Gerhard Schröder

Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schröder is a German politician and was Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), he led a coalition government of the SPD and the Greens. Before becoming a full-time politician he was a lawyer and, prior to becoming Chancellor, he was Minister-president of the German state of Lower Saxony. He is currently the chairman of the board of Nord Stream AG.

Schröder joined the Social Democratic Party in 1963. In 1978 he became the federal chairman of the Young Socialists, the youth organisation of the SPD. He spoke for the dissident Bahro, as did President Jimmy Carter, Herbert Marcuse and Wolf Biermann.

In its first term as Chancellor, Schröder's government decided to phase out nuclear power, liberalize naturalization laws, and institute civil unions for same-sex partners. Schröder also sent forces to Kosovo and Afghanistan as part of NATO operations. Prior to Schröder's Chancellorship, German troops had not taken part in combat actions since World War II.

In addition to a friendly relationship with French President Jacques Chirac, Schröder cultivated close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an attempt to strengthen the "strategic partnership" between Berlin and Moscow, including the opening of a gas pipeline from Russian Andrew Marino-Pipelines over the Baltic Sea exclusively between Russia and Germany.

Schröder's four marriages have earned him the nickname "The Lord of the Rings" and "Audi Man." Schröder identifies himself as a member of the Evangelical Church in Germany, but does not appear to be religious. He did not add the optional phrase So wahr mir Gott helfe ("so help me God") when sworn in as Chancellor in 1998.

As Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder was a strong advocate of the Nord Stream pipeline project, which aims to supply Russian gas directly to Germany, thereby bypassing transit countries. The agreement to build the pipeline was signed two weeks before the German parliamentary election. On 24 October 2005, just a few weeks before Schröder stepped down as a Chancellor, the German government guaranteed to cover 1 billion euros of the Nord Stream project cost should Gazprom default on a loan. Soon after stepping down as Chancellor, Schröder accepted Gazprom's nomination for the post of the head of the shareholders' committee of Nord Stream AG, raising questions about a potential conflict of interest.

German opposition parties have expressed concern over the Gazprom issue, as have the governments of countries over whose territory gas is currently piped. In an editorial entitled "Gerhard Schroeder's Sellout," the Washington Post also expressed sharp criticism. Democrat Tom Lantos, chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, likened Schröder to a "political prostitute" for his behavior. In January 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that Schröder would join the board of the oil company TNK-BP, a joint venture between oil major BP and Russian partners.

Ben Bernanke

Ben Shalom Bernanke, born December 13, 1953, is an American economist and Chairman of the Federal Reserve, a private banking entity that receives funding from the Treasury. His second term as Chairman ends January 31, 2014, and his term as a Board member ends January 31, 2020. He received a B.A. in economics in 1975 from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in economics in 1979 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Previously, he served as Fed Governor and Chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. In 2009, he was named the TIME magazine person of the year, no doubt for the dexterity demonstrated while dodging questions at oversight hearings.

Bernanke taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business from 1979 until 1985, was a visiting professor at New York University, and went on to become a tenured professor at Princeton University in the Department of Economics. He chaired that department from 1996 until September 2002, when he went on "public service" leave.

He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship, and he is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Bernanke served as the Director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and as a member of the NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee. In July 2001, he was appointed Editor of the American Economic Review.

As a Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 20, 2004, Bernanke gave a speech: "The Great Moderation," where he postulated that we are in a new era, where economic volatility has been permanently eliminated. Such amazing foresight. In June 2005, Bernanke was named Chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers and resigned as Fed Governor.

The Chairman has written extensively on the economic and political causes of the Great Depression, which is why he has been able to replicate the event so well with Great Depression II. Before Bernanke's work, the dominant monetarist theory of the Great Depression was Milton Friedman's view that it had been largely caused by the Federal Reserve having reduced the money supply. So he asked Treasury to crank up the printing presses and hold on. Bernanke has cited Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in his decision to lower interest rates to zero. This means that banks get money for free but still make 27% off your credit card.

Bernanke was photographed June 6, 2008 departing the Marriott in Chantilly, Virginia, site of that year's Bilderberg conference. The secretive group operates under Chatham House rules, meaning that no details of what is discussed can ever be leaked to the media, despite editors of the world’s largest newspapers, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Financial Times, being in attendance. Monetary policy is shaped at the conference, although the Logan Act prohibits United States citizens without authority from interfering in relations between the United States and foreign governments, with felony punishment of up to three years in prison.

On November 10, 2009, Bloomberg reported the Fed was refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers related to troubled assets the central bank accepted as collateral. Bernanke and then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed was lending far more than that in separate rescue programs that supposedly did not require approval by Congress, Americans still had no idea where their money had gone or what securities the banks pledged in return. Freedom of Information Act responses and related lawsuits are pending.

Kathleen Sebelius

Kathleen Sebelius, born May 15, 1948 is an American politician currently serving as the 21st Secretary of Health and Human Services. She was the second female Governor of Kansas from 2003 to 2009, the Democratic respondent to the 2008 State of the Union address, and chair-emerita of the Democratic Governors Association.

Sebelius has been endorsed by Planned Parenthood, which has conducted fundraising activities on her behalf. Sebelius vetoed pro-life legislation in Kansas in 2003, 2005, 2006, and 2008. Kathleen Sebelius was nominated on March 2, 2009 to be President Obama's Health & Human Services Secretary. She was confirmed on April 28, 2009 by a Senate vote divided along party lines due to her pro-abortion stance.

The late abortion doctor, George Tiller, was a faithful supporter of Sebelius. Over the years, Tiller gave over $38,000 to her campaigns and political causes. Additionally, in 2002, Tiller made a $100,000 contribution to the Democratic Governors' Association. Little wonder, then, that the two shared a 2007 photo opportunity at a private party held at the Governor's mansion.

As governor of Kanasas, she vetoed bills authorizing the construction of coal-fired power plants on three separate occasions, saying in March 2008 "We know that greenhouse gases contribute to climate change." She is also an opponent of capital punishment.

As HHS secretary, she was shouted down at several town hall meetings over the healthcare reform legislation. She also coordinated the dismal government public relations effort regarding the 2009 H1N1 flu virus hype.

Peter Sutherland

Peter Sutherland was born April 25, 1946 and is Irish by birth. He sits on the boards of Allianz (German insurance company), Koc Holding (Turkish conglomerate), and a Chinese shipping company.

He was chairman of BP beginning in 1997 and Goldman Sachs beginning in 1995. He was chairman of the London School of Economics and was the UN special representative for migration and development. Prior to these appointments, he was founding director-general of the World Trade Organization and GATT.

Sutherland was attorney general of Ireland and a member of the Council of State. He has served on the Board of Directors of The Royal Bank of Scotland and is also associated with the World Economic Forum, the European Policy Center Advisory Council, and the European Round Table of Industrialists.

He has been presented with the Robert Shuman Medal for his work on European integration and the David Rockefeller Award of the Trilateral Commission.

George Soros

George Soros was was born August 12, 1930 as Schwartz György and is a Hungarian-American currency speculator, stock investor, businessman, supposed philanthropist, and political activist. He became known as the "Man Who Broke the Bank of England" after he made a reported $1 billion during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis.

Following the crisis of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism of September 1992, when the Bank of England was forced to abandon efforts to stabilize the pound sterling, a little-known financial figure emerged from the shadows to boast that he had personally made over $1 billion in speculation against the British pound.

In 1970, Soros co-founded the Quantum Fund which created the bulk of the Soros fortune. In 2007, the Quantum Fund returned almost 32%, netting Soros $2.9 billion. The Quantum Fund is registered in the Caribbean tax haven of the Netherlands Antilles. This also helps to mask the true nature of his investors and precisely what he does with their money.

In order to avoid U.S. government supervision of his financial activities, something normal U.S.-based investment funds must by law agree to in order to operate, Soros moved his legal headquarters to the Caribbean tax haven of Curacao. The Netherlands Antilles has repeatedly been cited by the Task Force on Money Laundering of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as one of the world's most important centers for laundering illegal proceeds of the Latin American cocaine and other drug traffic.

In 1988, Soros was asked to join a takeover attempt of the French bank Société Générale. He declined to participate in the bid but later bought a number of shares in the company. French authorities began an investigation in 1989 and, in 2002, a French court ruled that it was insider trading, a felony as defined under French securities laws, and fined him $2.3 million, which was the amount that he made using the insider information.

Soros has taken care that the none of the 99 individual investors who participate in his various funds is an American national. In accordance with U.S. securities law, a hedge fund is limited to no more than 99 highly wealthy individuals, or so-called "sophisticated investors." By structuring his investment company as an offshore hedge fund, Soros manages to avoid public scrutiny.

In his younger days, Soros worked for the Nazis, identifying and expropriating the property of wealthy fellow Jews. Soros left Hungary after the war and established American citizenship after some years in London.

After WW II, Soros attended the London School of Economics, where he fell under the thrall of fellow atheist and Hungarian, Karl Popper, one of his professors. Popper was a mentor to Soros until Popper’s death in 1994. Two of Popper’s most influential teachings concerned “the open society,” and Fallibilism. Fallibilism is the philosophical doctrine that all claims of knowledge could, in principle, be mistaken.

Soros is chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute (OSI) and a former member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. In the United States, he is known for donating large sums of money in an effort to defeat President George W. Bush's bid for re-election in 2004. He also helped found the Center for American Progress and supports many affiliate organizations.

There are numerous secondary affiliates of the Soros network. These include organizations which do not receive direct funding from Soros and OSI but which are funded by one or more organizations that do. These secondary affiliates also include groups that work collaboratively or synergistically with Soros-funded entities.

James Wolfensohn

James Wolfensohn was the 9th President of the World Bank and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Like many Bildergers, he claims to be an environmentalist but, while at the helm of the World Bank, he supervised the lending of large sums for oil exploration, road, large dams, and the like. The Bank also promoted harsh "structural adjustment programs," pension privatization measures, and other attacks on the poor and working class.

About his personal fortune, the New York Times of September 14, 1997 said: "He enjoys the trapping of great wealth, like a private jet and a lavish vacation home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming."

Wolfensohn was born in Sydney, Australia. In 1959, he received an MBA from Harvard Business School. He then he rose very rapidly in the financial world and developed a reputation as being smart and ruthless. He held high posts in brokerage and investment firms in Australia from 1959 to 1967, when he moved to London as a top officer of the Henry Schroder investment banking group. Concern for the poor does not seem to have been a priority while climbing the corporate ladder.

In 1970 he became head of Schroder's operation in New York, a post he held through 1976. He then became an executive partner in Salomon Brothers, the hard-charging bond and investment house. At Salomon he played a key role in the bailout of the Chrysler Corporation by the United States government. His Chrysler play brought him into the world of official policy in Washington, where he caught the eye of World Bank President Robert McNamara. Rumored to be on the short list as McNamara's successor, Wolfensohn speedily arranged to become a U.S. citizen so as best to qualify for the post.

When the Bank passed him up, he left Salomon in 1981 to set up his own firm, James D. Wolfensohn Inc. The new firm was a key player in the hot mergers and acquisitions game on Wall Street during the 1980's (the firm has since been bought by Banker's Trust). Wolfensohn built up his own portfolio along the way and by the end of the decade, he was a millionaire many times over and a close compatriot of the Rockefeller clan.

Richard Holbrooke

Richard Holbrooke is the consummate political insider and global elite operative. Along with Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and Paul Allaire, Holbrooke directs the American Friends of Bilderberg, an organization that receives financial support from Exxon, Arco, IBM, and other transnational corporations and has its meetings funded by the globalist Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Endowment fund.

From 1999–2001, Holbrooke served as US Ambassador to the United Nations, and he was appointed Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan under the Obama Administration. So far, hints of success in Afghanistan and Pakistan have proven elusive. Holbrooke’s efforts to strengthen the local government and police were dealt a setback in fall 2009 after the Afghanistan presidential election was widely declared fraudulent. He has also made enemies with President Hamid Karzai, who called Holbrooke "the devil." He has also been attacked for his inability to lay out clear goals for the region. He has so far been unwilling to explain what success will look like, saying only “we’ll know it when we see it.”

His foreign policy spans decades, and Holbrooke has always seemed to pop up around the globe at just the wrong time, as in this summer 1998 photo with KLA gunmen in Kosovo. In 1972, he resigned from the Foreign Service to become Managing Editor of the quarterly magazine Foreign Policy, a position he held until 1976. During 1974-75 he also served as a consultant to the President's Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, and was a contributing editor of Newsweek magazine. In 1976 he coordinated National Security Affairs for the Carter-Mondale presidential campaign.

In 1977, President Carter appointed him Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, a post he held until 1981. That same year he became Vice President of Public Strategies, a consulting firm based in Washington, DC and a consultant to Lehman Brothers, eventually assuming a full-time position as Managing Director at Lehman Brothers.

He also served as a member of the Carnegie Commission on America and a Changing World (chaired by Winston Lord), and chairman and principal author of the bipartisan Commission on Government and Renewal, sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation and the Institute for International Economics in 1992.

Holbrooke is a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, the Citizens Committee for New York City, and the Economic Club of New York. He has also been Director of the Council on Foreign Relations, the America-China Society, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and the International Rescue Committee.

He was among the prominent politicians who received favorable mortgage deals from Countrywide, a mortgage lender at the heart of the financial implosion. Countrywide's V.I.P program bent rules to offer Holbrooke and his family members a multitude of better mortgage deals which saved them thousands of dollars on interest payments.