googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/ … t.html?m=1
Any ideas on how this turns out or whose questions get answered?
I would try it but, admittedly NSA has me spooked a bit. Yep its because my question would be well, questionable. Note that you are only allowed to ask questions about what he talks about in the State of the Union address. A very rigged setup as I see it.
More rigged than previous presidents?
I would ask him, “how do you cope with the tea party’s propaganda campaigns against you?” “how hilarious is it that they’re literally trying to convince Americans that they don’t want healthcare?”
I’d ask him what his plans are with respect to the Bilderberg Group.
A little background: globalresearch.ca/barack-o-b … ident/9270
They should be bombed.
Me, I’d be willing to settle for an acknowledgment of its existence: endoftheamericandream.com/archiv … berg-group
What say you, Mr. Obama, does it?
Everyone knows about them. Who’s not acknowledging it? I think it’s the secrecy and apparent circumvention of democracy that’s pissing people off.
On the contrary, I suspect that if Jay Leno ever went Jaywalking and posed the question, “what is the Bilderberg Group?” to, say, a thousand folks at random, only a teeny, tiny percentage could tell him. I mean, when is the last time CNN, FOX, MSNBC, CNBC or the major networks aired programs relating to its existence? When is the last time Obama was asked about it at a press conference? Or at the White House Correspondence Dinner? Do you think it will come up when he is out on the road now?
They were all over it last year when it was at that big mansion someplace in Europe. But to be fair, all they did was mention it’s existence, no one actually talks about what anyone’s talking about in there.
I mean I don’t mind something like a secret society running the show on a college campus or something, but when it’s the whole world…yeah…that’s kinda bad.
All presidents rig the shows they give. And if he were honest he would say something like: The same way Republican presidents handle it when democrats and others attack them.
Hey, they really did. Or at least CNN did – youtube.com/watch?v=l5ryWBAPAx8
This does surprise me. And although hardly a comprehensive report, it wasn’t a shitty one either. Still, at 4 minutes and 1 second [out of an entire year], they’ve got a long way to go.
But I would truly love to sit down with the president and not only ask him a question, but actually have a discussion about Bilderberg…and where [perhaps] he might fit into it himself down the road. We could invite Bill and Hilary Clinton. And his vice president. And his secretary of state. All attendees in the past. And then all the many other folks in his administration [like former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner] that have been connected to it.
Personally, I don’t approach Bilderberg as folks like, say, Jesse Ventura do. Some of their “conspiracy theories” seem downright preposterous to me. And many of these folks do have complex narratives regarding the role of capital and government in the global economy.
But what they represent and embody out in the real world is a long, long way from an open and honest democracy.
Mitt Romney goes all the time.
Everything written or said about the Bilderberg group is pure speculation. It’s as if the group wants to pique interest by making its secrecy so well-known. Do they meet to discuss the future of the world? To plan the elections of world leaders? To direct world economy? What’s said about them gives no answers.
Should it? Given one of the links iambiguous gave us, they really don’t have a very good track record in choosing US presidential/vice-presidential candidates. Is a global economy a main pursuit of the group? Just how did Bilderberg create the European Union and the Euro?
As I understand it, a global economy is not a global form of government–they’re two different things. A global economy would put some countries into the world market by creating manufacturing and trade which lead to more investment opportunities for countries. In other words, it’s all in the money. And please notice, most of the Bilderberg group are financiers rather than politicians.
While the theory may be a good one–raise living standards in ‘emerging’ countries by allowing them manufacturing and trade (through investment)–I believe it’s led to the disparity in wealth so many countries, ourselves included, are now facing. The Bilderberg group won’t answer, because it can’t.
I think it’s easy to say the disparity is what Bilderberg has wanted all along, but I wonder.
A ‘free market’ economy depends on consumption and the growth of a consumer class. Many people equate a free market economy with Democracy, but Democracy is a political system rather than an economic system. No country in the world is truly democratic–pure democracy doesn’t work. Nor does a free market economy.
It would be impossible for one man–chosen by the Electoral College, based on voting percentages–to be able to answer any question regarding either world economy or the current, global, political situations.
I doubt it. 
I would ask him if he felt lucky, before I shot him in the face.
Yes, you raise a lot of good points here. And I don’t pretend that my own rendition of Bilderberg is anything other than a subjective narrative that seems [here and now] to make the most sense to me. And I certainly don’t subscribe to some of the more ominous conspiracy theories regarding its alleged intention to “take over the world”. Instead my overall reaction to it is encompassed in points I raised on another thread:
[i]I believe that America is fully invested in preserving and sustaining its “ruling class”. And that, in so doing, it will in fact plot and plan to do things that unfold almost entirely behind the curtains. And that includes Barack Obama and most of the Democratic Party.
[And Bilderberg is certainly a part of this]
But not a “ruling class” in the simplistic Marxist sense of “the class struggle”. That was more a manifestation of the industrial revolution. Capitalism today is of the crony rendition—it has evolved light years beyond that.
Indeed, in today’s world, delineating something as “the ruling class” does not mean that once a month…literally…the folks from The Mainstream Media [and their Wall Street advertisers] sit down with relevant committee chairmen in Congress, Obama’s economic team in the White House, the K Street lobbyists and Henry Kissinger’s “colleagues” from Bilderberg to meticulously plan the next month’s political and economic agenda. It doesn’t work that way. Why? Because it doesn’t have to. Besides, even within these corporate/political concoctions of wealth and power, there are considerable conflicts. For example, corporations based here in America may be strongly opposed to government policies that favor companies that shift all or part of their business overseas. And companies that oppose policies seen as favorable to the interests of oil industry do so because the higher the cost of oil the more costly it is in run their own businesses profitably. As with most things global, it’s very, very complex. And that, of course, is where “democracy” comes into play. Democracy for the rich. But some of these conflagrations are titanic because so much money is at stake.
No, America’s ruling class does not encompass a bunch of secret meetings where secret conspirators plot and plan nefariously to carve up the world in Dr Evil’s secret location at Goldman Sachs.
In that context, I just don’t buy into many of the “truther” narratives—whether regarding Roswell, 9/11, Newtown or [as silly as this is] Russia. Where is the hard evidence?
Instead, the ruling class “conspiracy” narrative [mine, anyway] unfolds more like this:
From the Bullfrog Films review of the film “The American Ruling Class”:
[b]The American Ruling Class is one of the most unusual films to be made in America in recent years–both in terms of form and content. The form is a “dramatic-documentary-musical” and the content is our country’s most taboo topic: class, power and privilege in our nominally democratic republic.
At bottom the film is a morality tale, the story of two Yale students (played by Harvard men) who seek their opportunities upon graduation. As the renowned essayist, author and longtime Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham conducts them through the corridors of power: Pentagon press briefings, the World Economic Forum, philanthropic foundations, Washington law firms, corporations, banks, the Council on Foreign Relations, and New York society dinners–our two representative graduates “one rich and the other not so rich” must struggle with their responsibilities in “a world collaterally damaged by the magic of money and the miracles of science.” The real-life luminaries they meet on their journey become characters in a story about power, its responsibilities and abuses.
All the while “the Mighty Wurlitzer” plays on, a reference to the massive propaganda apparatus invented by the CIA’s Frank Wisner, here used to signify the nocturnal philosophy of acquisition and imperial hubris which continually calls to the young men, the siren song of careerist myopia that was bred into their bones at school.
As we watch these two young men wend their way through what is only a slight fictionalization of their actual lives and choices, as we meet former Secretaries of State and Defense, directors of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, the publisher of The New York Times, Kurt Vonnegut, Howard Zinn, Barbara Ehrenreich, Robert Altman and a host of others, we have to ask along with Mr. Lapham: “To what end the genius of the Wall Street banks and the force of the Pentagon’s colossal weapons? Where does America discover the wisdom to play with its wonderful toys?” The possible answers move beyond the empty distinction of party affiliation and into the heart of American Oligarchy itself. By film’s end, the young men must decide: Should they seek to rule the world, or to save it?[/b]
In this context, crucial aspects of American foreign and domestic policy are in fact rooted in political economy, in crony capitalism, in stuff that really does unfold behind the curtains.
Obama Inc. fits quite comfortably into this carefully calibrated cache. His first administration was veritably bursting at the seams with men and women of this ilk. For example, Bilderberg, CFR, TC folks alone included Hillary Clinton [and Bill of course], Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Rahm Emanuel, George Mitchell, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker, Robert Gates, James Jones, Tom Daschle, Eric Shinseki, Michael Froman, Susan Rice, Jack Reed, Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, Mona Sutphen.
Hey, it is just commonsense to point out that those who own and operate the political and economic instruments that sustain the global economy, are going to want to connect the dots with others like them around the world. They have “shared interests” that evolve from and center around transactions that swell well up into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
So, no, they don’t need to schedule a secret rendezvous where they can exchange secret handshakes and secret code words with the other secret participants.
If you grasp the manner in which these folks get together to sustain their own interests you begin to get a clearer sense of why a “progressive” agenda hardly ever comes up at all. Well, other than as rhetorical camouflage to dupe the unabashed liberal intellectuals who still believe that ObamaLand and BushWorld are the antithesis of each other.
And yet, with respect to many social issues, they really are, right?
And while it is true the neoconservatives in the ruling class disdain these “internationalists”, they are both attached at the hip to Wall Street and the military industrial complex.
This is where the CTs need to aim their narratives. Or so it seems to me.
This in my view is what makes the world go around. At least in “the West”. All that other stuff – Kennedy assassination, Watergate, operation cointelpro, operation chaos, iran-contra, the war on terror, the current NSA flap etc. – is all subsumed in that.[/i]
And in my view the Bilderberg folks have an important part to play in all this. But just a part. They don’t run the whole show from top to bottom.
But let’s ask Obama what he thinks of all this.m
I don’t like giving people inspiration to lie.
So why would I ask a politician anything?
What kind of answer do you seriously think that you are going to get?
Well James, you would get an illusion of truth.
Antithesis, please do ask that, it might get interesting.
No doubt the Secret Service is already on their way. Well, with any luck.
…
iambiguous wrote:
What he thinks of what, iam? Where’s your question?
Presidents, whether past or present, can never stand alone. I don’t believe anyone thinks they could. And this is true of any politician, isn’t it? The current American President is no different and neither he nor former President Clinton came from a monied background so they didn’t/don’t have an ‘elite’ background. To get the position, they had to have had support from below. President Obama claims he’s never taken campaign funds from any organized PAC representing a single position. May or may not be true. Now, however, the ‘grass roots’ folks, perhaps in response to the TEA Party folks, are organizing and sending representatives to DC to try to get the President’s ear.
By using the label “Obamaland,” you make it sound as if the President stands alone in all of his decision making. He doesn’t. For a lot of people, the political leaders should ‘stand’ for what’s best for the country and the people–at least, the majority of the people.
Only we don’t live, or aren’t supposed to be living, in a country ruled by the majority–or by an identifiable ruling ‘class.’ The Constitution is written to preclude that. Has any President ever really, flat out, gone against the Constitution? That doesn’t mean some President’s haven’t skated on thin ice, at times, when it comes to Presidential powers. GWB certainly flouted Congress when he set the invasion of Iraq into motion. But the American people stood solidly behind him. They believed the propaganda the main stream media spewed, and supported the war. That’s the sort of industrial/military complex we’re faced with.
What exactly is the industrial/military complex, to which former President Eisenhower so famously alluded, in your mind? And how has it kept the American public so willing to continue to invest in it? Isn’t it jingoism more than cronyism? Isn’t jingoism why the Dept. of Homeland Security was allowed, with all of its violations of Constitutional privileges? All of this is politics, not economics.
This is turning into a rant. I apologize–but I’m not sorry.
Most people have been “trained” to see only the president with power. They completely forget about Congress, Senate and the courts.