former President, European Central Bank
GRC Tsoukalis, Loukas President, ELIAMEP
SWE Wallenberg, Jacob Chairman, Investor AB
USA Zoellick, Robert B. Chairman, Board of International Advisors, The Goldman Sachs Group
wall of controversy 