Meeting in Chantilly: Trump administration progress report
I have been commenting on the annual meetings of the Bilderberg Club for several years now. June 1-4 in the United States in the small town of Chantilly, Virginia, its 65th annual meeting was held. The club sat in the luxurious Westfields Marriott Hotel. Something attracts the Bilderbergers to this town - the club has gathered here three times before: in 2002, 2008 and 2012. In general, the club prefers to change its meeting places. Four meetings in one place is an absolute record. Maybe Chantilly's appeal is due to the fact that this place is located a few kilometers from the White House in Washington? While there is no confirmation that George W. Bush and Barack Obama attended club meetings at the Westfields Marriott Hotel, experts say both presidents kept in touch with attendees online.
The topics for the 2017 Bilderberg meetings are: “Transatlantic Relations: Options and Scenarios”, “NATO Activities”, “EU Development and Governance”, “Can Globalization Be Slowed Down?”, “Jobs, Income and Unfulfilled Expectations”, “Information wars”,“Why is populism growing?”,“The role of Russia in the world order”,“Middle East”,“Nuclear proliferation”,“China”and“Current events”.
Well, the main theme, which became the brand of the 65th meeting of the Bilderberg Club, is formulated as follows: "The Trump Administration: a progress report." The wording is unprecedented. It's not hard to assume that if a club hears a report from the Trump administration, then that administration had some task. And the demand for a report just four and a half months after Trump's arrival in the White House is evidence that the "masters of discourse" are not satisfied with his behavior. I remember the extraordinary plenary sessions of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which met to resolve "personnel issues", after which other figures, like Nikita Khrushchev, left their posts "for health reasons." I would like to call this meeting of the Bilderberg Club an extraordinary plenum. However, other parallels are possible. For example, the Sanhedrin. This highest religious institution in Ancient Judea was also the highest judicial body. The meeting in Chantilly highlights the fact that the Bilderberg Club is not just a discussion platform for the world's elite, but also a gathering whose members consider themselves entitled to pass court verdicts.
The meetings in Chantilly were attended by 131 people from 21 countries of the world. For the third year in a row, the summit is chaired by Henri de Castries, who led the French AXA Group from 2000 to 2016, one of the largest in the world. Today, de Castries is the president of the Montaigne Institute - "a laboratory of ideas that contributes to the development of France in the global world." He is said to have been instrumental in promoting Emmanuel Macron to the presidency of France.
There are newcomers and veterans in the lists of meeting participants. The first of the veterans and elder of the club can be safely called 94-year-old Henry Kissinger. David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski could compete with him in this title, but those are no longer there. And the youngest participant was Boyan Slat, a Dutchman of Croatian origin, who is only 23 years old. On the lists, he is listed as the founder and head of The Ocean Cleanup, but I think the young man was invited to Chantilly not to clean up the world's oceans from garbage, but for subsequent inclusion in the “reserve”. This is how the Bilderbergers “looked” at the young Macron.
And who is reporting on the work of the Trump administration? Please: Herbert McMaster, Lieutenant General, Donald Trump's National Security Advisor; Wilbur Ross Jr., US Secretary of Commerce Christopher Liddell, assistant to the US president and director of the Center for Strategic Initiatives at the White House, vice chairman and chief financial officer of General Motors (GM) and chief financial officer of Microsoft Corporation; Nadia Shadlow, deputy assistant to the US president and member of the National Security Council responsible for developing the new administration's official national security strategy. Terry McAuliffe, Governor of Virginia, may also have contributed to the report.
US Senator Lindsay Graham, with an enduring reputation as a hawk, was invited to the Bilderberg meeting as "witnesses"; John Brennan, former CIA director, now a senior advisor to Kissinger Associates Inc.; David Petraeus, another former CIA director and now chairman of the KKR Global Institute, which analyzes the impact of macroeconomic, geopolitical and social changes on investment activities; Robert Rubin, Co-Chair of the Council on Foreign Relations, former US Treasury Secretary; a number of other "former" members of the teams of Barack Obama and previous American presidents. Their "testimony" on the activities of the Donald Trump administration, most likely, had an accusatory bias.
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Most of the participants in the meeting - as always, representatives of big business, bankers, politicians, heads of influential media. In recent years, big business has been represented, among other things, by the leaders, founders and owners of giant IT companies, primarily American ones. In Chantilly, this business sector was represented by Eric Schmidt, founder of Google, chairman of the board of directors of Alphabet Inc. (parent company Google), head of the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, US Department of Defense; Peter Thiel, President of Till Capital, founder of PayPal, the first professional investor in Facebook; Reed Hoffman, a well-known venture capitalist, co-founder of LinkedIn, a social networking site.
As always, full of representatives of the financial and banking world. Among them: Christine Lagarde, Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund; Claes Knot, President of the Dutch Central Bank (De Nederlandsche Bank); Bill Morneau, Minister of Finance of Canada; Jens Spahn, Federal Minister of Finance of Germany; Pierre Wunsch, Vice Chairman of the Belgian Central Bank (National Bank of Belgium).
The largest group of participants are representatives of private banks, foundations, investment funds and other financial institutions. This is Paul Ahleitner, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank AG; Ana Botin, executive chairman of Spanish bank Santander; Thomas Buber, CEO of the French insurance and investment company AXA Group; Ralph Hamers, Chairman of the Board of the Dutch financial conglomerate ING Group; Jacobs Kenneth, chief executive and chairman of the board of finance and investment firm Lazard; Vernon Jordan, senior managing director of investment bank Lazard Frères & Co. LLC; Carsten Kengeter, CEO of the German Stock Exchange (Deutsche Börse AG); David Rubinstein, co-founder and co-chairman of The Carlyle Group investment fund; Markus Wallenberg,Chairman of the Board of the Swedish bank Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB and a number of others.
It is noteworthy that many people were gathered in Chantilly, directly or indirectly connected with the Wall Street Bank of Goldman Sachs. For example, the American Robert Zoellick. In the list of Bilderberg-2017 participants, he is listed as a Non-Executive Chairman of the American investment company AllianceBernstein LP (its assets at the beginning of this year were estimated at $ 500 billion). In 2007-2011. Robert Zoellick served as President of the World Bank and prior to that was Managing Director of Goldman Sachs for several years. Another figure is American James Johnson. On the lists, he appears as the chairman of the board of Johnson Capital Partners. After some searching, I find out that he is also a member of the Goldman Sachs Board. And here is the representative of Portugal Jose Manuel Barroso. Many remember him as President of the European Commission (2004-2014). He left this post to link his life with Goldman Sachs (transplanting Barroso from one chair to another, contrary to EU ethics, even caused a scandal in Brussels).
Other participants in the meeting do not fully disclose their biographies. Additional investigations show that they have previously worked for leading Wall Street and City of London banks. For example, Ana Botin, who represented at the meeting the largest Spanish bank Santander (one of the largest banks in Europe, controlled by the Rothschild clan). From the biography of the lady, we learn that before that she worked for JP Morgan bank for 8 years.
Many participants in the meeting in Shatntilly are members of supervisory boards, boards, directorates of several (even several dozen) commercial organizations at once. For example, Claes Knot, mentioned above as the chairman of the Dutch Central Bank. He is simultaneously a member of the Governing Council and the General Council of the European Central Bank (ECB), as well as a member of the Board of Governors of the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
It is a pity that those antiglobalists who extract and publish lists of participants in the Bilderberg meetings do not give detailed biographical information about them. But many have a “smelly” past. I randomly investigated some. Take the same Barroso: in his youth he was fond of Mao's ideas, was involved in terrorist acts … Apparently, people with such a past are needed for organizers of meetings of this club.
One more observation. In recent years, the lists of participants in the Bilderberg Plenums have increasingly come across surnames against which the words “professor” or “senior researcher” (Senior Fellow) stand. This year I counted at least two dozen such "scientists". A deeper acquaintance with the biographies of the representatives of "science" at the meeting in Chantilly shows that the "professor" and "senior researcher" are a common disguise.
The well-known anti-globalization organization Zerohedge has prepared a diagram showing the geography of connections between the participants of the next Bilderberg gathering: the coverage is truly global.
VALENTIN KATASONOV