A couple of days ago I republished one of my newspaper articles while working as an investigative journalist in Scotland and North East England. It looked at the likely governmental conspiracy over the outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease in 2001.
Today I reload a piece I wrote in 1999 about the ultra-secret Bilderberg organisation.
Forewarned is forearmed!
THE world’s most powerful secret society is to meet in Portugal next week on the eve of the European elections to carry forward its plans for a globalised world government.
Top of their agenda is a strategy to allow the UN to directly tax global electronic commerce to strengthen its world-wide power base.
There are also proposals for the replacement of NATO forces in Kosovo with a “European Army”.
But their meeting has been damned by a Tory MP as a collection of “very powerful forces” whose intention is “to undermine and destroy the nation state”.
He says the time has come to expose their agenda and awake political leaders to their threat.
Bilderberg, one of the most secret organisations in the world, comprising politicians, top industrialists and financial leaders, will meet on Thursday at a heavily guarded holiday complex at Sintra in the Estoril region of Portugal, we have discovered.
Their high-powered conference takes place at a crucial time, just days before the European Parliament elections and G7 and G8 summits.
The Bilderbergers are strong supporters of the European Union and have spent years lobbying hard for a single European currency. Their wider agenda is to create a “one world” government.
The 120 Bilderberg delegates, under the Chairmanship of former NATO Secretary General Lord Peter Carrington and led by US billionaire David Rockefeller and media magnate Conrad Black will meet to discuss a range of global issues.
According to a Bilderberg source top of this year’s “massive agenda” is a plan to tax global E-Commerce with a slice going directly to the United Nations. This strategy will strengthen the current reforms of the UN and “assist the process of world governance”.
Other topics at this year’s meeting include:
* addressing the deepening crisis in Kosovo, the “dismemberment of Yugoslavia” and the replacement of NATO with a European Army.
* plans to create an Asian economic and political block under the leadership of Japan.
* preparations for a middle East Peace settlement and the creation of a Palestinian state
* the creation of an Americas Economic Union – a follow-up meeting has been timetabled for early next year in Quebec. This claims the Bilderberg source will be the first step to “full hemispheric union”.
* the US stock market speculative bubble. An abrupt collapse could have devastating world-wide consequences
* the development of a new “transatlantic marketplace” – stage two in the Bilderbergers’ plans to begin incrementally knitting together the three global regional blocks into one global trading, monetary and political union.
* the extension of the EMU to Eastern Europe, and the early entry of Britain into this second common European currency system.
The Observer editor-in-chief and political commentator Will Hutton who attended the 1997 conference said: “The Bilderberg conference is one of the key meetings of the year. The consensus established there is the backdrop against which policy is made world-wide.
“It is, in essence, a collection of people who are either up-coming or former top politicians and the cream of the world’s business leaders – the conference is a well-argued talk fest,” he said.
Hutton believes that the Bilderberg conference along with Davos [World Economic Forum] and IMF meetings provides the “common-sense background against which G7 takes its position.”
He said the issue of ‘globalisation’ would almost certainly top this year’s Bilderberg agenda.
“Following the US led fuck-up in Kosovo we need better social protection and more military common-sense if the globalisation aspired to by Bilderberg is to continue,” he said.
The Bilderberg conference is credited with selecting and nurturing political talent. Tony Blair first attended in 1993 when he was a junior opposition spokesman and Bill Clinton attended the 1991 meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany before he announced that he was running for president.
The Bilderbergs control the central banks, such as the Federal Reserve in the US, and are therefore in a position to determine discount rates, money supply levels, the price of gold and which countries should receive loans.
Just as NATO has bound Europe and North America together militarily so the Bilderbergers appear to have bound together American and European strategic and economic interests.
But their meetings and discussions are bound in the strictest secrecy.
According to the official Bilderberg line the publicity black-out surrounding their meetings: “makes discussion more intimate and candid. There are no massive indiscretions, but exchanges can be quite heated. “Bilderberg is just a flexible and informal international leadership forum in which different viewpoints can be expressed and mutual understanding enhanced.”
Critics claim the secrecy enables “this shadow world government” to plot their agenda which is then foisted upon the political movers and shakers of the western world.
“Their power and influence must not be underestimated,” said Bilderberg watcher and Scottish TV producer Sara Brown.
“These men live and work in the shadows and they don’t want it any other way.”
Bilderberg meetings are only held when and where the hosts can provide the highest levels of security for their guests. Last year Mail on Sunday reporter Campbell Thomas was arrested and held for eight hours by Strathclyde police for daring to ask a hotel chambermaid about the Bilderberg conference being held at the Turnberry Hotel.
According to US journalist and Bilderberg specialist Jim Tucker any intruders to Bilderberg conferences are manhandled, cuffed and jailed, and if they resist arrest or attempt to flee, they will be shot.
After 45 years on annual secret get-togethers the Bilderbergers are now facing some penetrating observation and questioning about their activities. Former BBC reporter Tony Gosling has spent the last two years campaigning for greater disclosure of the Bilderbergers’ activities.
Along with Tucker and Canadian John Whitley he has compiled a massive dossier on their membership, organisational structure and political agendas.
He believes it is no coincidence that this year’s conference falls on the eve of the European elections and G7 and G8 summits.
“With this roll-call of the richest and most powerful men in the world it is quite clear that their determination is to control the outcome of other political forums,” he said.
“And when you consider the inclusion of senior representatives from the IMF and all the major central banks that power can be used and abused at will to control global decision making.
“It is all done in secret and is completely unaccountable,” he added.
Washington reporter Tucker, who has followed the activities of the Bilderbergs for more than 15 years, says: “They want you to believe they are simply improving international relations. But they are controlling the world and making decisions that affect all of us with absolutely no democratic control on what they do.
Leading Tory Euro sceptic and Ludlow MP Christopher Gill has led a personal crusade to expose the workings of the Bilderberg group.
“I believe there are some very powerful forces at work and their intention appears to be to undermine and destroy the nation state,” he said.
“It is all the more sinister that when I ask questions about their activities I run into sand and don’t get answers.
“Their agenda seems to be to promote world government. It is a difficult enough job fighting against a European super state but how, as an individual, one can counteract the activities of a group which seems determined to create one-world government is a major task of our times.
“I believe the only course is to try to convince one or other of the main political parties and their leaders to recognise the enormity of this threat to our democratic rights and to fight to defend them.”
Gill has been supported in his quest to “out the Bilderbergs” by fellow Tory Nicholas Winterton MP.
Winterton has tabled numerous parliamentary questions asking government ministers for assessments of the power and influence of the Bilderbergers on world trade. Each time he has received either blank or “holding replies.”
However, Euro sceptic and close political ally Theresa Gorman is less conspiratorial, claiming Bilderberg is little more than a rich club for superannuated freemasons”.
These conferences are just a gigantic boomdoggle,” she said.
I don’t think any group like this can mould the world to one set of ideals – I think their importance is completely overplayed.”
Last night Scottish academics also doubted the real power wielded by the Bilderberg conferences.
Anton Muscatelli, economics professor at the University of Glasgow said: “An off-the-record forum makes sense for this type of gathering. The last thing large companies want is to be seen to have opinions that are politically loaded. Powerful companies are anyway going to have powerful influence”.
Muscatelli said he was sceptical about the Bilderberg group’s proposals for a global tax on E-commerce.
“Unless you ensured that every country went along with this, it would be extremely difficult to police. It really would require world collaboration.”
It seems a trifle ambitious,” said David Bell, professor of economics at Stirling University. “I just don’t see how you could make it workable.”
Two pro-European British Tories who have attended Bilderberg conferences in the past were both “out of the country for the next week” when the Sunday Herald tried to contact them.
A spokes woman for former chancellor Ken Clarke – a UK representative on Bilderberg, who attended their 1993 and 1998 conferences – said he would return a telephone call to the Sunday Herald.
When told it was to discuss Bilderberg, the spokeswoman said Mr Clarke was unavailable.
Sir Malcolm Rifkind – who attended Bilderberg in 1996 – was similarly unavailable and “out of the country”.
Scottish Conservative leader David McLetchie refused to discuss the issue of the Bilderberg conference.
Note: The Caesar Park Pengha hotel and conference suites to be used by Bilderberg in Sintra lie adjacent to a huge leisure complex owned by British property millionaires John and Douglas Hall – the owners of Newcastle United FC.
No Time to Think 