World leaders in ‘secret society Bilderberg meeting’

A person uses a copy of the Daily Mail newspaper to shield their identity from the demonstrators and the media as they arrive at The Grove hotel, which is hosting the annual Bilderberg conference.

AP | Jun 7, 2013

IT’S a busy weekend at the luxury Grove Hotel, favoured haunt of British soccer players and their glitz-loving spouses.

More than 100 of the world’s most powerful people are at the former manor house near London for a secretive annual gathering that has attained legendary status in the eyes of anti-capitalist protesters and conspiracy theorists.

The guest list for the Bilderberg meeting includes Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. British Prime Minister David Cameron is due to drop by Friday.

The Bilderberg Group was set up in 1954 to support military and economic co-operation between Europe and North America during the Cold War.

Named for the site of its first meeting – the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland – the forum for prominent politicians, thinkers and business leaders has been held annually at a series of secluded venues in Europe and North America.

What happens at Bilderberg, stays at Bilderberg. There is no media access and the public is kept away by a large security operation. The group says that “there is no detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued.”

But in a move toward slightly more openness, the group now has a website, which lists attendees and key topics for discussion, including the economy, US foreign policy, “cyber warfare and the proliferation of asymmetric threats” and “major trends in medical research.”

Invitees include British Treasury chief George Osborne, Goldman Sachs chairman Peter Sutherland and Thomas Enders, CEO of aerospace company EADS.

Publication of these details has done little to ease the concerns of protesters, who sense a shadowy global elite at work in the secretive meeting.

“When 130 of the leaders from all across the West get together, and many of these are billionaires, they are people who are immensely wealthy and immensely powerful,” said Michael Meacher, a lawmaker from Britain’s Labour Party.

“And when they all get together, it’s not just to have a chat about the latest problem, it is to concert plans for the future of capitalism in the West. That is on a very different scale.”

Others go even further, putting Bilderberg at the heart of a global web of conspiracy. The protesters in Watford include US talk-radio host and September 11 “truther” Alex Jones, and former professional soccer player David Icke, who believes the world is run by a race of reptiles in human form.

Demonstrators plan to hold a “Bilderberg fringe” festival outside the hotel until the conference ends on Sunday.

A Bilderberg spokesman – reached by email since no phone number is listed – said there is nothing sinister about the gathering.

“We disclose the date, the location, the participants and the key topics of the conference,” Xander Heijnen said. “Many groups of people meet without announcing it publicly at all, without disclosing who is taking part and without giving any key topics.

“The meetings broaden the participants’ range of viewpoints, help them to gain insights and exchange views,” he said. “It seems illogical to argue that a meeting of individuals designed to give and obtain fresh insights, somehow ‘undermines democracy.'”

That message has not swayed protesters like Judd Charlton, a ventriloquist from London who showed up on Thursday to jeer at cars with blacked-out windows entering the hotel compound.

“We are basically here to bring down the parasites who are drug dealers and bank collapsers who seem to want to destroy this world,” he said.

Bilderberg 2013: Secret Summit for World Domination…Live

(Clockwise from left) Christine Lagarde, a protester from the 2012 meeting in Virginia, Henry Kissinger, George Osborne and David Petraeus Photo: AP/Reuters

telegraph.co.uk | Jun 6. 2013

By Josie Ensor, and Matthew Holehouse

Bilderberg: The Secret Summit for World Domination

Four-day conference at Watford’s The Grove hotel begins
Millions spent on security as protesters demonstrate outside
Lord Healey: ‘the most useful of all the meetings I attend’

Latest

16.53 Well, as to be expected from the world’s most secretive conference, we have learnt nothing from today. The closest we managed to get was half-a-mile from the Watford hotel where the rich and powerful are gathered. We’ll therefore be wrapping it up here, but we leave you with this thought from Lord Healey:

“Lots of the stuff written about Bilderberg is a load of crap. Some people described it as a secret Communist organisation. Others said it was a secret American organisation. But it was balls.”

16.44 A great video from Alex Jones’s Youtube page of him being “provoked” by a BBC presenter.

15.45 Martin Taylor, a former secretary general of the Bilderbergs and businessman, who has been going on and off for the last 20 years, and is attending this year, spoke to the Telegraph’s Tom Rowley about the history of the conference.

“Bilderberg grew up in the early Fifties out of a feeling that if European leaders in all fields had been closer to their American counterparts before the Second World War, some trouble might have been avoided.

Related

Bilderberg Group: Secret 2013 meeting held amid tight security

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Bilderberg group summit: Cameron attendance at ‘cliche fest’ damned

The Bilderberg Group is powerful, works in shadows

The Public-Facing Guestlist for Bilderberg 2013

Sean Hannity: I’ve Never Heard of the Bilderberg Group

“That was at a time when people didn’t cross the Atlantic very often. It was a kind of Cold War council. People got together once a year, sometimes twice, but it was usually once. The numbers originally were about 60 or 70, it is now about 120. You got people from Europe and the US. It has now been rather enlarged.”

15.37 Security is tight, people are being checked in a field, hundreds of yards away from the hotel:

15.32 Speaking to the Telegraph earlier this week, Lord Healey of Riddleden, who attended the first Bilderberg meeting in 1954 and sat on the steering committee for 40 years, said:

“Lots of the stuff written about it is a load of crap. Those who weren’t invited were very jealous. Some people described it as a secret Communist organisation. Others said it was a secret American organisation. But it was balls.”

Lord Healey, who served as chancellor to Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, added: “I found it the most useful of all the meetings I attended regularly. The Bilderberg was the best because the level of the people attending regularly was so much higher.”

15.15 American news channel CNBC is reporting that police have anti-terrorism traffic regulations and a no-fly zone in place, so worried are they that Henry Kissinger and his pals with be the subject of attacks.

14.43 More on Alex Jones, who has been the centre of many controversies. He has previously accused the US government of being involved in the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, and the filming of fake Moon landings to hide NASA’s secret technology.

The outspoken Texan locked horns with Piers Morgan earlier this year after arguing on his show that taking away people’s guns would lead to government tyranny.

He has told an ever-growing group of conspirists gathered today that the Bilderberg Group wants to exterminate 80 per cent of the world population and replace them with robots who will be their slaves.

14.11 That’s nice, a Bilderberg welcoming committee:

14.01 Our reporter, Matthew Holehouse, who is as close to the hotel as press are allowed to get, has said a well-known pastor-like US conspiracy theoriest has arrived on the scene. Alex Jones told the crowd of Americans gathered that he is there to “expose the puppet-masters for what they are to the world”.

He said he wanted the attendees to be put on trial for crimes against humanity. We’re not entirely convinced The Hague would find in his favour.

“It is very, very sinister,” warns Jones.

“Not everybody who goes to Bilderberg, from my research, is a scoundrel or a villain. But there are definitely villains who are there who are basically trying to organise government and business.”

^{Alex Jones and the scrum}

14.00 Bilderberg, which formed in 1954, is making an attempt to change its reputation as one of the most clandestine and controversial meetings in the world; it is the first time the guest list and its limited agenda have been publicly released and journalists are allowed near the grounds.

13.00 David Icke, the world’s most famous conspiracy theorist, is set to come on Saturday – the third day of the conference and we hear he’s expected to bring a big crowd. He has written on his blog about the “proof” that the annual meetings dictate government policy.

12.36 Our reporter Matthew Holehouse is half a mile away from the hotel in a pen with other 50 other reporters. He says it is they are surrounded by a high steel fence that looks like the edge of a prison.

About 40 cars have gone in so far. Every time someone drives in with their luxury car, the crowds shout and heckle.

There are lots of elderly Americans, people wandering around with cameras and a man dressed up as a CCTV camera.

12.23 The cloak of secrecy surrounding the meetings, which ban journalists from attending, has fuelled conspiracy theories that so-called Bilderbergers are planning global domination and world unification.

People have been banned for booking into the hotel this week and reporters are being kept in a pen a long distance away from the entrance to the hotel.

12.14 Michael Meacher, Labour’s former Environment Minister, told our reporter Matthew Holehouse that the institution is shadowy and the public needs to know what is going on.

^{Michael Meacher addresses reporter in a field in Watford}

When asked if it was a shadow government, Meacher replied, “You’re putting it into rather colourful language. I wouldn’t go that far but a gathering like this has that aura about it. It is a shadow organisation that the rest of us do not have access to.

“Most of them are multi-millionaires and billionaires. The idea they have a charity is a distortion.

“The people here are the leaders of the biggest banks, multi-nationals, EU commissioners, and a smattering of politicians from Europe and America. If you wanted to find a group which represented the western governance structure you would come up with a list like this.They are meeting here in secrecy with no transparency or accountability.

12.07 Delegates for the private conference of top politicians and businesspeople from around the world have started to arrive at the hotel in cars with blacked-out windows. Doesn’t look much like they’re up for a stop and chat.

We have a handy agenda and guest list. Some of the country’s politicians have managed to clear four days out of their busy schedules for the event, including:

George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer
Ed Balls, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer
Kenneth Clarke, Cabinet Minister
John Kerr, Independent Member, House of Lords

^{Ed Balls is a confirmed guest of the Bilderberg Group}

12:04 Good afternoon and welcome to our liveblog. We will be covering the mysterious goings-on of the annual Bilderberg Group meeting which starts today and is being held in the UK for the first time … in a hotel in Watford.

Who Runs The World? Solid Proof That A Core Group Of Wealthy Elitists Is Pulling The Strings

theeconomiccollapseblog.com | Jan 29, 2013

By Michael

Does a shadowy group ofobscenely wealthy elitists control the world?  Do men and women with enormous amounts of money really run the world from behind the scenes?  The answer might surprise you.  Most of us tend to think of money as a convenient way to conduct transactions, but the truth is that it also represents power and control.  And today we live in a neo-fuedalist system in which the super rich pull all the strings.  When I am talking about the ultra-wealthy, I am not just talking about people that have a few million dollars.  As you will see later in this article, the ultra-wealthy have enough money sitting in offshore banks to buy all of the goods and services produced in the United States during the course of an entire year and still be able to pay off the entire U.S. national debt.  That is an amount of money so large that it is almost incomprehensible.  Under this ne0-feudalist system, all the rest of us are debt slaves, including our own governments.  Just look around – everyone is drowning in debt, and all of that debt is making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier.  But the ultra-wealthy don’t just sit on all of that wealth.  They use some of it to dominate the affairs of the nations.  The ultra-wealthy own virtually every major bank and every major corporation on the planet.  They use a vast network of secret societies, think tanks and charitable organizations to advance their agendas and to keep their members in line.  They control how we view the world through their ownership of the media and their dominance over our education system.  They fund the campaigns of most of our politicians and they exert a tremendous amount of influence over international organizations such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.  When you step back and take a look at the big picture, there is little doubt about who runs the world.  It is just that most people don’t want to admit the truth.

The ultra-wealthy don’t run down and put their money in the local bank like you and I do.  Instead, they tend to stash their assets in places where they won’t be taxed such as the Cayman Islands.  According to a report that was released last summer, the global elite have up to 32 TRILLION dollars stashed in offshore banks around the globe.

U.S. GDP for 2011 was about 15 trillion dollars, and the U.S. national debt is sitting at about 16 trillion dollars, so you could add them both together and you still wouldn’t hit 32 trillion dollars.

And of course that does not even count the money that is stashed in other locations that the study did not account for, and it does not count all of the wealth that the global elite have in hard assets such as real estate, precious metals, art, yachts, etc.

The global elite have really hoarded an incredible amount of wealth in these troubled times.  The following is from an article on the Huffington Post website…

Rich individuals and their families have as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280 billion in lost income tax revenues, according to research published on Sunday.

The study estimating the extent of global private financial wealth held in offshore accounts – excluding non-financial assets such as real estate, gold, yachts and racehorses – puts the sum at between $21 and $32 trillion.

The research was carried out for pressure group Tax Justice Network, which campaigns against tax havens, by James Henry, former chief economist at consultants McKinsey & Co.

He used data from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, United Nations and central banks.

But as I mentioned previously, the global elite just don’t have a lot of money.  They also basically own just about every major bank and every major corporation on the entire planet.

According to an outstanding NewScientist article, a study of more than 40,000 transnational corporations conducted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich discovered that a very small core group of huge banks and giant predator corporations dominate the entire global economic system…

An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The researchers found that this core group consists of just 147 very tightly knit companies…

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

The following are the top 25 banks and corporations at the heart of this “super-entity”.  You will recognize many of the names on the list…

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation

The ultra-wealthy elite often hide behind layers and layers of ownership, but the truth is that thanks to interlocking corporate relationships, the elite basically control almost every Fortune 500 corporation.

The amount of power and control that this gives them is hard to describe.

Unfortunately, this same group of people have been running things for a very long time.  For example, New York City Mayor John F. Hylan said the following during a speech all the way back in 1922…

The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation. To depart from mere generalizations, let me say that at the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as the international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes.

They practically control both parties, write political platforms, make catspaws of party leaders, use the leading men of private organizations, and resort to every device to place in nomination for high public office only such candidates as will be amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business.

These international bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.

These international bankers created the central banks of the world (including the Federal Reserve), and they use those central banks to get the governments of the world ensnared in endless cycles of debt from which there is no escape.  Government debt is a way to “legitimately” take money from all of us, transfer it to the government, and then transfer it into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy.

Today, Barack Obama and almost all members of Congress absolutely refuse to criticize the Fed, but in the past there have been some brave members of Congress that have been willing to take a stand.  For example, the following quote is from a speech that Congressman Louis T. McFadden delivered to the U.S. House of Representatives on June 10, 1932…

Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks. The Federal Reserve Board, a Government board, has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt. The depredations and iniquities of the Federal Reserve Board has cost this country enough money to pay the national debt several times over. This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of the United States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Federal Reserve Board, and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.

Sadly, most Americans still believe that the Federal Reserve is a “federal agency”, but that is simply not correct.  The following comes from factcheck.org…

The stockholders in the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks are the privately owned banks that fall under the Federal Reserve System. These include all national banks (chartered by the federal government) and those state-chartered banks that wish to join and meet certain requirements. About 38 percent of the nation’s more than 8,000 banks are members of the system, and thus own the Fed banks.

According to researchers that have looked into the ownership of the big Wall Street banks that dominate the Fed, the same names keep coming up over and over: the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, the Lazards, the Schiffs and the royal families of Europe.

But ultra-wealthy international bankers have not just done this kind of thing in the United States.  Their goal was to create a global financial system that they would dominate and control.  Just check out what Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley once wrote…

[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.

Sadly, most Americans have never even heard of the Bank for International Settlements, but it is at the very heart of the global financial system.  The following is from Wikipedia…

As an organization of central banks, the BIS seeks to make monetary policy more predictable and transparent among its 58 member central banks. While monetary policy is determined by each sovereign nation, it is subject to central and private banking scrutiny and potentially to speculation that affects foreign exchange rates and especially the fate of export economies. Failures to keep monetary policy in line with reality and make monetary reforms in time, preferably as a simultaneous policy among all 58 member banks and also involving the International Monetary Fund, have historically led to losses in the billions as banks try to maintain a policy using open market methods that have proven to be based on unrealistic assumptions.

The ultra-wealthy have also played a major role in establishing other important international institutions such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.  In fact, the land for the United Nations headquarters in New York City was purchased and donated by John D. Rockefeller.

The international bankers are “internationalists” and they are very proud of that fact.

The elite also dominate the education system in the United States.  Over the years, the Rockefeller Foundation and other elitist organizations have poured massive amounts of money into Ivy League schools.  Today, Ivy League schools are considered to be the standard against which all other colleges and universities in America are measured, and the last four U.S. presidents were educated at Ivy League schools.

The elite also exert a tremendous amount of influence through various secret societies (Skull and Bones, the Freemasons, etc.), through some very powerful think tanks and social clubs (the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Bohemian Grove, Chatham House, etc.), and through a vast network of charities and non-governmental organizations (the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund, etc.).

But for a moment, I want to focus on the power the elite have over the media.  In a previous article, I detailed how just six monolithic corporate giants control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day.  These giant corporations own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites.

Considering the fact that the average American watches 153 hours of television a month, the influence of these six giant corporations should not be underestimated.  The following are just some of the media companies that these corporate giants own…

Time Warner

Home Box Office (HBO)
Time Inc.
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
CW Network (partial ownership)
TMZ
New Line Cinema
Time Warner Cable
Cinemax
Cartoon Network
TBS
TNT
America Online
MapQuest
Moviefone
Castle Rock
Sports Illustrated
Fortune
Marie Claire
People Magazine

Walt Disney

ABC Television Network
Disney Publishing
ESPN Inc.
Disney Channel
SOAPnet
A&E
Lifetime
Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Buena Vista Theatrical Productions
Buena Vista Records
Disney Records
Hollywood Records
Miramax Films
Touchstone Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures
Pixar Animation Studios
Buena Vista Games
Hyperion Books

Viacom

Paramount Pictures
Paramount Home Entertainment
Black Entertainment Television (BET)
Comedy Central
Country Music Television (CMT)
Logo
MTV
MTV Canada
MTV2
Nick Magazine
Nick at Nite
Nick Jr.
Nickelodeon
Noggin
Spike TV
The Movie Channel
TV Land
VH1

News Corporation

Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Fox Television Stations
The New York Post
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Beliefnet
Fox Business Network
Fox Kids Europe
Fox News Channel
Fox Sports Net
Fox Television Network
FX
My Network TV
MySpace
News Limited News
Phoenix InfoNews Channel
Phoenix Movies Channel
Sky PerfecTV
Speed Channel
STAR TV India
STAR TV Taiwan
STAR World
Times Higher Education Supplement Magazine
Times Literary Supplement Magazine
Times of London
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
20th Century Fox International
20th Century Fox Studios
20th Century Fox Television
BSkyB
DIRECTV
The Wall Street Journal
Fox Broadcasting Company
Fox Interactive Media
FOXTEL
HarperCollins Publishers
The National Geographic Channel
National Rugby League
News Interactive
News Outdoor
Radio Veronica
ReganBooks
Sky Italia
Sky Radio Denmark
Sky Radio Germany
Sky Radio Netherlands
STAR
Zondervan

CBS Corporation

CBS News
CBS Sports
CBS Television Network
CNET
Showtime
TV.com
CBS Radio Inc. (130 stations)
CBS Consumer Products
CBS Outdoor
CW Network (50% ownership)
Infinity Broadcasting
Simon & Schuster (Pocket Books, Scribner)
Westwood One Radio Network

NBC Universal

Bravo
CNBC
NBC News
MSNBC
NBC Sports
NBC Television Network
Oxygen
SciFi Magazine
Syfy (Sci Fi Channel)
Telemundo
USA Network
Weather Channel
Focus Features
NBC Universal Television Distribution
NBC Universal Television Studio
Paxson Communications (partial ownership)
Trio
Universal Parks & Resorts
Universal Pictures
Universal Studio Home Video

And of course the elite own most of our politicians as well.  The following is a quote from journalist Lewis Lapham…

“The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country’s equestrian classes, a.k.a. the 20% of the population that holds 93% of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy institutes, the casinos, and the sports arenas.”

Have you ever wondered why things never seem to change in Washington D.C. no matter who we vote for?

Well, it is because both parties are owned by the establishment.

It would be nice to think that the American people are in control of who runs things in the U.S., but that is not how it works in the real world.

In the real world, the politician that raises more money wins more than 80 percent of the time in national races.

Our politicians are not stupid – they are going to be very good to the people that can give them the giant piles of money that they need for their campaigns.  And the people that can do that are the ultra-wealthy and the giant corporations that the ultra-wealthy control.

Are you starting to get the picture?

There is a reason why the ultra-wealthy are referred to as “the establishment”.  They have set up a system that greatly benefits them and that allows them to pull the strings.

So who runs the world?

They do.  In fact, they even admit as much.

David Rockefeller wrote the following in his 2003 book entitled “Memoirs”…

“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

There is so much more that could be said about all of this.  In fact, an entire library of books could be written about the power and the influence of the ultra-wealthy international bankers that run the world.

But hopefully this is enough to at least get some conversations started.

So what do you think about all of this?  Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…

U.S. moves to bolster French military campaign in Mali

French soldiers deployed in an operation against Islamist militants in Mali ride in a military vehicle at an air base near Bamako, the capital. (Eric Feferberg, AFP/Getty Images / January 14, 2013)

The U.S. is preparing to ferry more French troops to Mali and provide other help. The fight against Al Qaeda affiliates gained urgency given the rebel advances.

Los Angeles Times | Jan 14, 2013

By Shashank Bengali, Ken Dilanian and David S. Cloud

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is preparing to ferry hundreds of additional French troops to the North African country of Mali, bolstering a rapidly evolving military campaign in the latest conflict with Al Qaeda affiliates.

U.S. officials said they also were making plans to send drones or other surveillance aircraft and provide help with aerial refueling of French fighter jets, which bombed columns of Al Qaeda-allied militants in northern Mali for a fourth straight day Monday.

The Pentagon’s moves reflect growing concern in Washington about rebel advances, and a decision by the Obama administration to back France’s operation after months of inaction. French officials said they had halted the rebels’ advance on Bamako, the capital, but insurgents later overran Malian forces in a town about 200 miles northeast of the capital.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, speaking to reporters during a trip to Europe, said the U.S. was already providing the French with intelligence help, citing “a responsibility to go after Al Qaeda wherever they are.” Defense officials said small numbers of U.S. troops might be sent to Mali and surrounding countries but that they would be limited to a support role.

“We have promised [France] that we will … provide whatever assistance we can to try to help them,” Panetta said.

As the Obama administration winds down the United States’ long, costly war in Afghanistan, the focus of Western governments’ terrorism concerns has shifted to places such as Yemen, Somalia and northern Nigeria. Once-stable Mali joined the list after Islamist rebels seized the northern half of the country after a military coup in March. According to U.S. officials, the militants set up training camps and increased coordination with militant groups elsewhere in Africa.

The militants imposed harsh Islamic law, including forced amputations and summary executions.

The rebels include hundreds of fighters from Al Qaeda’s North African affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which U.S. officials have described as the terrorist network’s best-financed branch. Flush with cash from kidnapping and smuggling operations, the fighters gained large stocks of military equipment after the 2011 fall of Moammar Kadafi in Libya. Weapons from Kadafi’s regime flowed across the lawless Sahara into Mali.

U.S. officials say the Al Qaeda offshoot has between 800 and 1,200 fighters and that an unknown number also have joined in recent months from other African nations and Europe.

“They’ve increased in numbers because they’re able to operate a little more openly,” one U.S. defense official said before the French campaign began. “A lot of folks have seen the success they’ve had, and that draws in people from the region as well as foreigners who’ve come in from outside the region.”

France, the former colonial power in Mali, has a large North African immigrant population and has long feared that Islamists could use their base in Mali to plot attacks on French soil. Eight French hostages reportedly are being held by Islamists in northern Mali.

U.S. officials until recently didn’t regard the threat with great urgency, but the rebel advance last week appeared to force France’s hand — and heightened American concern. According to local news reports, one group of fighters attacked the town of Konna and moved toward government-controlled Mopti while a second group advanced to the west, showing a level of coordination that analysts hadn’t seen before.

“Until a week ago, I and others were telling people we don’t really think that there’s much of a threat here, because these [militants] have very parochial interests and we don’t think they’ve got the military capability,” said Michael Shurkin, a former CIA analyst who worked on Mali and is now an expert at the Rand Corp. think tank.

“What France saw this last week just scared it. It saw real capability, audacity and capacity,” he said.

French President Francois Hollande swiftly sent 550 troops to Mali, mainly to Bamako to secure the airport and, if necessary, evacuate the roughly 6,000 French citizens living there, officials said. France has asked the Pentagon for help in quickly moving another 500 to 600 troops and their equipment into the country, a U.S. defense official said.

U.S. military planners were devising options for using Air Force cargo planes to move the forces from France to staging areas outside Mali, possibly including the neighboring countries of Niger and Burkina Faso, the official said.

“We’re going to do it,” the official said. “We just don’t know what platforms yet,” referring to the types of aircraft.

The United States for several years conducted training operations with Mali’s armed forces but was legally required to suspend all assistance to the Malian government after the March coup. A U.S. official said that restriction was delaying assistance to the French operation, but Obama administration lawyers were looking at ways around the prohibition.

Last month the United Nations signed off on a West African-led plan to send 3,300 regional troops to help Malian forces retake the north. France is putting pressure on the West African bloc to speed the deployment of its soldiers.

Full Story

Bilderberg Bangs War Drums; Pushes Obama to Bomb Iran

americanfreepress.net | Jan 7, 2013 

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By James P. Tucker Jr.Bilderberg luminary Dennis Ross celebrated Christmas by banging his war drums in a campaign to prod President Barack Obama into killing Palestinians and Iranians on behalf of Israel. Americans would, again, spill most of the blood and would finance the military operation. Israel will pay a share of the costs with your tax dollars.

In a Bilderberg-staged interview with The Washington Post published on December 23, Ross, who was an advisor to President Obama, made the case for invading Iran in 2013. Ross embraced the earlier warhawking by Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.).

After seven years of war talk but no gunfire, 2013 will “finally bring a break in the Iranian standoff—by means of a military confrontation, the appearance of an Iranian bomb or a diplomatic deal of some kind,” Jackson Diehl wrote of his interview with Ross. “And interestingly, one of the people making that case is Obama’s first-term advisor on Iran, Dennis Ross, who has worked on the Middle East in five administrations.”

Ross said three factors point to war on Iran: “an approaching Iranian ‘breakout’ capacity; Obama’s stated determination to prevent it; and the slow emergence of an economic and political climate in Iran that could prompt Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to change course.”

In a series of meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama said publicly, “It is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Ross added, “If by the end of 2013 diplomacy hasn’t worked, the prospects for the use of force becomes quite high.”

Iran signed on to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and passes inspections each year. Israel is known to have a huge nuclear weapons stockpile dating back decades but refuses to sign the NPT and is never inspected.

 

Bilderberg Group Dominates Bloomberg Billionaires Index

Globalist Report | Jan 4, 2013

by Andrew Puhanic

Bilderberg Group, an organisation founded in 1954 by the global elite has once again dominated the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

So what is the Bilderberg Group? The Bilderberg Group is a secretive organisation who meets on a yearly basis to discuss political and economic issues that pertain to the Globalist Agenda. Many of the members of the Bilderberg Group are derived from both Government and Private organisations.

All Bilderberg Group meetings are held in secret, with no official record of who attends, the agenda and what deals have been agreed.

Records of Bilderberg Group participant lists are usually smuggled out from within the organisation by insiders and / or are published in their ‘official’ website (Many names are missing from their official list of attendees).

Ever since the Bilderberg Group was founded, very few records of the organisations agenda have ever been publicized. In fact, since 1954, there has been a media blackout on Bilderberg Group reporting.

Only recently have Activists been successful in forcing the main-stream media to report on Bilderberg Group meetings.

The following tables reveal official Bilderberg Group members who have been listed on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

 

Rank	Name	Estimated Net Worth	Bilderberg Group Attendance (Year)
2	Bill Gates	$63.4 Billion	2010
4	Warren Buffett	$49.8 Billion	2009
8	Larry Ellison	$40.7 Billion	1999
9	Bernard Arnault	$29.8 Billion	1992
20	Jeff Bezos	$24.1 Billion	2011
26	George Soros	$21.6 Billion	1999

 

So why should we be worried about the Bilderberg Group? THE primary concern with the activities of the Bilderberg Group is not the fact that the global elite are meeting with heads of states and government officials (That’s never going to end), it’s the fact that they meet in secret, behind closed doors without any record of what was discussed and or agreed.

Full Story

 

It’s back: Texas in ‘Super Highway’ deal with Spain

Perry signs agreement 3 years after public opposition halted project

wnd.com | Dec 29, 2012

by Jerome R. Corsi

NEW YORK – Believe it or not, the Trans-Texas Corridor is back.

Very quietly, Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas Department of Transportation, or TxDOT, signed in October a comprehensive development agreement to construct a toll-road redevelopment of Interstate 35 north of downtown Fort Worth.

TxDOT signed the 50-year deal with NTE Mobility Partners Segments 3 LLC, a U.S.-based wholly-owned subsidiary of Cintra, the Spanish-owned construction company. TxDOT picked Cintra in 2005 to build what some critics called the “NAFTA Super Highway.”

Chris Lippincot, the former TxDOT information officer who is currently acting as the new public relations man for Cintra in the United States, also announced TxDOT signed a contract in September with Cintra to build a privatized State Highway 130 toll road in San Antonio.

Jerome Corsi’s “America for Sale” exposes the globalists’ effort to put America on the chopping block

Perry may never have abandoned his original idea to build what during the presidential administration of George W. Bush was known as the Trans-Texas Corridor project, a 4,000-mile network of privately built and operated toll roads to crisscross the state, with Spanish development company Cintra scheduled to earn the tolls under 50-year leases.

In 2009, Perry scrapped the TTC plan after a series of combative town hall meetings throughout the state showed TxDOT it faced massive taxpayer resistance.

But now, the plan apparently is being implemented in small chunks, without the fanfare of divulging a statewide blueprint Perry and TxDOT may still have tucked away in their back pockets.

Was TTC ever really dead?

Operating below the radar of public opinion, Texas currently has $20 billion in roadwork underway through public-private partnerships, according to Ted Houghton, TxDOT chairman, the Texas Tribune reported earlier this month.

Despite Perry’s pledge in 2009 to end the Trans-Texas Corridor project with Cintra, TxDOT has kept the public-private partnership toll road concept alive by proposing smaller projects for the approval of the Texas state legislature.

Nicholas Rubio, the president of Cintra’s U.S. arm in Austin, told the Texas Tribune that Cintra currently has contracts for three road projects in Texas, consisting of approximately $5 billion in private investment against about $1 billion in public subsidies.

“You have to recognize, in general, that policymakers in Texas have been ahead of the curve,” Rubio told the Tribune. “The states that have been developing P3s (public-private partnerships) are Texas, Florida, Virginia, and that’s about it.”

In October, Perry and Rafael del Pino, chairman of Ferrovial, Cintra’s parent company in Spain, attended the grand launch of a 41-mile stretch of State Highway 130 P3 project between Austin and Sequin.

Texas owns the land on which the SH 130 P3 project is built, but a private consortium owned and operated by Cintra is scheduled to build the toll road. It’s to be operated under a 50-year lease, with Cintra taking the lion’s share of the tolls collected over the next 50 years to recover construction costs and to make a profit.

To make the SH 130 toll road palatable to Texas drivers, the speed limit will be set to 85 miles per hour, the fastest posted limit in the United States.

A look-back to the Bush era

Quietly but systematically, the Bush administration in conjunction with Perry in Texas advanced the plan to build a huge highway, four football fields wide, through the heart of Texas, parallel to Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Texas, to the Texas border with Oklahoma.

The Trans-Texas Corridor moved ahead to begin construction following the re-election of Perry in November 2006.

Plans to build TTC-35 were fully disclosed on KeepTexasMoving.org, a now defunct official TxDOT website.

On March 11, 2005, a “Comprehensive Development Agreement” was signed by TxDOT to build the “TTC-35 High Priority Corridor” parallel to Interstate 35.

The contracting party was a limited partnership formed between Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A., a publically-listed company headquartered in Spain, majority controlled by the Madrid-based Groupo Ferrovial, and a San Antonio-based construction company, Zachry Construction Corporation.

The Cintra deal meant that once the TTC was completed, anyone who wanted to drive on it would have to pay an investment consortium in Spain for the privilege of driving in Texas.

Although somewhat incomprehensible to most U.S. citizens, these public-private partnerships involve selling off key U.S. infrastructure projects to foreign entities.

Granted, the “ownership” rights of projects like TTC-35 would have remained with the state of Texas, yet selling off the leasing rights amounts in the thinking of most U.S. citizens to selling off the highway to foreign interests for the term of the lease.

Under the terms of the TTC agreements with TxDOT, Cintra would have had the rights to operate TTC-35 for 50 years and to collect all tolls on the road in that period of time.

The Comprehensive Development Agreement called for Cintra-Zachry to provide private investment of $6 billion “to fully design, construct and operate a four-lane, 316-mile toll road between Dallas and San Antonio for up to 50 years as the initial segment of TTC-35.

For this, Cintra-Zachry paid the state of Texas $1.2 billion for the long-term right to build and operate the initial segment as a toll facility.

In April 2006, TxDOT released a 4,000-page Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS, for what was described as the “Trans-Texas Corridor-25 Oklahoma to Mexico/Gulf Coast Element.”

The April 2006 EIS made clear that Cintra-Zachry planned to build a 1,200-foot-wide (approximately four football fields wide) complex with 10 lanes of highway – five lanes in each direction, north and south.Three lanes in each direction would be reserved for passenger vehicles and two separate lanes reserved for trucks.

The EIS design included six rail lines running parallel to the highway, with separate rail lines in each direction for high-speed rail, commuter rail and freight rail.

Finally, the design called for a 200-foot wide utility corridor that would include pipelines for oil, natural gas, water, telecommunications and data, as well as electricity towers.

According to the TxDOT Trans-Texas Corridor Plan adopted in June 2002, TxDOT ultimately would build some 4,000 miles of highway-railway-utility super-corridors throughout Texas over the next 50 years, using some 584,000 acres of what is now Texas farm and ranchland, at an estimated cost of $184 billion.

The TTC plan left little doubt TTC toll-road super-corridors were designed to facilitate international trade, primarily speeding trucks and trains carrying “inter-modal” containers from Mexican ports to destinations in the heartland of the U.S.

The full TTC build-out was designed to move goods through Texas rapidly, bypassing the major cities.

John Kerry, Tipped as the Next Secretary of State, Has Bilderberg Links

Editor’s Warning: PR, Propaganda, Disinformation and Spin. Read at your own risk.

forbes.com | Dec 18, 2012

by Eamonn Fingleton

US Senator John Kerry: Secretary of State in the wings? (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

The news this morning is that John Kerry is in line to become America’s next Secretary of State. If so, it is another piece of  red meat for Bilderberg conspiracy theorists.

Operating  from a tiny office in a Dutch university, the Bilderberg organization is hardly known outside the highest reaches of power. Yet as networking organizations go, it is so rarefied it makes Davos look about as exclusive as Facebook. Adding spice to the story is the fact that the Bilderberg organization has embarrassing links with Nazi-era Germany.

Bilderberg is not well known because – highly controversially – it doesn’t want to be. But its annual get-togethers in five-star hotels in Europe and North America are noted for their apparent clairvoyance in identifying future top leaders.

Bill Clinton was one such pick. A relatively obscure governor of a poor southern state, he was invited to his first Bilderberg meeting in 1991. The following year he was elected president of the United States.

Now, John Kerry may figure in a similar sequence. He participated in the latest Bilderberg gathering in Northern Virginia this summer and as of this morning is being touted as Secretary of State in President Obama’s second administration.

This follows hard on the heels of the appointment of another Bilderberger, the Canadian investment banker Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England. Having attended his first Bilderberg meeting in 2011, Carney was invited back in 2012. As I have pointed out in a previous note, it may be significant that the British finance minister George Osborne, who announced Carney’s appointment last month, also attended both get-togethers.

Conspiracy theorists have long argued that Bilderberg is a uniquely powerful organization that constitutes a sort of shadow world government whose approval can prove decisive for aspirants to a host of top jobs.

Of course this is a classic case of “post hoc, propter hoc” — just because phenomenon A is followed by  phenomenon B does not mean that A caused B. And in the Bilderberg group’s case, there is  rarely, if ever, any evidence  of a causal link between its gatherings and subsequent developments. To the extent that the group may sometimes invite fast-rising future leaders to its  gatherings, this may merely reflect the fact that it is reacting to fundamental forces beyond its power to influence. This applies in spades to the Kerry episode in that, as the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, he was hardly a rank unknown when he got the Bilderberg invitation.

One thing is clear: as a supposed  ultimate pinnacle of world power Bilderberg comes up short. Although some Bilderbergers  probably privately enjoy all the masters-of-the-universe chatter, the reality is that they are still bogged down trying to secure their original, rather limited, and more or less openly stated, objective of establishing European unity.

This is not to say that there are not axes grinding. On closer examination, the Bilderbergers break down into two camps:

1. A  tightly focused hard core representing the  national interests of Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria. One of their top objectives seems to be to get Britain and the United States to continue to facilitate central European trade policies.

2. A ragbag of British and American notables who have led their nations’ push towards unconditional, and often unreciprocated, free trade. Some of these are showboaters  (Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger come to mind) and some are idealists (Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf might be among them). But irrespective of whether or not they believe the radical free market dogma they spout, they  rank high on any list of  people the export-minded governments of central Europe might want to encourage.

The Bilderberg group is notably secretive,  which catches the lunatic fringe’s imagination. But it has also attracted reasoned criticism from quite sane observers over the years. An early example was Phyllis Schafly, a conservative American Catholic who tackled the group in a book as far back as the mid-1960s. A decade later the British journalist C. Gordon Tether, a then prominent columnist for the Financial Times, tried to focus attention on the group. For his pains he was fired by FT editor Fredy Fisher.

What is undeniable is that the group’s genesis is highly controversial. In a previous note, I wrote that the group was founded by Prince Bernhard, a one-time Nazi who went on to marry the future queen of the Netherlands. My facts have been challenged by a commentator who uses the pen-name Hegemony.

As Hegemony is not prepared to use his or her real name, I would normally shrug off the challenge.   But let’s give him or her the benefit of the doubt. Take Hegemony’s suggestion that Bernhard somehow had little to do with Bilderberg’s genesis. The fact is that Bernhard owned the Bilderberg hotel in the Netherlands where the group held its first meeting in 1954. He not only served as president of the organization at that first gathering but continued in this capacity into the mid-1970s – and even then had to be bundled off the stage only because he suddenly emerged at the center of the Lockheed bribery scandal.

As for Bernhard’s Nazi past, again there is little room for debate. It is a matter of historical record that he was a member of the notorious Sturmabteilungen (SA) until late in 1934. My edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica describes SA members as “the select exponents of the Nazi doctrine” and adds, “force was the keystone of their existence.” The Dutch author Annejet van der Zijl has published evidence that Bernhard joined the SA well before the Nazis seized power – and thus his action was voluntary and cannot be excused by any suggestion of coercion.

It is true that soon after he married the future Dutch queen, he switched sides. What is clear is that truthfulness was not his strong suit and he persisted to the end in denying he was ever a Nazi.

If Mr. or Ms. Hegemony is to be believed, the Bilderberg’s principal founder was the Polish political leader Joseph Retinger. Perhaps. What seems to be true is that he was the originator of the idea which he then took to Bernhard. But Retinger was also a notably controversial figure. Born in the Austro-Hungarian empire, he was not necessarily the unalloyed Polish nationalist he has been portrayed. It is a matter of historical record that the Polish resistance were sufficiently convinced that he was a Nazi secret agent that they tried to have him assassinated.

Of the early Bilderbergers the third most important was Paul Rijkens, chairman of Unilever. Rijkens too had a record that was less than ideal. While it would be going too far to suggest he was a Nazi collaborator, he knew Hitler quite well and, up until the outbreak of war, the two did much mutually satisfactory business together.

Is the Bilderberg organization some sort of shadow world government? Disappointingly for the conspiracy theories, this does not withstand  examination. For one thing, Bilderberg boasts almost no East Asian participation. For those who follow the money, any get-together of putative masters of the universe that does not include heavy representation from East Asia is Hamlet without the prince. After all East Asia now accounts for close to 75 percent of the world’s capital exports. To be sure, Bilderberg meetings recently have included one or two participants from China but these are obvious lightweights. What is remarkable is the almost total absence of other East Asians, most notably the Japanese but also the Koreans, Taiwanese, and Singaporeans. The Japanese absence is particularly significant given that Japan – that alleged basket case of global economics – has somehow increased its net overseas assets from less than $200 billion at the end of 1989 to nearly $3.5 trillion on the latest count.

United Nations Presents Grim Prognosis on World Economy

nytimes.com | Dec 18, 2012

By RICK GLADSTONE

World economic growth has weakened substantially this year and faces the confluence of a triple threat — the fiscal cliff in the United States, a worsening European debt crisis and a sharp slowdown in China, the United Nations said in a year-end report released on Tuesday. The worst case, the report said, could be a new global recession that mires many countries in a cycle of austerity and unemployment for years.

The principal author of the report, Robert Vos, director of the Development Policy and Analysis Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, said the trends meant it could take until at least 2017 just to recoup the jobs lost in the United States and Europe since the 2008-2009 global recession.

He forecast the pace of world growth for 2013 at 2.4 percent, “a significant downgrade” from the United Nations midyear forecast of 3.1 percent. He said the 2012 growth rate was 2.2 percent, weaker than the midyear forecast of 2.5 percent.

“I’m afraid this time around we’re not very optimistic about how things are moving,” Mr. Vos told a news conference at the United Nations headquarters.

“A worsening of the euro area crisis, the ‘fiscal cliff’ in the United States and a hard landing in China could cause a new global recession,” Mr. Vos said in the report, titled “World Economic Situation and Prospects 2013.” He said the forecast pace of growth “will be far from sufficient to overcome the continued jobs crisis that many countries are still facing.”

The report’s proposals to avoid that outcome — more government programs that focus on job growth, fiscal coordination and aid to developing countries — are not likely to be widely embraced by policy makers in the United States and Europe, where the major preoccupation is on budget cuts and spending discipline. Still, the report provides one of the most complete assessments of the world’s economic trends and reflects what United Nations experts view as the most pressing areas of concern.

Shamshad Akhtar, assistant secretary general for economic development, who introduced Mr. Vos’s report, began by reciting a litany of maladies, including record unemployment in Europe, a decline in global trade, volatility in the international flows of capital and low food stocks in many poorer countries that have made prices in those countries unpredictable. “Even minor supply shocks may cause new prices hikes and shortages,” she said.

While she and Mr. Vos acknowledged the news reports on progress in the debt-reduction negotiations between the White House and Congressional Republicans to avoid dire automatic year-end spending cuts, the so-called fiscal cliff, they erred on the side of assuming the worst. Both said the international economic shock of such spending cuts would reverberate quickly, further weakening economies elsewhere.

“Even if we don’t get to the fiscal cliff, what’s on the table now is not too far from what would happen if the United States goes over the cliff. That is reason for some concern,” Mr. Vos said.

He criticized the focus in developed countries on austerity, budget cutting and a reduction in aid to the developing world. “Fiscal austerity in donor countries is not only detrimental to their own economic recovery, but certainly should not come at the expense of the development efforts of the poorest nations,” he wrote in a summary of the report.

Unlike the economic crisis four years ago, when China helped to cushion the impact with enormous doses of stimulus spending, there is no single savior this time. If China’s growth rate of 7.5 percent this year slows to 5 percent or less in coming years, Mr. Vos said, “that would have major global ramifications.”

He said growth rates in 2012 fell sharply in nearly every part of the world except Africa, where economies grew in the 5 percent to 6 percent range, helped in part by strength in oil-exporting countries, spending on basic infrastructure improvements like roads and expanding ties with Asian economies.

Nonetheless, he said, Africa remains plagued by armed conflicts and other “numerous challenges,” and the strong growth rates will not hasten the end of the continent’s widespread poverty.

UN urges countries to impose global taxes for changing climate, wealth redistribution, etc

UN proposes carbon, billionaires, currency taxes. Says more money needed for aid, global challenges

Reuters | Jul 5, 2012

UNITED NATIONS, July 5 (Reuters) – The United Nations on Thursday urged countries to impose international taxes to raise more than $400 billion a year, such as a carbon tax, a currency transaction tax and a billionaires tax, to offset cutbacks in aid by many countries amid global economic turmoil.

The U.N. World Economic and Social Survey found the needs of developing countries were not being met, more money was needed to fight challenges like climate change and new taxes would help “donor countries overcome their record of broken promises.”

The United Nations has no authority or mechanisms to enforce an international tax and can only urge its 193 members to do so. The world body plays a marginal role in economic issues, which is the realm of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

“Donor countries have fallen well short of their aid commitments and development assistance declined last year because of budget cuts, increasing the shortfall to $167 billion,” the survey’s author, Rob Vos, said in a statement.

Here Is a List of Global Taxes Proposed by the United Nations Last Week

“We are suggesting various ways to tap resources through international mechanisms, such as coordinated taxes on carbon emissions, air traffic, and financial and currency transactions,” he said.

Some United Nations officials have made various global economic proposals such as replacing the U.S. dollar as the world’s currency with IMF Special Drawing Rights, an idea that a number of countries have been pushing.

One suggestion made in The World Economic and Social Survey was that regular allocations of IMF Special Drawing Rights and use of idle Special Drawing Rights could produce about $100 billion annually to buy long-term assets that would then be used as development finance.

The survey also said a $25 per tonne tax on carbon emissions in developed countries – collected by national authorities but allocated for international causes – could raise an estimated $250 billion a year.

Another $40 billion a year could come from a 0.005 percent transaction tax on the four main currencies, the U.S. dollar, euro, yen and the British pound. A tax of 1 percent on billionaires could also be explored, the survey said.

“Realizing the potential of these mechanisms will require international agreement and corresponding political will, both to tap sources as well as to ensure allocation of revenues for development,” Vos said.