Bilderberg To Prolong Global Financial Recession For Another Year

Tucker: Elite will get together in Sitges, Spain from June 3-6 to push agenda for world economic governance; Hotel Dolce Sitges likely location

The Bilderberg Group will meet this year in Spain and continue to advance their agenda for world economic governance while agreeing to prolong the global financial recession for another year, according to Bilderberg sleuth Jim Tucker, who has discovered through his routinely accurate inside sources that the conference will take place from June 3-6.

Bilderberg sleuths were correct in predicting that this year’s meeting would take place in western Europe, but were wrong in pinpointing the UK as the likeliest location. The 2010 conference will take place in a coastal resort called Sitges, which is about 20 miles from Barcelona.

Bilderberg have now been absent from the UK for the longest time in their history. Even if Bilderberg chooses the UK as their 2011 destination, 13 years will have passed since their 1998 conference in Scotland, the longest gap between UK conferences since the group’s founding in 1954. As we highlighted yesterday, Bilderberg’s decision to avoid the UK is undoubtedly related to increased awareness of the group and the expectation that they would receive unwanted press attention as well as sizeable demonstrations if they held the meeting in the British Isles.

Bilderberg last met in Spain in 1989 when they held their annual conference on the Spanish island of La Toja.

This year’s confab will be similarly secluded, with Bilderberg’s increasing army of police and private security guards on hand to create a lock down of the entire resort.

Bilderberg will have a wide choice of hotels from which to host their secretive get-together, meaning the precise location of the conference will be harder than ever to pin down. The area is known for having a plethora of high standard hotels and is a popular tourist resort.

The most likely candidate however would appear to be the Hotel Dolce Sitges (pictured top), a 5 star luxury resort adjacent to a prestigious golf club. Forming the consensus which sets the agenda for global policy behind closed doors can be stressful, which is why Bilderbergers like to interrupt their scheming with the odd round of golf.

“Business facilities include 11 meeting rooms, 25 breakout rooms, 2 boardrooms, and a spacious amphitheatre accommodating up to 60 guests. All of the venues are equipped with the latest audiovisual technologies and ideal for holding congresses, cocktails, weddings and any other kind of event for up to 550 guests,” states the promotional text for the hotel, suggesting it would be ideal for the Bilderbergers.

The Hotel Dolce Sitges has no rooms available from June 2 to June 6, strongly indicating that this is when the resort will be locked down for the arrival of Bilderberg elitists.

The resort appears to be suitably secluded and away from the crowded tourist areas, making it perfect for Bilderberg’s needs. In addition, attempting to book a room from June 3-6 via the hotel’s website reveals that no rooms are available from June 2 to June 6, strongly indicating that this is when the resort will be locked down for Bilderberg.

However, Bilderberg has been known to leak false information about where the group is staying, so we cannot confirm the exact location until Jim Tucker or Daniel Estulin pinpoint the precise location via their inside sources, who have proven to be habitually accurate.

State of the art conference facilities and 5 star luxury suggest the Hotel Dolce Sitges may be the preferred location for this year’s Bilderberg meeting.

This year’s confab will focus around prolonging the global financial recession and creating more economic woe in order to provide the pretext for more regulation in pursuit of world economic governance, according to Jim Tucker’s sources.

“Bilderberg hopes to keep the global recession going for at least a year, according to an international financial consultant who deals personally with many of them. This is because, among several reasons, Bilderberg still hopes to create a global “treasury department” under the United Nations. Bilderberg first undertook this mission at its meeting last spring in Greece, but the effort was blocked by nationalists in Europe and the United States. “Nationalists” (a dirty word in Bilderberg) objected to surrendering sovereignty to the UN,” writes Tucker.

Tucker’s source highlighted a recent speech by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in which he called for a “new global monetary order.” As we have highlighted, such rhetoric has been abundant over the past year, with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and EU President Herman Van Rompuy repeatedly echoing similar ideas.

As Bilderberg investigator Daniel Estulin revealed during last year’s Bilderberg meeting in Greece, elitists were planning to paint a false picture of economic recovery in order to sucker investors into ploughing their money back into the stock market, which is exactly what has happened with the Dow soaring back to just below the 11,000 level.

Estulin correctly predicted the housing crash and the 2008 financial meltdown as a result of what his sources inside Bilderberg told him the elite were planning based on what was said at their 2006 meeting in Canada and the 2007 conference in Turkey.

“Bilderberg’s ultimate goal remains unchanged,” writes Tucker. “Turn the UN into a world government with “nation-states” becoming merely geographic references. The European Union is to become a single political entity, followed by the “American Union” and, finally, the “Asian-Pacific Union.” The “American Union” is to include the entire Western Hemisphere, including Cuba and other offshore islands.”

Cash-strapped county offers Hollywood chance to blow up decaying bridge

A financially-strapped Florida county has offered Hollywood the chance to blow up a bridge it cannot afford to maintain.

Friendship Bridge in Tampa Bay

The decaying 2.6 mile-long Friendship Trail Bridge was deemed unsafe and closed last year after an engineering report concluded it was in danger of collapsing into Tampa Bay.

Politicians in Pinellas County have baulked at the $48 million (£32 million) it would cost to repair the concrete bridge but are also dismayed by the $13 million (£8.5million) it would cost to demolish it.

The solution that has been put forward by John Morroni, a county commissioner, is to offer a big-budget filmmaker the chance to include the bridge's demolition in its production.

"See if there is anyone, any kind of filmers, that would like to come down and blow up that bridge for a movie," Mr Morroni told the St Petersburg Times.

And they would do it under their budget and it wouldn't cost us a thing, or very little." The idea may sound far-fetched but Pinellas County has had some success in this area. In 1991, the producers of Lethal Weapon 3, an action film starring Mel Gibson, paid the county $50,000 for the right to film the old city hall being torn down.

However, the feasibility of auctioning the bridge's destruction has been played down by the state's film commission, which seeks to encourage productions in Florida.

Todd Roobin, a Florida Film Board member, said Hollywood producers no longer had the sort of budget to cover the entire cost of a demolition although he conceded they might pay for some of it.

The Coming European Debt Wars

Government debt in Greece is just the first in a series of European debt bombs that are set to explode. The mortgage debts in post-Soviet economies and Iceland are more explosive. Although these countries are not in the Eurozone, most of their debts are denominated in euros. Some 87% of Latvia’s debts are in euros or other foreign currencies, and are owed mainly to Swedish banks, while Hungary and Romania owe euro-debts mainly to Austrian banks. So their government borrowing by non-euro members has been to support exchange rates to pay these private-sector debts to foreign banks, not to finance a domestic budget deficit as in Greece.

All these debts are unpayably high because most of these countries are running deepening trade deficits and are sinking into depression. Now that real estate prices are plunging, trade deficits are no longer financed by an inflow of foreign-currency mortgage lending and property buyouts. There is no visible means of support to stabilize currencies (e.g., healthy economies). For the past year these countries have supported their exchange rates by borrowing from the EU and IMF. The terms of this borrowing are politically unsustainable: sharp public sector budget cuts, higher tax rates on already over-taxed labor, and austerity plans that shrink economies and drive more labor to emigrate.

Bankers in Sweden and Austria, Germany and Britain are about to discover that extending credit to nations that can’t (or won’t) pay may be their problem, not that of their debtors. No one wants to accept the fact that debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. Someone must bear the cost as debts go into default or are written down, to be paid in sharply depreciated currencies, but many legal experts find debt agreements calling for repayment in euros unenforceable. Every sovereign nation has the right to legislate its own debt terms, and the coming currency re-alignments and debt write-downs will be much more than mere “haircuts.”

There is no point in devaluing, unless “to excess” – that is, by enough to actually change trade and production patterns. That is why Franklin Roosevelt devalued the US dollar by 75% against gold in 1933, raising its official price from $20 to $35 an ounce. And to avoid raising the U.S. debt burden proportionally, he annulled the “gold clause” indexing payment of bank loans to the price of gold. This is where the political fight will occur today – over the payment of debt in currencies that are devalued.

Another byproduct of the Great Depression in the United States and Canada was to free mortgage debtors from personal liability, making it possible to recover from bankruptcy. Foreclosing banks can take possession of collateral real estate, but do not have any further claim on the mortgagees. This practice – grounded in common law – shows how North America has freed itself from the legacy of feudal-style creditor power and the debtors’ prisons that made earlier European debt laws so harsh.

The question is, who will bear the loss? Keeping debts denominated in euros would bankrupt much local business and real estate. Conversely, re-denominating these debts in local depreciated currency will wipe out the capital of many euro-based banks. But these banks are foreigners, after all – and in the end, governments must represent their own home electorates. Foreign banks do not vote.

Foreign dollar holders have lost 29/30th of the gold value of their holdings since the United States stopped settling its balance-of-payments deficits in gold in 1971. They now receive less than a thirtieth of this, as the price has risen to $1,100 an ounce. If the world can take that, why shouldn’t it take the coming European debt write-downs in stride?

There is growing recognition that the post-Soviet economies were structured from the start to benefit foreign interests, not local economies. For example, Latvian labor is taxed at over 50% (labor, employer, and social tax) – so high as to make it noncompetitive, while property taxes are less than 1%, providing an incentive toward rampant speculation. This skewed tax philosophy made the “Baltic Tigers” and central Europe prime loan markets for Swedish and Austrian banks, but their labor could not find well-paying work at home. Nothing like this (or their abysmal workplace protection laws) is found in the Western European, North American or Asian economies.

It seems unreasonable and unrealistic to expect that large sectors of the New European population can be made subject to salary garnishment throughout their lives, reducing them to a lifetime of debt peonage. Future relations between Old and New Europe will depend on the Eurozone’s willingness to re-design the post-Soviet economies on more solvent lines – with more productive credit and a less rentier-biased tax system that promotes employment rather than asset-price inflation that drives labor to emigrate. In addition to currency realignments to deal with unaffordable debt, the indicated line of solution for these countries is a major shift of taxes off labor onto land, making them more like Western Europe. There is no just alternative. Otherwise, the age-old conflict-of-interest between creditors and debtors threatens to split Europe into opposing political camps, with Iceland the dress rehearsal.

Until this debt problem is resolved – and the only way to resolve it is to negotiate a debt write-off – European expansion (the absorption of New Europe into Old Europe) seems over. But the transition to this future solution will not be easy. Financial interests still wield dominant power over the EU, and will resist the inevitable. Gordon Brown already has shown his colors in his threats against Iceland to illegally and improperly use the IMF as a collection agent for debts that Iceland doesn’t legally owe, and to blackball Icelandic membership in the EU.

Confronted with Mr. Brown’s bullying – and that of Britain’s Dutch poodles – 97% of Icelandic voters opposed the debt settlement that Britain and the Netherlands sought to force down the throat of Allthing members last month. This high a vote has not been seen in the world since the old Stalinist era.

It is only a foretaste. The choice that Europe ends up making will likely drive millions into the streets. Political and economic alliances will shift, currencies will crumble and governments will fall. The European Union and indeed, the international financial system will change in ways yet to be seen. This will be especially the case if nations adopt the Argentina model and refuse to make payment until steep discounts are made.

Paying in euros – for real estate and personal income streams in negative equity, where the debts exceed the current value of income flows available to pay mortgages or for that matter, personal debts – is impossible for nations that hope to maintain a modicum of civil society. “Austerity plans” IMF and EU style is an antiseptic, technocratic jargon for life-shortening and killing impact of gutting income, social services, spending on health on hospitals, education and other basic needs, and selling off public infrastructure for buyers to turn nations into “tollbooth economies” where everyone is obliged to pay access prices for roads, education, medical care and other costs of living and doing business that have long been subsidized by progressive taxation in North America and Western Europe.

The battle lines are being drawn regarding how private and public debts are to be repaid. For nations that balk at repayment in euros, the creditor nations have their “muscle” waiting in the wings: the credit rating agencies. At the first sign a nation is balking in paying in hard currency, or even at the first hint of it questioning a foreign debt as improper, the agencies will move in to reduce a nation’s credit rating. This will increase the cost of borrowing and threaten to paralyze the economy by starving it for credit.

The most recent shot was fired n April 6 when Moody’s downgraded Iceland’s debt from stable to negative. “Moody’s acknowledged that Iceland might still achieve a better deal in renewed negotiations, but said the current uncertainty was hurting the country’s short-term economic and financial prospects.”[1]

The fight is on. It should be an interesting decade.

by Prof. Micheal Hudson

Jim Rogers Discusses Commodities Market, Gold Prices

Click this link ...... http://eclipptv.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=11242

The Guy Who Stole All Our Money Now Wants to Steal Our Paycheck, Too

Ben Bernanke has funneled trillions of dollars worth of bailouts, guarantees and sweetheart deals to U.S. (and foreign - and see this) banks.

This money was pickpocketed from you and me, directly (through government spending) and indirectly (increasing debt costs, future inflation, etc).

Bernanke is now calling for tax increases and raising the possibility of reductions in entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security.

Tax increases means we keep less from each paycheck. Reduction in services means that money we've already paid to the government (through social security, etc.) will now instead be paid to the bankers to service the U.S. debt.

Isn't that like a guy who stole our money now trying to steal our paycheck, too?

As JR writes:

We now have the unbelievable spectacle of the banker as the taxman—Volcker, the banker calling for a VAT tax; Bernanke calling for a tax hike and the possibility of reductions in Medicare and Social Security.

At last, the pretense is gone. First these bankers, posing as national leaders with a mission to rein in inflation, steal the money from the treasury, debase the currency, game the debt, and, now, take the lead in asking for more.

What a VAT Means for the Economy

Click this link ........ http://eclipptv.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=11235

Wall street's Naked short Swindle, $3.87 trillion dollar lawsuit.

Click this link ...... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN8xp66k-is