Bilderberg 2014 – Participant List
Bilderberg 2014 – Participant List
62nd Bilderberg conference to take place from 29 May – 1 June 2014 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Copenhagen, 26 May 2014 – The 62nd Bilderberg meeting is set to take place from 29 May until 1 June 2014 in Copenhagen, Denmark. A total of around 140 participants from 22 countries have confirmed their attendance. As ever, a diverse group of political leaders and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media have been invited. The list of participants is available on http://www.bilderbergmeetings.orgThe key topics for discussion this year include:
- Is the economic recovery sustainable?
- Who will pay for the demographics?
- Does privacy exist?
- How special is the relationship in intelligence sharing?
- Big shifts in technology and jobs
- The future of democracy and the middle class trap
- China’s political and economic outlook
- The new architecture of the Middle East
- Ukraine
- What next for Europe?
- Current events
Founded in 1954, Bilderberg is an annual conference designed to foster dialogue between Europe and North America. Every year, between 120-150 political leaders and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media are invited to take part in the conference. About two thirds of the participants come from Europe and the rest from North America; approximately one third from politics and government and the rest from other fields.
The conference is a forum for informal discussions about major issues facing the world. The meetings are held under the Chatham House Rule, which states that participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s) nor of any other participant may be revealed.
Thanks to the private nature of the conference, the participants are not bound by the conventions of their office or by pre-agreed positions. As such, they can take time to listen, reflect and gather insights.
There is no desired outcome, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued.
Of particular note to me is this alarming statement questioning the very existence of privacy.
Among some notable participants: Huang, Yiping, Professor at Peking University (indicating the evolution of Chinese involvement within liberal elite power blocs), David Petraeus (noteworthy in light of his role in the Benghazi scandal), Kasim Reed (Mayor of Atlanta), Eugene Rumer (Senior Associate and Director, Russia and Eurasia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), Eric E.Schmidt (Executive Chairman, Google Inc.), Thiel, Peter A. (a notable returnee who gained some notoriety among libertarians for donating $2 million to the Ron Paul campaign), among others.
This will be the second year without Jim Tucker, who died about a month or so prior to the last Bilderberg meeting in 2013. Perhaps Daniel Estulin will have some luck disseminating some details.
Google to buy drone-maker Titan Aerospace
Google Inc said it will buy drone-maker Titan Aerospace in an attempt to provide Internet access to more parts of the world, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Google did not disclose a purchase price for Titan, whose solar-powered drones are intended to fly for years, the paper said.
Read more: http://reut.rs/1iiYGlx
(Photo credit: REUTERS/Krishnendu Halder)
We’re Living in the Era of “Economic Elite Domination”
Welcome to the new aristocracy, political scientists say, where the public’s opinion is literally of “little or no” significance in the democratic process.
This article discusses a fascinating paper by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page and some varying theories about the nature of voting, public policy, and who writes the law. I have heard it argued that the law is motivated by public opinion (many libertarians tend to argue this when it comes to things like the Civil Rights Act), but this conflicts with other notions about the nature of power and the state’s tendency to favor rule by the few.
Creepy show on Disney: Indoctrination by the surveillance state or innocent entertainment?
Special Agent Oso.
This is quite intriguing in light of last year’s revelations about the surveillance state.
Most people probably already know that insect spy drones are already in the works. While spy shows are not new (Here, here, and here you can find some information about the Pentagon’s and CIA’s ties to Hollywood), it is not hard to see that at the very least, this show gets young children used to the notion that small cameras are everywhere and that their ends are always beneficial. Notice that the Shutterbug sends signals of its location directly to agent Oso via the satellite, where he is told the children’s exact whereabouts. Some illuminating lyrics from the song:
She’s always in flight, on the case both day and night
Sending the picture right up to the satellite!
Also,
She’s on the front line of a unique team
So things will be fine whenever she sounds the alarm!
In other words, whenever something is “going wrong,” Shutterbug takes a picture of it and sends that picture and a signal of the location of that “wrong” to Special Agent Oso so that he can help to “fix” the situation. In the video, you see the Shutterbug taking a picture of a dead plant to document that someone has let a plant die and did not clean up the mess. Shutterbug also takes pictures of sad kids to report to Special Agent Oso that their lives need some “fixing.” Note that the Shutterbug flies inside the home of these children. All of this happens while the parents have left the child unattended.
This has probably already circulated around Tumblr, but I just couldn’t resist giving my opinion about this, especially since similar smart phone apps are now available.
Indoctrination by the surveillance state or innocent entertainment? You decide!
Hearing: Taking Down the Cartels: Examining United States – Mexico Cooperation | The House Committee on Homeland Security
Here you will find statements from members of Congress on the Mexican-American alliance against some of the drug cartels. These involve both the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartels. Here, Representative McCaul discusses cartel involvement in a plot to assassinate an ambassador to Saudi Arabia. It is interesting to wonder to what extent rival cartels might have cooperated with the Mexicans and Americans in the fall of “El Chapo?”
The weakening of one cartel means the strengthening of another.
One killed as Ukrainian forces launch ‘anti-terrorist’ operation
One Ukrainian state security officer has been killed and five others wounded in an “anti-terrorist” operation on Sunday against pro-Russian separatist militants in a city in the east, the interior minister said.
On the side of the separatists there had been an “unidentifiable number” of casualties during the operation in the town of Slaviansk, the minister, Arsen Avakov, said on his Facebook page. ”There were dead and wounded on both sides,” Avakov said. Full story
We have taken sick, disturbing, real-life covert operations and turned them into entertainment.
The sad part is that Scarlett Johansson is a Jew, and it was her line in the movie Captain America 2 that glossed over the explanation of what Operation Paperclip actually was: The U.S. government protecting Nazi scientists, giving them covers, and hiring them. The movie’s explanation? “German scientists gathered for strategic purposes.”
Nice job, Hollywood. Yet another movie with blessings from the CIA-Pentagon network.
Is Senator Ron Wyden really a privacy hero?
By James Buchal
Sen. Ron Wyden recently entertained a large crowd in Portland by what The Oregonian termed “scorch[ing] senior CIA and NSA officials and their ‘pattern of deception.’” But on March 12, 2013, Sen. Wyden asked the director of national intelligence, James Clapper: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper responded: “No, sir.” (It was so obvious that Clapper was lying that the Daily Show later ridiculed him, saying that “no spy should have that much of a tell.”)
Rather than “scorching” Clapper, Sen. Wyden responded: “I thank you for the answer.” Sen. Wyden had even supplied the question in advance. In June 2013, after the Snowden revelations, everyone knew that Clapper had lied. We can be pretty confident that Sen. Wyden knew that Clapper was lying back in March 2013.
How do we know this? Because in August 2013, in an attempt to justify the blatantly illegal NSA spying, the Obama administration released a white paper which said: ”information concerning the use of section 205 to collect telephony data in bulk was made available to all Members of Congress.” Sen. Wyden is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and, thus, in a better position than nearly all members to know what was going on. If he didn’t, he was surely not much of an asset to the committee. So why didn’t he challenge Clapper’s lie back in April?
The entire question-in-advance exercise may well have been a deliberate attempt by Sen. Wyden to mislead the American people about the scope of government spying. From this perspective, in the wake of the Snowden revelations, Sen. Wyden is a modern-day Captain Renault: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”
The countervailing argument is that Sen. Wyden was barred from challenging Clapper’s answer because to do so would reveal classified information. But if that were true, then what purpose would be served by asking the question in the first place? Sen. Wyden would then be asking a question that could not be honestly answered without committing a crime. The possibility remains that the answer Sen. Wyden was seeking was: ”I cannot answer your question.” Under this theory, Sen. Wyden would have been stymied by the lie.
The problem with this theory is that there is no reason to believe Sen. Wyden would have suffered prosecution for responding to Clapper by saying “you, sir, are a liar”— instead of “thank you for your answer.” Sen. Mike Gravel once read the top-secret Pentagon Papers into the record during a congressional subcommittee meeting. The United States Supreme Court refused to let prosecutors even investigate the crime, stating: ”We have no doubt that Sen. Gravel may not be made to answer – either in terms of questions or in terms of defending himself from prosecution – for the events that occurred at the subcommittee meeting.”
Moreover, Sen. Wyden could also have invoked standing procedures of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence under section 8 of S. Res. 400, which provides that the committee “may, subject to the provisions of this section, disclose publicly any information in the possession of such committee after a determination by such committee that the public interest would be served by such disclosure.” Sen. Wyden did attempt to seek declassification of legal opinions concerning the meaning of the intelligence statutes, but he did so in a way that was not effective, and a release of legal theories is a far cry from letting Americans know that he and his fellow members of Congress have already constructed a surveillance state of immense and sinister proportions at taxpayer expense.
The people of Portland may believe that Sen. Wyden is their privacy hero, but I have serious doubts. An essential quality of a hero is courage, and a courageous senator would have attacked Clapper immediately and worked effectively to bring about declassification of patently-illegal surveillance programs. But for Snowden, we can have no confidence that Sen. Wyden would have ever told us what was really going on. And unless and until Sen. Wyden explains what was going on back on March 23, 2013, it will be hard to tell whether the efforts he sometimes seems to make are real or just a shadow play for the voters. Above all else, a real hero for privacy would not fund the construction of the surveillance programs in the first place.
A little known fact about PRISM is that it is likely that the entire Congress knew about the spying but was “not allowed to talk about it due to its ‘classified’ status.” Could the conversation in which Clapper lied about spying have been staged? It is very interesting that such a conversation should take place just before Edward Snowden’s famous leak. What if Ron Wyden would have called him out at the time? As the article argues, a simple, “Sir, you are a liar,” would have sufficed. This should serve as a sober reminder to all of us about trusting politicians.
Venezuela government and foes talk; Vatican to mediate
President Nicolas Maduro’s government and Venezuela’s main opposition group agreed on Tuesday to begin talks intended to halt the nation’s worst political unrest in a decade. Representatives of the Vatican and South American regional bloc Unasur will mediate, both sides said. Clashes between security forces and pro-government militants on one side, and hooded opposition demonstrators blocking streets on the other, have killed 39 people since mid-February, according to official figures. The dead have included government supporters, opponents, and members of the security forces.
Very interesting politics here. That the Vatican is stepping in to mediate should serve as a sign of its power and influence. Whether it is successful is quite another story.
Google to Obama: Leave Us Out of Your Spying Fight
Silicon Valley doesn’t want people to confuse NSA prying with private data mining.
Seems as though the tech giant is motivated by bad publicity. Has anyone forgotten that they were compliant in the spying?
The politics between the feds and the tech giants are fascinating.
Bilderberg Meetings | The official website
Bilderberg has publicly announced where it will be holding its annual meetings: As the link above states, “The 62nd Bilderberg meeting will take place at the end of May 2014 in Denmark.”
I do not recall Bilderberg being so open about its meeting times in the past, though I could be wrong about this method. Many have thought that increased public pressure about the secrecy of the Group has led it to start its own website with an official attendees list, as you will see if you click on the links above. Usually, it is up to those “in the know” with special contacts who discover when the meetings will be. What an interesting coincidence that these people should publish their official location so openly the year after we lose Jim Tucker.
CIA Official Dies in Apparent Suicide
A senior CIA official has died in an apparent suicide this week from injuries sustained after jumping off a building in northern Virginia, according to sources close to the CIA. CIA spokesman Christopher White confirmed the death and said the incident did not take place at CIA headquarters in McLean, Va.
Tragic turn of events. The article does not release names and assumes he did, in fact, jump. This man is stated to be in middle management, though he apparently did not jump from CIA headquarters in Virginia. It is possible that he did, however, jump from another CIA location. This is something worth following up on in the days to come.
Missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: Secret services involvement in investigation sparks speculation over terrorism
Malaysian authorities have revealed secret services from the UK, the US and China have been involved in the investigations into the disappearance of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, adding to speculation that the plane’s disappearance could be down to terrorism.MI6, the CIA and Chinese agencies have been looking into the flight simulator found in the home of the flight’s Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, though acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said the FBI has found nothing sinister in the device.
MI6, the CIA, and Chinese intelligence are all revealed to be working together to “solve the mystery” of the missing plane.
Rand Paul builds 50-state network, courts mainstream support for presidential bid
Paul, 51, of Kentucky, has been courting Wall Street titans and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who donated to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, attending elite conclaves in Utah and elsewhere along with other GOP hopefuls.
Foreign policy advisers — such as Richard Burt, a former ambassador, and Lorne Craner, a former State Department official — are expected to be part of the chain of command.
Joe Lonsdale, a hedge fund manager, is also on board, as is Ken Garschina, a principal at Mason Capital Management in New York. So are brothers Donald and Phillip Huffines, Texas real estate developers; Atlanta investor Lane Moore; and Frayda Levy, a board member at conservative advocacy groups Americans for Prosperity and the Club for Growth.
From the state parties, outgoing Iowa Republican Party Chairman A.J. Spiker and former Nevada GOP chairman James Smack have signed on, and a handful of Republican officials are preparing to join once their terms expire, including Robert Graham, chairman of the Arizona Republican Party.
Furthermore:
[Erika] Sather, a former development director at the Club for Growth, spent much of the winter introducing Paul to donors beyond the libertarians who helped Ron Paul raise more than $40 million for his 2012 presidential campaign. Stafford, a former adviser to several conservative groups, has mined the donor lists of the Campaign for Liberty, FreedomWorks and other advocacy organizations.
Cathy Bailey and Nate Morris, two prominent GOP fundraisers from Kentucky, also were instrumental in bringing the group together.
Morris, 33, previously a prolific GOP fundraiser who has raised money for George W. Bush, has served as Paul’s guide as the freshman senator has navigated steakhouse dinners and tony receptions with Republican power brokers.
Nurturing relationships with Bob Murray, a coal baron and former Romney bundler; former George Bush donor Jack Oliver, who is aligned with Jeb Bush; and Blakely Page, an associate of billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch, has been a priority.
Those big-name donors have not signed on with any potential Republican candidate, but Paul’s supporters think the formation of a leadership team could entice them, or at least signal Paul’s seriousness.
Is Paul the Younger on his way to making friends with the elites of the Eastern Establishment? Only time will tell. It is my prediction that Rand Paul is tragically becoming the right-wing version of Barack Obama. Instead of touting Hope and Change, we hear Liberty and Restoration for America.
I called it here first.
Rand Paul builds 50-state network, courts mainstream support for presidential bid
Public feud between CIA, Senate panel follows years of tension over interrogation report
An excerpt:
The bulk of the research was completed more than a year ago, yielding a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that amounts to a damning chronicle of that CIA program. But the struggle to shape whether and how that history is presented to the public has triggered a fight between the CIA and the committee over what happened behind that locked door.
The dispute, which spilled into public view this week, centers on whether the committee broke laws in obtaining a set of documents the agency never intended to share, or whether the CIA broke laws in its searches of committee computers to see how those files ended up in the panel’s possession.
The documents themselves would seem to be of little significance. Created at the direction of then-CIA Director Leon E. Panetta, they were meant to take inventory of the records being turned over to Congress and, in some cases, anticipate in written asides how damaging some of that material might be in the committee’s hands.
Nevertheless, control of those “Panetta review” documents could be critical to whether that report comes to be seen as an exhaustive and accurate accounting of the CIA’s interrogation operations or, as many agency officials contend, a flawed document that reaches deeply misguided judgments about the program and whether it worked.
What most people do not realize is that public feuds between Congress and the CIA are highly unusual. The shock of the CIA’s surveillance of Congress comes from the fact that the Eastern Establishment has used the CIA in its covert operations for decades. So when people like Dianne Feinstein come out swinging against the surveillance, it is because it’s like having your own dog betray you.
Sit, Ubu sit. Good dog!
Public feud between CIA, Senate panel follows years of tension over interrogation report
U.S. regulator says knocking out nine key substations could cause nationwide blackout
In its modeling, FERC studied what would happen if various combinations of substations were crippled in the three electrical systems that serve the contiguous U.S. The agency concluded the systems could go dark if as few as nine locations were knocked out: four in the East, three in the West and two in Texas, people with knowledge of the analysis said.
The actual number of locations that would have to be knocked out to spawn a massive blackout would vary depending on available generation resources, energy demand, which is highest on hot days, and other factors, experts said. Because it is difficult to build new transmission routes, existing big substations are becoming more crucial to handling electricity.
In last April’s attack at PG&E Corp.’s Metcalf [California] substation, gunmen shot 17 large transformers over 19 minutes before fleeing in advance of police. The state grid operator was able to avoid any blackouts.
The Metcalf substation sits near a freeway outside San Jose, Calif. Some experts worry that substations farther from cities could face longer attacks because of their distance from police. Many sites aren’t staffed and are protected by little more than chain-link fences and cameras.
While the prospect of a nationwide blackout because of sabotage might seem remote, small equipment failures have led to widespread power outages. In September 2011, for example, a failed transmission line in Arizona set off a chain reaction that created an outage affecting millions of people in the state and Southern California.
Sabotage could wreak worse havoc, experts said.
“The power grid, built over many decades in a benign environment, now faces a range of threats it was never designed to survive,” said Paul Stockton, a former assistant secretary of defense and president of risk-assessment firm Cloud Peak Analytics. “That’s got to be the focus going forward.”
U.S. regulator says knocking out nine key substations could cause nationwide blackout
Utilities testing techology to track guns within 10 meters of gunfire
With the shooters who attacked a Silicon Valley power station last April still at large and Congress increasing pressure on utilities to do more to protect such facilities, electricity companies are looking at a new security technology popular among urban police forces.
Sensors that can immediately track, within 10 meters, the location of gunfire will soon be tested at two power stations. An executive at the Bay Area firm that manufactures that technology, ShotSpotter, said public safety concerns preclude him from disclosing exactly where.
The test run comes as the FBI remains flummoxed by the shooting at the Pacific Gas & Electric Co. power station near San Jose. The attack on the transformers caused considerable damage and came dangerously close to knocking out power in Silicon Valley.
Energy experts, including the former chief of the Federal Regulatory Commission, have since warned that the assault could have been a dress rehearsal for a larger attack on electricity infrastructure. A coordinated series of similar shootings, they say, has the potential to knock out power in a large part of the West for an extended time.
The ShotSpotter audio sensors can triangulate the sound of a gunshot to pinpoint its exact location and send an alert to law enforcement. The technology is used by police forces across the country, including in the city of South Gate, parts of Oakland and a large swath of Washington D.C. It costs $150,000 to $200,000 to install at a substation, plus annual monitoring costs of about $20,000.
Utilities testing techology to track guns within 10 meters of gunfire
Report: EPA tested deadly pollutants on humans
The Environmental Protection Agency has been conducting dangerous experiments on humans over the past few years in order to justify more onerous clean air regulations.
The agency conducted tests on people with health issues and the elderly, exposing them to high levels of potentially lethal pollutants, without disclosing the risks of cancer and death, according to a newly released government report.
These experiments exposed people, including those with asthma and heart problems, to dangerously high levels of toxic pollutants, including diesel fumes, reads a EPA inspector general report obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The EPA also exposed people with health issues to levels of pollutants up to 50 times greater than the agency says is safe for humans.
The EPA conducted five experiments in 2010 and 2011 to look at the health effects of particulate matter, or PM, and diesel exhaust on humans. The IG’s report found that the EPA did get consent forms from 81 people in five studies. But the IG also found that “exposure risks were not always consistently represented.”
“Further, the EPA did not include information on long-term cancer risks in its diesel exhaust studies’ consent forms,” the IG’s report noted. “An EPA manager considered these long-term risks minimal for short-term study exposures” but “human subjects were not informed of this risk in the consent form.”
According to the IG’s report, “only one of five studies’ consent forms provided the subject with information on the upper range of the pollutant” they would be exposed to, but even more alarming is that only “two of five alerted study subjects to the risk of death for older individuals with cardiovascular disease.”
Three of the studies exposed people to high levels of PM and two of the studies exposed people to high levels of diesel exhaust and ozone. Diesel exhaust contains 40 toxic air contaminants, including 19 that are known carcinogens and PM. The EPA has publicly warned of the dangers of PM, but seemed to downplay them in their scientific studies on humans.
“This lack of warning about PM,” the IG’s report notes, “is also different from the EPA’s public image about PM.”
covertpolitik 