The ruling class’s establishment of global governance with CFR and BIS at the helm

CFR member Carroll Quigley was a history professor at Georgetown University from 1941 to 1976. He also taught at Princeton and Harvard and lectured at the Brookings Institution. He was a frequent lecturer at the American Laboratory for Marine Weapons, the Institute of Foreign Service, and the United States Naval University in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1958, he was a consultant for the Congressional Election Committee that created the National Space Agency. In 1964, he served as a consultant at the Naval Postgraduate School for Graduates in Monterey, California, in the Seabed project. The project was created to visualize the future American weapons systems.

It’s not difficult to understand why President Clinton praised Carroll Quigley in his nomination speech at the Democratic Party convention. Quigley graduated with honors when he received his master’s and Ph.D. from Harvard. He was featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not for being Harvard’s youngest person to receive a Ph.D. After teaching at Harvard and Princeton, he went to Georgetown, where he was elected by former students as the most influential professor for 28 consecutive years. The Dean of the School of Foreign Service, Dr. Peter F. Krough, aptly said, ”He was one of the last of the great macro-historians who traced the development of civilizations… with excellent ability.” Through his teaching, Clinton and other aspirants found themselves in influential positions. As Quigley pointed out, ”Look at the real situations that lie beneath the conceptual and verbal symbols.”

A CFR Historian’s Story from Inside
In the early 1960s, Carroll Quigley conducted extensive research for his encyclopedic work ”Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time.” ”Tragedy and Hope” recounted, in over 1,300 densely written pages, how a cadre of extremely wealthy and powerful individuals gradually came to power. Some were bankers, others started in other industries but entered the world of banking because that’s where the real power was. They usually operated behind the scenes, not as the political elite of nations, but as an international elite, or super-elite. For them, natural borders and loyalties became increasingly meaningless.

Carroll Quigley wrote in ”Tragedy and Hope”:

”There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (particularly its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general, my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”

The greatest value of ”Tragedy and Hope” is that it represents a brave and boastful admission from within the establishment that there does indeed exist a relatively small but powerful group that has succeeded in gaining a stranglehold on American and British affairs. Dr. Quigley identified this group as the ”international bankers,” men who are quite different from ordinary bankers in distinctive ways: they were cosmopolitan and international; they were closely tied to governments and were especially interested in questions regarding national debts; they were almost equally devoted to secrecy and the secret use of financial influence in political life. These bankers came to be known as international bankers and, more specifically, as merchant bankers in England, private bankers in France, and investment bankers in the United States.

Dr. Quigley points out that the core of control lies in the financial dynasties of America and Europe, who have exercised political power through the formation of international financial syndicates. These monopoly money dynasties learned the basic lesson that all governments must have sources of revenue from which they can borrow money in times of crisis. By providing them with such resources, international bankers could make both kings and democratic leaders extremely obedient to their will. Quigley names who they are. He tells how they have well concealed the extent of their immense wealth from the public by keeping their firms personal, usually as partnerships, with no stocks, no reports, and usually no advertising. Dr. Quigley traces the immense power and control exercised by the Rothschild family, the Bank of England, J.P. Morgan, and the Rockefeller family. At the turn of the century, according to Dr. Quigley, the influence of these business leaders was so great that the Morgan and Rockefeller groups together, or even the Morgan group alone, could have destroyed the country’s economic system.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the American economy had become so dynamic that the larger banking dynasties found it increasingly difficult to maintain strong control. In addition, their control was challenged as a major political issue in national referendums. So the Morgan and Rockefeller dynasties decided to follow the pattern of financial monopoly power established by the Bank of England, a bank that is an institution in private hands and has the appearance of being a government institution. The result was the Federal Reserve Act, originally planned at a secret meeting on Jekyll Island in 1910 attended by representatives of Morgan and Rockefeller banks. The proposal for the Federal Reserve was introduced in the Senate by Senator Nelson Aldrich, the ancestor of Governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. The original proposal failed because Aldrich was too closely associated with Morgan and Wall Street. The Morgan-Rockefeller group then realized that they needed the support of the Democrats to erase Wall Street’s fingerprints on the proposal. The opportunity arose during the 1912 election. Desperate to defeat President William Howard Taft (who opposed the Aldrich proposal), Wall Street showered the presidential campaigns of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt with money to split the Republicans and ensure Wilson’s election.

International Control Bank
In 1929, the Young Committee was established to create a program for regulating German war reparations, one of the results of the Versailles Treaty, drafted at the 1919 peace talks in Paris. The committee was chaired by Owen D. Young, the founder of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), a subsidiary of General Electric. He also served as CEO and chairman of GE between 1922 and 1939 and co-authored the Dawes Plan in 1924. He was appointed as a board member of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1928, and in 1929, he also served as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. When he was sent to Europe in 1929 to design the program for Germany’s repayments, he was accompanied by J.P. Morgan, Jr.

The committee created the Young Plan, which ”definitely was a method of occupying Germany with American capital and mortgaging German real assets in exchange for a giant loan in the United States.” The Young Plan led to ”ever-increasing unemployment,” which, in turn, allowed Hitler to promise that he would ”abolish unemployment,” which ”was the actual reason for the enormous electoral successes Hitler had in the election.”

The plan took effect in 1930, the year after the stock market crash. Part of the plan was to create an international regulatory organization; this was created in 1930 and is called the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The alleged purpose was to facilitate and coordinate the payments of war reparations from the Weimar Republic to the Allies. However, its secondary function was much more important and much more secret: ”to coordinate the operations of the world’s central banks.” BIS was described as a ”bank for central banks” and ”a private organization with shareholders but performing functions for public authorities. Such functions are strictly confidential, so the public is usually unaware of most of BIS’s activities.”

BIS was created ”to remedy London’s decline as the world’s financial center by creating a mechanism that could create a world with three leading financial centers in London, New York, and Paris that could still function as a unit.” As Carroll Quigley explained in ”Tragedy and Hope”:

”… the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements [BIS] in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks, which were themselves private firms.”

BIS was founded by ”the central banks of Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, and the United Kingdom, together with the three leading commercial banks in the United States, including J.P. Morgan & Company, First National Bank of New York, and First National Bank of Chicago. Each central bank subscribed to 16,000 shares, and the three American banks also subscribed to the same number of shares.” However, ”only central banks have voting rights.”

Today, BIS has sovereign immunity, pays no taxes, and has its private police force. BIS now consists of 55 member countries, but the club that meets regularly in Basel is a much smaller group, and within that, there is a hierarchy. In a 1983 article in Harper’s Magazine titled ”Ruling the World of Money,” economist Henry CK Liu observed that Basel Committee agreements have forced national banking systems ”to march to the same tune, beneficial when administered separately, and dangerous in combination, as it solidifies any concentration of economic power by an elite.” He wrote, ”National politics is exposed suddenly to the overwhelming influence of global finance… all members of a controlled hierarchical system, dominated from the money center of New York. The result is forcing national banking systems to privatize.”

FDR’s and Louis Dembitz Brandeis’ Warnings
In a letter dated November 21, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt wrote the following to the American diplomat Edward M. House: ”The real truth is, as you and I know, that economic elements in the larger centers have owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson – and I am not wholly excepting the administration of Woodrow Wilson. The country is going through a repetition of Jackson’s fight with the Bank of the United States – only on a far bigger and broader basis.” (F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce 1950, p. 373.). Four years later, in a letter to all governors regarding a uniform land-use law (February 26, 1937), President Franklin Roosevelt acknowledged that democracy was not working and that the United States was on the verge of becoming a fascist state, with unprecedented concentrations of private power. In a message to Congress on combating monopolies on April 29, 1938, to prove his thesis that the current concentration of economic power had no historical precedent, the President cited well-known statistics from the Bureau of Internal Revenue: 1) 0.1% of U.S. companies own 52% of all corporate assets, receive 50% of all corporate income; barely 5% of U.S. companies own 87% of all assets, and less than 4% of all manufacturing companies account for 84% of all net profits; 2) as early as 1929, 0.3% of the population received 78% of the dividends, and 3) in 1936, 33% of all inheritances went to 4% of all heirs.

Louis Dembitz Brandeis, who served as a judge on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939, warned about these colluding directorates of banking institutions as early as 1914 in his book ”Other People’s Money And How the Bankers Use It.” He wrote:

”The dominant element in our financial oligarchy is the investment banker. Associated banks, trust companies, and life insurance companies are his tools. Controlled railroads, public-utility and industrial companies are his subjects. Correct though it is to speak of the Money Trust and the Money Power, the real power lies not in the Money Trust, because it is merged in a Money Power greater than itself. The dominant element is the investment banker, who by the natural and irresistible process of things is gradually assuming control, as manager, of the funds that are to him intrusted, funds that go largely to the development and control of the railroads and other public-utility and industrial companies. He has but taken advantage of a situation created by others. He could not even have got his opportunity if no mistake had been made by those active in the railway world.

The characteristic of the investment banker’s function, and the tendency to concentration of financial power, is the rendering of service, special and of a very high order, and the doing of all those things for others which they cannot do for themselves. Instead of the banker being a mere dealer in money or credit, his most useful function is that of an intermediary between those who have money to lend and those who can use it. The leading investment bankers are thus able to render an important service to the public and those who manage our great aggregations of capital, which are of such recent growth as to have outgrown the financial machinery hitherto provided for their service. Moreover, they are equipped not only to finance existing public-utility and industrial companies, but to organize and promote new ones.”

Brandeis further explained how investment bankers were able to dominate various functions in the business world, including their control of public service companies, railroads, and industrial enterprises, as well as their influence over banks and trust companies. He stated:

”The development of the financial oligarchy followed, in this country, the lines of the political despotism’s history we are familiar with: usurpation that continues by gradual encroachments rather than violent acts, subtle and often long-concealed concentrations of various functions which are beneficial when separated but pernicious when combined. It was by processes such as these that Augustus became the master of Rome. The framers of the American Constitution had the dangers of this political freedom in mind when they provided so carefully for the separation of powers.”

Banking Affairs with Hitler
During the 1930s, Germany was able to create a few dominant industrial cartels, all financed by Wall Street’s bankers and industrialists, through loans provided by the Dawes and Young Plans. These cartels formed the basis and the primary financial support for the Nazi regime. Collaboration between Nazi Germany’s industry and American industry and big finance continued, especially with the interests of Morgan and the Rockefellers, but also with Ford and DuPont. The international banks and companies affiliated with the Morgan-Rockefellers had an intimate connection with the growth of the Nazi industry. Rockefeller’s empire, Standard Oil, provided crucial assistance to Nazi Germany’s preparations for World War II. Furthermore, the Rockefeller Foundation played a crucial role, not only in funding racist and elitist eugenic movements in the USA but also in introducing eugenic ideology in Nazi Germany, making it easier to instill the values that led to the Holocaust.

Hjalmar Schacht, the President of the Reichsbank during the Weimar Republic, remained as the head of the German central bank between 1933 and 1939. He was a central figure in Nazi Germany and one of the driving forces behind Germany’s plans for reindustrialization, renewal, and rearmament. Hitler appointed Schacht as his Minister of Finance in 1934.

Central banks across Europe began to buy Nazi gold, which was smuggled, melted down, and re-stamped in Switzerland (similar to what happened with Soviet gold). Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Turkey, France, the United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary, and the USA ”all conducted trade with the Nazis in gold transferred through the BIS.” This was done in cooperation between central banks because ”the BIS engaged in gold and currency transactions with Nazi Germany through its collaboration with the Reichsbank.” Schacht leveraged his significant influence and ”contributed to placing high-ranking Nazis and foreign associates on the BIS board.”

While the ruling classes aimed at empire-building, they couldn’t simply tell their working classes to go and die in the service of profit. Workers remembered bitterly the ”war profiteers” and the ”merchants of death” who had sent them to die in the trenches of World War I. Therefore, the United States and its allies sold their imperialistic war by claiming it would be fought to defend democracy. They systematically concealed their true motives. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) published a series of studies to help define the USA’s goals in the war. A history of the Council quotes a study that warned that ”the formulation of statements of war aims for propaganda purposes is very different from formulating a statement which defines the true national interest.”

A CFR study noted:

”If war aims are stated which seem to be concerned only with Anglo-American imperialism, they would offer little to people in the rest of the world, and would tend to strengthen the most reactionary elements in the USA and in Britain. Other peoples should be able to see some interest which would be served by the immediate destruction of Nazism … This would improve the chances of successful peace propaganda.” (Memorandum E-B32, April 17, 1941, CFR, War-Peace Studies, NUL).

James Stewart Martin was an antitrust lawyer heading the Economic Warfare Section of the U.S. Army, whose mission was to break up Germany’s industrial cartels to prevent the revival of the Nazi war machine. In 1950, he published his book ”All Honorable Men,” which described his experiences leading the post-war investigation of Nazi industrialists. Martin argued that American and British businessmen had appointed themselves to key positions in this post-war investigation to divert, slow down, and stifle the investigation of Nazi industrialists, thus keeping their own involvement hidden. A British officer was court-martialed and sentenced to two years for protecting a Nazi, and several American officials were reassigned.

During the investigations, Martin’s team made some surprising discoveries, among them: the fact that Germany had laid the foundations for rearmament long before Hitler came to power, that German companies, following a plan constructed before World War I, had used patents as weapons of war, that American businessmen played a key role in helping Germany arm itself for war, that Hitler was as much controlled by the German business elite as he controlled them, that American bankers helped the Nazis hide their wartime booty as the collapse of Greater Germany loomed, and that, in the end, the German power structure remained practically intact, thanks to assistance from British and American business interests.

Martin came to Europe from Washington in 1945 with his investigative team to protest to G-2, the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ODCSINT), about the General Motors-Nazi connection. He arrived at the U.S. Military Command at Bushy Park, London, only to discover that Graeme K. Howard from General Motors was his superior officer. He managed to find a copy of Howard’s book, ”America and a New World Order,” in which Howard sympathized with the Nazis. Fearing a public backlash, the army sent Howard home. Martin and his team were quickly blocked from conducting the investigations they wanted. He wrote in his book ”All Honorable Men”:

”We had not been stopped in Germany by German activity. We had been stopped in Germany by American activity. The forces that stopped us had operated from the United States but had not operated in the open. We were not stopped by the Congress, by the President’s decree, or by a change of policy that had been made by the President … In short, whatever it was that had stopped us was not ’the government.’ But it had clearly had command of channels through which the Government normally operates. The relative powerlessness of governments in the face of the growing economic power of corporations is of course not new … National governments stood on the sidelines while the bigger performers arranged the world’s business.” Martin goes on to describe a global trend, how corporations, given certain powers by the government to pursue their own interests, have merged on an international scale and ”created a private world government.” This new order extends far beyond the borders of any single nation, operating not under any law except the private laws of their secret agreements.”

Nine years before James Stewart Martin discovered this secret order of American business elite, the American Ambassador to Germany in 1937, William Dodd, warned of these industrialists in a letter to President Roosevelt, explaining:

”A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress, they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions.” (Federated Press, January 7, 1938. The Tragedy of Henry Ford, by Jonathan Norton Leonard.)

Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year pure race empire and the bankers’ own plans led to a devastating world war in which over 50 million people were killed, and many more were injured. For the prevailing elite in finance and business, it was just ”business as usual,” and they continued to profit from the booming war industry while laying plans to shape the minds of the traumatized masses in the ”right” direction after the war.

The Economist Murray Rothbard’s Research on the History of the Anglo-American Empire (The Unplanned Federal Reserve, The Round Table, and CFR)
The fact is that, as the historian and economist Murray N. Rothbard shows, the CFR/Trilateral network is just the latest incarnation of a trend deeply rooted in modern American history. Long before the founding of the CFR and the Trilateral Commission, there was a power elite in the USA; this elite is likely to persist long after those organizations are gone or have transformed into something else. Rothbard’s unveiling of the historical and economic roots of this trend is crucial to understanding that this is not a ”conspiracy” centered on the CFR and the Trilateralists as such but an ideological trend traditionally centered in the Northeast, among the upper classes and deeply rooted in American history.

If it is conspiracy-mongering to believe that people engage in activities to achieve economic, political, and personal goals, then rational men and women must necessarily admit to this. The alternative is to claim that human actions are aimless, random, and inexplicable. History, in this light, is a series of disjointed coincidences.

Yet it would be incorrect to call the Rothbardian worldview a ”conspiracy theory.” To say that the Morgan family was involved in a ”conspiracy” to involve the USA in the First World War, when they openly used all their cunning, every lever both economic and political, to push the country into the ”war to end all wars,” seems woefully inadequate. This was not some secret cabal meeting in a company’s soundproof conference room but a ”conspiracy” of ideas openly and loudly expressed.

Rothbard’s history of the Federal Reserve described the role of a new intellectual class without whom the banks could not have been successful. For Rothbard, the system that deceived the American public and made them accept the Federal Reserve represented a ”new alliance between the State and the Molders of Opinion,” which was a ”partnership between government, business leaders, intellectuals, and experts.” Within this alliance, the intellectual served two functions: ”(a) to help drive and plan the new state system, and (b) to excuse the new world order.” If historians were part of this group of intellectuals helping to create the Federal Reserve, it is not surprising that Morgan’s and Rockefeller’s family interests are not widely understood today.

In ”The Case Against the Federal Reserve,” Rothbard also dismissed the traditional academic aversion to the dreaded ”historical conspiracy theory.” Here, the question was ”not some sort of ’theory of history,’ but a willingness to use one’s common sense. All that the analyst or historian needs to do is assume, as a hypothesis, that people in government or lobby for government policies might at least have as much self-interest and profit motive as people in business or everyday life, and examine the significant and revealing patterns he will see before his eyes.” For Rothbard, the most significant pattern was not so much Democrats versus Republicans, but an exchange or conflict between the Morgan family and their allies on one side and the Rockefeller alliance on the other. Historians who are not inclined to doubt the true workings of the Federal Reserve missed the significance of the Morgan/Rockefeller model because they were not ”equipped for an analysis of the power elite or the ruling class.” Established historians continued to focus on the traditional but accepted channels of knowledge—superficial party divisions.

One of the most well-known economists in the USA has recently criticized the Federal Reserve system sharply. Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist at the World Bank and a Nobel laureate in economic science, said at a conference at the Roosevelt Institute in 2010 that the structure of the Federal Reserve system is so filled with conflicts that it is corrupt and undermines democracy. Stiglitz emphasized that the Fed banks have clear conflicts of interest because the banks are largely controlled by a board that includes officials in the banks they are supposed to oversee.

The Unplanned Federal Reserve
Federal Reserve was the outgrowth of five years of planning, change, and compromise among various political and concerned financial groups, led by big finance, including the Morgans, Rockefellers, Kuhn, Loeb, along with their various economists and technicians.

Particularly prominent among Rockefeller’s interests were Senator Nelson W. Aldrich (R.-RI.), father-in-law to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Frank A. Vanderlip, vice president of Rockefeller’s National City Bank of New York. From Kuhn, Loeb came the prominent Paul Moritz Warburg, of the German investment bank firm M.M. Warburg and Company. Warburg emigrated to the USA in 1902 to become a senior partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co., after which he spent most of his time advocating for an American central bank.

Similarly, an igniting force for the Federal Reserve was Jacob H. Schiff, the powerful head of Kuhn, Loeb, to which Warburg was related by marriage. Backing and sponsoring Warburg in the academic sphere was the prominent economist from Columbia University, Edwin R.A. Seligman, from the investment-banking family J. & W. Seligman & Co; Seligman was Warburg’s brother-in-law.

Morgans were prominently represented in the planning and agitation for a central bank by Henry P. Davison, a Morgan partner; Charles D. Norton, the president of Morgan’s First National Bank of New York; A. Barton Hepburn, the head of Morgan’s Chase National Bank; and Victor Morawetz, a lawyer and banker in the Morgan fold and chairman of the executive committee of the Morgan-controlled Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad.

While the establishment of the Federal Reserve system in the late 1913 was a result of the coalition between Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb interests, there is no question about which financial grouping controlled the personnel and policies of the Federal Reserve once it was established. (Although influential in the broad decisions of the Federal Reserve, board member Warburg was disqualified from leadership because of his pro-German views.) The first board of the Federal Reserve, appointed by President Wilson in 1914, included Warburg; one of Rockefeller’s men, Frederic A. Delano, the uncle of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and president of the Rockefeller-controlled Wabash Railway; and a banker from Alabama, who had ties to both Morgan and Rockefeller.

Dominating these three were three definitive Morgan men, and a university economist, Professor Adolph C. Miller of Berkeley, whose wife’s family had ties to Morgan. The three definitive Morgan men were Treasury Secretary McAdoo; Comptroller of the Currency John Skelton Williams, a Virginia banker and a longtime supporter of McAdoo on Morgan’s railroads; and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Charles S. Hamlin, a Boston lawyer who married into an Albany family long connected to the Morgan-dominated New York Central Railroad.

But more important than the composition of the Federal Reserve’s board was the man who became the first governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and single-handedly dominated Fed policy from its inception until his death in 1928. This man was Benjamin Strong, who had spent virtually his entire business career and personal life in the top circles of J.P. Morgan’s colleagues. A secretary at several trust companies in New York City, Strong became the neighbor and close friend of three of Morgan’s top partners, Henry P. Davison, Dwight Morrow, and Thomas W. Lamont. Davison, in particular, became his mentor, and brought him into Morgan’s Bankers Trust, where he soon succeeded Lamont as vice-president, and then ultimately became president. When Strong was offered the position of governor of the New York Fed, it was Davison who convinced him to take the job.

Strong was an enthusiast for U.S. entry into the war, and it was his mentor Davison who had engineered the coup to get Morgan designated as the sole underwriter and purchasing agent for Britain and France. Strong quickly worked to formalize cooperation with the Bank of England, a cooperation that would continue in force throughout the 1920s. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York became foreign agent to the Bank of England, and vice versa.

The main result of the cooperation between Norman-Strong was that Strong was pressed to boost inflation of money and credit in the United States throughout the 1920s to prevent Britain from losing gold to the United States due to its inflationary policies. Britain’s dilemma arose from its insistence on returning to the gold standard after the war at the prewar overvalued level of the pound, and then insisting on boosting inflation instead of devaluing to make its exports competitively priced on the world market. Thus, Britain needed to get other countries, especially the United States, to devalue along with them. The Strong-Norman-Morgan linkage did the job, setting the stage for the great financial collapse of 1929-1931.

As World War I drew to a close, influential British and Americans decided that close postwar cooperation between the two countries required more than just close cooperation between central banks. What was needed was permanent organizations to promote common Anglo-American policy to dominate the postwar world. (Murray N. Rothbard, Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy p. 21)

The Round Table
In England, Cecil Rhodes had already started a secret society in 1891 with the goal of maintaining and expanding the British Empire to reabsorb the United States. After the end of the 19th century, the leadership, organization, and recruitment for the society fell to Rhodes’s friend and right-hand man, Alfred Lord Milner. The Milner Group dominated domestic planning in the UK during World War I, particularly in the planning of post-war foreign and colonial policy. The Milner Group appointed the British delegation of experts to the Versailles Peace Conference. To advocate for the intellectual agitation of such a policy, the Milner Group also set up Round Table groups in England and around the world in 1910.

The first American to be invited to join the Round Table was George Louis Beer, who came to their attention when his books attacked the American Revolution and praised the British Empire as it existed in the 19th century. Such loyalty could not go unrewarded, so Beer became a member of the group around 1912 and became the American correspondent for the Round Table magazine. We have seen Beer’s pro-British role as a colonial expert for The Inquiry. He was also the American chief expert on colonial affairs at Versailles, and afterward, the Milner Group made Beer the head of the Mandate Department in the League of Nations (early UN).

During the war, Beer, along with the anglophile Yale historian George Burton Adams, and the powerful Columbia historian James T. Shotwell, a key leader of The Inquiry and the head of the National Board for Historical Services, which sent deceptive propaganda for the war effort, founded a secret society to advocate for Anglo-American cooperation. Finally, led by Beer on behalf of the United States and the head of the Round Table group in England, Lionel Curtis, the British and American historians at Versailles took the opportunity to establish a permanent organization to agitate for an informal, if not formal, reconstituted Anglo-American empire.

The new group, the Institute of International Affairs, was founded at a meeting at the Majestic Hotel in Paris on May 30, 1919. A six-man organizing committee was formed, three Milnerites from Britain and three Americans: Shotwell; Harvard historian Archibald C. Coolidge, head of the Eastern European division of The Inquiry and a member of the Morgan-oriented finance family from Boston; and James Brown Scott, a Morgan lawyer who would write Robert Bacon’s biography. The British branch, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, set up a committee to oversee the writing of a multi-volume history of the Versailles Peace Conference; the committee was funded by a gift from Thomas W. Lamont, a Morgan partner. (Murray N. Rothbard, Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy p. 25)

CFR
The American branch of the group took some time to get started. Eventually, the dormant American Institute of International Affairs merged with a defunct corporation established in 1918 by New York businessmen concerned with the post-war world and organized as a dinner club to listen to foreign visitors. This organization, the Council on Foreign Relations, had as its honorary chairman the Morgan lawyer Elihu Root, while Alexander Hemphill, chairman of Morgan’s Guaranty Trust Company, was the chairman of its finance committee. In August 1921, the two organizations merged into the new Council on Foreign Relations, Inc., an immensely powerful organization that included bankers, lawyers, and intellectuals.

While various financial interests were represented in the new organization, the CFR was Morgan-dominated from top to bottom. The honorary president was Elihu Root. The president was John W. Davis, Wilson’s solicitor general and now chief counsel for J.P. Morgan & Co. Davis would become the Democratic presidential candidate in 1924. The financial secretary of the new CFR was Edwin F. Gay, an economics historian from Harvard, director of planning and statistics for the Shipping Board during the war, and now editor of New York’s Evening Post, owned by his mentor, Morgan partner Thomas W. Lamont.

It was Gay who conceived the idea of establishing Foreign Affairs, the CFR’s quarterly journal, and suggested that both his Harvard colleague Archibald Coolidge be its first editor and New York Post reporter Hamilton Fish Armstrong be its assistant editor and executive director of the CFR. Other prominent officials in the new CFR included: Frank L. Polk, former Secretary of State and now an attorney for J.P. Morgan & Co.; Paul M. Warburg from Kuhn, Loeb; Otto H. Kahn from Kuhn, Loeb; former Secretary of State under President Wilson, Norman H. Davis, a banking colleague of the Morgan family; and as vice president, Paul D. Cravath, senior partner at the Rockefeller-oriented law firm Cravath, Swaine and Moore on Wall Street.

After World War II, the Council on Foreign Relations became dominated by Rockefeller interests rather than Morgan’s, reflecting a broader shift in financial power on a global scale. Following World War II, as oil emerged as a prominent factor, it brought the formerly intense rivals, Morgans and Rockefellers, into an Eastern establishment over which the Rockefellers became senior and the Morgans junior partners. (Murray N. Rothbard, Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy p. 26)

CFR’s policy-making
In 1977, political scientist Thomas Dye delivered his address to the Southern Political Science Association at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His topic was the role of so-called ’private’ policy-making organizations in determining US federal policy. His address was published in 1978 as an essay in The Journal of Politics, and much attention was given to the significance of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in shaping American foreign policy. In general, this event was unusual and helped correct an oversight noted by sociologist G. William Domhoff in his 1970 book, ”The Higher Circles; The Governing Class in America”: ”there has never been a paper about [CFR] in any journal indexed by the Social Science and Humanities Index.” Many political scientists seemingly considered this a proper order of things and wanted the status quo to continue. Therefore, Dye wrote on the first page: ”I appreciate the help I have received from G. William Domhoff, of the University of California, Santa Cruz. I apologize to the outstanding political scientists who have been told that [studying] the activities performed by private policy-makers is not ’political science.'”

It is indeed interesting that ”outstanding political scientists” would object to the examination of the Council on Foreign Relations and other supposedly ’private’ policy organizations. We will return to these phenomena. But first, let’s get a grasp of what CFR is and a context from which we can evaluate Dye’s phrase ”private policy-makers” with this organization as a reference.

In his essay, Thomas Dye writes:

”Political scientist Lester Milbraith observed that the influence of CFR throughout the government apparatus is so pervasive that it is difficult to distinguish CFR from government programs: ’While the Council on Foreign Relations is not financed by any government, it works so closely with the government that it is difficult to distinguish the actions of CFR stimulated by the government from autonomous actions.'”

One could also say it the other way around: it’s hard to distinguish government actions stimulated by the Council from autonomous government actions. Dye lists quite significant American foreign policy initiatives that CFR led, ”including both the initial decision to militarily intervene in Vietnam and the later decision to withdraw.” Members and leaders of the Council on Foreign Relations also played a key role in the tactical decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan. War Secretary Henry L. Stimson was President Roosevelt’s chief advisor on nuclear matters and led the special interim committee established by President Truman at the end of April 1945 to provide guidance on the use of nuclear weapons. The eight-member committee was dominated by 5 CFR members, including Stimson, the chairman, who had been active in several CFR programs for over a decade. One of the five members of the council, scientist Karl T. Compton, president of M.I.T., voiced the opinion that the atomic bomb should be used to ”impress the world,” lending credibility to those who have argued that the bomb was used on Japan primarily to frighten the Russians and thus strengthen the American position as a world leader.

William Putnam ”Bill” Bundy, who was part of the CIA and served as foreign adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, also honored CFR for having helped establish the mental framework that led to the Marshall Plan and NATO. Thomas Dye also pointed out that many important CFR members are also top government officials. For example, ”Council members in the Kennedy-Johnson administration included Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Adviser McGeorge P. Bundy, CIA Director John McCone, and Deputy Secretary of State George Ball.” A list of key figures in CFR over the years up to 1978, which Dye also provides us, shows that many of them are former top officials in the U.S. government.

But CFR is not just where current and former holders of government positions meet; it’s also an incubator for future officeholders. As William Domhoff observed:

”Douglass Cater, a journalist from Exeter and Harvard who served in the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, has noted that ’a diligent researcher would do well to dig about the role played by the semiofficial Council on Foreign Relations in the nurturing and cultivation of a burgeoning American establishment.’ … Turning to the all-encompassing issue of government involvement… the point is made most authoritatively by John J. McCloy… the director of CFR and a government appointee to a number of roles since the early 1940s: ’Whenever we needed a man,’ McCloy said when explaining the presence of CFR members in the modern defense establishment during World War II, ’we thumbed through the roll of council members and made a telephone call to New York.'”

So in what sense, then, can we say that CFR is private? In this technical sense: the money that supports CFR comes from private foundations and corporations. It is now evident why CFR was called a ”school for statesmen that comes close to being an organ of what C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite — a group of men, similar in interests and outlook, who shape events from behind the scenes.” Financial backers of CFR get to convert their views into policy without the scrutiny that would accompany running for public office, under the guise of working for a supposedly ’private’ organization. Even the academic world of ”outstanding political scientists,” as we have seen, collaborates in keeping CFR in the shadows because, according to them, the study of CFR apparently is not ”political science.”

This shadow not only obscures the process of policy-making in the United States but throughout the Western world. Thomas Dye writes:

”A discussion of CFR would not be complete without some reference to its multinational arm — the Trilateral Commission. The Trilateral Commission was established by CFR’s chairman David Rockefeller in 1972, with the support of CFR and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Trilateral Commission is a small group of top officials from multinational corporations and government leaders of industrial nations who meet periodically to coordinate policy for the United States, Europe, and Japan.”

A modern study of CFR noted the following,

“This study has revealed the roots of American imperialism in the economic, political, and strategic needs of the dominant sector of the American ruling class, led by the Council on Foreign Relations, CFR. Their lust for power and the pursuit of world hegemony have made the United States the greatest imperial power in human history by sending troops to every continent and by controlling the economy and politics in large parts of the world. The main reason for this policy has been, as we have shown in our case studies, the needs of American capitalism for a world order that is open and responsive to American expansion. In contrast to the hard-line view among extreme neoliberals that includes laissez-faire and nationalist competition, there is a measure of realism in the Council that allows it to accept irreversible changes, reject the extreme anti-communist “roll-back” position, and show a willingness to accept détente. But there is an (equally) strong determination to maintain a world where US capitalism feels at home. The war in Indochina, the enormous waste of extensive military spending, the encouragement of the execution of foreign leaders, support for reactionary regimes worldwide, bribery and corruption, and even domestic oppression to maintain imperialism abroad, political trials against dissidents, CIA and FBI harassment of radical groups and covert surveillance are all the result and evidence of the destructive nature of imperialism.” (Laurence H. Shoup, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy, Authors Choice Press, 20, 2004, p. 278.)

CFR’s Ambition for a Global Financial Dictatorship
Both the UN and the IMF have thrown their weight behind proposals to introduce a new global currency reserve monetary system to replace the dollar as part of the acceleration towards a global financial dictatorship. ”A UN panel of expert economists pressed for a new global currency reserve to replace the chaotic dollar-based system and for the measures of rich countries to be coordinated to stimulate their economies,” reported AFP on March 26, 2009. Furthermore, ”IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that discussions about a new global currency reserve to replace the US dollar were ’legitimate’ and could take place ’in the coming months,’ according to the report.

Jeffrey Garten, a CFR member, wrote an article in the Financial Times of London in 2008 where he called for a ”new global monetary authority” with the power to oversee all government financial authorities and all major global financial institutions. ”Even if America’s massive financial rescue succeeds, it should be followed by something even more far-reaching – the establishment of a Global Monetary Authority to oversee markets that have become borderless,” writes Jeffrey Garten, who served as undersecretary of commerce for international trade in Clinton’s administration and as dean of the Yale School of Management. Before that, Garten served as CEO of the Blackstone Group and Lehman Brothers on Wall Street and on the White House Council on International Economic Policy under Nixon’s administration and in the policy planning staffs formulated by Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance under Ford and Carter.

Citing the current global institutional apparatus’s ”globalization,” a ”philosophical struggle,” and the ”center’s vacuum,” Garten describes his vision for a new monolithic worldwide authority to monitor all economic activity around the world. Here are some highlights:

A GMM (Global Monetary Authority) would act as a re-insurer or discount guarantor to mitigate some of the central banks’ responsibilities. It would review regulations in government agencies with more teeth than the IMF has and oversee the implementation of a limited set of global rules. It would monitor global risks and establish an effective system for early warning with more forceful alarms than the BIS.

It would serve as a ”bankruptcy court” for financial reorganizations of global companies above a certain size. The largest global financial companies will be required to register with the GMA and be subject to oversight or be blacklisted. This includes commercial companies and banks, but also government sovereign wealth funds, giant hedge funds, and private equity firms.

A GMA board must include central banks not only from the US, the UK, the euro area, and Japan but also from China, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil. It would be funded through mandatory contributions from all economically capable countries and from insurance premiums issued by global financial companies, both publicly traded and government-owned.

In a conclusion that smacks of Problem, Reaction, Solution, Garten adds, ”In terms of American and international politics, a Global Monetary Authority is probably an idea whose time has not yet come. This could change as today’s crisis deepens.”

What he describes is nothing less than the cross-border activities of a global financial dictatorship and the subjugation of nations and corporations to register and be strictly monitored and adhere to the same rules. The implementation of such a system would constitute total interventionism and the absolute final nail in the coffin of the free market. Garten’s call for a GMM echoes the words in a June text published in the FT by CFR member Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Having just attended the Bilderberg Conference in Chantilly, Virginia, Geithner is calling for a globalized banking system with ”appropriate capital and liquidity requirements.”

For years, the CFR has promoted a global dictatorship and its world currency. In the May/June 2007 edition of the New York Council on Foreign Relations news journal Foreign Affairs, an open call was made to end sovereign nations’ control of their own currency. In an article by Benn Steil, director of international economics at CFR, titled ”The End of National Currency,” CFR essentially endorsed the end of economic sovereignty and called for the complete capitulation of all nations, rich and poor, to unfettered globalization. Steil argued that the solution to currency crises is ”not to return to a mythical past of monetary sovereignty, with government authorities controlling local interest and exchange rates in blissful ignorance of the rest of the world. Governments must let go of the fatal notion that nationhood requires them to make and control the money used on their territory. National currencies and global markets simply do not mix; together they make a deadly brew of currency crises and geopolitical tensions and create ready pretexts for damaging protectionism. In order to globalize safely, countries should abandon monetary nationalism and abolish unwanted currencies, the source of much of today’s instability.”

If there were any doubt that Steil called for a new form of super-imperialist dominance in a post-Westphalian, post-sovereign-nation state type of utopian world, he made this point clear, by claiming that the latter part of the 19th century, which led into World War I, was the high point of past globalization, the period when the British Empire was at its zenith. ”The lessons from the 19th-century gold standard must be kept in mind,” Steil wrote: ”… As economic development beyond globalization is no longer possible, countries must abandon monetary nationalism. Governments must replace national currencies with the dollar or the euro, or, in the case of Asia, collaborate to produce a new multinational currency over a comparably large and economically diversified area…. Most of the world’s smaller and poorer countries would clearly do best to formally dollarize, whatever the interim risks and transnational constraints on national financial policies. Latin American countries should all abandon their weak domestic currencies and replace them with the dollar.” Steil’s final warning: If governments, including the United States, do not heed his advice, ”the market will privatize money on its own.”

As Georgetown professor and CFR historian Carroll Quigley noted in Tragedy and Hope, the goal of the banking families and their minions is ”nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole … controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.”

Former Clintonista Dick Morris, a political consultant in the White House after Clinton was elected in 1992, told Sean Hannity on Fox News in March 2009, ”A major thing is happening in London at this G20 meeting, and then they hide it, they camouflage it, they don’t talk about it. The coordination of international regulation, i.e., what they are going to do is to subject our Fed [Federal Reserve] and our SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] to the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. That’s what’s on the agenda. They call it coordinating regulations. What it really is is putting the American economy under international regulation. People who have been shouting that the UN is going to take over and that the New World Order is here have been, frankly, right.” Sean Hannity chimes in that ”those conspiracy people have been saying this for years … you’re not wrong.” It is the ”international regulation of the financial institutions” we need to worry about, warns Dick Morris. It will be under ”IMF control … Remember that the IMF is run by Europeans and is backed by the US.” As designed by our rulers, a global ”super currency” will ultimately require a world government. Morris primarily blames the Europeans for this and he is only partly right – it’s a scam long since thought up by international bankers mainly based in Europe and the UK, and backed, as Morris admits, by the American financial elite.

The CFR’s Ambition for a World Government
”The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has as its goal to drown the independence and national sovereignty of the United States in an all-powerful government that rules the entire world.” These words come from Admiral Chester Ward, a former CFR member and Chief Judge of the U.S. Navy, in his book ”Kissinger on the Couch,” 1974.

The Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations was an investigative committee of the U.S. House of Representatives between 1952 and 1954. The committee was originally created by House Resolution 561 during the 82nd Congress. The Reece Committee investigated tax-exempt foundations such as Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie. The committee’s report found that:

”On the international front, foundations, and the interlock of some of them with certain organizations, have exercised a strong effect upon our foreign policy and upon public education in international matters. This has been accomplished by vast propaganda, by supplying executives and advisors to government, and by controlling much research in this area, and by their control of the media of mass communication. The net result has been to promote ’internationalism’ in a particular sense—a form directed toward ’world government’ and a derogation of American ’nationalism.'”

They pointed out that major foundations ”actively supported attacks upon our social and government system and financed the promotion of socialism and collectivist ideas.” The Reece Committee made it clear that the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) was ”essentially an instrument of the United States Government” and that their ”publications are not objective but are overwhelmingly biased toward promoting the ideology of globalization.”

In 1959, ”The West in Crisis” by James Warburg was published, in which he proclaimed, ”…a world order without world law is an anachronism…a world which fails to establish the rule of law over nations will not be around for long. We live in a dangerous transitional period, from an era of entirely sovereign nation-states to an era of world government.” James Warburg was a member of the CFR and a founder of the United World Federalists. He was also FDR’s financial advisor and the son of Paul Warburg, who wrote the Federal Reserve Act.

In 1960, Elmo Roper (CFR), the financial director of the Atlantic Union Committee, gave a speech and wrote a pamphlet, both titled ”The Goal is World Government.” In his call for global governance, Roper said, ”It is clear that the first step towards world government cannot be completed until we have advanced on the four fronts: the economic, the military, the political, and the social.”

The idea of a world government has always been a concept that elites have patiently pursued. The precursor to their dream of world government was called the League of Nations (LN). The LN was established in 1919 under the Versailles Treaty to promote international cooperation and achieve peace and security in the world. Many felt this was important because the world had just experienced its first world war. The LN paved the way for the modern United Nations (UN).

The organization known as the UN was officially established when representatives from 50 nations met in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, to sign the UN Charter. But the symbolic event was the culmination of years of planning by a private, high-level policy group that had effectively gained control of American foreign policy during the Roosevelt era. Immediately after entering the war, that organization, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), sowed the idea of a world-governing organization for ”peace.”

J.B. Matthews, former head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, said, ”I challenge the idea that the UN is an instrument of peace… It can’t be anything other than a cruel hoax if it were organized from hell for the simple reason to assist and promote the destruction of the United States.”

At the initiative of the State Department, the 26 nations at war with the Axis Powers came together and called themselves the United Nations in January 1942. Historian Clarence Carson observed:

”Roosevelt worked to avoid the pitfalls that had helped keep the United States out of the League of Nations. His hand is evident in efforts to get the name accepted even before the organization itself had been formed. (Americans continued to refer to their side as the ”Allies” during World War II, not the ”United Nations,” but the latter term was used officially.)”

However, President Roosevelt sought only to implement policies handed down to him from above. In January 1943, Secretary of State Cordell Hull formed a steering committee composed of himself, Leo Pasvolsky, Isaiah Bowman, Sumner Welles, Norman Davis, and Morton Taylor. All of these men—except Hull—were members of the CFR. Later known as the Informal Agenda Group, they drafted the first outline for the establishment of the UN. It was Bowman, the founder of the CFR and a member of Colonel House’s old ”Inquiry,” who first broached the concept. They brought in three lawyers, all CFR men, who decided that it was constitutional. They then discussed it with FDR on June 15, 1944. The President approved the plan and announced it to the public on the same day. FDR sold the UN to the 50 nations that came to the conference in San Francisco in 1945. Among the 47 CFR members on the American public delegation were: Edward Stettinius, the new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, Adlai Stevenson, Nelson Rockefeller, and Alger Hiss. To ensure that the new organization would have its headquarters in the U.S., John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated land for the UN skyscraper.

On July 27, 1949, The New York Times reported how UN Secretary-General and CFR member Alger Hiss wished to transform the UN into a world government in an article titled ”WORLD GOVERNMENT THE KEY TO PEACE, HISS SAYS; Tells Friends’ Seminar He Sees U.N. as Step Toward Creation of Such Body.”

Almost seven months later, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1950, CFR member James Warburg stated, ”We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest.” (Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (1950). Revision of the United Nations Charter: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Eighty-First Congress. United States Government Printing Office. p. 494).

In his 1962 book titled ”Why Not Victory,” former Senator Barry Goldwater recalls that the Senate approved the UN mostly due to representations from the State Department that assured the Senate:

”…it does not constitute any form of world government, and that neither the Senate nor the American people need fear that the United Nations or any of its agencies will interfere in the sovereignty of the United States or in the domestic concerns of the American people.”

The ink on the UN Charter had not even dried when the charter for UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) was introduced in London in November 1945. UNESCO absorbed and expanded the Paris-based International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, which was the vestige of the League of Nations. Julian Huxley, the brother of Aldous Huxley, was the first Director-General of UNESCO. Aldous Huxley wrote ”Brave New World” and ”Brave New World Revisited.” In 1947, Julian Huxley wrote in the foreword to UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy:

”The task before UNESCO … is to help the emergence of a single world culture with its own philosophy and background of ideas and with its own broad purpose. This is opportune, since this is the first time in history that the scaffolding and the mechanisms for world unification have become available… And it seems that I am not the only one who believes that this is the opportune moment to open this new chapter in the history of human civilisation.”

The threat of nuclear war. An antithesis leading to a new synthesis
In 1946, shortly after the latest World War, there were two major armies, the Soviet and the American. If they had joined forces, no other force could have resisted them. A proposal for a world government was outlined in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for several months in 1946. In his book ”Has Man A Future?”, Bertrand Russell describes how it evolved, first as a proposal put forward by David Lilienthal, then in a form developed by Bernard Baruch – an advocate for world government. This ”Baruch Plan” was put forth in discussions in 1946 and was presented to Stalin. By the end of that year, Stalin had rejected it because it required submission to Washington, and the Cold War had begun. Many of these figures would mention the threat of nuclear war to promote their intentions and goals. Bernard Baruch was one of the loudest people to do this with his ”Baruch Plan.” Later, these goals were discreetly turned into law, with the State Department’s publication #7277, titled ”Freedom From War,” written in 1961 (which corresponds to Public Law 87-297).

Of course, all of this was based on deception, as revealed by Major George Racey Jordan, who supervised Harry Hopkins’ Lend-Lease program, which sent military supplies to the Soviet Union during World War II, as the U.S. government was also sending nuclear materials to the Soviet Union during World War II. Major George Racey Jordan was an officer for the United Nations who worked at ”UN Depot No. 8, Lend-Lease Division, Newark Airport, Newark, New Jersey, International Section, Air Service Command, Air Corps, US Army.” Jordan was responsible for shipping American military supplies to Russia during World War II. He testified that he was tasked by the White House and the State Department to deliver components of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, even while the nation was concerned that Russia had stolen the bomb’s secrets. Jordan was meticulous in documenting everything he did and witnessed in his diary, which was full of dates, shipping manifests, and the names of pilots who flew missions. A congressional committee led by Donald T. Appell, a former FBI agent and special investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), investigated the matter and removed all doubts about the authenticity of his notes regarding the shipment of American military materials, secret documents about industrial and military developments, and uranium (uranium oxide and uranyl nitrate) and heavy water (deuterium oxide).

As British-born economist and historian Antony C. Sutton pointed out, there was massive support for the Soviet Union throughout the entire Cold War. Sutton noted the extent of this support in his testimony before Subcommittee VII of the Republican Party’s Platform Committee in Miami Beach, Florida, on August 15, 1972:

”In a few words: there is no such thing as Soviet technology. Almost all – perhaps 90-95 percent – came directly or indirectly from the U.S. and its allies. In fact, the U.S. and NATO members built the Soviet Union. Its industry and its military capacity. This massive construction job took 50 years. Since the revolution of 1917. It was carried out through trade and the sale of facilities, equipment, and technical assistance.”

Alan H. Belmont, a former Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), authorized the release of the following volumes by Dr. Sutton at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, around 1968-1973:

Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1917-1930 [Publication 76] Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1930-1945 [Publication 90] Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1945-1965 [Publication 113]

Complete concurrence supporting the general argument of this study comes from an excellent source: Joseph Stalin. In W. Averell Harriman’s June 1944 report to the U.S. State Department on a discussion between Eric Johnston and Stalin, the following significant statement was made:

”Stalin praised the help given by the United States to Soviet industry before and during the war. He said that about two-thirds of the large industrial enterprises in the Soviet Union had been built with American help and technical assistance. (Source: US State Dept Decimal File, 033.1161 Johnston, Eric/6-3044: Telegram June 30, 1944)

An interesting letter regarding how W. Averell Harriman sneaked illegal projects past the U.S. government in 1925 when he invested millions in developing Soviet manganese deposits, which Evan E. Young discouraged his colleagues in the State Department from investigating, demonstrated the powerlessness of the State Department to challenge the behind-the-scenes power. (How the order creates war and revolution, Antony C. Sutton, p. 58).

Political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: ”For an impressive proof of Western involvement in the early phase of Soviet economic growth, see Antony C. Sutton’s Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development: 1917-1930, where it is argued that ’Soviet economic development during 1917-1930 was essentially dependent on Western technological aid’ (p. 283) and that ’at least 95 percent of the industrial structure received this assistance’ (p. 348). Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking Press; 1970).

H.G. Wells, in his book ”The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution,” in 1933, regarding the interference of the great powers in Russia:

”The method of the covenant and a modus vivendi was already in operation in the case of Russia. It was indeed difficult to say whether the Communist Party or the modern state movement had control; so far had assimilation gone.” (Wells called his world-state movement the modern state movement).

The Baruch Plan was not implemented directly but, instead, it was implemented in a Fabian style. In 1961, the U.S. State Department issued a plan to disarm all nations and arm the UN. State Department Publication #7277, titled ”Freedom From War,” provides a three-step plan to disarm all nations and arm the UN, with the final step being that ”no state shall have military power to challenge the progressively strengthened UN peace force.” Publication #7277 (equivalent to Public Law 87-297) states the following:

Page 10:

”Production of armaments should be prohibited except for those types and quantities to be used by the U.N. peace force and those required to maintain internal order. All other armaments would be destroyed or converted to peaceful purposes.”

It is also referred to on page 11:

”The reduction of the armed forces of the nation to the lowest point consistent with internal safety, and the prohibition of the establishment of military establishments, except those required to support the U.N. peace force.”

It is also referred to on page 12:

”The establishment and effective operation of an International Disarmament Organization within the framework of the U.N. to ensure compliance at all times with all disarmament obligations.”

This was later updated in a document called ”Blueprint for the Peace Race.”

This becomes especially alarming when considering the information disclosed in Sutton’s Hoover Institution studies, which show that this ”threat” was being aided all along and built up to serve as the antithesis, leading to a new synthesis. Later, many of these figures would propose gradual regionalization and the entanglement of nations in complex webs of international relationships as preferable to simply announcing a world government governed by the UN.

Former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Gardner, who wrote an article in Foreign Affairs in April 1974 titled ”The Hard Road to World Order,” provided insight into how the world state should be constructed:

The ”Hard Road” article began with Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Richard Gardner lamenting that like-minded internationalists had failed to achieve what he called ”instant world government.” He proposed a new, more effective path to establish an all-powerful global superstate, stating, ”In short, ’the house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It will look like a great ’booming, buzzing confusion’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault. Of course, for political as well as administrative reasons, some of these specialized arrangements should be brought into an appropriate relationship with the central institutions of the U.N. system, but the main thing is that the essential functions be performed.”

The Hidden Flexible Network of Globalization
The economist and author Jeff Faux has described in his books how there exists a global ruling class today that, through their networks, some of which CFR member Anne-Marie Slaughter has identified, operates outside the democratic process:

”The actual work performed by the Davos Party (the ruling class that meets in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum)…is done through a tightening network of second- and third-party corporate managers and bureaucrats… This network is essential to save the Davos Party from having its dream of globalization dashed by the paradox described by philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that only a world government could free us from the plagues of war but that a world government would be so tyrannical as not to be worth it… The Davos Party faces a ”catch-22” over how to rule the economy in the absence of world dominion:

Davos needs global rules to advocate for capital’s freedom. Enforcing rules requires world dominion. World dominion would curb capital’s freedom.

The style of these networks is eclectic, informal, and behind the scenes. Democracy is kept at a distance. Anne-Marie Slaughter has identified more than 60 of these informal, horizontal connections that bypass traditionally vertical, global connections between governments, yet these networks involve governmental functions. She calls it a ”divided state” that has the speed and flexibility to ”perform many of the functions of a world government – legislation, administration, and adjudication – without the form.

Free from the constraints of a responsible government, globalizing bureaucrats can recruit others into the network in ways that would be inappropriate or illegal in their home country… ”As international actors from NGOs to corporations have already recognized, globalization and the IT revolution make networking the best choice of organizational form in a rapidly changing and varied environment. By comparison, formal international organizations increasingly resemble slow dinosaurs.” (The Global Class War, pp. 169-172).

Award-winning scholar in public order and anthropology, Janine R. Wedel, is one of the few modern academics who, in her book Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market, has identified and studied some of these networks whose players make public decisions without public input in areas ranging from domestic to foreign and financial policy. Maneuvering through their many spheres of influence, they challenge both government regulations on accountability and corporate ethical competition and ultimately answer only to each other.

Dr. Wedel has identified what she calls ”flex networks” of individuals who share a common ideology and, by playing a series of related and intertwined roles, work together to manipulate the policies and actions of governments, corporations, and NGOs. She labels these individuals ”flexians” for how they use multiple simultaneous and sequential roles to fulfill the goals of their flex networks, often to the detriment of the companies and authorities they represent or advise. Dr. Wedel presents her thesis and then illustrates it with three detailed examples of flex networks, the individuals involved, and the global effects of their actions over time. These flex networks exert a significant determining influence on global political actions and do so beyond any control, oversight, or even recognition by any national or international authority.

The establishment as a concept
Sometimes referred to as ”Analysis of the Power Elite” or ”Establishment Studies,” this examination of causal relationships regarding the nature and extent of political power, who wields it, and how it is exercised is critical to understanding the relationship between the state and organized crime. There is a similarity between this analysis and what researcher Peter Dale Scott calls ”Deep Politics,” the critical examination of the confidential reality behind superficial appearances, an attempt to unmask the true face of power, revealing the elite among social, economic, and financial groups and individuals who benefit from the coercion exercised by the state.

The establishment as a concept was first used in England in reference to the established (or official) state church, the Anglican Church or the Church of England, created by the illegitimate ruler and despot Henry Tudor during the Protestant Reformation. The 19th-century writer William Cobbett later expanded the concept to include the networks of financial institutions related to the Bank of England, elite public schools and clubs, and publishing organs (such as ”the old Times”) that the ruling aristocracy used to train and maintain its oligarchic bureaucracy, which staffed the British Empire. Cobbett referred to this power elite as ”the Thing.”

As Leonard and Mark Silk observed in their masterful book, ”The American Establishment,” the British historian A. J. P. Taylor later adapted Cobbett’s ”the Thing” to ”the Establishment” in an article from 1953 in The New Statesman, followed by journalist Henry Fairlie’s use of the term in The Spectator in 1955.

The broad concept was soon adopted by a wide range of American analysts, with a focus on the current ruling elites. These analysts included Richard H. Rovere, C. Wright Mills, Dan Smoot, Phyllis Schlafly, Carroll Quigley, John Kenneth Galbraith, and G. William Domhoff.

These authors recognized that while the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits an established religion, the American nation indeed, like its British cousin across the pond, has an Establishment, complete with its own theological canon and doxology for statesmanship and espionage. Its ”Vatican” is the Council on Foreign Relations. Its primary source of wealth and alms has been the financial empires of Morgans and Rockefellers, who created the Federal Reserve, the great enabler of the welfare-warfare state. Many of its chief seminarians studied at Ivy League institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, or Columbia; some, in particular, at Yale, where they were initiated into Skull and Bones.

The political scientist Andrew Bacevich’s recent book, ”Washington Rules,” which summarizes and exposes the ”rules” and ”credit” for the American establishment’s foreign policy, is another excellent example of an analysis of the power elite or ”establishment studies.” Bacevich focuses on the immediate post-war era in history, tracing the establishment’s bipartisan ”foreign policy consensus” through the Cold War to Bush/Obama’s war on terrorism. He sees this as the critical gestation period, a time that implements ”the American century” as described by Henry Luce, of the Truman administration’s creation of the national security state and its containment doctrine as a public rationale for global political intervention and a military-industrial complex (and George F. Kennan, Robert A. Lovett, and the Dulles brothers’ secret policy of rollback or liberation through covert operations carried out by the OPC and the CIA).

But the establishment’s rules and credo were outlined on papyrus long before 1948. They were presented by visionary prophets of profit, plunder, and empire fifty years earlier during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection against the Americans.

A central figure was the crafty Elihu Root, later the first chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, who, like his interventionist, war-criminal accomplices Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama, was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He was the establishment’s abused archetype in the category of ”wise man,” old media’s designation of chosen servants to power, ranging from Root to the recently deceased Richard Holbrooke – Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, a former CEO of Lehman Brothers and a board member of AIG until July 2008 (just before the bailout packages).

Before Truman’s celebrated ”wise man” came the older era’s ”four evangelists.” Led by Elihu Root, his protege ”Colonel” Henry L. Simpson, along with ”Colonel” Edward M. House and Raymond B. Fosdick, this little-known quartet was the real architects behind the American Establishment and its interventionist gospel of the welfare-warfare state. They are the ones who wrote its credo, which has transformed the American republic into a bloated and oversized empire.

The World Order Under American/Western Hegemony
According to the researcher Peter Dale Scott, there is today within many states a security sphere that ”invades” the sphere of democratic politics. An autocratic security force or a ”state of security” appears to operate in parallel with the regular democratic state, and this duality or ”double state” was already described by Hans Morgenthau in 1955. According to Morgenthau, the American state includes both a ”normal state hierarchy” that operates in accordance with the rule of law and a more or less concealed ”security hierarchy” that not only operates in parallel with the former but also monitors and exerts control over it. Morgenthau believes that this security aspect of the state can ”effectively veto the decisions of the regular state governed by the rule of law. While the ’democratic state’ provides legitimacy for security policy, the ’security state’ intervenes as needed, for example, in an emergency, by limiting areas within democratic politics. In fact, it is the security state that is the apparatus that defines when and if a ”state of emergency” will appear. This aspect of the state is what Carl Schmitt, in his 1922 work ”Political Theology,” called ”sovereign.”

”National Security and Double Government” is a book from 2014 by Michael J. Glennon, a professor of international law at Tufts University. Glennon argues based on theories of the British author Walter Bagehot (1826-1877), who discussed the structure of the British government in his book ”The English Constitution” (1867). He claims that Bagehot’s thesis of a ”double government” in 19th-century Britain also applies to the United States today. Glennon points out that there are two institutions in control: the ”Madisonian” public institutions of Congress, the presidency, and the courts, which maintain the necessary public illusion that they are responsible and have control over policies, while a secretive ”Trumanite” network of unelected, unaccountable national security bureaucrats actually creates and determines policies that the Madisonians implement as their own. Glennon warns that control by the Trumanite network weakens constitutional restraints on government, such as the separation of powers and oversight, and results in less democracy and an increased risk of despotism.

Glennon discovered that the American government is divided between the three official branches of government on one hand – the ”Madisonian” institutions enshrined in the Constitution – and several hundred unelected officials who perform the actual work of a constellation of military and intelligence agencies on the other hand. These officials, referred to as ”Trumanites” in Glennon’s terminology because they emerged from the national security infrastructure established under Harry Truman, make the real decisions in the field of national security. (To conduct the Cold War, Truman created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Department of Defense, CIA, NSA, and National Security Council.) ”The United States, in short,” Glennon writes, ”has moved beyond a mere imperial presidency to a bifurcated system – a structure of double government – in which even the president now exercises little substantive control over the overall direction of U.S. national security policy. The experience of threat, crisis, and emergency has been influential phenomena that have created and nurtured the United States’ double government. If al-Qaeda did not exist, the Trumanite network would have to create it – and Glennon suggests they may well have done so.”

In several states, and especially in the USA, there is an extensive war elite that actively seeks to initiate military conflicts in order to lead them and benefit from them. Because the war economy (weapons and drugs) is as important as the world’s oil economy, American secret forces can play a central role in calibrating violence in different regions to profit from arms and drug smuggling, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In some cases, the American strategy for prolonging the war is to support both sides of the conflict. But in addition to the goal of making economic gains from the war, this strategy also has a more profound geopolitical objective: to defend the US-dominated unipolar world order against economic multipolarity and increasing influence among the major rivals. US superior military strength and intelligence hegemony can only be transformed into power and real global dominance if there are ongoing conflicts – wars and terrorist attacks – that threaten the multipolar power structure in the economic-political world order.

Just a few years ago, a secret US Army Special Operations Field Manual, FM 3-05.130, leaked in December 2008, confirmed that the penetration and mobilization of criminal networks and terrorist networks are fundamental pillars of US unconventional warfare (UW), defined as: ”activities conducted by, with, or through irregular forces in support of a resistance movement, insurgency, or conventional military operations.”

According to FM 3-05.130, modern IW theory includes the following components: ”insurgency; COIN (counterinsurgency); UW; terrorism; CT (counter-terrorism); FID (foreign internal defense); stability, security, transition, and reconstruction operations (SSTR); strategic communication (SC); PSYOP; civil-military operations (CMO); intelligence operations (IO); espionage and counter-espionage (CI); transnational criminal activities, including drug trafficking, illegal arms trading, and illicit financial transactions supporting or aiding IW” (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-5).

The document explicitly states that its ”strategic purpose [is] to gain or maintain control or influence over populations and support these populations with political, psychological, and economic methods.” While both IW and UW aim to gain influence over ”relevant population groups,” UW, unlike IW, is ”always by, with, or through non-conventional forces.” In other words, local proxies drawn from suitable right-wing groups and/or organized crime are the tools to exert ”influence” over ”relevant population groups.”

This special operations document confirms that a fundamental function of deep political activities is ”calibrating violence” to a large extent through criminal and terrorist networks to manipulate the conflict’s intensity and influence the political choices of the civilian population in accordance with the demands of 1) maintaining specific forms of capital accumulation (such as arms, defense, and drug trafficking), and 2) the perpetually one-sided American dominance of the global political economy by suppressing inter-imperialist and geo-economic rivalries internal to the transnational capitalist class and their respective home countries.

An abundance of evidence in public records confirms that UW doctrine has manifested itself in a policy of cooperation with Islamist extremist networks after the Cold War. This policy was designed to destabilize strategically important regions, forcing the local population to accept integration into the global political economy in a way that benefited American investors, particularly in terms of controlling hydrocarbon resources. However, the strategic complexity of UW doctrine goes much further, and other consequences of this may include taking control of profits from organized crime and also putting potential rivals in a dependent position on the USA, thereby strengthening the American-dominated unipolar world order.

The authors of FM 3-05.130 believe that ”appropriately integrated manipulation of economic power can and should be one of the components of UW.” It doesn’t matter that such ”manipulation” can and did indeed result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq before the US invasion and occupation in 2003, as well as in a dozen other countries that defied the USA.

Chile and Nicaragua are illustrative in this regard: President Richard Nixon, the disgraced, promised to ”make the economy scream” before the 1973 coup; similarly, crippling sanctions and an economic embargo were imposed on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Various sanctions against regimes ”can build and maintain international coalitions that carry out or support American UW campaigns.

Like all other instruments of US national power, the use and effects of economic ”weapons” are internally related and must be coordinated carefully. ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] must work closely with DOS [Department of State] and intelligence agencies to determine which elements of the human terrain in UWOA are most receptive to economic intervention and what secondary and tertiary effects are likely after such an intervention. The United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) presence overseas and its mission to employ groups of people provide a channel for strengthening economic incentives. DOCs can similarly enhance their routine influence among American companies operating abroad. Furthermore, IO effects from economic promises kept (or broken) can prove critical to the legitimacy of US UW efforts. Practitioners of UW must plan for these effects (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-7).

ARSOF’s plans for UW take an integrated approach and argue that they ”can and should exploit the active and analytical capabilities that exist among the financial instruments of U.S. power.” However, the application of financial warfare, including ”coercive influence” over ”actors” at the national and other levels regarding the availability and terms of ”loans, aid, or other financial assistance,” depends on the willingness to comply with the will of the United States. The authors argue that ”such exercise of financial power must be part of a discreet, integrated, and consistent UW plan.” In other words, threats, bribes, and economic disruption can work effectively to gain the attention of the recalcitrant states not ”on board” with the USA. In Chapter Two, ”Financial Instrument of U.S. National Power and Unconventional Warfare,” they explicitly state how the IMF, BIS, and WB are financial weapons of U.S. national power.

As the researcher in international security policy, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, points out, despite the extensive documentation of the consistent history of American imperialism, terrorism, and antihumanism, members of the academic community often harbor erroneous and benign interpretations of these interventions that stand in contrast to the abundance of evidence. It is interesting to observe the extent to which relevant facts are rarely examined by those who adhere to the dogma of Western benevolence in their understanding of Western policy – and when they are examined, the logical consequences are ignored. Most often, the question of whether Western policy is justified is beyond debate, and the analysis is framed on the basis of the righteousness of Western motives, serving as the foundational cornerstone for political discourse.

Attempts to dismiss ”the more familiar and malevolent motives” behind Western neoliberal imperialism, where policy is determined by a multitude of factors ultimately related to protecting profit and its boundless pursuit, result in fact in ignoring vast amounts of empirical data.

For example, Richard Barnet argues that industrial states seek to project power and influence for security purposes. As Michael Parenti notes:

”Indeed, the field studies in Barnet’s book Intervention and Revolution point to the business world, rather than national security agencies, as the primary motive for American intervention. Anti-communism and the Soviet threat appear to be less of a source of policy than a propaganda ploy to scare the American public and garner support for overseas commitments. The motives Barnet dismisses seem to be relevant in his field studies in Greece, Iran, Lebanon, and the Dominican Republic, specifically the desire to secure access to markets and raw materials, and the need to, as several policymakers have explicitly stated, safeguard the free world market throughout the world.”

Fundamentally, Barnes’ theories and analysts like him rely on simply ignoring historical and empirical facts in which the anti-human/economic agenda behind Western policy is proven not only by the reality of the policy itself but by documented statements of policy makers. For example, in his historical study ”The Ambiguities of Power,” the British researcher Mark Curtis shows how the Cold War was not primarily motivated by security reasons – but that the main motive was hegemonic economic dominance, which resulted in a conflict of interest; the actual security threat barely existed in reality but was exaggerated to justify the pursuit of neo-imperial economic interests. Professor of Politics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Richard Falk, argues on this aspect that: ”Despite the defense as a strong pretext, the actual course of American foreign policy has been much more contradictory in practice, seeking as much space as possible for capitalist expansion.” However, as Falk also notes: ”The main challenges to capitalist control in recent decades have been domestic pressure from revolutionary nationalism.” For this reason, ”the consistent, bipartisan pattern of American anti-nationalist intervention in the third world… is clear in its primary nature ’aggression’ as a quality… This pattern of aggression has translated into massive human suffering for many non-Western societies, often extending over a wide range of years.”

A particular example of disregarding quite obvious facts can be witnessed when liberal writers point out that empires can actually cost more than they bring in revenues. This is true in the sense that empires can cost more than they generate in income. For example, from 1950 to 1970, the U.S. government spent several billion dollars supporting a corrupt dictatorship in the Philippines, with the aim of protecting only one billion dollars of American investments in the country. The conclusion that can be drawn, therefore, is that maintaining such a global empire is detrimental to American interests. Nevertheless, as Michael Parenti sees it, this conclusion is based on ignoring another critical fact – that even though the regime for an imperial nation may spend more than it earns, the people enforcing the law make up the mass of the domestic population; while the people reaping the profits are an elite minority. This point was eloquently described by Thorstein Veblen in ”The Theory of the Business Enterprise” (1904), where he pointed out how the empire’s profits are concentrated in the hands of a privileged business elite. At the same time, the massive costs, which can far exceed the profits, are extracted from what Veblen aptly called ”the industrious many.” In other words, transnational corporations reap the empire’s revenues, but they contribute little or nothing to the general cost.

”The expenditures required in the form of weapons and support to make the world safe for General Motors, General Dynamics, General Electric, and all the other generals are paid by the U.S. government, that is, by the taxpayers… In fact, when it comes to protecting their money, our money is no obstacle.”

The common argument put forth to discredit an analysis where neo-imperialistic economic imperatives are identified as the overarching driving force behind policy-making doesn’t even attempt to address the wealth of empirical data that supports the analysis but rather complains about the alleged ”simplicity” of the conclusion, as it clearly ignores other variables such as geopolitics, culture, ethnicity, nationalism, ideology, and morality. In fact, this argument reveals no logical flaws in the conclusion. All it demonstrates is that the economic hegemonic agenda of the West – the existence of which has already been proven – is not immune to these other variables but relies on their support. This simply points to further areas of study where the analyst can discover the exact way in which Western culture, ideology, and morality provide self-justification and motivation for the economic hegemonic agenda of Western politics and their interaction with the phenomena of geopolitics and nationalism. To disprove the conclusion, one must show that the galvanized evidence for it is false – but this is never done.

As Dr. Michael Parenti points out:

”The existence of other variables such as nationalism, militarism, the pursuit of national security, and the quest for power and hegemonic dominance do not force us to either dismiss economic realities or treat these other variables as isolated from class interests. Thus, the willingness to expand American strategic power into specific regions is forced at least in part by a desire to stabilize the area along lines advantageous to politico-economic elite interests – which is why the region is targeted in the first place. In other words, different aspects work in a circular effect on each other. The growth of foreign investments gives rise to a need for military protection. This, in turn, creates a need to secure bases and establish alliances with other nations. The alliances now expand the ’defense lines’ that must be maintained. So a particular country becomes not only an ’essential’ asset for our defense but must itself be defended like any other asset.” (A Critical Review of The Objectives of U.S. Foreign Policy in The Post-World War II Period by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed.)

Global Pirates vs. Tax Fairness
At least $21 trillion of unreported private financial wealth was owned by affluent individuals through tax havens at the end of 2010. This amount is equivalent to the size of the economies of the United States and Japan combined. It could be as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets held offshore by high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), according to the report ”The Price of Offshore Revisited,” believed to be the most detailed and accurate study ever done on financial assets in financial offshore centers and secrecy structures.

They consider these numbers conservative. This is just financial wealth and excludes the maze of real estate, yachts, and other non-financial assets owned through offshore structures. Research for the Tax Justice Network (TJN) by James Henry, formerly chief economist at McKinsey & Co, comes amid growing concerns about a massive and growing gap between the rich and the poor in countries around the world. Complementing this research is another TJN study titled Inequality: You Don’t Know the Half of It, which shows that all studies of economic inequality have so far failed to account properly for this missing wealth. The conclusion that inequality is much worse than we think.

Henry relies on data from the World Bank, IMF, UN, central banks, the Bank for International Settlements, and national treasuries, triangulating his results against data reflecting demand for reserve currencies and gold, and data on offshore private banking studies by consulting firms and others. The impact on inequality following from this new data is staggering. They estimate that fewer than 100,000 people, i.e., 0.001% of the world’s population, now control over 30% of the world’s financial wealth.

Who are the real debtors? Henry’s research shows that a large number of countries, traditionally seen as debtors, are in fact creditors to the rest of the world. For the focus group of 139 mostly low- and middle-income countries, traditional data shows they had a total external debt of $4.1 trillion at the end of 2010. But when taking their currency reserves and offshore private holdings of their richest citizens into account, the picture is reversed: these 139 countries have a total net debt of minus US$10.1-13.1 trillion.

In other words, these countries are net creditors to the world, and on a massive scale. The problem here is that their assets are held by a few affluent individuals, while their debts are shouldered by their ordinary people through their governments. These countries are painted as having a debt problem. But the true picture is radically different: they have a hidden offshore wealth problem. When it comes to combating poverty, it’s hard to imagine a more pressing global issue to address.

Henry writes, ”What may be most interesting about the new landscape of global inequality that we have discovered is the recent emergence of a genuine transnational private elite – a relatively small part of the world’s population that shares surprisingly similar needs and interests, rooted in financial secrecy, banking services, taxation, and regulation.

Indeed, more individual members of this private elite can assume many of the same attributes as multinational corporations (MNCs), while even MNCs have become more like individuals as far as political rights are concerned. This means that super-rich individuals are increasingly acting as citizens in multiple countries at once, even if they may be ”resident” ”nowhere” for these purposes; that they have the ability to move rapidly across borders; and that they have the ability to acquire ”representation without taxation,” the ability to exercise local political influence in several jurisdictions, independently of the taxes they pay in a given jurisdiction.

It also means that, as a group, this trans-border elite has a strong self-interest in pushing for lower income and wealth taxation as well as weaker state regulation, more ”open” markets, and weaker restrictions on political influence and campaign spending across borders – with an enormous ”transnational army” of private banks, law firms, accounting firms, lobbyists, and PR companies ready to do their bidding.

Thus, the objective increase in global inequality of individual wealth that we have begun to measure here raises the issue of asking a number of questions about the resulting political and social consequences for the traditional nation-state.” (Source: Tax Justice Network, The Price of Offshore Revisited: Press Release and The Price of Offshore Revisited: Key Issues.)

The ruling class’s establishment of global governance with CFR and BIS at the helm