Bilderberg: sinister with a smile

[CHIMO]

An extraordinary thing happened last weekend. The world's most secretive strategy group, Bilderberg, poked its nose out of the shadows and launched its own website: bilderbergmeetings.org. For an organisation that prefers to cordon the press a mile from its meetings, whose press relations policy to date has been to arrest, harass and search journalists, this was an astonishing turnaround.

Until now, David Rockefeller's policy forum carried on quietly out of sight. It welcomed politicians (David Cameron in 2008, George Osborne 2006-2009) to strategise in secret with corporate heads, European royalty and bank bosses. This year saw Google CEO Eric Schmidt take part alongside Robert Zoellick (president of the World Bank), Bill Gates and the usual sprinkle of EU commissioners and Goldman Sachs heavyweights. If you didn't know it was going on, that's understandable. It's what they wanted.

This year, in the Spanish seaside town of Sitges, the sheer weight of attention on Bilderberg became too much for its policy of "ignorance management". TV crews at the police line, bloggers blogging, the Spanish press asking questions about cost, the Canadian press wondering at this year's unusual glut of Canucks – finally, the mainstream press was taking notice. I found myself taking part in a debate on the BBC World Service. I knew something had changed when Kate Adie spoke passionately of her concerns about the armed secrecy of Bilderberg.

This secrecy in action is quite a sight. For four whole days, a normally tranquil hotel on the Spanish coast was transformed into the Pentagon: riot police, police helicopters, military divers moored offshore, and hundreds of plain clothes officers – a mammoth €10m campaign of press exclusion for a "private meeting", all paid for by the already hard-pressed Spanish taxpayer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/11/bilderberg-sinister-with-smile

[Jackpine Radical]

1. I keep thinking of Charles Fort:

"We are cattle."

[Tutankhamun]

2. Come on! Bilderberg is just a place for the world's richest, most powerful people to meet

and play some darts N stuff.

:sarcasm:

[Mopar151]

3. It's a club, and you ain't in it!

George Carlin

[peacetalksforall]

4. My gut tells me that there are no redeeming good works on behalf of the human race underway. I don'

know how I became so leary and disapproving of a secret group. Repugnant.

[Bitwit1234]

5. I just don't understand WHY

the republican MSM aren't messing their pants to cover this convention. They have more members than the tea bags and yet they are ignored.