Amerika

“Those who do not learn from history are condemned to re-live it” – George Santayana.

More and more people are taking an increasingly critical view of the worldwide phenomenon called globalization. Not that they are against constructive cooperation among the sovereign nations of the world on common goals, but rather that they reject this present model of globalization.

As we now have it, globalization can be defined as an ideology which identifies the sovereign Nation-state as its key enemy. It thus seeks to weaken, dissolve and eventually destroy it as a social institution in order to replace it with new supranational world management structures. These structures tie in with the political objectives and economic interests of a small number of highly concentrated and very powerful groups which today drive and steer the globalization process in a very specific direction.

These power groups consist of private interests which have today achieved something unprecedented in human history and which can de describe as the privatization of power on a global scale. Globalization is an understatement of that which former US presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and George Bush, each at different historical times described as a “new world order”.

A New World Order! Clearly, when former president Bush indiscretely used that term a decade ago, the Establishment quickly silenced and replaced it by the more neutral and harmless sounding “globalization” which, nevertheless, today has but one meaning: Anglo-North American neoimperialism on a planetary and all-encompassing level.

Who are they? What do they want?

The process we have described is in no way anonymous or secret, because the power groups promoting and driving globalization are in full view of public opinion: multinational corporations ­ especially the Fortune 500s accounting for 80% of the US economy -; the global financial structure which includes banks, investment funds, stock exchanges and commodity markets; multimedia monopolies; major Ivy League universities; international multilateral organizations and, most important, key governmental posts in the United States and other industrialized nations.

What is not immediately obvious is the fact that all these players in this veritable wheel of global power have one thing in common: their key managers, financiers, strategists, bankers, government officers, academics and shareholders belong to the same network of think tanks. This network forms a common hub steering the wheel of world power on its course.

Among these key think tanks – which are really geopolitical planning centers –, the role of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Brookings Institution, the RAND Corporation and the Center for Strategic & International Studies, among others, are of vital importance.

A bit of history

To properly understand today’s world one needs to look back on yesterday’s, in order to see how things came about. It was back in 1919 when a small group of influential bankers, lawyers politicians and academics ­ all of whom were taking part in the Paris peace negotiations between the victorious Allies and the vanquished Central Powers of Europe ­ met in the Parisian Hotel Majestic and reached a transcendental agreement: they decided to create a “think tank”; a sort of “gentlemen’s club” or lodge from which they could design the kind of “new world order” which would properly accomodate the colonial interests of the Anglo-North American alliance.

In London, that think tank would take on the name of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), whilst in the United States it would be known as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), based in New York City. Both organizations had the unmistakeable seal of the social strategy of gradually imposing a socialist order as a means of mass control which was then being promoted by the Fabian Society, financed by the Round Table Group which was in turn created, controlled and financed by South African magnate Cecil Rhodes, the international financial dynasty of the Rothschilds, and the British Crown.

The CFR got its initial support from the most wealthy, powerful and influencial families in the United States which included Rockefeller, Mellon, Harriman, Morgan, Schiff, Kahn, Warburg, Loeb and Carnegie (the latter in particular through its own front organization the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace).

In order to express and thus propagate its influence among elite circles, one of the first measures of the CFR consisted in founding its own journal which to this day remains the world’s premier publication on geopolitics and political science: Foreign Affairs. Among the CFR´s first directors, we find Allan Welsh Dulles, a key figure in the US intelligence community who would later consolidate the spy structure of the CIA; journalist Walter Lippmann, director and founder of The New Republic; J.P. Mogan corporate lawyers; bankers Otto H. Kahn, and Paul Moritz Warburg, the latter a German emigrée who came to the United States and in 1913 designed and promoted legislation which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank which to this very day controls the financial structure of the United States. When the Second World War ended in 1945, the Federal Reserve Bank was supplemented by the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank, both of which were masterminded, planned and designed by the CFR at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944.

Another member of the CFR and one of its first directors was geographer and president of the American Geographical Society, Isaiah Bowman, who would re-draw the map of Central Europe after the First World War thus ushering in times of grave turmoil in that continent which would lead to the Second World War. It was CFR lawyers like Owen D. Young (president of General Electric) and Charles Dawes (J P Morgan Bank), who in the twenties designed and promoted the “refinancing” plans for Germany’s war reparations debt as imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. It was top Federal Reserve Bank directors and CFR members who would generate the monetary distortions leading to the 1929 financial crisis and ensuing Depression.. It was CFR directors who through the powerful media under their control such as the NBC and CBS radio networks and newspapers like the The Washington Post and The New York Times, would coax and press public opinion to break US isolationist neutrality and embark the nation on another European war in 1939, which they themselves had been promoting since the early thirties.

The Second World War

At the very start of this European war in which The United States would only formally take part in 1941, CFR members set up the War & Peace Studies Group which literally became a part of the State Department, and designed its major foreign policies towards Germany, Italy, Japan and its allies. Later, they began preparing for yet another “new world order” after the then forseeable Allied victory. In this manner, the CFR designed and promoted the creation of the United Nations to manage world politics and some of its key economic agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank, through its members Alger Hiss, John J. McCloy, W. Averell Harriman, Harry Dexter White and many others.

Once the war ended, US President Harry Salomon Truman would establish the far-reaching national security doctrine which was based on the doctrine of containment of Soviet expansion based on the proposal of yet another CFR member and at that time US Ambassador to Moscow, George Kennan, who described his ideas in a famous seminal Foreign Affairs article which he signed with the pseudonym “X”; as well as on national security directive NSC68 issued by the National Security Council which was drafted by CFR member Paul Nitze. The same can be said of the so-called “Marshall Plan” designed by a CFR task force and later implemented by W. Averell Harriman.

Power structures

Although it is a little known organization among public opinion, the CFR is very powerful and has grown in influence, prestige and breadth of activities. So much so that today we can say without doubt that it conforms the “world’s mastermind” silently directing the course of the many complex and highly volatile social, politicial, financial and economic processes throughout the world. There is not a people, region or aspect of human life which is not affected by the CFR’s influence ­ knowingly or unknowingly ­ and it is the fact that it has nevertheless been able to remain “behind the scenes” that makes the CFR so exceptionally powerful.

Today, the CFR is a discreet organization counting among its more than 3.600 members, the best, most capable and powerful people wielding great influence in their respective professions, corporations, institutions, governmental posts and social environments. In this way, the CFR brings together top corporate officers of financial institutions, industrial giants, the media, research organizations, academics, top military officers, governmental leaders, university deans, trade union leaders and study center investigators. Their fundamental objectives consist in identifying and assessing a wide range of political, economic, financial, social, cultural and military factors spanning every imaginable aspect of public and private life in the United States, its key allies and the rest of the world. Today, thanks to the enormous power wielded by the United States, that breadth of activities of the CFR literally spans the whole planet.

Its researches and investigations are carried out by different task forces and study groups within the CFR which identify opportunities and threats, assess strengths and weaknesses, and design far-reaching strategies to promote its interests worldwide, each with their respective tactical and operative plans. Although such intensive and far-reaching tasks are made within the CFR, the key issue to understanding its enormous success lies in the fact that the CFR per se, never actually does anything under its own name but rather it is its individual members who do so, and this they do from their formal posts as chairmen, CEO’s and directors of major corporations, financial institutions, international multilateral institutions, media, and key posts in government, univerisities, the armed forces, and trade unions.. They never invoke or even refer to the CFR as being their main seat of planning and coordination.

The CFR members are powerful indeed as today we find among them (and we only refer to but a handful of the 3600 CFR members), people like David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, international speculator George Soros, supreme course judge Stephen Breyer, CEO of Lowes/CBS Laurence A. Tisch, present secretary of state Gral. L. Colin Powell, CEO of General Electric Co. Jack Welsh, CEO of CNN W. Thomas Johnson, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post / Newsweek / International Herald Tribune Katherine Graham, vicepresidente of the United States, former secretary of defence and former CEO of Halliburton Richard Cheney, president George Bush, former national security advisor to president Clinton Samuel “Sandy” Berger, former CIA director John M. Deutch, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank Alan Greenspan, president of the World Bank James D. Wolfensohn, CEO of CS First Boston Bank and former governor of the Federal Reserve Bank Paul Volcker, reporters Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters, former CEO of CitiGroup John Reed, economists Jeffrey Sachs and Lester Thurow, former treasury secretary, ex CEO of Goldman Sachs and present director of CitiGroup, Robert E. Rubin, former secretary of state and “mediator” during the the Malvinas Islands War between Argentina and Britain Gral. Alexander Haig, the “mediator” in the Balcan conflict Richard Holbrooke, CEO of IBM Louis V. Gerstner, democratic senator George J. Mitchell, republican representaitve Newt Gingrich, and present national security advisor Condoleeza Rice, among many other.

In the business world, the top corporations of the Fortune 500 ranking all have a senior director who is a member of the CFR. These corporations together have a combined market value alomost twice the gross domestic product of the United States, concentrate the better part of the wealth and power of the country, and control key resources and technologies throughout the world. Together they employ over 25 million people in the US alone and account for over 75% of its GDP. In short, they wield gigantic power, leverage and influence in the US and in our planet.

We thus find here the key to the CFR’s enormous effectiveness in that its decisions and plans are drafted and agreed in its meetings, conferences and task forces behind closed doors, and are then carried out by its different members from each of their formal posts in different organizations. And what powerful posts these are!

If, for example, there were a series of plans agreed regarding, say, the globalization of the economy and the financial system, or which countries shall have peace and prosperity and which war and famine, then we can suppose that the coordinated action of personalities such as the president of the United States, his secretaries of state, defense, commerce and treasury, CIA director, the main international bankers and financiers, captains of industry, media media, reporters and writers, military officers and academics, heads of the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization, shall be able to coordinate concrete, effective and ­ no doubt ­ almost irrestistible actions. This has been so over the past eighty years.

Real power and formal power

In order to trully understand how the world really works, we must first understand the difference between formal power and real power. What the media propagate with a very high public profile every day in their newscasts on television, radio and in the press is nothing but the concrete and visible results of the actions of formal power structures, particularly those of national governments and the technocratic and supranational financial and corporate structures. However, real power levers are far less visible and they are the ones which plan out what will occur in the world, when and where it shall take place and who shall carry it out.

Formal power is short term and has high public profile; Real power is long-term and has almost no public profile. Formal power is “public” ­ Real power is “private”. As the United States is today’s sole planetary superpower, it is reasonable to conclude that this world power structure ­ as that is what it truly is ­ provisionally manages this veritable world government from the territory and the political and economic structures of the United States. This by no means implies that the majority of the people of the United States necessarily form part of this scheme of things, but rather that their elites and ruling classes do. We are thus speaking of a power group which operates within the United States (as it also does within the United Kingdom, Germany and, Japan, and through its agents in Spain, Argentina, Brasil, Korea and many other countries), but which is not necessaily identified with the people of Unisted States (nor any of the other countries with whose peoples, their needs and interests they need not heed nor be in agreement with).

In order to better understand the true nature of the United States, we should keep in mind that ­ especially in what refers to its foreign policy ­ the US “Administration” as they themselves so aptly call their government, is based in Washington DC, which is the seat of formal power in the US, whilst its real power structures are located in New York City. I.e., the US is managed from Washington DC but governed from New York City. Once we grasp this, then many other things automatically fall into place. Additionally, the true planetary center of power sits not in New York, but in London….

That this should be so is understandable when one remembers that the exercise of real power requires compliance with a set of rules and conditions such as continuity spanning years and decades in order to achieve far-reaching goals and complex strategies which will, in turn, span the entire planet, its nations and resources. This requires long-term planning: 20, 30 and 50 years ahead. These power elites well know that there is no greater threat to political continuity and consistency in the design and execution of such worldwide strategies, than to have them subjected to the democratic process with imposes a high public profile on its leaders who must heed the voice of the public at every step they take, and the constant power interruptions which democratic electoral processes entail.

How much better it is to operate discreetly, from what one could formally describe as a mere gentlemen’s club like the CFR, of which powerful and influential men and women can be officers, directors and chairmen for decades at a time without ever having to render any explanation to anybody but their own peers. In this manner, 3.600 powerful persons can exert gigantic policital, economic, financial and media influence over countless millions throughout our entire planet. It goes without saying that the media impose “political correctness” which can only be expressed through two major political parties ­ democrats and republicans in the US, labour and conservative in the UK, CDU or SPD in Germany, radicals and justicialists in Argentina ­ which are mere variations of the same basic teners. In practice, stable Western democracies have all conformed to what is in practice a one-party system with slightly different internal factions.

What we are describing is in fact the central hub of a veritable network of powerful men and women, considering that the CFR is in turn supplemented by a myriad of similar institutions both inside and outside of the United States. Among these we can mention a handful: The Hudson Institute, The RAND Corporation , The Brookings Institution, The Trilateral Commission , The World Economic Forum, Aspen Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtigen Politik, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

All of these think tanks bring together the most intelligent, best prepared, creative and ambitous men and women in a wide range of fields and disciplines. They are paid and rewarded very handsomely both economically and socially, so long as they clearly and uncompromisingly align themselves with the basic tenets of the CFR’s political objectives. These are nothing less than the creation of a private world government, the sistematic erosion of the structures of all sovereign Nation-states (though, naturally, not all of them in the same way, at the same speed nor at the same time), the standardization of cultural values and social norms, the spreading of the globalized financial system on a speculative-usurary basis, and the management of a global war system in order to maintain the necessary social cohesion of its own masses through permanent coaxing and alignment against real or imagined enemies of “democracy”, “human rights”, “freedom” and “peace”.

Thus, in order to better understand the world, one needs to read and assess what the CFR ­ or rather, its individual members – says and propagates, as many of its activities are not secret but rather merely discreet. Any person visiting their headquarters on fashionable Park Avenue and 68th Street in New York City as the undersigned has done many times in recent years, will be able to obtain a free copy of their latest Annual Report which describes its main activities and the full list of its 3.600 members. So the information is readily available for all who wish to see it.

It is, however, up to us to then take the trouble of cross-checking all the information regarding the CFR’s members with what each really does in their professional, corporate, academic and government activities. We also need to look back on modern history and assess the exceptional leverage which the CFR has had throughout the twentieth century both on its own as well as in conjunction with its sister organizations, thus triggering and influencing ideologies, public events, wars, formation of alliances, political crimes, covert activities, mass psychological warfare, economic and financial crises, promotion and destruction of political and business personalities, and other high-impact events ­ many of them clearly difficult to admit or confess ­, which have all however marked the course of humanity in our stormy modern times.

It would seem that we are all kept too occupied and fascinated as pasive spectators of the whirlwind of events which take place every day in the world so as to ensure that none of us ever thinks of looking elsewhere for suitable explanations to today’s grave crises, which would thus enable us to identify not so much the effects and shocking results of many such political decisions and covert actions which are taken, but rather their real and concrete causes and sources.

In order for this gigantic mass psychological warfare ­ for that is what it is all about – to succeed, the mass media play an essential and vital role which cannot be sufficiently stressed. For they are the instruments whose goal it is to undermine and neutralise the capacity of independent thought among the world’s population. That is the role of the world’s mass media like CNN, CBS, NBC, The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, Le Figaró, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Corrieri della Sera, Le Monde, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Business Week, RTVE, all of which are directed by key people belonging to the CFR and/or its sister organizations in the US and elsewhere.

Implications for Argentina Within this context, we can say that the local media in Argentina, our educational and our mainstream politicians are all aligned to the globalization process, and are set to achieving three key objectives:

1. To hide from public opinion how the world really works, knowing that if we cannot properly understand and diagnose the origin of our problems and weaknesses, we can hardly expect to find the proper solutions to them. We are thus (mis)led into believing that we are at “peace”, when in actual fact a veritable and violent total war is being waged against Argentina since over half a century on the political, economic, financial, media, educational, technological and environmental fronts. It is primarily a psychological war.

2. To make us believe that we are in a difficult situation but that “things will improve” so long as we reach yet another agreement with the IMF, privatize even more state interests, reform our federal and provincial governments to the World Bank’s liking, reform our labour and social legislation so that “international investors” will smile on us, and do our homework implementing IMF and World Bank “recipes”. The truth is that to say we are in a “difficult situation” is an absurd understatement. Argentina is in a terminal situation and if we do not awaken to this reality in a few years more ­ a decade at most ­ we shall cease to exist as a country altogether.

3. To make us believe that, whether we like it or not, there´s nothing we can do to stop “globalization”. The truth is, however, that there are myriads of hings that can be done to neutralise the adverse effects of globalization. These basically imply recovering the Nation-state so that it will comply with its basic and fundamental functions of:

– integrating internal ;conflicting social forces,

– foreseeing all possible threats and opportunities from without and within, and

– leading the Nation on a political course defending its national interest.

These functions imply that there exists a sovereign Nation-state which Argentina today no longer has. We have become a colony and we thus must, as a first step, promote a true Second Declaration of Independence in order to then found a Second Republic. The implications and inspiration for our region and even further afield in the world of such a revolutionary act would be truly momentous. Additionally, one must bear in mind ­ and it is beyond the scope of this brief article to go into further details ­, that the global financial infrastructure is on the brink of a controlled worldwide collapse which is something that the CFR has been carefully planning for through their so-called Financial Vulnerabilities Project and New International Financial Architecture programmes. As we become aware of these realities, the road which we need to tread becomes increasingly clear too and, in truth, things then do not appear as complex as one would have thought. It is all basically a question of thinking with our own minds and not with that of our enemies; of starting to assess and defend our national interests, which implies having our own view of world events, interests and forces, and then defending them according to our needs, true possibilities and idiosincracy. In actual fact, we need not “reinvent the wheel” because the CFR itself gives us a blueprint model for successful political, economic, financial and social planning and management for national power. Why not learn from them? Why not form our own network of think tanks bringing together a wide range of local, regional and like-minded interests, players and thinkers from different fields, putting them all to work on promoting the national interests of Argentina and its neighbours, so as to recover sovereignty and self-determination for our poeples in a consistent and coherent manner, irrespective of what the world power players may try to impose upon us? This would imply understanding what globalization really is: an immensely large range of threats and opportunities which we need to avoid and take advantage of, as the case may be. On every subject having potential impact on us, we need to begin to understand which are our relative strengths and weaknesses in order to be able to successfully confront them, if not today then certainly in the future. That requires proper planning. Medium and long-term planning. That requires trying to be always one step ahead of the Enemy, of achieving and keeping an edge and an advantage over coming events.

No doubt this would lead us to properly designing policies consistent with our national interest, which in many instances will not coincide with the interests of todays power brokers to which end we need to seek and work closely with nations and organizations in Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe with a common goal of neutralising the negative effects of global domination. In truth this would imply creating a New Argentina. We have many of the necessary tools already at hand; we have millions of countrymen ready to accept the challenge if we but explain to them clearly and forcefully the odds which are at stake; and millions more beyond our borders with whom we can work arm-in-arm for a common Cause.

So it is a question of understanding that in politics there are two kinds of people: those who are actors in the political arena and those who merely look on. The Council on Foreign Relations is a key active actor in the world political arena where they make their strength felt. Is it not time that we start doing the same in our own country?

* * *

(1) Warburg belonged to a prestigious and powerful Jewish German family of bankers, closely related to the Rothschilds and the Schiff s, owners of New York-based banking house, Kühn Loeb & Co. of which Paul Warburg was a partner. When the First World War ended, eloquent circumstances found one Warburg ­ Paul ­ on the Allied side of the negotiation table in Versailles, whilst another Warburg ­ his brother Max ­ was on the side of the vanquished Germans. Jakob Schiff, Paul Warburg’s partner, had in turn financed the Japanese against the Russian Tsar during the 1905 Russian-Japanese War…..

(2) Today Kennan is 98 years old and still writes for the CFR, an eloquent symbol of his continued influence spanning more than half a century among Real Power brokers in the CFR.

(3) Notably, W. Averell Harriman was a business partner of Prescott Bush, republic senator from Connecticut, father of former president George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of president George W. Bush.

(4) CFR rules of conduct specifically ban its member from ever publicly invoking the CFR in any way or manner.

(5) The reader will find detailed information in the author´s Spanish language bookl El Cerebro del Mundo: la cara oculta de la Globalización (Ediciones del Copista, Córdoba, Argentina, 1999, 404 pages.).

(6) Think tank closely linked to the US Air Force which, among other things, created the Internet.

(7) Founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller and bringing together interests of the power elites of the United States / Canada, Europe and Japan. Its ideologue is Zbigniew Brzezinski, professor at Georgetown University and Columbia University and former National Security Advisor to president James Carter (also a CFR and Trilateral member as was the case with most of his cabinet).

(8) Among these “enemies” of the “free peoples of the world” over the past decades we can mention Fascism, German Nationalsocialism, the Japanese, Communism, environmental contamination, terrorism, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Islamic “fundamentalism”, militarism, and “antisemitism”, among many others.

(9) This might sound a bit strong and yet at the pace things are occuring in the world, such a forecast may hold true for just about any country in the world. Just think what everydoby would have thought only twelve years ago ­ at the beginning of 1989 ­ if they had been told that only three years later the following would take place: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the USSR into fifteen independent republics and their abandoning Marxism for Capitalism. One would have thought such a person as being totally exagerated if not downright stupid and yet…..that is exactly what occurred. It does make one think…

(10) Elsewhere, the author of this article has written extensively on the need to found a Second Argentine Republic.

Tags: Adrian Salbuchi, Geopolitics and Eurasia