Bilderberg 2014: A Secretive Elite Wonders if Privacy Exists

Author Govert SchullerPosted on October 26, 2014May 27, 2024Categories ParapoliticsTags Conspiracy, Politics

 

If you are interested in studying parapolitics–i.e. the practice of attaining political ends through secrecy and covert operations by intelligence agencies, think tanks and private networks (Scott)–there might be no better group to look into as the “Bilderberg”, the annual three-day conference in which the cream of the crop of the Atlantic power elite can freely exchange differing viewpoints and enhance mutual understanding, as they like the public to believe.

This year (2014) the conference was in Copenhagen, in a Marriott hotel guarded by “a double ring of three-metre (10ft) high security fencing” and a little army of security guards. As usual, the hotel was closed off to regular guests and certainly to journalists, two of whom were arrested for asking questions of the organizers at the hotel bar (Skelton).

The conference is conducted under the so-called Chatham House Rule by which “participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed” (Chatham House). Participants can make notes, but are not allowed to take those home. What they can take home is a list of the participants and their contact information. There was no press conference nor a communiqué and participants agreed not to give interviews to the press. As the organizers state about the conference in a press release: “There is no desired outcome, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued”.

The organization does publish a list of participants and mentions the topics of discussion, but is otherwise stingy in providing more information. Its headquarters has the same address as the main address of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands at a picturesque canal just around the corner where I used to live. It might have a staff of just one person. All the footwork and research though seems to be done at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York, which many consider the most influential of long-term policy planning organizations in the West. They were the architects of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the then still-born World Trade Organization (Shoup & Minter). Many of the Bilderberg Steering Committee members are prominent members of the CFR.

The Non-Reporting by Reporters

The media were well represented, but do not hold your breath to receive a report or, God forbid, a scoop by John Micklethwait, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist; Natalie Nougayrède, Director and Executive Editor of Le Monde; Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator of The Financial Times; or by any of the other five highly placed journalists present from Austria, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Turkey. The condition of their participation is to put away their notebooks and keep silent afterward.

If Bilderberg is ever mentioned in such media it is to ridicule conspiracy theorists and their inflated, paranoid ideas about who runs the world. Any attempt at critical analysis, of which I deem them perfectly capable, seems verboten, though reporting during the last decade has improved. And small chance to see academic studies mentioned which view such gatherings from a non-conspiratorial social science angle like the work of Ian Richardson, Carol Quigley, Anthony Sutton, Laurence Shoup, Holly Sklar, G. William Domhoff, or Kees van der Pijl. This is unfortunate, because such knowledge is now pushed under and into the dark where it gets mixed with antisemitism, alien agendas and–to which undersigned has contributed–occultism. Fortunately, besides the mainstream The Guardian in the United Kingdom, there are some journalists representing smaller and fringe media reporting on the Bilderberg like Jon Ronson, Jim Tucker, Alex Jones and others with widely differing qualities of reporting.

One of the questions discussed this year in Denmark was “Does privacy exist?” Given the extensive security measures surrounding the conference and the strict rules of engagement inside, this question drips with sinister irony. As Charlie Skelton, reporting on the spot for The Guardian, UK’s foremost paper to tackle under-reported stories, contemplates:

There’s something distinctly chilling about the existence of privacy being debated, in extreme privacy, by people such as the executive chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, and the board member of Facebook Peter Thiel: exactly the people who know how radically transparent the general public has become.

Now, add to this list of social media representatives Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, and Clara Shih, CEO and founder of Hearsay Social (about whom more later), and you have a nice group of experts for the elite to consult about social media and privacy.

Maybe the best way to frame the topic is to realize that the elite there gathered in Denmark takes privacy and secrecy for granted as a right for themselves and considers the public’s privacy as merely a privilege to be tinkered with in secrecy. Facebook’s business model requires transparency to shape its members into predictable, profitable consumers and the NSA’s Snowden-blown secret mandate is to monitor the world’s communication patterns and treat ordinary Americans as incipient terrorists. Both NSA and Facebook tinker with their interpretations of privacy and political rights as much as they can get away with.

Little Case Study

To help maximize the reach of “highly regulated companies” like banks and insurers into our social networks to make money, is a California start-up company Hearsay Social. Without a hint of alarm about the company’s 1984-ish agenda The New York Times reported that,

To help bank employees navigate regulations, Hearsay offers software that includes libraries of approved content to post on social media, and it allows employees to customize their messages as long as they are vetted before publication. In addition, the program lets its users “listen” to activity on their social networks (Alden).

I mention this factoid because the CEO of this company, Clara Shih, was also in Copenhagen and might be the youngest Bilderberg attendee I know of. She is 32. Her monitoring software might be in high demand by other very important participants from the banking sector like HSBC’s chairman Douglas Flint and its senior adviser Sherard Cowper-Coles; Paul Achleitner and Josef Ackerman of Deutsche Bank; Franco Bernabe, VP of Rothschild Europe; and representatives of international financial institutions like Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF and Benoît Coeuré, executive board member of the European Central Bank. Add to this list some higher-ups from Lazard and Goldman Sachs and the picture is again of an enormous concentration of power and influence present at this Bilderberg conference.

NATO War Council?

Besides the social media and banking companies, both the intelligence and military community are also well represented at this Bilderberg meeting. Where else would one find–besides a possible NATO war council–professionals with the highest security clearance and military authority like Keith B. Alexander, the former commander of the U.S. Cyber Command and former director of the NSA; Philip M. Breedlove, the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe; the Secretary General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen; and John Sawers, head of the UK Secret Intelligence Service? Again, a quite impressive grouping.

Because the crisis in the Ukraine is officially on the Bilderberg agenda and NATO can be construed as an instrument of western, corporate finance capitalism (extremely well represented in Copenhagen) which together push into Eastern Europe and beyond to find more living space for corporations to extract wealth, this meeting might indeed be an informal war council to formulate a medium to long term policy which might satisfy all major–and sometimes divergent–corporate, military, intelligence and financial interests involved. After all, the name of the game in these clubs is consensus building around long-term corporate policy preferences (Richardson).

The Facebook-Intelligence Interface

As a last point, one might find in the above mentioned Peter Thiel an interesting interface between social media and the intelligence community as he sits on the board of Facebook and was behind Palantir Technologies, “a secretive data-mining company that made its name working for the CIA” (Waters), whose current CEO Alex Karp’s whereabouts in June was … you guess … also in Copenhagen. Once you look into the biographies of the attendants, very interesting patterns come to the fore and cry out for further investigation.

One might ask Thiel for the sake of transparency what actionable information he privately divulged and received on the question of privacy during the conference. And if the information might impact the running of Facebook. As long as he does not mention with which participants he had an exchange and is not talking to the press, he is not breaking the rules, at least not the ones set by the organizers. Such questions are relevant as Thiel is on the record stating he wants even more and better technology to monitor the world to prevent terrorism (Waters).

Academic Scrutiny

Fortunately a group of social scientists did manage to publish one of the rare academic monographs on Bilderberg, titled Bilderberg People: Elite power and consensus in world affairs. They did interview some of the attandees. Their research program is based on the following legitimate curiosity:

“In order to comprehend the significance of elite transnational networks, we need to gain some degree of transparency on what is taking place within them. We need to understand the interdependencies and motivations of participants, as well as the relationship between power and consensus within such communities. And, crucially, we need to understand how consensus is formed and disseminated within, and beyond, networks of this kind” (Richardson, 36).

Framing the Bilderberg like this might not be exciting, but the imperative to correctly understand these people, rather than demonizing them, is of great importance if attainable, realistic reforms of this world are on your agenda.

One of the pertinent questions in this study is about how to best frame our understanding of this club. One quoted reference about the origin of Bilderberg asked in its title ” CIA plot, socialist conspiracy, or new world order?” (Wilford), to which the authors answered, though tucked away in a footnote, that “Wilford’s research provides extremely qualified support for the new world order hypothesis” (Richardson et al). This hypothesis is basically stating that Bilderberg tries to understand and shape the process of globalization through secretive consensus building within the transatlantic elite. In their conclusion Richardson et al come to the following succinct formulation of their findings:

This book has sought to demonstrate that they are an integral part of a system of world politics that exists beyond any formal conception of constituency or process. They facilitate communication primarily between transnational business interests and internationalist political elites, and their focus, not always conscious, is related to the structural challenges of globalization (217).

Much more could be written about this group, but for now, I hope you have obtained a taste for parapolitics as a relevant discipline to understand a bit better how the world works. It is not an invitation to grand conspiracy theorizing, but a call to vigilance because the cumulative effect of a series of petites conspiracies in the many shapes corruption takes, combined with the secretive long-term policy formation process within the transnational elites, might be equal to the dystopian disasters the grand conspiracy theorists project.

Sources

Alden, William. “Hearsay Social Raises $30 Million to Give Bankers an Online Presence“. The New York Times. Sept 5, 2013. Web.

Bilderberg Meetings. “Participants“. Web (cached).

Bilderberg Meetings. “Press Release“. Web (cached).

Chatham House. “Chatham House Rule“. Web.

Richardson, Ian; Andrew Kakabadse; Nada Kakabadse. Bilderberg People: Elite Power and Consensus in World Affairs. (London & New York; Routledge, 2011). Print.

Skelton, Charlie. “Bilderberg at 60: inside the world’s most secretive conference“. The Guardian. May 29, 2014. Web.

Waters, Richard. “Lunch with the FT: Peter Thiel“. Financial Times . Dec 20, 2013. Web.

Wilford, Hugh. “CIA plot, socialist conspiracy, or new world order? The origins of the Bilderberg group, 1952–55”. Diplomacy & Statecraft 01/2003; 14(3):70-82. Print.

Background

Aubourg, Valerie. “Organizing Atlanticism: the Bilderberg group and the Atlantic Institute, 1952–1963”. Intelligence and National Security, 18:2 (2003), 92-105. Comparing two private, transatlantic organizations which started in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s.

Domhoff, G. William. The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America: An Investigation of the Men and Women who govern our Country (New York: Vintage Books, 1969). Penetrating sociological study of the power elite. Special chapter on the CFR and one on conspiricist views of the upper-class.

Domhoff, G. William. The Powers That Be: Processes Of Ruling Class Domination In America (New York: Vintage Books, 1978) Study of the ways and means of power-elite hegemony. Most revealing chapter on the role of the CFR in creating the UN, IMF and Worldbank.

Eringer, Robert. The Global Manipulators: The Bilderberg Group… the Trilateral Commission… covert power groups of the West. Bristol, UK: Pentacle Books, 1980. Print. An early journalistic foray into Bilderberg-land and how the media failed the public. First chapter here.

Estulin, Daniel. The True Story of the Bilderberg Group. Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2007. Print. “For some 15 years, Estulin has been a thorn in the sides of the Bilderbergers, relentlessly hunting down their secret meeting places, gaining inside sources who divulge what goes on behind closed doors, even photographing attendees and publicly disclosing it all.”

Pijl, Kees van der. The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso, 1984). Print. Study of the development and integration of the American and West European post-WWII corporate elite.

Quigley, Carroll. The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden (New York: Books in Focus, 1981). Print. Eminent historian reveals historical roots of a secret cabal within the Anglo-American establishment. Study written in 1946 and finally published posthumously in 1981.

Quigely, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1966). Print. Tucked away in a vast narrative of 1870-1945 world history, eminent historian reveals evidence of the existence of a secret cabal within the Anglo-American establishment and its impact on history.

Richardson, Ian. “Bilderberg, Elite Consensus and the Media“. The Huffington Post, UK Edition. July 13, 2011. Web.

Richardson, Ian; Andrew Kakabadse; Nada Kakabadse. “Shaping Global Political Realities: The Workings of Transnational Elite Networks“. World Financial Review. March-April 2012. Web.

Ronson, Jon. Them: Adventures with Extremists (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002). Two chapters dedicated to his adventures to find out more about Bilderberg.

Ross Sr., Robert Gaylon. Who’s Who of the Elite: Members of the Bilderbergs, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and Skull & Bones Society. (N.p.; RIE, 1995). “The book is an excellent “reference” as to specifically who is affiliated with each specific elite organization, as well as cross-referencing what branch of government, industry, etc. their “day-job” corresponds with”. Different editions available.

Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

Shoup, Laurence H. and Minter, William. Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly review Press, 1977). Print. Academic study of the history, network and influence of the CFR, especially its architecture of the post-WW II order with institutes like the UN, IMF and World Bank, and later its 1980s Project laying the groundwork for trilateralism, the G-7 Summits and the Trilateral Commission.

Thompson, Peter. “Bilderberg and the West”. In Trilateralism, Holly Sklar (Editor).

Sklar, Holly (Editor). Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management (Boston: South End Press, 1980). Collection of case studies of the imperialist power of the TC. Includes an annotated TC membership list.

Sutton, Antony and Patrick Wood. Trilaterals Over Washington. 2 vols. (Scottsdale, Arizona: August Corp., 1978, 1981). Groundbreaking study on the Trilateral Commission by academic investigators.

Sutton, Antony. America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones (Billings, Montana: Liberty House, 1986). After obtaining the membership list of this Yale senior secret society, Sutton could connect the dots from his Wall Street trilogy and lay out the central role S&B played in fomenting wars and revolutions and controlling education.

Wala, Michael. The Council on Foreign Relations and American Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War (Oxford & New York: Berghahn Books, 1994). “Based on extensive analysis of primary sources, this book clearly delineates the Councils activities- its study and discussion groups and its publications – and the developing international political, military, and economic situations.”

Added in 2020:

Ronson, Jon. 2001. “The Bilderberg Group“. Part 5 of “Secret Rulers of the World”. Documentary. World of Wonder Productions, 27 May 2001.

Wisnewski, Gerhard. 2014. The Bilderbergers, Puppet-Masters of Power?: An Investigation into Claims of Conspiracy at the Heart of Politics, Business and the Media. West Hoathly, UK: Clairview Books.

Kantor, Lukas. 2017. “Bilderberg Group and Transnational Capitalist Class: Recent Trends in Global Elite Club as Vindication of neo-Marxism.” Critique, 45/1-2: 183-204.

Gijswijt, Thomas W. 2007. Uniting the West: The Bilderberg Group, the Cold War and European Integration, 1952-1966. PhD. Thesis / Dissertation. Heidelberg University, 2007.

Gijswijt, Thomas W. 2019. Informal Alliance: The Bilderberg Group and Transatlantic Relations During the Cold War, 1952-1968. Oxon, UK & New York: Routledge.

Willimon, Beau, et al. 2013. House of Cards. The Complete Fifth Season.
Bohemian Grove is the inspiration for “Elysian Fields” in season 5.