The highly secretive Bilderberg Group held its 2009 annual meeting from May 14 to 17 at a luxury resort in Athens, Greece. As always, there was very little publicity and so we have a lot of speculation and few actual specifics.
Reports of the meeting began circulating in Greek publications such as Elefterios Tipos back in March. The English-language GR Reporter picked up the story. These accounts stated that the meeting would take place in the Nafsika Astir Palace Hotel, located in the town of Vouliagmeni, a few miles south of Athens. Movers and shakers in global commerce and high finance have met there in the past.
No one was sure that would be the location until the group actually met. The Group appears to have planted false leads to throw would-be observers off track. They may have done this last year. Hints appeared in the media suggesting a location in Greece; then they met in Chantilly, Virginia.
The Bilderberg Group usually holds its annual meeting in late May, but has been known to meet in June.
This year, the early reports turned out to be correct. The Group did meet at the Nafsika Astir Palace. As always, security was extremely tight. British reporter Charlie Skelton found himself in police custody after having taken one photograph of the area. “Important people,” he recounts for the UK’s The Guardian. “No ‘fotografia.’”
In another article, Skelton reports that he found himself followed and harassed for the remainder of his time in Greece. He left “chilled to the bone,” as he put it, convinced that the Bilderberg Group must be opposed.
What we are to oppose is not all that clear. Attendees swear an oath of secrecy, not to divulge to the media or anyone else the contents of the behind-closed-doors discussions carried on by the globe’s elites. It seems clear, however, that this year’s topic was the global economic meltdown.
Daniel Estulin (author of The True Story of the Bilderberg Group) claims that inside sources keep him informed, and that the topics of this year’s meeting included:
• The future of the U.S. economy, which is bleak. If Estulin can be believed, the recent uptick is a carefully contrived hoax. The economy will turn downward again; official unemployment will soar to around 14 percent by the end of this year.
• Bilderberg attendees’ two options: either a prolonged depression that will doom this country to decline, or a very intense but shorter depression that will open the door to the “new, sustainable economic world order” the elites envision. Either way, according to Estulin, if the Bilderberg Group has its way, national sovereignty is finished.
Attendees included, among Europeans, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Queen Sofia of Spain, Josef Ackermann (CEO of Deutsche Bank), Georgios A. Arapoglou (Governor of the National Bank of Greece), Martin Wolf (associate editor and economics commentator for the British Financial Times), and many other such luminaries of the European elite, ranging across royalty to high finance.
American attendees included well-known arch-globalists Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, former U.S. Trade Representative (now at the World Bank) Robert Zoellick, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, economist and former Harvard president Lawrence Summers (Director of the White House’s National Economics Council), former Fed chairman Paul Volcker (now Chair of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board); Harvard historian Niall Ferguson (author of the “official” two-volume history of the Rothschild dynasty), lawyer Vernon Jordan (close advisor to Bill Clinton), journalist Donald Graham (CEO and Chairman of the Board at the Washington Post), and — even more interestingly — Richard Holbrooke (Obama’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan) and Gen. David Petraeus (former Commander of U.S. Armed Forces in Iraq).
Photo: Acropolis of Athens with the Parthenon
