By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS Staff Writer Some of the nation’s leading billionaires met secretly to consider ways in which they can use their wealth to slow the growth of the world’s population. According to a report by London’s Times Online, the club, known as The Good Club, met at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist in Manhattan on May 5. The afternoon meeting was so discreet even the billionaire’s aides were told they were at a “security briefing.” The group included David Rockefeller, Jr., patriarch of one of America’s wealthiest dynasties, financiers Warren Buffet and George Soros, Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, and media moguls Oprah Winfrey and Ted Turner. The meeting was called by Bill Gates and was devoted to discussing how they could join forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change. Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learned about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said. Sketchy details of the meeting are emerging. Apparently, the billionaires were each given 15 minutes to present their favorite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an “umbrella cause” that could harness their interests. While they debated issues such as setting up rural schools and improving water systems, they all agreed to make overpopulation a priority. “They agreed that the world’s number one problem is that there are too many poor people,” said Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, who broke the story. “And what is their solution? Get rid of the poor people.” Calling the group “a veritable rogues gallery of anti-life and anti-family plutocrats,” Ruse said “These fabulously wealthy people with their grand houses, private jets, yachts and lavish lifestyles have decided to pool their massive resources to declare war on the world’s poor by spending billions of dollars on population control!” One attendee, Bill Gates, 53, has not hidden his interest in investing billions in this particular cause. At a conference in Long Beach, California, last February, he said: “Official projections say the world’s population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive healthcare, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion.”  An unnamed guest at the meeting told the Times there was “nothing as crude as a vote” during the conference but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.   “This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” he said. “They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming.”   Why all the secrecy? “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government,” he said. © All Rights Reserved, Living His Life Abundantly/Women of Grace. http://www.womenofgrace.com