The Three ­Hundred ­Puppeteers

What unites high-ranking Freemasons, the big banks, the Illuminati, the royal houses, and the tycoons? They are all members of the ‘Committee of 300’, which, according to a ­British ex-spy, rules the world—here and now.

As soon as some people hear the word ‘conspiracy’, they lose interest: too reductive, too biased, too one-eyed. And, in fact, they wouldn’t be too far wrong thinking that. It’s not simply ‘the Freemasons’, or ‘the Jews’, or ‘the Illuminati’ who are pulling the strings behind the scenes. Pulling the strings in a show that for them represents a triumph, yet for 90% of humanity is to end in tragedy, in a kind of slavery—controlled by the external power of a dictatorial One World Government, from the first sip of coffee in the morning till the moment the head hits the pillow at night. Certainly, that doesn’t mean that there is no conspiracy, just that the directors behind the scenes, the string pullers, are a lot more diverse than some of the simpler theories would lead us to believe.

At the very latest it has become clear to everyone since the onset of the financial crisis that our politicians aren’t the ones in control. In its edition of Dec 12 2001, even the establishment news magazine Der Spiegel had the nerve to ask a probing question for once: “Mon­ey rules the world… and who rules the money?” was the bold headline across the front cover. They may not have given any definitive answers—certain power structures are taboo, and Der Spiegel is not excepted from respecting those taboos—but they did pose some tough, penetrating questions. “How is it that nation states lend banks money, only to become indebted to the very same banks?”—“How can it be that a single financial market is ten times bigger than the economic output of the entire world?”—“Is it true, as the politicians allege, that ‘the markets’ were speculating with the European economy at a whim?”—and “Why have elected governments been unable to control the power of financial markets—in short, who owns the world, who controls the money?”

It is no coincidence that so many once prosperous countries now find themselves on the edge of bankruptcy. It is a direct consequence of financial markets run riot, with a wealthy, powerful, and well-informed cabal able to act just as selfishly as it wished, without restraint or moral scruple. And all risk-free to boot: if it looks like they might be going bust, then the state springs to the rescue—with the people’s money. So they keep playing their rigged game. The Italian comedian Maurizio Crozza commented on Italian TV “Wait a minute: the nations have rescued the banks from bankruptcy. Then the banks took this money and made the nations bankrupt. And now the banks are running the government. That stinks to high heaven, doesn’t it?”

The context for this remark is that the current—unelected—head of the Italian government, Mario Monti, the ‘crisis manager’ who was supposed to save the country from bankruptcy, was from 2008 a financial advisor to Goldman Sachs. And we see the Goldman Sachs connection again in the case of Mario Draghi, former Governor of the Bank of Italy and current President of the European Central Bank: from 2002 to 2005 he was the Vice-President of Goldman Sachs International in Europe. He was a partner whose business was ‘businesses and sovereign states’, and head of that department which, shortly before he took it over, had used a ‘credit default swap’ to help Greece disguise its debts and window dress its balance sheet. The role of ­former Governer of the Bank of Gree­ce (1994 to 2002) Lucas Papademos in the concealment of Greece’s budgetary problems, with the assistance of Goldman Sachs, is still unclear… he was Prime Minister in the 2011-12 ‘Government of National Unity’.

The Whole World on the Spin of a Wheel

Only a few decades ago, this would all have been impossible. The blame for the financial plague unleashed by the banking sector lies firmly with the deregulation of the financial markets, which swept away any and every constraint—moral, ethical, even plain good sense. It began in the 1970s, when the theory that state intervention in the economy did more harm than good gained ground with many economists. They demanded that the rich be given the freedom to make themselves even richer—under the pretext of bringing economic prosperity to all, including ‘the little guy’. However, their real plans for him were to prove quite different.

Actual deregulation began in 1982 under President Reagan. Regional ‘Savings & Loans’ building societies were freed from government regulations, and for the first time banks were permitted to set variable interest rates. The process gained real momentum during Bill Clinton’s presidency. He “further deregulated the US banking sector. In 1994 he lifted the restriction on regional expansion for American banks. Five years later, the legal separation of retail and investment banking, introduced after the Great Depression of the 1930s, was done away with. In 2004 under President George W. Bush, the SEC removed funding limits for investment banks, meaning they could operate solely on credit”, reported Handelsblatt. Der Spiegel enumerates the fatal consequen­ces: “Worldwide, more than 8,000 funds manage around $1.7 trillion. In 1990 the figures were only 600 funds and $40 billion”. Within only 21 years, the number of funds had increased by a factor of 13, and the amount of money they handled by a factor of 42.5. The biggest corporate raiders, i.e. the hedge funds, “handle up to $70 billion of capital”, reports Der Spiegel. “It’s true that most of the funds have significantly smaller capital assets, of perhaps one or two billion dollars, yet they wield a disproportionately large influence. These hedge funds use leverage: they don’t just invest their own money, but take on huge, cheap loans that they speculate with. That’s how they multiply their stake”. And these loans, according to Der Spiegel, “come mostly from the big banks: just a dozen institutions are the creditors and trading partners of almost all the world’s hedge funds”.

Boldly, the news magazine names “always the same big banks […] above all JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, UBS, HSBC, BNP Paribas, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank” and concludes: “Those who are looking for the answer to the question ‘who rules the money?’ will find it here”. And since, even according to Der Spiegel, money rules the world, then these financial juggernauts too must take their place at the council of the world’s rulers—first and foremost among them the Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs.

Three Hundred Power Brokers

And that is indeed the truth. Yet these banks aren’t there in isolation, and it raises the question: are there other powers at work, above and beyond the big banks, drawing up the big plans? Are the bankers ‘employees’ just as much as the politicians? A former intelligence officer in MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, has attempted to answer these questions. Since the early 1960s he has been deeply involved in research, with access to sources that would be out of reach for most writers (some of whom have reached a certain level of fame, e.g. David Icke or Jimm Marrs). More often than not, they make use of his material. In the meantime, John Coleman (76) has written twelve books on the subject and, for him, one thing is clear: there is a group of about 300 people who control the world’s destiny, steering it in their chosen direction. He calls these global players ‘The Committee of 300’. Bill Clinton, mentioned above, is one of them, just as his predecessor and successor, the George Bushes senior and junior. So too the heads of the big banks named by Der Spiegel. And, of course, the two ‘Super Marios’—Monti and Draghi.

The expression ‘Committee of 300’ goes back to the German politician Walter Rathe­­nau (1870-1922), the Weimar Republic’s Foreign Minister in the early 1920s. He supposedly said: “There is a Committee of 300 men whose identity is known only to each other who rule the world”. In the Viennese Neue Freie Presse he wrote, “Three hundred men, all of whom know one another, direct the economic destiny of Europe and choose their successors from among themselves. The strange origins of these strange phenomena, which shine a glimmer of light into the darkness of future social developments, are beyond the scope of this article”.1 He was more precise in a letter to the poet Frank Wedekind: “The real ‘300’ are prudent and ac­customed to denying their power. If you were to call them, they would say that they know nothing, that they are businessmen like any other. And then not 300, but 3,000 Councillors of Commerce, who produce stockings or margarine, would announce themselves and say ‘We are the 300’. Power lies in anonymity. I know one of the better-known ones—not always the most powerful—someone who is almost never seen, other than by his barber. I know one you might almost consider poor, yet he controls powerful businesses. I know one, perhaps the richest, and whose fortune belongs to his children, who he hates. You could call many of them insane. One manages the Jesuits’ assets; another works for the Roman Curia [the Vatican’s administrative body, Ed.]. One, the representative of a foreign consortium, is in possession of 280 million in bonds and hence the biggest creditor of the Prussian state. It is all confidential. So you see, it’s almost impossible to get hold of these men in the normal way”.2

Walter Rathenau died on June 24th 1922, the victim of a political assassination. Officially, the terrorist group Organisation Consul was held responsible for the crime. John Coleman believes that the murder took place at the behest of the ‘300’. The reason: Rathenau had played a key role in the negotiations that led to the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo on April 6th 1922. Germany and the Soviet Union had agreed to cancel all pre-war debts, and Germany would recognise the communist government and raise loans for it. Coleman: “When the treaty was an­­nounced, it spread panic among the British and the French, and in the USA too there was broad conster­nation. The ‘300’ had not granted permission for the wide-reaching consequen­ces that the treaty un­­leashed. Indeed, the plans that the British and French had in store for Russia were stymied by Germany. It see­med as if Germany, despite its defeat in the Great War, was preparing itself once again to challenge Britain’s position as leader in world trade,” muses Coleman, himself British. On the other hand, “the Genoa Conference, held not far from Rapallo, was in­­tended by the British to gain control of trade with Russia. Yet without the prior knowledge of the representatives of the ‘Committee of 300’, Rathenau had made repeated offers to the British and French, which would have resulted in economic agreements that would have permitted Germany a quick recovery after the debacle of Versailles. If the Allies had accepted Rathenau’s extremely fair and balanced proposals, then perhaps the Second World War would never have happened. Rathenau had always made it clear that he considered an economically reinvigorated Germany to be in the interest of the victorious powers, as only then would Germany be able to meet the heavy burden of reparations forced on it at the ‘Peace Conference’ of Versailles. Yet these Allies were prepared to see Germany remain a slave-nation for at least a hundred years, or otherwise seek salvation in a new and not at all unwelcome war, which would shuffle the geopolitical deck once again.

“When the British and French delegates returned from Genoa, their respective governments, under the direction of the ‘300’, acted with astonishing speed. Letters of protest rained down, demanding that the German-Russian trade agreement be annulled”. Just two months after the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo, Rathenau was murdered in the street. He was shot and then attacked with a hand grenade in broad daylight.

Coleman has no doubt that “the assassination was carried out by agents of the [British] Secret Intelligence Service. Germany’s most brilliant statesman and the architect of the Treaty of Rapallo had been liquidated; Germany shaken to its foundations. It was possibly the first time that a politician on the world stage had dared to reveal that there was a secret government, a secret power controlling the world”.

Coleman wondered whether Rathenau, as a former advisor to the Rothschild family, had lulled himself into a false sense of security. The Rothschilds without a doubt are right at the top of the ‘300’ hierarchy. These exercisers of secret power know all too well how overwhelming their worldly power is—that’s why they call themselves Olympians, after Mount Olympus, home of the Greek gods.

The existence of a larger club, exercising direct power, was remarked on by a formerly high-ranking Illuminati (and therefore a keeper of many secrets), John Todd (1950-2007).3 His version, admittedly, is of a ‘Council of 500’, rather than 300. It could be that the size of the body has grown along with the world population, or that ‘300’ is just an approximate rather than a fixed number. In any case, as we shall see, the banks play a deciding role at this level. Todd called the ‘Council of 500’ explicitly ‘the world banking system’. Above this would stand the ‘Council of 33’ (the highest-ranking Freemasons in the world), and above them the ‘Council of 13’ (to whom the Rockefellers belong, for example), and right at the top the Rothschild Tribunal, seen as ‘divinity in human form’. And this, in turn, is supposed to be in direct contact with Lucifer.

That may sound extremely weird, yet John Coleman, during his decades of pain­­­staking research, has also discovered that the abolition of Christianity is high on the agenda not just of the Illuminati, but also the Freemasons and so ultimately the ‘Committee of 300’. All the more disconcerting, as representatives of Opus Dei, the Jesuits, and the Vatican are also said to belong to the committee….

Sources

  • 1 Walther Rathenau in his 25/12/1909 article "Our Successors" in the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna, No. 16288.
  • 2 Süddeutsche Zeitung, No. 33, 07/02/1963
  • 3 Cf. article on the Illuminati in Facts are Facts No. 5, page 16