Globalists fear Greece could exit single currency and stage a miraculous economic recovery.

The Bilderberg Group is terrified that Greece’s potential exit from the eurozone could lead to a dramatic economic recovery and provide a template for other countries to follow suit, threatening to torpedo the euro single currency and the entire agenda for a European federal superstate.

One of the primary discussion topics at this year’s upcoming Bilderberg Group meeting in Chantilly, Virginia will revolve around how the elite plan to address the issue that threatens to bring their agenda for global governance crashing down – the euro crisis.

The increasing threat of Greece abandoning its promise to honor draconian bailout terms agreed with Brussels and Berlin last night led German chancellor Angela Merkel to acknowledge for the first time that Greece could exit the euro, a likelihood that has sent the single currency along with financial markets plunging in recent days.

The euro crisis is now at its most severe point in history, outstripping similar crisis points which coincidentally also occurred just before the annual Bilderberg Group meetings in 2010 and 2011.

On both of those occasions, political consensus formed by Bilderberg members was enough to keep the euro on life support for another 12 months each time, and the same globalists will once again try and hammer out a strategy behind closed doors that will provide redemption for their cherished pet project.

CONTINUED at Prison Planet.

Massive activist effort to shine spotlight on secretive global elite.

Alex Jones’ call for Infowarriors to ‘Occupy Bilderberg’ during their upcoming meeting in Chantilly Virginia is gathering steam, with activists heeding the call to protest the clandestine annual confab involving the globe’s top powerbrokers.

It is now confirmed that the Bilderberg Group will hold their 2012 conference at the Westfields Marriott Washington Dulles hotel in Chantilly, Virginia from May 31st to June 3rd.

The Bilderbergers hate the spotlight. It’s only in recent years that the media has even acknowledged their existence and the group itself, comprising some 120 influential power brokers in the fields of business, politics, media, academia and banking, has been forced to set up a website and issue a yearly press release.

This is thanks to the fact that ever increasing numbers of protesters are gathering outside wherever Bilderberg meets to demonstrate against the elitist confab’s role in secretly steering world events outside the purview of democratically elected governments.

Following Jones’ call to occupy Bilderberg, the grass roots activist community has gone into overdrive. A detailed Facebook page has been set up along with a website in addition to numerous other alternative media websites who are getting on board with the event.

We urge as many people as possible to travel to Virginia at the end of the month to do what the maionstream media habitually fails to accomplish – speaking truth to power and demanding answers as to why Bilderberg attendees think they can break their own country’s laws, such as the Logan Actin America and its equivalents elsewhere, by meeting secretly with foreign agents while serving in public office.

As we have exhaustively documented, there are numerous examples to illustrate the fact that Bilderberg is not merely a “talking shop” as some in the corporate press frame it, but a venue where consensus is formed for the implementation of both national and geopolitical policies.

In 2009, Bilderberg chairman Étienne Davignon bragged about how the Euro single currency was a brainchild of the Bilderberg Group.

“A meeting in June in Europe of the Bilderberg Group- an informal club of leading politicians, businessmen and thinkers chaired by Mr. Davignon- could also ‘improve understanding’ on future action, in the same way it helped create the Euro in the 1990s, he said,” reported the EU Observer in March 2009.

The foundations for the EU and ultimately the Euro single currency were laid by the secretive Bilderberg Group in the mid-1950’s. Bilderberg’s own leaked documents prove that the agenda to create a European common market and a single currency was formulated by Bilderberg in 1955.

As we first reported in 2003, a BBC investigative team were allowed to access Bilderberg files which confirmed that the EU and the Euro were the brainchild of Bilderberg.

In spring 2002, when war hawks in the Bush administration were pushing for a summer invasion of Iraq, Bilderbergers expressed their desire for a delay and the attack was not launched until March the following year.

In 2006, journalists who got leaked information from inside Bilderberg predicted that the U.S. housing market would be allowed to soarbefore the bubble was cruelly popped, which is exactly what transpired.

In June 2008, we learned that Bilderberg were creating the conditions for a financial calamity, which is exactly what began a few months later with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Bilderberg has habitually flexed its muscles in establishing its role as kingmaker. The organization routinely selects presidential candidates as well as running mates and prime ministers.

Despite widespread expectation that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be announced as the first European Union President, the former Prime Minister of Belgium, Herman Van Rompuy, was picked for the role just days after he attended a Bilderberg Group dinner meeting.

Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were both groomed by the secretive organization in the early 1990’s before rising to prominence.

Barack Obama’s running mate Joe Biden was selected by Bilderberg luminary James A. Johnson, and John Kerry’s 2004 running mate John Edwards was also anointed by the group after he gave a glowing speech at the conference in 2004.

Despite the fact that the establishment media, many titans of which are Bilderberg members, routinely plays down the weight of the group’s influence on world affairs, in a 2010 radio interviewformer NATO Secretary-General and Bilderberg member Willy Claes admitted that Bilderberg attendees are mandated to implement decisions that are formulated during the annual conference of power brokers.

Although the topics on the agenda are usually disclosed during the course of the Bilderberg meeting, we already know that the group will have an influence on picking Mitt Romney’s running mate for the U.S. presidential election, with Florida Senator Marco Rubio being the firm favorite.

Rubio recently flaunted his “foreign policy chops” during a Brookings Institution speech in which he called for the U.S. to attack Syria and Iran.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

Source: Prison Planet.

My thoughts on what some in the Tea Party call the Conservative Savior. Who really is Marco Rubion and what does he stand for? Is he just a puppet for the Bush family? This and much more. Subscribe to my channel for weekly updates and follow me @Fabian4Liberty

Speculation that the location of the Bilderberg Group’s annual meeting would be chosen to coincide with this year’s U.S. presidential election appears to have been accurate with the likelihood that Bilderberg will hold their confab in Chantilly, Virginia from May 31st to June 3rd.

An Exclusive interview, Alex Jones speaks with Sen. Rand Paul on NDAA, TSA undercover on Houston busses, Obama’s overall neglect of the Constitution, his possible impeachment and much more. This is a must see video.

Secretive cabal selected John Edwards as Kerry’s number 2 in 2004.

A story in today’s Washington Post written by veteran columnist Al Kamen suggests that the Bilderberg Group may have a decisive role to play in picking Mitt Romney’s running mate, continuing a recent trend in which the secretive cabal has had a direct influence on the U.S. presidential election.

Kamen has been writing for the Washington Post for over three decades and also worked with Watergate icons Woodward and Bernstein, suggesting the title of his column, “In the loop,” has some meaning behind it.

Kamen remarks on how both President Obama and Hillary Clinton are heading to the Summit of the Americas this weekend in Cartagena, Colombia to meet with over 30 other heads of state. They will be joined by Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has been touted as a potential VP having endorsed Mitt Romney last month.

“Curiously, not many senators seem to be going. In fact, it may be that the only one going from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a possible vice presidential pick, who we’re told is flying commercial to attend,” writes Kamen, adding that Rubio’s presence could “help boost his foreign-policy chops” just as a visit with the clandestine Bilderberg Group was key in John Edwards being picked as John Kerry’s number two in 2004.

“Reminds us of a foreign jaunt made by another potential vice presidential pick back in 2004. That would be John Edwards , whose criminal trial is set to begin Thursday in Greensboro, N.C. Edwards gave a speech in June 2004 at the Bilderberg conference that was widely credited as one reason John Kerry chose him,” writes Kamen.

CONTINUED at Prison Planet. Written by Paul Joseph Watson.

A new documentary from Alex Jones definitively declares war against the attempts to control the population through a fear of false dangers. The facts are in– terrorism as a mass threat is a hoax. It is government, and the elite who control it, that pose the real threat to humanity. This new film will serve as evidence to the fact that government is history’s greatest killer– with various regimes claiming more than 262,000,000 unnatural deaths in the 20th Century alone. Now, a 21st century technocratic global corporate tyranny seeks to kill not mere millions but billions– through their superweapons, central banking warfare model and eugenics mindset.

New World Order: Blueprint of Madmen, which premiered to sold out audiences at the ‘Blueprint to Defeat the New World Order‘ twin events that took place in Dallas and Orlando this past week, will be available to PrisonPlanet.tv subscribers within hours and will later be available to the public, in hopes that it will serve as a warning.

Watch this preview of the film:

The film begins with a humorous intro, mocking the false sense of power carried by those who serve the system in the name of spotting a terrorist. Alex Jones portrays an everyday citizen snitch in the service of government, reporting on potential terrorists who pay for coffee with cash or use the Internet in a cafe. He’s part of the “federal family” that “Big Sis” Janet Napolitano speaks of– part of a self-feeding paranoia that assumes anyone can be a terrorist anywhere, anytime. The FBI’s recentCommunities Against Terrorism campaign embodies this, by continuing to paint a broad brush nationwide that demonizes ordinary citizens, returning veterans and political activists as potential terrorists and domestic extremists.

Forget the fear. Routine activities in life pose more danger than the Pentagon’s shadow puppet al Qaeda.

Instead, Alex reveals a host of statistics from ordinary life that have proven much more deadly. In short, these statistics make clear that terrorism is a complete hoax. It was deliberately created as a false alarm to secure funds for national security contractors building a Stasi state built to control the population through the power of “fear itself.”

But what are the REAL threats our society faces?

Alex turns the tables on the constant propaganda about a projected enemy. He documents proven academic research inDemocide, or Death by Government, demonstrating that the real killers throughout history have always been in government. From Mao in Communist China, Stalin in the U.S.S.R., Hitler in Nazi Germany, Pol Pot under the Khmer Rouge and so many others, governments have killed more than 260 million people in just the last one hundred years.

Through this important documentary, you will understand how history’s mega-killers are now poised to kill not millions but billions in a new age of dominance under world government. The elite psychopathic rulers, along with their technocratic Renfield minions, are pursuing a transhumanist vision where they seek to become gods while the masses of humanity are sacrificed in the name of saving the earth, all while risking our very planet in their destructive experimentation.

The existing danger of government has been heightened by the designs of an elite trying to legitimize their corporate-driven world government system– launched in part to carry out the forcible reduction of the population.

Hidden behind another hoax, the very billionaires hailed as saints for their philanthropy have met in secret to ‘solve’ the overpopulation problem by pushing trojan horse vaccines, GMOs and other soft kill weapons on a global scale.

Bunkered down with Arctic seed vaults, endless wealth and private organic food supplies, the elite have in reality waged a war by siege, using food as a weapon to depopulate the earth. Studies confirm that pesticide-producing GMOs are linked to organ failure, sterility and other dangers, yet testing and even labeling of these engineered foods has been blocked by government regulators bought & paid for by Big Agra and Monsanto, putting the general public in harm’s way.

Yet privately, these same elite have been caught in a revealing hypocrisy: From David Rockefeller, to the Queen of England, Bill Gates and China’s ruling class or Monsanto’s own employees and research scientists, the very people pushing GMO refuse to eat it. The same is true for vaccines– as in the case where German politicians received a “clean” flu vaccine while exposing the public to the experimental live virus cocktail jab. This elite knows well the genocidal potential of these dangerous policies, as well as the effects of hundreds of other chemicals that have been spiked into our modern lifestyles. From fluoride, to BPA, aspartame and more, reducing fertility and inducing cancer has been underway for decades by design.

But covert poisoning of the population is only the beginning of the power elites’ megadeath design. The 21st Century happened upon us only after extensive testing and experimentation had long ago risked opening Pandora’s Box. Unlocking the codes to atomic energy, chemical and biological warfare, genetic engineering, etc., has already risked total existence of life on earth. Scientists theorized and tried the explosion of the atmosphere in the fifties. Today CERN’s super hadron collider and other high technology refuses to yield to the possibilities of a black hole and other phenomena while nanotech, genetic engineering and an unfolding age of viral warfare, including race-specific bioweapons, have again threatened to wipe out entire peoples. The “big prize” for these eugenicists is a 90-95% total population reduction, as called for repeatedly in their thoroughly documented Endgame strategy.

Yet they have been so reckless and destructive that not even the elite are safe. Full of hubris, they believe they are gods, but in fact are not. Like failed rulers before, their downfall will come from their arrogance. There is no way to truly contain many of the contagions that have already been released, or are waiting ready for deployment.

“One of the biggest threats we face is the fact that these eugenicists who run our governments have produced literally hundreds of superweapons, and are just waiting until they have their police state grid in place to release them,” Alex Jones states in the documentary.

Yes, they are poised and waiting to use the powers they’ve long built up. As a hand fits into a glove, the elite have wielded science and laboratory research, built up national security & emergency powers, conditioned us that humanity is a menace, and have prepared the masses to cling to government in a disaster, while toying always with destruction. Whether or not we stop these madmen will determine our future, our destiny as a species. What happens is up to you.

But this documentary is another powerful tool in exposing the false threats used by the elite to control us– powerful because it casts an even greater light on their own dangerous megalomaniacal quest for total power. It’s time to see through the propaganda and face the real threats to humanity.

PRISONPLANET.TV MEMBERS WILL HAVE FIRST ACCESS TO THIS NEW DOCUMENTARY. PLEASE CONSIDER SUBSCRIBING TO GET THIS TOOL AND HELP US FUND THE INFOWAR.

“Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.”
- Sir Thomas Malthus, 1798

“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
- Prince Phillip

“I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing…War, as I remarked a moment ago, has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective.
If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full… The state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of that? Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people’s.”
- Lord Bertrand Russell

Source: Prison Planet.

From Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS), a journal from the independent publisher Sage Publications, comes an article that has predictably seen wide distribution on the Internet. It implies that those who believe in globalist conspiracy theories are illogical – even downright nutty.

The article is entitled  ”Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories” and the thesis of the article is that people who believe in conspiracy theories eventually become so immersed in them and so mesmerized that they do not realize they are holding contradictory beliefs.

“Conspiracy theories can form a monological belief system: A self-sustaining worldview comprised of a network of mutually supportive beliefs. The present research shows that even mutually incompatible conspiracy theories are positively correlated in endorsement.” (SPPS Abstract)

“Conspiratorialists” become so distrustful of “government” and “authority” that they will impute any and every kind of malevolence to them.

Thus it is that people can claim, on the one hand, that Osama bin Laden is “dead” and died years ago, while simultaneously claiming that bin Laden remains alive and that US and Pakistan government authorities are not being truthful about him and his physical state.

Of course, I’ve never run into anyone, who claims that bin Laden is ALIVE. But it’s true that here at the Daily Bell we’ve run articles explaining that bin Laden probably died years ago. See, for instance, “Osama bin Laden is Dead Again?”

The SPPS article would likely have you believe this is an outrageous conspiracy theory. But given that FOX news ran a report on bin Laden’s death in 2001, and given that Pakistan’s former president Benazir Bhutto herself claimed that bin Laden died in the early 2000s (supposedly as the result of an assassination), it doesn’t seem so far-fetched to speculate that bin Laden didn’t die as the result of a US raid in 2011.

But that’s almost minor stuff. Articles like this, despite their scientific patina, are deeply illiterate. Why so? Because invariably such articles won’t deal with the bedrock financial illiteracy of current economic and political paradigms.

Imagine if the world were based on lies. Well, unfortunately, that’s the truth. The lies go far beyond “who shot JFK” or whether the US government was directly or indirectly involved in 9/11.

When one uses the logical framework of Austrian, free-market analysis to analyze the Way the World Works in the modern age, one inevitably comes to the conclusion that modern society is built around fundamental untruths.

The first one is economic: It is the idea that central bankers can efficiently and effectively set the price of money. They cannot.

Every time central bankers decide on how much money to print or where short interest rates should be, the decisions are “fixing” prices – and price-fixing never works. Price-fixing distorts economies and causes a wealth shift from those who create it to those who don’t and may not know what to do with it. Over time, aggressively mis-priced money causes first recessions and then depressions.

The second lie is that laws and regulations are necessary and that they can save society from “anarchy.” In fact, anarchy is only the absence of government. That’s the real definition. And absence of government does not necessarily imply “chaos.” Just as setting interest rates fixes the price of money, so every law and regulation is a price fix as well, preventing someone from doing something within the context of the marketplace. This also constitutes a wealth transfer.

One can have a perfectly adequate and satisfying society without formal government, certainly without the kinds of intrusive and murderous governments we’ve got today. History is full of examples of societies that flourished with at least minimal government, especially societies where power truly flowed from the bottom up.

The third lie is that government is essential for purposes of defense and defending its citizens. But a quick survey of modern wars shows a disturbing tendency of governments – especially certain Western governments – to foment the very wars that citizens believe they’re being protected from.

War is the “health of the state” – the way that those in power consolidate their hold while punishing their enemies using phony pretexts having to do with “treason” and “leaking classified information.” Sound familiar?

It is what we call the Internet Reformation that has gradually shed light on the fundamental untruths permeating modern society in both the developed and developing world.

The Internet, like the Gutenberg Press before it, is a revolutionary device that has allowed people access to information that was hitherto denied or covered up, especially in the 20th century when the power elite‘s control over society was perhaps at its apex.

A conspiracy likely DOES exist. The Internet easily reveals not just facts that illuminate it, but also PATTERNS that show the same command-and-control strategies implemented throughout history, over and over.

It is easy, unfortunately, to mock those who believe in so-called “conspiracy theories” because the truth of what has occurred in this weary world is so extreme and shocking that most people simply cannot believe it. What truly horrifies us becomes a target for mockery. It’s a defense mechanism.

Here’s the seeming hard truth: A tiny group of Anglosphere banking families controlling most if not all of the world’s major central banks have used the trillions to which they have access in order to foment what can be called a “New World Order.”

This tiny group of intergenerational plotters and their enablers and associates have apparently built a seamless matrix of control around the entire globe to implement their schemes. They are building world government and are putting in place its building blocks.

What is it about the UN, IMF, World Bank, International Criminal Court, World Health Organization and hundreds of others lesser known globalist facilities that people who deny or decry modern “conspiracy theory” don’t understand?

An entire gamut of globalist entities has been superimposed on the world in the past 75 years. Most recently − only this past week, in fact − the US military held a formal exercise over the skies of Los Angeles using the same black helicopters that conspiracy theorists were mocked for mentioning not a decade ago.

But the biggest issue by far – bigger than even the establishment of the facilities of the New World Order – is the fundamental illiteracy of those who choose to support modern society as it is today and as it has evolved over the past 100 years.

While human societies have always been based on fairly bizarre rituals, it is safe to say that the current crop of behind-the-scenes leaders have raised statist insanity to a new level.

Every part of modern society, from its basic economic building blocks to its liturgical belief in dysfunctional “laws and regulations” to its deep-seated reverence for the manipulated destruction of war, is questionable on a factual basis.

The reality of modern society is increasingly pathological – and the ones with the pathology are those who lead the rest of us along using paradigms that are evidently and obviously dishonest and dysfunctional.

Articles that mock the looniness of “conspiratorialists” need to deal with the fundamental economic and sociopolitical dishonesty of their own assumptions. They should begin by admitting the evident and obvious logical fallacies of the “modern” society they celebrate.

I’m not holding my breath.

Source: The Daily Bell.

Treasury Secretary “Hank” Paulson was the trailblazer with his proposal for TARP in September 2008. He walked into the Capitol with a list of demands—unlimited powers to hand unlimited amounts of taxpayer money to whomever—and threatened that the whole world would collapse if his demands weren’t met immediately.

When Congress didn’t go for it, markets fell off a cliff, and Paulson’s world of finance appeared to come to an end. So Congress approved a more limited TARP, which ended up being irrelevant compared to the trillions the Fed would hand out. Thus, Paulson’s extortion had worked—though the source of money had shifted from the Treasury to the Fed. It would be copied.

In November, just after the G-20 meeting in Cannes, France, it was Greek Prime Minister Giorgios Papandreou’s turn. With a single sentence about a referendum on Greece’s exit from the Eurozone, he knocked the world’s financial markets into a tailspin. His message: give me more money and larger write-downs on Greek debt, or else I will say a whole paragraph. It reopened the spigot, and money started flowing again (temporarily).

In early January, it was Greece’s new Prime Minister Lucas Papademos. He threatened the world with “disorderly default.” His goal: impose salary cuts on private-sector workers and ever bigger “voluntary” haircuts on banks and hedge funds that hold Greek debt. “So we can get the next loan installment,” he explained. Unions rebelled, and bondholders dug in their heels, but they started talking again. For that whole debacle, read…. Greece’s Extortion Racket Maxed Out.

Now Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, has stepped into the extortion racket herself and threatened that there would be another Great Depression—the red line on the financial threat-o-meter—if certain countries and their taxpayers didn’t fork over more money. She never mentioned Germany and the US by name, but those were her prime targets.

“It is about avoiding a 1930s moment,” she said at the German Council of Foreign Affairs in Berlin, “a moment, ultimately, leading to a downward spiral that could engulf the entire world.”

Paulson couldn’t have phrased it more darkly.

The discussions Sunday evening between her and German Chancellor Angela Merkel must have been interesting, and there was no dog and pony show or even common statement afterwards. But Monday, Lagarde made clear what she wanted:

- €500 billion in mostly German taxpayer money to double the size of the future bailout fund, the ESM, to €1 trillion, so that it would be large enough to bail out Italy and Spain. Their insolvency “would have disastrous implications for systemic stability,” she threatened. So, pay up German taxpayers.

- $500 billion in taxpayer money from around the world, specifically from the US, Japan, and Germany, the three largest contributors to the IMF, to double its bailout lending power to $1 trillion.

- More government spending in those European countries that can afford it, to stimulate the economy for everyone else. She didn’t mention Germany, but German taxpayers, please step up to the plate. Your money is needed elsewhere. Or else—

- Common liabilities, such as Eurobonds, through which taxpayers in fiscally stronger countries, like Germany, would guarantee the debt of others.

- Elimination of trade imbalances by stimulating internal demand in countries with large trade surpluses. Alas, Germany’s economy lives and dies by its exports, and a drop in the surplus has a vicious effect on GDP. Read…. Germany’s Export Debacle.

Merkel and her government immediately rejected Lagarde’s demands on essentially all fronts. To commit more money to the ESM would also require a vote in the Bundestag where the last bailout increase passed only by a thin margin. And the US Congress is in no mood to hand over more money to the IMF. But as Paulson’s efforts have shown, extortion has a way of migrating. If recent history is any guide, Lagarde’s threat of another Great Depression will work, and money will start flowing from taxpayers to her anointed recipients.

Meanwhile, in one of the most above-board shining examples of a virtuous country in the Eurozone—the outright opposite of Greece—there has been a hiccup. Read…. Bribery, Kickbacks, and Money Laundering at the Austrian National Bank.

Source: Testosterone Pit.

Economic and political elites meeting this week at the Swiss resort of Davos will be asked to urgently find ways to reform a capitalist system that has been described as “outdated and crumbling.”

“We have a general morality gap, we are over-leveraged, we have neglected to invest in the future, we have undermined social coherence, and we are in danger of completely losing the confidence of future generations,” said Klaus Schwab, host and founder of the annual World Economic Forum.

“Solving problems in the context of outdated and crumbling models will only dig us deeper into the hole.

“We are in an era of profound change that urgently requires new ways of thinking instead of more business-as-usual,” the 73-year-old said, adding that “capitalism in its current form, has no place in the world around us.”

Some 1,600 economic and political leaders, including 40 heads of states and governments, will be asked to come up with new ideas as they converge at eastern Switzerland’s chic ski station for the 42nd edition of the five-day World Economic Forum which opens Wednesday.

The eurozone’s failure to get a grip on its debt crisis and the spectre this is casting over the global economy will dominate discussions.

“The main issue would be the preoccupation with the global economy. There will be relatively less conversation about social responsibility and environment issues — those tend to come to the fore when the economy is doing well,” John Quelch, dean of the China European International Business School, told AFP.

“The main conversation will be about a deficit of leadership in Europe as a prime problem,” he added.

The annual talk-shop comes barely a week after the eurozone’s reputation took a further battering, as ratings agency Standard and Poor’s downgraded the credit-worthiness of nine eurozone countries, including stripping France of its triple-A grade.

While saved from the downgrade embarrassment, the region’s economic powerhouse Germany has nevertheless been forced to lower its growth forecast, dragged down by its neighbours’ debt woes and weaker demand from emerging markets.

The forum will centre on the issue from the beginning, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel opens with a keynote speech.

European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde will also give a broader insight into the international economic impact of the eurozone crisis.

The World Bank slashed its global economic growth forecasts to 2.5 percent for 2012 and 3.1 percent in 2013 — sharply lower than previous estimates of 3.6 percent for both years.

Beyond economic issues, the forum will address a plethora of other subjects.

Sessions will range from scientific discoveries expected to shape 2012, to a discussion on the differences perceived when a Beethoven sonata is played on historic and modern instruments, to how virtual games can be harnessed for innovation in the real world.

It will also hear about the profound changes in the Arab world after a series of revolutions swept across the region in 2011. New Tunisian Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali and Egyptian presidential candidate Amre Moussa will both be present at the meeting.

Political issues in other regions will be addressed, with the participation of Mexican Felipe Calderon, his Nigerian counterpart Goodluck Jonathan and Salva Kiir Mayardit, President of the fledgling South Sudan.

Up to 5,000 Swiss soldiers have been mobilised to secure the location, and the air space around eastern Switzerland’s Davos region will also be severely restricted during the week.

But anti-capitalist demonstrators are planning to make their presence felt.

The Occupy WEF protestors have built igloos in the middle of the village perched 1,500 metres above sea level and are planning a protest against those they call “self-proclaimed elites.”

Source: Raw Story.