A handful of high-ranking Obama administration officials this month delivered private briefings at the annual invitation-only conference held by an elite international organization known as the Bilderberg group.

The closed meeting of some of the most powerful business , media and political leaders in North America and Western Europe heard from top Obama diplomats James Steinberg and Richard Holbrooke, who detailed the administration’s foreign policy, while economic adviser Paul Volcker, chairman of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, also gave a presentation at the heavily guarded seaside resort in Greece that hosted the event.

The Bilderberg group, which takes its name from the Dutch hotel where it held its first meeting in 1954, exists solely to bring together between 100 and 150 titans of politics, finance, military, industry, academia and media from North America and Western Europe once a year to discuss world affairs.

Its ultra-exclusive roster of globally influential figures has captured the interest of an international network of conspiracists, who for decades have viewed the Bilderberg conference as a devious corporate-globalist scheme.

This year’s closed-press meeting, held at the five-star Astir Palace hotel in Vouliagmeni on the Aegean Sea about 25 miles south of Athens, marked the 57th gathering of the opaque organization.

The publicity-shy Bilderberg group – which in a rare mass-circulation press release last year described itself as “a small, flexible, informal and off-the-record international forum in which different viewpoints can be expressed and mutual understanding enhanced” – has no website and participants are asked not to publicly discuss the proceedings.

But a meeting attendee tells POLITICO that Holbrooke, a State Department special envoy, briefed attendees on the Obama administration’s unified approach to dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, gave a presentation on the administration’s broader foreign policy and National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander also participated in the conference.

An assistant to Volcker said she did not know the subject of his presentation at this year’s meeting. A White House official stressed that Volcker is not a full-time employee and wasn’t representing Obama in Greece. The White House, State Department and NSA did not respond to questions about whether Alexander, Holbrooke and Steinberg – all repeat Bilderberger attendees – were representing the Obama administration at the meeting and whether tax dollars paid for their travel.

Steinberg, it should be noted, was in the region on official business for talks with officials from Greece, Macedonia and Montenegro, on the eve of Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to other Balkan states: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia.

Though Bilderberg tends to attract mostly former U.S. government officials, it’s not uncommon for sitting officials to attend.

Bilderberg stalwart Henry Kissinger, who’s attended more than half of its meetings, reportedly went at least twice during his stint as Secretary of State, while Alexander attended last year’s session as NSA director. In 2004, then-Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) attended the Bilderberg conference in Stresa, Italy, and both TIME magazine and the New York Times reported that his performance at a debate there played a role in his selection one month later as the vice presidential running mate for Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

But any suggestion that Bilderberg is secretly anointing world leaders or plotting global policy is the provenance of “the black helicopter crowd,” the attendee of this year’s conference told POLITICO.

The meetings are “one of the least well-kept secrets in the world” and “don’t have any decision-making authority,” said the attendee, who did not want to be identified breaching Bilderberg’s off-the-record rule. The attendee called Bilderberg “a useful group of people who are well-connected and thoughtful who put on these meetings and usually invite a few people from the [U.S.] administration to come so they understand what the administration is doing.”

Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, who attended the 2007 and 2008 Bilderberg meetings and until recently sat on the steering committee that picked invitees, did not respond to a request for comment about how invitees are selected.

Other American participants at this year’s conference included World Bank President Robert Zoellick, billionaire Bilderberg regular David Rockefeller, academic Barnett Rubin and leading neoconservatives Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, according to the attendee, who added that Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis and Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis also attended.

Representatives of Obama economic advisor Larry Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner – both of whom have participated in past Bilderberg meetings – refuted foreign press reports predicting their presence last weekend.

Geithner was in New York, said Treasury spokeswoman Heather Wong. “I don’t know how that [Bilderberg rumor] got out there. I had some foreign press calls asking me where he was last weekend, but I didn’t have any domestic calls.”

Indeed, the gathering produced barely a blip in the American mainstream media, with the only notable dispatches coming from a Wall Street Journal reporter who was barred entry to the usually publicly accessible Astir Palace hotel, and an Associated Press reporter who noted that it was being protected by “hundreds of police, navy commandos, coast guard speedboats and two F-16 fighter planes.”

As in past years, the near-absence of mainstream media coverage left Bilderberg-veil-piercing duties to a group of self-styled Bilderberg hunters whose reporting and speculation fill fringe, libertarian-leaning websites, newspapers and AM radio shows popular with those whose worldview is characterized by a deep and angry suspicion of the ruling class rather than any prevailing partisan or ideological affiliation.

“Leaked Agenda: Bilderberg Group Plans Economic Depression,” blared a headline early this month on the popular website Infowars, which is run by syndicated radio talk show host Alex Jones.

The story was based on reporting by veteran Bilderberg sleuth Daniel Estulin, whose sources told him Bilderbergers were torn between whether to initiate “a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline and poverty … or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency.”

Estulin, the author of “The True Story of the Bilderberg Group,” claims to have infiltrated Bilderberg, and he told POLITICO that “in the end, the shorter-intense crowd within the Bilderbergers won out and so we’re going to be looking at a year, a year-and-a-half of really intense financial meltdown.”

Estulin, who was the first to report the precise location of Bilderberg 2009 (though in late 2007 he also reported that U.S. intelligence was considering assassinating Texas GOP Congressman and libertarian icon Ron Paul), declined to email POLITICO a copy of the pre-meeting booklet on which his story was based.

Both Estulin and Jim Tucker, another veteran Bilderberg hunter, insisted that Geithner—who Infowars reported was “to take orders from global elite at Bilderberg”—attended this year’s conference.

Tucker, who edits the nationalist American Free Press newspaper, traveled to Greece to report on last weekend’s Bilderberg meeting. He says he’s been on the sidelines of about 30 of the meetings. At this year’s event, two of his reporters were confronted by the Greek Navy when they rented a boat to try to take photographs of beachside Bilderbergers from the sea, he said.

“They don’t want the world to know how they’re planning our lives,” Tucker contended. “Obama is Bilderberg’s obedient little boy. He’ll follow orders.”

Leaked 1955 Bilderberg Docs Outline Plan for Single European Currency

Global elite spoke of agenda to create Euro nearly 40 years before it was first codified in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, May 8, 2009

Leaked documents from the 1955 Bilderberg Group conference held in Germany discuss the agenda to create a European Union and a single EU currency, decades before they were introduced, disproving once again debunkers who claim that Bilderberg has no influence over world events.

Leaked papers from the meeting which took place from September 23-25 1955 at the Grand Hotel Sonnenbichl in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany, were released by the Wikileaks website yesterday.

The full document can be read here (the password is ‘dynbase’).

As we first reported in 2003, a BBC investigative team were allowed to access Bilderberg files which confirmed that the EU and the Euro were the brainchild of Bilderberg. They were probably reading from the same documents that were released by Wikileaks.

It was only last month that Belgian viscount and current Bilderberg-chairman Étienne Davignon bragged that Bilderberg helped create the Euro by first introducing the policy agenda for a single currency in the early 1990’s.

However, the documents show that the agenda to create a European common market and a single currency go back decades earlier.

The summary report of the 1955 meeting talks of the “Pressing need to bring the German people, together with the other peoples of Europe, into a common market.”

The document also outlines the plan, “To arrive in the shortest possible time at the highest degree of integration, beginning with a common European market.”

Just two years later, in 1957, the first incarnation of the European Economic Community (EEC) was born, which comprised of a single market between Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The EEC gradually enlarged over the next few decades until it became the European Community, one of the three pillars of the European Union, which was officially created in 1993.

The 1955 Bilderberg summary outlines a consensus that, “It might be better to proceed through the development of a common market by treaty rather than by the creation of new high authorities.” The EEC was duly created via the Treaty of Rome, which was signed on 25 March 1957.

The same process is still being followed to this day with the Lisbon Treaty, which hands over vast swathes of national sovereignty to the EU by means of the consent of Presidents and Prime Ministers of European countries, rather than by the arbitrary creation of new authorities, a method that would more obviously lay bare the fact that the creation of a federal EU superstate is totalitarian by its very nature.

Even so, debunkers will probably still try and claim that the idea of a common European market was floating around in the early 1950’s and that Bilderberg were merely debating contemporary political ideas.

However, the same cannot be said for the single European currency, which wasn’t even introduced in the form of notes and coins until January 2002, having been first codified in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. The documents prove that Bilderberg members were pushing for its introduction nearly 40 years earlier.

“A European speaker expressed concern about the need to achieve a common currency, and indicated that in his view this necessarily implied the creation of a central political authority,” states the summary document.

True to form, the single European currency, the Euro, was not introduced until after the creation of a central political authority - the EU itself.

The document also stresses, “The necessity to bring the German people into a common European market as quickly as possible,” adding that the future was in danger without a “United Europe”.

We also learn that, “A United States participant confirmed that the United States had not weakened in its enthusiastic support for the idea of integration, although there was considerable diffidence in America as to how this enthusiasm should be manifested. Another United States participant urged his European friends to go ahead with the unification of Europe with less emphasis on ideological considerations and, above all, to be practical and work fast.”

Despite the plethora of manifestly provable examples of where Bilderberg’s agenda has later played out in actual policies and geopolitical developments on the world stage, establishment media debunkers still scoff and sneer at independent researchers who dare claim that 150 of the world’s most influential powerbrokers meeting in secret to discuss the future of the planet might equate to something more than an informal talking shop, calling such assertions “conspiracy theories”.

Indeed, the sheer stupidity of debunkers to suggest that an event that attracts the titans of government, industry, banking, business and academia, at which the most pressing global issues of the day are vigorously discussed under the cloak of a mutually agreed media blackout, has no bearing on future world events, is the most laughable “conspiracy theory” ever uttered.

Bilderberg’s 2009 agenda has already been leaked before their May 14-17 meeting in Vouliagmeni, Greece. According to investigative journalist Daniel Estulin, one of Bilderberg’s aims is to smear anti-Lisbon Treaty activists and politicians by planting derogatory stories in the media, enabling them to silence opposition to an EU federal superstate that Bilderberg has been carefully cultivating since their very first meetings in the 1950’s - a fact, not a conspiracy theory, proven by Bilderberg’s own internal documents.

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