Bilderberg 2012: the technocrats are rising at this year’s annual conference
Source: guardian.co.uk
Our man at Bilderberg is back for a fourth year and has touched down in Chantilly for the 2012 gathering. The shadowy elite leaders’ conference starts tomorrow, so what’s on the agenda?
It’s all change at Bilderberg this year, with a new chairman, new media and Occupy Bilderberg knocking at the gates.
Everything’s set. The hotel is being primped and hoovered, the security is arriving, the press is nowhere to be seen, and I just had a really boring crab salad. It’s shaping up to be a vintage Bilderberg.
We were lunching in the Palm Court restaurant of the Westfields Marriott hotel, in Chantilly, Virginia. A few days from now, this hotel will be dripping with billionaires and bankers, industry CEOs and finance ministers, here for the annual Bilderberg summit. "The leaders of the world are coming to our hotel", beams one member of staff. "Are you here for the brunch?"
We are. Most of the other guests have left by now. The hotel is edging towards lockdown. All that’s left is a team of nervy conference organizer who start filming us with their iPhones, several dozen security operatives, me, my wife and a really rather boring ’spook’, brunching on an adjacent table.
He droned on for the full length of a crab salad about his "internal and external drivers", about how "I got a panel of three-star admirals together" to secure a "$30m contract" and how "CACI excels in capture management".
He talked fondly of CACI International Inc (a giant defense contractor), although more recently he’s had "a nice success rate with Booz Allen" (another giant defense contractor). His world was the deathly dull blur between the federal government and private defense corporations. The grim feeding trough of "systems solutions", "security logistics" and "mission assurance". My crab ended just as he was declaring, wisely: "When you leave the navy and you go to a contractor, you say: what’s my mission?"
His mission for the next week or so is to keep the queen of the Netherlands, the chairman of Barclays, and the chairman, vice-chairman and CEO of Shell Oil safe and sound for a three-day conference. The hotel is encircled by the offices of the world’s largest arms’ manufacturers, 15 minutes up the road from the headquarters of the CIA. I suspect they’ll be OK.
Welcome to Chantilly: a little bit of paradise on earth.
Photograph: Charlie Skelton for the Guardian
The Bilderberg conference was last here in Chantilly, at the exact same godforsaken spot, back in 2008 – which, like 2012, was a US election year, and the moment the current economic woes really started hitting the fan. You might remember, it was the year when then-senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton paid a flying visit to Bilderberg (aka ’an event in northern Virginia’), after shaking off the press pack during the Democratic presidential campaign. AP had the story:
"Reporters travelling with Obama sensed something might be happening between the pair might when they arrived at Dulles International Airport after an event in northern Virginia and Obama was not aboard the airplane."
You can watch the hilarious footage of Robert Gibbs, Obama’s press secretary, trying (and failing) to placate a furious press corp, who found themselves tricked aboard a flight to Chicago. "Others had a desire to meet with him in a private way," he explains. This is an extraordinary admission from Gibbs – "others" clicked their fingers, and Obama came running, with Hillary in tow.
Bill Clinton was introduced to the political big league at Bilderberg 1991. The man who introduced him was Vernon Jackson, a lawyer, civil rights activist and currently board member of Lazard investment bank. Speaking last year about the occasion, Jackson recalls:
"In 1991, I took Bill Clinton to the Bilderberg meetings in Baden Baden, Germany. Bilderberg meetings have been going on since 1954, sort of the North-American / European Alliance."
Later, after Clinton won the election:
"The steering committee of Bilderberg came to Washington in January, and I called the president up and I said ’Mr President, they’re here’ – and he came to the Four Seasons hotel, and the Europeans felt like they owned him because they met him when he was totally unknown."
That’s interesting: a meeting of the Bilderberg steering committee at the Four Seasons in Washington? In January? But according to Bilderberg’s official website, "Bilderberg’s only activity is its annual conference".
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Read the full article at: guardian.co.uk
Top Image: Source
Video from: YouTube.com
Video from: YouTube.com
May 30 2012, A day before the official kick off of the Bilderberg conference Alex Jones and crew were officially kicked out of the Westfields Marriott Hotel because they are ’renovating’. Infowars has confirmed from multiple sources that the Bilderberg group will indeed be meeting at the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly Virginia this weekend.
Video from: YouTube.com
