Mikael Forsberg
2016-06-04 23:11:25 UTC
http://www.transparency.org.uk/bilderberg-2016-the-elephant-in-the-lobby/
Bilderberg 2016: The Elephant in the Lobby
On Thursday of next week, at a luxury hotel in central Dresden, the
doors of the annual Bilderberg policy conference will be flung open. Not
to members of the press, mind. In fact, perhaps “flung” is overstating
it. Gingerly, behind a battalion of armed police, private security and
secret service bodyguards, the hotel door will be cracked ajar, and in
will slide a handpicked few of the most senior corporate executives in
the world: board members of transnational banks, chairmen of global
energy companies, and the owners of vast industrial and media conglomerates.
Scurrying in behind the bank bosses and hedge-fund billionaires will be
a clutch of extremely senior politicians from around Europe:
Chancellors, PMs, party leaders and finance ministers. Last year, the
President of Austria and the Prime Ministers of Holland and Belgium took
part in the discussions. Our own esteemed Chancellor of the Exchequer,
George Osborne, is a regular attendee, David Cameron himself was ushered
inside in 2013, and Lord Mandelson is often to be found popping on a
coveted white lanyard. This year, most notably, a hefty contigent from
the German cabinet is due to attend.
Inquiries made by the left-wing Die Linke party prompted the German
government to confirm that Chancellor Angel Merkel has been invited to
the Dresden conference, along with five senior federal ministers:
Wolfgang Schäuble (Finance); Ursula von der Leyen (Defence);
Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Foreign Affairs), Sigmar Gabriel (Economic
Affairs and Energy); and Peter Altmaier (Special Affairs, and in charge
of German’s intelligence services).
On the table: the most pressing economic, military and strategic issues
of the day. Around the table: the assembled heads of NATO, Deutsche
Bank, Airbus, the IMF and Google. Stretching out before them: three days
of intense, meticulously structured talks, with nothing but a laughably
skeletal agenda released to the press. What the organisers deign to
provide is scarcely better than nothing – a weedy list of brilliantly
vague bullet points, like “current events” and “Africa”, as if that’s
any sort of information at all. I’d be genuinely more impressed if their
entire press release was a grainy photograph of the Clacton seafront. It
would be intellectually more honest, and a great deal less irritating.
As for the politicians who attend: all those solemn trumpetings about a
new age of transparency – quietly forgotten on the flight home. Just one
example: George Osborne’s risible post-Bilderberg report to the public,
in his quarterly transparency data, is the same two words each year:
“general discussion”. That’s his summary of 3 days of meetings. Yeah,
thanks for keeping us in the loop, George. That’s great. I almost feel
like I was there in the room. You should write a novel.
I should say, not all the politicians in Germany are delighted by the
prospect of the Dresden summit. The chairman of Die Linke in the Saxony
parliament, Rico Gebhardt, has spoken out against the coming conference,
stressing the fundamental incompatibility of “the democratic process”
and this chronic level of “untransparency”. According to Gebhardt,
“politics thrives on transparency and legitimacy” – but then you have to
remember, even with so many politicians attending, and so many policies
being thrashed out, Bilderberg isn’t really politics.
As Hannibal Lecter says, paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius: “of each thing,
ask: what is it – in and of itself?” And Bilderberg I would have to say
– in its very essence – is lobbying.
A three-day corporate-funded lock-in with a bunch of cherrypicked
ministers and European Commissioners: no wonder the oil company CEOs and
hedge-fund billionaires take time out of their boardrooms for
Bilderberg. Technology, war, diplomacy, globalisation – these people
don’t have a dry, academic interest in these subjects, like a professor
of entemology is fascinated by the knee-joints of the centipede. They’re
focused on these policy areas like a vampire on a neck-pulse. Whether
it’s austerity or sustainability, foreign affairs or cyberspace, it’s
all business. And business is everything.
Of course, some of the lobbying is ideological: there are people at
Bilderberg for whom globalisation is nothing short of a religion and a
European superstate is a tremendous, glittering utopia – a glorious
stepping-stone towards a Pepsi future of globalised thought and
consumption. But even for the old-school globalists like Henry
Kissinger, David Rockefeller and Étienne Davignon, the grand vision of a
globalised future is always underpinned by a kind of hawkish hunger for
dollars. The twin goals of governance and greed are so entwined in a
kind of Googlosophy of life that I couldn’t begin to unpick them.
What I can say is that for industrialists and ideologues alike, the
annual Bilderberg conference is the Wimbledon Championships of the
lobbying calendar. Although unlike Wimbledon, the BBC doesn’t send 300
journalists and cameramen to cover it. Or indeed, anyone at all.
Even after 60-odd years, the mainstream media still doesn’t quite know
how to talk about Bilderberg. It hasn’t got the language. The problem, I
suspect, is this: the lobbying at Bilderberg takes place at such a high
level (Chairman to Chancellor, CEO to Prime Minister, bank boss to Nato
Secretary-General) that the basic business going on behind closed doors
is easily overlooked. It’s all so lofty and prime-ministerial, that
you’re apt to forget what what the CEO of Titan Cement Co. is doing
there in the first place.
Bilderberg has the pseudo-academic gloss of a conference, with policies
passed off as “megatrends”, and a heady sprinkle of European royals for
glitz, but at its root, it’s nothing more than good, old-fashioned
corporate lobbying. What you’re seeing is the Anglo-American financial
and industrial establishment doing business. It’s three days’ hard work.
And you can be damned sure the Vice-Chairman of Blackrock and the CEO of
JPMorgan Asset Management wouldn’t be there unless it was three days
that paid.
In this context, it’s instructive to compare the Bilderberg summit with
a similarly unpublic gathering: a little-known Brussels lobbying event
called AMISA2, which was recently written about by the Corporate Europe
Observatory research and campaign group.
AMISA2 takes the form of a monthly breakfast, attended by
representatives from seventeen major corporations, and a special guest
from the world of public policy (often, the European Commission).
There’s quite a considerable crossover in the corporations present at
the two events. Five of the seventeen companies at AMISA2 have a senior
executive who is currently on the steering committee of Bilderberg: ABB,
Airbus, Bayer, Norsk Hydro and Google. Another four corporations have a
director or CEO who has attended at least one Bilderberg conference:
Dow, ExxonMobil, Michelin and Roche.
But here’s the difference: according to the Corporate Europe Observatory
“only the head of a Brussels office can participate in AMISA2 breakfast
meetings, so effectively that company’s top EU lobbyist.” At Bilderberg,
it’s not the head of the Brussels office wearing the white lanyard, it’s
the head of the company.
AMISA2 might attract the head of staff of a European Commissioner. At
Bilderberg you’re more likely to bump into the President of the EC
itself. There’s even an ex-EC President (Barroso) on the steering
committee. And there’s the sheer scale of the event: at Bilderberg, it’s
a three-day working conference with NSA snipers on the roof, not a plate
of eggs with a hovering waitress.
And yet the AMISA2 breakfast is more obviously and understandably an
example of “lobbying” in action. It’s compact enough to fit inside the
concepts we have of undue influence and unaccountable corporate access
to policymakers. Bilderberg is so big and brazen, so bursting with
ministers and billionaires, that it confounds our ability to talk about
it in the mundane and grubby terms of corporate lobbying. It’s the
elephant in the lobby.
Wittgenstein said: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be
silent.” And when it comes to Bilderberg, mainstream journalists really
need to learn how to speak about it, sensibly and accurately, so they
can start reporting on it for what it is, with all the quiet,
unhysterical disdain that it so richly deserves.
This year’s Bilderberg Conference is taking place in Dresden, June 9-12,
at the Hotel Taschenbergpalais Kempinski. Charlie Skelton will be
reporting on it for the Guardian, and tweeting from Dresden on @deyook.
http://www.transparency.org.uk/bilderberg-2016-the-elephant-in-the-lobby/
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Bilderberg 2016: The Elephant in the Lobby
On Thursday of next week, at a luxury hotel in central Dresden, the
doors of the annual Bilderberg policy conference will be flung open. Not
to members of the press, mind. In fact, perhaps “flung” is overstating
it. Gingerly, behind a battalion of armed police, private security and
secret service bodyguards, the hotel door will be cracked ajar, and in
will slide a handpicked few of the most senior corporate executives in
the world: board members of transnational banks, chairmen of global
energy companies, and the owners of vast industrial and media conglomerates.
Scurrying in behind the bank bosses and hedge-fund billionaires will be
a clutch of extremely senior politicians from around Europe:
Chancellors, PMs, party leaders and finance ministers. Last year, the
President of Austria and the Prime Ministers of Holland and Belgium took
part in the discussions. Our own esteemed Chancellor of the Exchequer,
George Osborne, is a regular attendee, David Cameron himself was ushered
inside in 2013, and Lord Mandelson is often to be found popping on a
coveted white lanyard. This year, most notably, a hefty contigent from
the German cabinet is due to attend.
Inquiries made by the left-wing Die Linke party prompted the German
government to confirm that Chancellor Angel Merkel has been invited to
the Dresden conference, along with five senior federal ministers:
Wolfgang Schäuble (Finance); Ursula von der Leyen (Defence);
Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Foreign Affairs), Sigmar Gabriel (Economic
Affairs and Energy); and Peter Altmaier (Special Affairs, and in charge
of German’s intelligence services).
On the table: the most pressing economic, military and strategic issues
of the day. Around the table: the assembled heads of NATO, Deutsche
Bank, Airbus, the IMF and Google. Stretching out before them: three days
of intense, meticulously structured talks, with nothing but a laughably
skeletal agenda released to the press. What the organisers deign to
provide is scarcely better than nothing – a weedy list of brilliantly
vague bullet points, like “current events” and “Africa”, as if that’s
any sort of information at all. I’d be genuinely more impressed if their
entire press release was a grainy photograph of the Clacton seafront. It
would be intellectually more honest, and a great deal less irritating.
As for the politicians who attend: all those solemn trumpetings about a
new age of transparency – quietly forgotten on the flight home. Just one
example: George Osborne’s risible post-Bilderberg report to the public,
in his quarterly transparency data, is the same two words each year:
“general discussion”. That’s his summary of 3 days of meetings. Yeah,
thanks for keeping us in the loop, George. That’s great. I almost feel
like I was there in the room. You should write a novel.
I should say, not all the politicians in Germany are delighted by the
prospect of the Dresden summit. The chairman of Die Linke in the Saxony
parliament, Rico Gebhardt, has spoken out against the coming conference,
stressing the fundamental incompatibility of “the democratic process”
and this chronic level of “untransparency”. According to Gebhardt,
“politics thrives on transparency and legitimacy” – but then you have to
remember, even with so many politicians attending, and so many policies
being thrashed out, Bilderberg isn’t really politics.
As Hannibal Lecter says, paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius: “of each thing,
ask: what is it – in and of itself?” And Bilderberg I would have to say
– in its very essence – is lobbying.
A three-day corporate-funded lock-in with a bunch of cherrypicked
ministers and European Commissioners: no wonder the oil company CEOs and
hedge-fund billionaires take time out of their boardrooms for
Bilderberg. Technology, war, diplomacy, globalisation – these people
don’t have a dry, academic interest in these subjects, like a professor
of entemology is fascinated by the knee-joints of the centipede. They’re
focused on these policy areas like a vampire on a neck-pulse. Whether
it’s austerity or sustainability, foreign affairs or cyberspace, it’s
all business. And business is everything.
Of course, some of the lobbying is ideological: there are people at
Bilderberg for whom globalisation is nothing short of a religion and a
European superstate is a tremendous, glittering utopia – a glorious
stepping-stone towards a Pepsi future of globalised thought and
consumption. But even for the old-school globalists like Henry
Kissinger, David Rockefeller and Étienne Davignon, the grand vision of a
globalised future is always underpinned by a kind of hawkish hunger for
dollars. The twin goals of governance and greed are so entwined in a
kind of Googlosophy of life that I couldn’t begin to unpick them.
What I can say is that for industrialists and ideologues alike, the
annual Bilderberg conference is the Wimbledon Championships of the
lobbying calendar. Although unlike Wimbledon, the BBC doesn’t send 300
journalists and cameramen to cover it. Or indeed, anyone at all.
Even after 60-odd years, the mainstream media still doesn’t quite know
how to talk about Bilderberg. It hasn’t got the language. The problem, I
suspect, is this: the lobbying at Bilderberg takes place at such a high
level (Chairman to Chancellor, CEO to Prime Minister, bank boss to Nato
Secretary-General) that the basic business going on behind closed doors
is easily overlooked. It’s all so lofty and prime-ministerial, that
you’re apt to forget what what the CEO of Titan Cement Co. is doing
there in the first place.
Bilderberg has the pseudo-academic gloss of a conference, with policies
passed off as “megatrends”, and a heady sprinkle of European royals for
glitz, but at its root, it’s nothing more than good, old-fashioned
corporate lobbying. What you’re seeing is the Anglo-American financial
and industrial establishment doing business. It’s three days’ hard work.
And you can be damned sure the Vice-Chairman of Blackrock and the CEO of
JPMorgan Asset Management wouldn’t be there unless it was three days
that paid.
In this context, it’s instructive to compare the Bilderberg summit with
a similarly unpublic gathering: a little-known Brussels lobbying event
called AMISA2, which was recently written about by the Corporate Europe
Observatory research and campaign group.
AMISA2 takes the form of a monthly breakfast, attended by
representatives from seventeen major corporations, and a special guest
from the world of public policy (often, the European Commission).
There’s quite a considerable crossover in the corporations present at
the two events. Five of the seventeen companies at AMISA2 have a senior
executive who is currently on the steering committee of Bilderberg: ABB,
Airbus, Bayer, Norsk Hydro and Google. Another four corporations have a
director or CEO who has attended at least one Bilderberg conference:
Dow, ExxonMobil, Michelin and Roche.
But here’s the difference: according to the Corporate Europe Observatory
“only the head of a Brussels office can participate in AMISA2 breakfast
meetings, so effectively that company’s top EU lobbyist.” At Bilderberg,
it’s not the head of the Brussels office wearing the white lanyard, it’s
the head of the company.
AMISA2 might attract the head of staff of a European Commissioner. At
Bilderberg you’re more likely to bump into the President of the EC
itself. There’s even an ex-EC President (Barroso) on the steering
committee. And there’s the sheer scale of the event: at Bilderberg, it’s
a three-day working conference with NSA snipers on the roof, not a plate
of eggs with a hovering waitress.
And yet the AMISA2 breakfast is more obviously and understandably an
example of “lobbying” in action. It’s compact enough to fit inside the
concepts we have of undue influence and unaccountable corporate access
to policymakers. Bilderberg is so big and brazen, so bursting with
ministers and billionaires, that it confounds our ability to talk about
it in the mundane and grubby terms of corporate lobbying. It’s the
elephant in the lobby.
Wittgenstein said: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be
silent.” And when it comes to Bilderberg, mainstream journalists really
need to learn how to speak about it, sensibly and accurately, so they
can start reporting on it for what it is, with all the quiet,
unhysterical disdain that it so richly deserves.
This year’s Bilderberg Conference is taking place in Dresden, June 9-12,
at the Hotel Taschenbergpalais Kempinski. Charlie Skelton will be
reporting on it for the Guardian, and tweeting from Dresden on @deyook.
http://www.transparency.org.uk/bilderberg-2016-the-elephant-in-the-lobby/
---
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