A small number of extremely wealthy people, descendants of wealthy families in Europe and the U.S, own a major part of the material wealth of the world. This power is concentrated in London which is the centre of the world banking system. The control they exercise is kept within the original families and passed down from generation to generation. They are highly organised, operating in secret through a web of 'private' organisations.

This group is known as the Global Elite.

Their wealth is accumulating on a compound basis. They determine the course of history, through virtual control of the world economy.

They are working to a 'grand plan' which is now well-advanced.

The common reaction of people when first hearing of the global elite and their operations is one of disbelief and a refusal to give the claims any credibility as it appears so outrageous. But during the last few years there has been an increasing volume of books, articles and essays, all with the same story. All are based on well-documented research. The information revealed is consistent with the events of recent history, leaving no room for doubt. It is the "New World Order" taking shape - the Global Elite strategy.

For our purposes. the concentration of control over financial resources started with the Industrial Revolution. The 18th century saw the emergence and rapid rise of the House of Rothschild - the largest and most powerful financial empire - built on money embezzled by Mayer Amschel Bauer (later Rothschild) from William IV, who had stolen it from the soldiers he had hired out to the British government to fight Napoleon's armies. Rothschild sent the money to England, bought vast quantities of gold from the East Indian Company, used this to finance the Duke of Wellington's exploits and, working through the Brotherhood network, manipulated governments and created wars and revolutions. He lent money to both sides of the conflicts in what became a standard practice of the banking elite. Rothschild's influence can hardly be overstated, for it was the precursor of today's vast transnational corporations and banking empires which have extended their control to the four corners of Earth in the long-term agenda of the Brotherhood. As Historian John Reeves puts it:

Little could Mayer Amschel have anticipated that his sons would in after years come to exercise such an unbounded sway that the peace of nations would depend upon their nod; that the powerful control they exercised on the European money markets would enable them to pose as the arbiters of peace and war, since they could at their pleasure withhold or furnish the percuniary [sic] means required to carry on a campaign.

But this, incredible as it may seem, was what their vast influence, combined with their enormous wealth and unlimited credit, enabled them to do, for no firms existed strong enough to oppose them for any length of time, or rash enough to take up a business which the Rothschilds had refused. To reach this exulted position, Mayer Amschel and his sons required the cooperation of the states, but, when once he had climbed over their banks and reached the height of his ambition, he was independent of all aid and could act with the greatest freedom, whilst the states remained in a suppliant attitude at his feet.

The Rothschild approach was reportedly summed up by Mayer Amschel himself: "Give me control of a nation's currency and I care not who makes the laws." When Rothschild's son Nathan died, his eldest son, Lionel, took over, making massive loans to the British and American governments and others, including some $80 million to Britain to finance the Crimea War. Lionel was succeeded by the second Nathan, the first Lord Rothschild, who took his seat in the House of Lords in 1885. He became the governor of the Bank of England (the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street) with unlimited power over the world's financial system. That power has not diminished - far from it - it has simply expanded with new empires like that of Morgan and Rockefeller, so that in the closing decade of this century the power and the control of the world's financial system behind its many 'fronts' is completely in the hands of the Global Elite and is enormous.

But to return to the start of the Industrial Revolution. At its beginning, the ruling powers in Great Britain embarked on one of the most sustained efforts to destroy community life ever undertaken. From 1770 to 1830 some 3,280 enclosure bills were passed putting into private hands for private gain more than six million acres of commonly-held lands. By 1830 not a single country had more than three percent of its land open to public use. According to historian George Sturt:

To the enclosure of the commons more than to any other cause, may be traced all the changes which have subsequently passed over the village. It was like knocking the keystone out of an arch.

This control of finite resources, and with it the diminution of democracy, was well advanced by 1901 when Morgan and Rockefeller, who headed the two main financial groups in America, amalgamated 112 corporate directorates, combining $22.2 billion in assets - a massive sum in those days. In 1910 eight financiers, including the host, met in absolute secrecy at the private hunting club of J.P Morgan - the Jekyll Island Club off the coast of Georgia - "to shoot ducks". News of this meeting did not leak for six years, but from then on snippets of information were made public. For example, on 18 January 1920, The New York Times made a most revealing statement about the Federal Reserve System, the basic plan for which those secretive bankers had proceeded to draft back in 1910: "The Federal Reserve is the fount of credit, not of capital." This meant that Reserve notes, instead of being backed by precious metal or other suitable commodity which would provide capital funds for the betterment of industry and commerce, are backed by paper loaned at interest.

On 25 July 1921, Senator Owen stated in the same paper: "The Federal Reserve Board is the most gigantic financial power in the world. Instead of using this great power as the Federal Reserve Act intended that it should, the board ....delegated this power to the banks,...." In 1931 on 3 May, when commenting on the death of one of J.P Morgan's closest associates, The New York Times remarked: "One-sixth of the total wealth of the world was represented by members of the Jekyll Island Club." This reference was to just those men who were part of Morgan's group and members of his Club. It excluded the Rockefeller group and the European financiers. Among those "duck shooters" present back in November 1910 were Benjamin Strong, head of J.P Morgan's Bankers Trust Company and from 1914 till his death in 1928 Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank, and Paul Warburg, who not knowing one end of a gun from the other had carried a borrowed shotgun onto the train that night at Hoboken, New Jersey. Warburg, who had exceptionally powerful banking connections in New York, England, France, Germany and the Netherlands, was the real power behind the Federal Reserve throne. His brother Max was head of the German Secret Service during World War I.

J.P Morgan and his "duck shooters" proceeded to draft the basic plan for the Federal Reserve System with five objectives:

• Stop the growing competition from the nation's newer banks.
• Obtain a franchise to create money out of nothing, for the purpose of lending.
• Get control of the reserves of all the banks.
• Get the taxpayer to pick up the cartel's inevitable losses.
• Convince Congress that the purpose of the FRS was to protect the public.

It succeeded brilliantly. As Anthony Sutton remarks about one of the more blatant scams in history: "The Federal Reserve System is a legal private monopoly of the money supply operated for the benefit of the few under the guise of protecting and promoting the public interest."

Space does not permit any exploration of the secret machinations and malfeasance, including the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, organised by Montague Norman, Governor of the Bank of England from 1916 to 1944, and Benjamin Strong, with a little help from their friends. Nor is there room to examine the wider implications of the actions of these Robber Barons and their support for Germany in the First World War (Nurse Edith Cavell was shot by the Germans upon the insistence of the British authorities for her "inconvenient" exposure that "Belgian Relief" supplies were being shipped to Germany to feed its army), and for Hitler's subsequent rise to power.

Prior to assuming real power, Montague Norman had had a nervous breakdown in 1912 and, as was fashionable, had gone to Switzerland to be treated by Jung.

When people of this class are stricken by guilt feelings while plotting world wars and economic depressions which will bring misery, suffering and death to millions of the world's inhabitants; they sometimes have qualms. These qualms are jeered at by their peers as "a failure of nerve". After a bout with their psychiatrists, they return to their work with renewed gusto, with no further digression of pity for "the little people" who are to be their victims.

It should be noted, according to Eustace Mullins, that the same all-powerful names, the same closed shop responsible for the foundation of the Federal Reserve System, still manage the world's closely interlinked finances, "with profits for themselves but with disastrous results for everyone else".

Next we jump to Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, 1944, and the first United Nations International Monetary Conference. It hammered out the final agreement for the post-war New World Order under which in due course there would be a further massive shift in power out of the hands of nation states and democratic governments and into the hands of banks and transnational corporations. William Pitt, more than two centuries ago, summarised what has taken place: "Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it" - a dictum which is more generally known from Lord Acton's statement of 1887; "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The Bretton Woods conference also structured Anglo-American hegemony over world oil supplies and led to the creation of the all-powerful International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) which, under the control of the US Federal Reserve System, since then, deliberately and ruthlessly, have put most of the so-called Third World into extreme debt. It has been said that the WB and IMF "have arguably done more harm to more people than any other non-military institutions in history." As Jesse Jackson put it in 1993: "They no longer use bullets and ropes. They use the World Bank and the IMF." Between 1982 and 1990, debtor countries paid back more than $1,300 billion but began the nineties 61 percent more in debt than they were in 1992. Sub-Saharan African debt alone increased by 113 percent." In 1993, for every one pound given in aid, rich nations took back 3 pounds in debt payments. Nigerian writer and environmentalist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, roundly condemned the World Bank's position:

The World Bank has to accept that its real instrument of torture is its insistence on growth, its economic theorising at the expense of human welfare...

The sooner debtor nations realise the political nature of the World Bank, the sooner they will be able to face the bogus economic theories of the Bank with an equivalent weapon -people's power.

Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists were hanged on 10 November 1995 by Nigeria's dictator, General Abacha. In case the message is not clear, the 1988 registration of former senior IMF economist Davison Budhoo, should leave no doubt. Budhoo resigned in disgust, hoping, he said, to "wash my hands of the blood of millions of poor and starving people."

The IMF was never designed to help the Third World or end poverty. It was established by the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 to restore economic and financial order to the Western world. There was no element of compassion for humanity in its formulation. The Fund's aim is first and foremost to assure the interests of developed countries. We make or break human life every day of every year as probably no other force has ever done in the past or will ever do again.

Coupled with these two exceptionally powerful organisations are the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), formulated shortly after the WB and IMF, and finally signed in 1993, and the new World Trade Organisation (WTO) of 1995. This quadruplet is now able to enforce throughout the world the doctrine of corporate libertarianism - a transnational corporate bill of rights - and God help any country that gets in the way.

The Secret Agenda

David Icke's book "...and the Truth Shall Set You Free" lists a summary of the basic themes of the Elite's plan following World War II:

• To introduce a world authority called the United Nations (with associated bodies like the World Health Organisation), which could evolve into a world government with powers to control the lives of everyone on the planet.
• To continue to cause conflicts across the world and to use the fear of the Soviet Union to massively increase spending on nuclear weapons and 'conventional' weapons, thus adding to the terror of nuclear war and demands for global security. To set up an American-European defence alliance (which was called the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)) and a United Nations 'peace'keeping force, which, through the engineering of conflicts, would eventually be fused together to form the world army.
• To create three 'free trade' regions in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, which would be sold to people initially as merely economic groupings. Gradually, however, these would be evolved into a centralised political unions, with one central bank and one currency. These would be stepping-stones to the introduction of the same institutions on a global scale. The European Economic Community, now the European Union, was the first of these, but the other two are now underway also.
• To advance the control of public opinion and to research and expand the understanding of how to manipulate the human psyche, individually and collectively. Today this agenda includes the microchipping of people and their permanent connection to a global computer.
• To create a welfare state while destroying alternatives to the economic system and, when the desired dependency had been achieved, to dismantle that state welfare support, so creating a vast underclass without help or hope.
• To make fantastic amounts of money in the course of realising all these ambitions via the Elite-controlled companies and banks.
• To continually add to the debt burden of people, business, and state, thus increasing the control exerted over them.

The approach which was followed to hoodwink public thinking was painfully predictable, but highly effective: Discredit the nation state. This was laid out during the War by the German economist and refugee, Hans Heymann, who produced his Plan for Permanent Peace using funds given by... the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.