Does anyone have a tin foil hat they can lend me?
There is no "illuminati" running the world, contrary to specious internet claims, along with the History Channel, which is always running stuff about the illuminati/masons/skull and bones etc... Conspiracy theories are just another form of mind control in my view, a means used to distract people, to keep them focused away from issues that impact them directly. Speculating on this kind of stuff isn't practical or necessary in the broader scheme of things.
In other words, don't believe everything you read and see. There's a lot of disinformation out there.
There is indeed more to the world than the eye can see. If you want to find out about who runs the world, you have to look towards the international arena because that's where the action is. This is where the fate of nations is decided, where transnationals, central banks, multinationals, and other major international organizations operate over the heads of sovereign nations.
When I was in grad school studying political science, one thing that many of my colleagues failed to understand was the fact that money runs the world, not religion or ideology. Too many people cannot step out of their comfort zones to realize this, but the world does not operate with the theoretical "neatness" that many academics assume. This is a messy place with many layered interests acting with or against each other. If you really want to know who runs the world, follow the international currency markets to the highest levels of the economic system.
Inter-Governmental organizations and international conglomerates have a lot of influence globally. People think that George Soros and Warren Buffett, or large corporations like Microsoft and Wal-Mart wield a lot of influence, but you've got to go higher to find out where the real power lies. Within the power elite, we have contracting corporations who benefit a lot from cozy relationships with national governments and are able to parlay that into highly lucrative government contracts. Examples of such corporations include Halliburton and Blackwater. But the influence reflected out here is only at the lowest level of the power elite.
If you follow the path of world currencies, you will find that power goes well beyond certain organizations like the World Bank and the IMF, both of which are tools used to maintain the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. In short, they aren't truly international institutions, but rather are dominated by the US. The world's currencies all flow into the Bank of International Settlements, headquartered in Switzerland. The BIS is essentially a "bankers bank" for the world's central banks, like the Fed or the European Central Bank. It is a private bank jointly co-owned by the world's central banks.
The BIS is where all the world's central banks meet to analyze the global economy and to determine what course of action they will take next. They control the amount of money in circulation globally and how much interest they will charge governments and central banks for borrowing from them. There is a lot of power contained here--they can control a nation's fate by starting booms and busts, they can also create runs on certain currencies, especially if a certain government does not follow loan terms as they see fit.
BIS is the world's largest bank, but it only works with central banks that make transactions in the trillions. BIS is above the law, doesn't pay taxes, it has no official governance over it, it answers to no one, but it has the ability to set banking policy for all the world's banks. The Basel Accords sets capitalization policies for banks worldwide, along with interest rate margins. Every bank in this country and globally are governed by these rules of the road designed to make banking policies more uniform globally.
The IMF only deals with other governments directly. The BIS deals only with other central banks. Whenever the World Bank or the IMF makes loans to governments in crisis (as is very commonly done, especially in the 3rd world), the BIS provides "bridge loans" to the central bank within the same countries, largely as a means to facilitate financing. The affected country, upon receipt of funds from the IMF or the World Bank, repays the funds to the local central bank, which then repays it to the BIS. So the BIS makes money off of the countries in crisis, with the IMF and the World Bank acting as frontmen as money is exchanged between the country, the IMF and the central bank. The BIS facilitates these movements of capital and pulls in untold billions in interest payments.
The big losers in all of this are countries that are forced to go to these international organizations for loans. Many times it takes years of mandated austerity policies to dig themselves out of the onerous terms set by the IMF and World Bank. Just take a look at Argentina, Mexico, Peru, or any host of African and Asian nations to see what these policies do to a given countries social infrastructure. These things don't happen in a vacuum, they happen as a consequence of global dynamics.
BIS regulations and policies are largely designed to strengthen the international banking system, even at the expense of national governments. The IMF and the World Bank act in tandem with the BIS, almost like a tag team: internationally positioned banks lend recklessly to borrowers in emerging economies to create a foreign debt crisis, the IMF arrives with a promise of loans to get a country through the crisis, then the international banks arrive as vulture investors there to buy up the countries capital assets and banks as a deep discount. It happens everywhere, it is the nature of the international financial system.
To an extent we're seeing these dynamics play out here in the US. The weak dollar over the past few years has created a situation where international investors are buying up the countries assets at a record clip. They're buying real estate, banks, companies, anything with significant value. In the long term, that's a bad trend, as those are profits that are going offshore.
So there's really no conspiracy here, just business as usual. There's no central mind guiding the world. There are groups of very powerful people though that wield a lot of influence globally and they are all parts of interconnecting international financial organizations. It's very complicated and there are a lot of different trends going into it. Follow the money you'll find the truth.
