More fun with conspiracy theories

World Bank president Robert Zoellick has been in Greece on unspecified business since May 14th, US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s public schedule is mysteriously empty for the next couple days, Josef Ackermann, head of Deutsche Bank, will be travelling “somewhere in Europe” while Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, will not be around until the end of the week. Yep, it's conspiracy theorists wet dream time again, the Bilderburg Group is meeting this weekend at a hotel in Vouliagmeni, Greece, just south of Athens. Do 140 of the world's most powerful people meet every year to make key decisions on international policy that essentially control the world?

Named after the Bilderberg hotel in Oosterbeek, the Netherlands, where the first meeting was held in 1954, the group operates under the Chatham House Rules, meaning that participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed. Adding more fuel to the conspiracist's view is the total media blackout maintained at these meetings; it's truly amazing that a group of names like this could have met just outside Washington, DC last year with almost no mainstream press coverage. Therefore, like any good conspiracy story, we're forced to mostly rely on rumor and coincidence to piece most of the Bildeberg story together.

So how does a group that doesn't even have a web page control the world? Seems the groups origins can be linked to the Knights of Malta, whose Hospitaller's connections are almost as strong a conspiracy magnet as the Templars, through its organizer, Joseph Retinger, a Pole who effectively forged ties with the European Council of Princes, the CIA, and Britain's MI6 to create the New World Order (NWO) think-tank. Bill Clinton was just a governor from Arkansas when he was invited in 1991, Margaret Thatcher's first appearance in 1975 was a near disaster as she needed to be prodded to join the discussion. When she finally did, she was marked for higher office. That other Clinton, Hillary, may have been convinced to let Obama become the next president at the 2008 event, privacy being ensured by locking reporters in the bathroom of a plane! Wars don't simply happen either, many say Bildeberg at the very least set the timeline for the latest Iraq war, facilitated the Falklands war by determining sanctions should be imposed on Argentina and perhaps triggered the war to bring down Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia.

Finance and politics mix freely at Bilderberg, of that there can be no doubt. This year's focus will more than likely be the global economy, pushing to the backseat the North American union plans feared by many a loony. Who am I calling loony? Bilderberg did put together the European Union after all. Working on ways to get the Lisbon Treaty to pass will be on the agenda, with bets being placed on thinking they will focus a smear campaign on “Libertas”, an anti-treaty group led by Declan Ganley. One of the Bilderberger supposed planned moves is to use a whispering campaign in the US media suggesting that Ganley is being funded by arms dealers in the US linked to the US military. Having come so far, the EU project now numbers 27 countries (and of course the Eurovision song contest this weekend) they will find a way to get the treaty ratified, with or without Ireland's 'yes' vote. Retinger didn't bring Bildeberg into existence by himself, his strongest supporter was Prince Bernhard from the Netherlands. German-born Bernhard was a card-carrying Nazi and member of the SS, a fact that makes another conspiracy about the group, that it is a zionist organization, hard to swallow. Alden Hatch wrote a biography of Prince Bernhard where he insists that Bilderberg was the cradle of the European Community - later rebranded European Union. He describes Bilderberg's ultimate goal as a one-world government.

Of course most of the rumors this year are swirling around the economic crisis. Bilderberg 'guru' Daniel Estulin claims the pre-meeting booklet sent out to attendees stated they are looking at two options: Either a prolonged, agonizing depression that dooms the world to decades of stagnation, decline, and poverty ... or an intense-but-shorter depression that paves the way for a new sustainable economic world order, with less sovereignty but more efficiency. Credence to Estulin's claims are strengthened by his previous claims of using leaked information from his sources of what was said at the 2006 meeting in Canada and 2007 in Turkey to correctly predict the housing crash and the 2008 financial meltdown in his book The True Story of the Bilderberg Group. According to Estulin, they plan to continue to deceive millions of savers and investors who believe the hype about the supposed up-turn in the economy, setting them up for massive losses and searing financial pain in the months ahead. The bank “stress tests” conducted by Washington were little more than a shameless hoax. Hmm, why not? After all, the oil shocks of 1973 and last year both could have been masterminded by the group to get the petrodollar engine revving. In Europe, Belgian viscount and current Bilderberg-chairman Étienne Davignon recently admitted they "helped create the euro in the 1990s"; now thanks to the crisis it could be fast tracked into use in the 11 EU countries still not using the currency.

This latest admission seems all the creepier as this super secret society has been taking steps towards more transparency going so far as issuing a press release for the first time last year. How else could the acceptance by the public to handing over the economy to the banksters during the past 6-months be explained than the fact that we actually want to be controlled by these people. As far back as 1991, permanent Bilderberg member David Rockefeller said:

"It would have been quite impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries ..."

The club is strictly European and American, very white and very male. According to Bilderberg founder member Dennis Healy: "Bilderberg is a way of bringing together politicians, industrialists, financiers and journalists. Politics should involve people who aren't politicians. We make a point of getting along younger politicians who are obviously rising, to bring them together with financiers and industrialists who offer them wise words. It increases the chance of having a sensible global policy." Are they Satan preparing the ground for a NWO through economic collapse, the coming food shortage and the ensuing war leading to the global government's birth to restore order? Do they want to create a global department of health out of the World Health Organization, a global treasury with a global currency out of the IMF? Are they telling the Americans to sign onto International Criminal Court treaty? Is climate change simply part of a plan to impose a global carbon tax to fund it all? Probably not, but whether it's the Bilderberg's who are marching us down the path toward the corporate autocracy or not, we seem to be going on our own anyway.