Bilderberg Bared

• AFP on the scene in Austria to cover annual globalist confab.

By Mark Anderson —

Bilderberg’s 63rd confab in 61 years has begun in Telfs, Austria, at the picturesque Interalpen Hotel near Innsbruck. One thing is clear: Bilderberg is the least transparent entity in a dizzying worldwide network of institutes, think tanks and business lobbies dedicated to a global society of their making.

In AMERICAN FREE PRESS’s ongoing overview of individual Bilderberg attendees, especially those from the United States, attendee Klaus Konerko Kleinfeld, chairman and CEO of Alcoa, a metallurgical giant, is among the standouts. Other Americans who frequent Bilderberg include Peter R. Orszag of Citigroup, Jessica Tuchman Mathews of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and news personality Charles Peete “Charlie” Rose, Jr., among several others.

German-born Kleinfeld, who has attended Bilderberg since 2010, if not before, [See comment below from Terry—Ed.] is a member of the Business Roundtable (BR)—a lobby that consists of a brigade of heavy-hitting corporations. As of this writing, the roundtable is instrumental in pressing Congress to pass fast-track trade negotiating power so President Barack Hussein Obama and future U.S. presidents can try to secure trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific and other trade and investment schemes, which in effect elevate big banks, corporations and their meetings and associations (Bilderberg, etc.) over sovereign nations.

According to his BR biography, Kleinfeld is a member of the Brookings Institution’s board of trustees, and sits on the World Economic Forum Foundation Board’s board of directors.

Interestingly, some biographical sketches of Bilderberg attendees, posted on the websites of such organizations, or on online encyclopedias, refer to the Bilderberg meetings in passing; thus, mentioning Bilderberg by name is no longer completely off limits, although public knowledge of Bilderberg, while it’s slowly improving, still has a ways to go.

Speaking of the Brookings Institution, which is among the most influential think tanks across the globe, it has been steadily represented at Bilderberg by Chinese-born American Cheng Li—whose rather revealing biography indicates his interest in the field of U.S. presidential candidates on both sides of the proverbial aisle. Referring to Li’s newly appointed position as head of a new China team under the auspices of Brookings’ John L. Thornton Center, China Daily USA writer Chen Weihua wrote of Li:

“His Brookings China Center team is also ready to advise both Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2016 presidential election, as well as to those in Congress.”

But Li, a fixture at Bilderberg going back to the elite group’s Spain meeting in 2010 and evidently before that, opportunistically operates in a fashion that suits whatever circumstances come up as far as U.S. elections, even while his elbow-rubbing extends to China’s Communist party.

“[He] joined the advisory team for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008 and later President Barack Obama’s team after he defeated Clinton for the presidential nomination,” Weihua also wrote. “The new team leader [Li] also has set his sights on the meeting of the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China in three years.”

The company one keeps tells a story. Thus, seasoned Bilderberger Li’s networking is quite notable. His team of Brookings’ China experts includes Jeffrey Bader, who was special assistant to President Obama for national security affairs at the National Security Council, while team member Richard Bush was a U.S. National Intelligence officer for East Asia and served on the National Intelligence Council in the ’90s.

Li’s China Team’s financial support comes from John L. Thornton himself. A professor and director of global leadership at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Thornton, an American, is a former president and “Co-CEO” of The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. He’s also chairman of the board at Brookings, through which he associates with Kleinfeld.

Goldman is represented at Bilderberg and on the Trilateral Commission (TC) by longtime Bilderberg attendee Peter Sutherland of Ireland. The BR’s Goldman Sachs guy is Jewish American Lloyd C. Blankfein.

Citigroup’s Bilderberg representative, Orszag, is also a TC member and has worked with and written for the Brookings Institution. He attended Bilderberg’s 2010 Spain gathering during his time as the White House’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. Today, Orszag is vice chairman for global banking for Citi Institutional Clients Group, New York. He also served as the director of the Congressional Budget Office under George W. Bush. Furthermore, Orszag is a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) adjunct senior fellow and serves on the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics board of directors.

The steady American Bilderberg attendee for the Carnegie Endowment is Ms. Tuchman Mathews.

Recall that two Bilderberg 2014 topics in Denmark were “Ukraine” and “the New Architecture of the Middle East.”

In the past, Ms. Tuchman Mathews has offered mixed views on Russia. She called Russian leader Vladimir Putin “a bully,” but pointed out that it was “a terrible mistake” for the West to imply that Ukraine must become part of the West.

“As I said, I think Ukraine has to be a buffer state,” she told PBS television talk show host and fellow Bilderberger Charlie Rose. She added, however, that Obama must keep the U.S.-European Union alliance together in order to supply natural gas to Europe and wean Europe off its energy dependency with Putin. In the summer of 2013, she was against war with Syria but did not recognize Putin’s key role in averting a disastrous, deadly attack on Syria by the U.S. and its allies. She simply lauded the U.S. for its so-called role in forcing Syria to rid itself of chemical weapons.

Other frequent or otherwise significant American Bilderberg attendees include but are not limited to:

• CFR co-chairman Robert E. Rubin, a former Goldman Sachs figure and former Treasury secretary, who’s accused, with considerable evidence, of financial wrongdoing that traumatized the U.S. economy.

• James D. Wolfensohn, former World Bank president and a neoconservative war hawk.

• Richard N. Perle, likewise a neocon war hawk, and American Enterprise Institute fellow.

• Marie-Josée Kravis, wife of billionaire Henry R. Kravis, serves on the international advisory board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a member of the CFR, and serves on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group.

• Thomas E. “Tom” Donilon, a distinguished fellow of the CFR and an O’Melveny & Myers LLP attorney who attended Bilderberg in 2012 in Virginia as the 23rd U.S. National Security Advisor. He’s a longtime TC member and Brookings Board member.

• Harvard economics professor Martin Stuart “Marty” Feldstein.

All these people are private citizens who go behind closed doors with foreign officials at Bilderberg, with every opportunity and temptation to help establish policy with those officials, a felony under the Logan Act. But Bilderberg’s super-secrecy precludes confirming whether such improper “correspondence” takes place.

Check back frequently for updates from Austria.

AFP Roving Editor Mark Anderson is a veteran reporter who covers the annual Bilderberg meetings and is chairman of AFP’s new America First Action Committee, designed to involve AFP readers in focusing intensely on Congress to enact key changes, including monetary reform and a pullback of the warfare state. He and his wife Angie often work together on news projects.