Throughout the centuries there have been rumors of a secret elite manipulating world events for various nefarious purposes. Theories about groups like the Masons, the Illuminati, the Elders of Zion, and others have ranged from the ridiculous and racist to eerily accurate. Today we live in a world where an openly acknowledged elite wields vast and often unquestioned power. For example, the economic activities of many transnational corporations dwarf the gross domestic product of most nations, and the richest three men in the world control more wealth than the 47 poorest countries combined. The shadowy ritual chambers of 19th century secret societies seem an impossible distance from the gleaming board rooms where CEOs and bankers meet today, and yet a fusion of the two continues, albeit far away from the glaring lights of modern news media.

While the current global elite hammers out deals and treaties behind the closed doors of overt globalist organizations like the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, they also meet at shadier locals which seem straight out of an X-Files episode. In California’s Sonoma County lies a redwood retreat known as Bohemian Grove. Proving that truth is stranger than fiction, various world leaders gather here once a year to perform a bizarre ritual known as the “Cremation of Care” which involves a mock human sacrifice ritual before a huge stone statue of the ancient deity Moloch. The Bohemian Club is an off-shoot a more well-known society called Skull and Bones.

Skull and Bones was founded at Yale in 1832, as the second chapter of a German secret society which its founders had come in contact with while studying abroad. Its founders were fascinated with the new scientific methods of propaganda and mass psychology, and based the Order’s teachings on those of German philosopher Hegel, who taught that the State was absolute and the individual meaningless.

Located in New Haven, Connecticut, the Order’s fortunes were based on the wealth of the cousin of one of its founding members, William H. Russell. Samuel Russell had been the primary American player in the “China trade”, or opium smuggling. Many of the other great American and European fortunes were built on this trade as well, for opium was the most lucrative commodity on the planet in the 1830’s.

Dr. Benjamin Sillman Jr., a Bonesman, was the first to make the petrochemicals gasoline and paraffin. He conferred with his colleagues, then made a proposal to the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, the very first oil company. He told them, “Gentlemen, it appears to me that your Company may have in their possession a raw material from which, by a simple and not expensive process, they may manufacture very valuable products.” Pennsylvania Rock Oil soon passed into the hands of New Haven investors, and the Company’s original owners and financiers, the Bissells and the Townsends, soon had their sons enrolled in Yale and Skull and Bones.

In 1886, Supreme Justice Morrison R. Waite, a Bonesman, made an interesting decision regarding the 14th Amendment, which had been designed to protect freed black slaves. Waite ruled that the amendment applied to business corporations- that a corporation could now claim the legal rights and privileges of a person.

Incidentally, in the 1800’s, Connecticut became known as the “Arsenal of Democracy,” as more per capita defense spending went to it than any other state in the union. Connecticut is the birthplace of the military-industrial complex, against which Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

When Rudolf Diesel showcased his new engine at the 1900 Exposition, it presented a major threat to the Oil Monopoly, because the Diesel Engine was originally designed to run on peanut oil. But in 1913, Diesel mysteriously decided to go for a swim while on a ship crossing the English Channel, and within 20 years, his engine was running solely on petrochemicals.

Skull and Bones had their hands in many other important American institutes around this time. After coming to dominate the Yale leadership, Skull and Bones members would go on to be the first Presidents of the University of California, John Hopkins, and Cornell University. They helped to found and set the direction for the Carnegie Institution, the Peabody, Slater, and Russell Sage Foundations, as well as the American Economic Association, the American Historical Association, and the American Psychological Association. Bonesmen Gilman, White, and Rockefeller have also had considerable influence on the development of public education. For those who would downplay the role of Skull and Bones in the development of the United States, consider that members of this Order designed the institutions which have been responsible for teaching Americans their history, defining sanity and normalcy, and telling Americans what and how to think.

Scores of Bonesmen can be traced to other positions of enormous influence, including the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, captains of industry, and all branches of the political apparatus. It should be noted that many Skull and Bones members never achieve any great prominence. But it is this way with every secret society- there have to be a number of “porch brethren”, lending an air of normalcy and respectability, and unaware of the designs of the “inner circle”. And considering that only 15 new members are initiated each year, the number who have risen to the heights of power is quite astonishing.

The actions of the dominant families in Skull and Bones reveal a common agenda, a refinement and expansion of the agenda held by their predecessors: power and profit at any cost, even if that means war, famine, and disease for the rest of us. For Skull and Bones was added a new political objective- a Hegelian super-state, a “New World Order” (to use their own term), in direct contradiction to the vision held by the Founding Fathers. This New World Order would be the synthesis resulting from conflicts between opposing extremes which they themselves would finance and influence. This was the Hegelian “historical dialectic” being used to improve upon the methods used by of the banking families of old.

The cabal’s oil business would find vast new markets as the British, German, and American Navies all switched from coal to oil before World War I. With this leap in military technology came the predictable war, which has been related in American history books as being a consequence of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. A much more reasonable explanation for the first World War lies beneath the surface when you learn that the first place British troops deployed during WWI was Iraq.

During Hitler’s rise to power, Nazi Germany received major financial help from members of Skull and Bones, including Prescott Bush. Through Brown Brothers Harriman&Co., the Union Banking Corporation, and Hamburg America Shipping Lines, Bush and other Bonesmen helped German industrialist Fritz Thyssen build the Nazi War Machine. Of all the war materials which the German military used, the percentage which came from Thyssen is astounding: 50.8% of pig iron, 41.4% of universal plate, 36% of heavy plate, 38.5% of galvanized steel, 45.5% of pipes and tubes, 22.1% of wire, 35% of explosives.

So impressed were American corporate leaders with Hitler’s political system, that in the 1930’s, a group of them planned a coup to set up a similar system in America. The coup was to be led by Marine General Smedley Butler, who had served corporate interests for many years by subduing indigenous populations in the Philippines and Caribbean. But Butler was “tired of being a gangster for capitalism,” and cooperated just long enough to identify and expose those behind the plot including the DuPont Family, the Remington Family, and J.P. Morgan, who was backed by the old European banking families, who had Bonesmen partners, and who financed many Skull and Bones families including the Rockefellers and Harrimans. All of this came out in the investigation by the McCormack-Dickstein Committee hearings, the transcripts of which are still publicly available. Although the committee supported Butler’s allegations about the plot, no prosecutions or further investigations followed. At the time of his death, Butler was the most decorated U.S. Marine in history, with two Medals of Honor.

America’s “great enemy” after WWII was the U.S.S.R., but the fact was, Soviet Russia had been financed by Wall Street and Skull and Bones all along. State department records show that guns and ammunitions were being shipped to the Bolsheviks long before WWII. Companies controlled by the Bonesmen of the Harriman group jump-started Russia’s critical oil and manganese mining operations with massive investments and machinery imports. And in 1920, the Anglo-Russian Chamber of Commerce was created to promote trade with Russia, headed by Bonesman Samuel R. Bertron.

On October 22,1945, Secretary of War Robert Patterson created the Lovett Committee, chaired by Bonesman Robert A. Lovett, to advise the government on Post-WWII intelligence activities. With his business partners, the Dulles brothers, Lovett created the new US intelligence organization, the Central Intelligence Agency. The intelligence and finance communities have long been saturated with Bonesmen including, of course, John Kerry and George H.W. Bush. Another important thing to remember about the CIA is their ties with the media. Operation Mockingbird was exposed as part of an ongoing buy-off of mainstream media as well as actual infiltration by CIA agents.

A special election was held in Connecticut in 1952. Although several companies managed by Prescott Bush had been taken over by the U.S. Alien Property Office under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1942, the Bones-dominated “free press” quietly managed this fact and allowed Mr. Bush to become the new Connecticut Senator. Prescott’s son George Herbert Walker Bush would go on to become President of the United States, as would his son, George Walker Bush. When we remember that the fortunes of Skull and Bones were built on oil and opium, is should hardly surprise us that both Bush presidents led us into wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, which hold the largest concentrations of both commodities in the world. Nor should it surprise us, given then history of Skull and Bones, that the Bush family would continue to finance America’s enemies, as witnessed in 2004 when Jonathan Bush’s Riggs Banks was fined a U.S.-record $25 million for laundering money for terrorist organizations.

For many people, confrontation with these alarming historical facts simply results in a wall of denial. Although disheartening, this reaction is not unexpected, since to accept the facts is to be thrown into a terrifying world such as Neo discovers after taking the red pill in The Matrix. Almost everything we’ve ever been told about history is a lie. Things aren’t going to be okay, and it’s not all good, because the real rulers of this world do not have our best interests at heart. But it’s time to grow up. We’ve got the Internet now, after all, and there’s no excuse for hiding from the knowledge of how the world really works. The precepts of liberty and justice have been perverted far beyond the constraints against which the founding fathers of America originally rebelled. I’m calling you out, America. As Samuel Adams put it, “If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

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This article was adapted from Jeremy Begin’s “Fighting for G.O.D. (Gold, Oil, and Drugs)” which is coming out in June. You can order a copy from Trine Day Press here: http://www.trineday.com/paypal_store/product_pages/Fighting_for_GOD.html