AFP Cracks Bilderberg

By James P. Tucker Jr.

OTTAWA, CANADA - As Bilderberg gathers at the posh Brook Street Resort, there was concern that Latin America will use oil as a weapon to block expansion of NAFTA throughout the Western Hemisphere and whether Bush could be talked out of an all-out invasion of Iran.

Bilderberg is concerned that leftist governments in Latin America, led by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, will use manipulation of oil supplies and prices to form an economic union that would include Brazil, Cuba, Peru and Mexico.

Such a union, by refusing to join NAFTA, would wreck Bilderberg’s long-standing goal of expanding NAFTA throughout the Western Hemisphere and evolving it into an “American Union” patterned after the European Union. The dollar would become the common currency of the American Union.

Reaction to Chavez’s earlier announcement that he would exact new taxes on companies that extract oil from his country was angry This directly affects Bilderberg, which has its own oil bloc, including Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and the Rothschild companies of Britain and Europe. Companies affected include Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp, Conoco-Phillips, Total, BP PLC and Norway’s Statoil ASA. Chavez also irritated the striped-britches boys by offering oil at low prices to impoverished locations in the United States and Britain. His domestic oil is subsidized—Venezuelans pay 12 cents a gallon.

There is a feeling expressed among Bilderberg luminaries that Chavez is having fun with them. They are not known for humor.

But Bilderberg says its “policies” are turning the Chavez threat around. Chavez hosted the OPEC meeting in Caracas but his proposal for a cut in oil production to boost prices was rejected. OPEC has maintained its official output ceiling at 28 million barrels a day since July 2005.

It has been reported that Mexico’s Felipe Calderon of the America-friendly National Action Party now leads in the polls over the populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in the July 2 presidential election. Although he is from the same party as President Vicente Fox, Calderon has cast himself as a rival who advocates improving Mexico’s economy so there would be no incentive to illegally enter the United States.

In Peru, Ollanta Humala, who is friendly with Chavez, lost to former president Alan Garcia. While Bilderberg has celebrated America’s “little wars,” there has been opposition by the European wing to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan from the outset. With NATO taking on a larger role in Afghanistan, the controversy has calmed a bit.

But European Bilderbergers fear a United States attack on Iran, which would have a tremendous global impact.

The meeting is set to begin on Friday, June 9. AFP will be there covering the event over the course of the weekend. The Bilderberg group takes it name from the hotel in Holland where the group met in 1954, during the earliest period of its inception. Bilderbergers meet regularly, presumably on a once-a-year basis, at various locations around the world, always in extreme secrecy, often at resorts controlled by either the Rockefeller or Rothschild families. The Rothschild family is the leading European force within the Bilderberg group, sharing its power with the American-based Rockefeller empire.

Bilderberg maintains an extremely low profile and seldom, if ever, publishes reports or studies for the public, at least, under its own official aegis. Participants denied the group’s very existence for decades until it was forced into the open by the glare of Media publicity, generated largely by the now defunct Spotlight newspaper. It follows so-called “Chatham House rules,” whereby attendees are forbidden to speak on the record about topics of discussion during the gathering.