Saturday, July 7, 2018

Is This The New Breed of Bilderbergers? Questa è la nuova razza dei Bilderberg?


Image result for tim cook
Above, Tim Cook of Apple.
Private jets double-parked at Friedman Memorial Airport and nondisclosure agreements required. You won’t see any formal signs for Allen & Co.’s annual media, business and technology conference, but entering its 36th iteration at Sun Valley Resort, locals know where to look.
The select cadre of the world’s richest and most powerful converge on the Wood River Valley for the hush-hush affair, slated to start Wednesday.
Though guests rarely say what happens at the Sun Valley Inn, the Allen & Co. effect ripples countywide. For many residents, the week of work, ranging from babysitting to catering to guiding gigs, has become a welcome rite of July, complete with boosted wages and, often, a fat tip.
The conference, like the company itself, is secretive. Allen & Co., a private Fifth Avenue investment bank, doesn’t have a website. It counts George Tenet, the former head of the CIA, among its employees. Organizers and staff are contractually bound to silence. The schedule, as always, stays under lock and key. Presentations and panels cover a wide range of topics, but have focused on politics and on the technology, media and telecommunications sector—the bank’s specialty.
Still, much of the real business happens outside the classroom, yielding very big and eventually very public results. Time Warner’s doomed merger with AOL is rumored to have grown from the meeting. So was the $250 million purchase of The Washington Post by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Four of Money magazine’s richest people on the planet came to the conference: Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg.
Every year, the guest list stays tightly guarded, and the 2018 invitees are no different.
These days, Charlie Rose counts in the second camp. A longtime television journalist and celebrated interviewer, Rose is a regular at Allen & Co., known for hosting Q&As with its most powerful attendees.
Now, felled by the #MeToo movement and, it seems, his own behavior, Rose is out of a job: In November, a Washington Post investigation found that Rose had allegedly sexually harassed eight women in the workplace. He was fired from CBS, PBS and Bloomberg the next day. Since then, the accusations have widened: The Post continued its investigation and, in May, published a report that identified 27 women who said they were sexually harassed by Rose, as recently as April 2017.
Rose’s invitation to the 2018 event should not surprise anyone because he is a fellow traveler to the Sun Valley insiders.
That includes his old boss, CBS CEO Les Moonves, and Hollywood heavyweight Barry Diller, who, in a March interview with The New York Times, told columnist Maureen Dowd that “Charlie Rose ceases to exist.”
Needless to say, “slug” Harvey Weinstein was left off this year’s list.
NBC’s Tom Brokaw was also invited back, despite sexual harassment allegations against him. Brokaw, who hosted the “Nightly News” for 22 years, has denied wrongdoing.
An invitation doesn’t guarantee attendance—but it’s a tough one to turn down. Ask any of the heavy-hitters expected to attend, according to Bloomberg, like Fox titan Rupert Murdoch, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, General Motors head Mary Barra, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
Don’t try to ask the attendees questions because you will hear the Allen & Co.’s de-facto motto: “We have no comments on the conference,” That message has been the same for 35 years: nobody’s talking.

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