“It was our belief that the love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome. Its appeal is to the material part, and if allowed its way it will in time disturb the spiritual balance of the man.”
- Ohiyesa, Wahpeton Dakota[1]
How many of you saw the video of the beautiful Russian beach in Crimea on Sunday, June 23, 2024? You see a beautiful blue sky, warm sandy beach, Russians relaxing, and, unlike any American beach I’ve seen in my adult years, you’re not packed in like sardines on the sand with ropes limiting the swimming area to a depth of five feet of water or less. That’s a type of freedom unfamiliar to many Americans.
Then suddenly cluster bombs come out of the sky, bombs that hammer down courtesy of the US government (USG), who, without consulting or truthfully informing the American people about the full nature of the conflict, without even admitting the nature of its own role in Ukraine’s 2014 coup that jumpstarted this entire war, decided to arm Ukraine with the stupidly named ATACM missiles—made by Lockheed Martin—and utterly inhumane cluster bombs.
Some people will say that beach wasn’t Russian, it was Ukrainian; they’ll insist that Crimea never had a referendum to secede from Ukraine and rejoin with Russia. They’ll insist that Russians invaded and forcibly annexed Crimea. I’ve already cast severe doubts on this line of reasoning in my essay from July 11, 2023: “Weaknesses of the National Security Strategy 2022: Part 11.My secession is legal, yours isn’t: Defending the UN Charter.”[2] I personally find much reason to believe that Crimea did hold a valid referendum that genuinely expressed the decision by the vast majority to secede from Ukraine and to rejoin Russia. But no matter whether you consider Crimea and its predominantly ethnically-Russian population to be Russian or Ukrainian territory, the people on that beach were victims of an attack that would not have happened without the weaponry, funding, pressure, and propaganda of an avaricious USG, anxious to get its hands on Crimea for its own purposes.
What should have been a beautiful day at the beach from beginning to end was atrociously destroyed, with at least 5 people killed and more than 150 people injured.[3] Likely every one of them was traumatized. Likely not one of them will ever be able to relax with peace of mind on a beach again.
As an American, witnessing this scene was one of the most shameful moments of my life. I’m sure if I’d seen videos of multiple other moments around the world where the USG has struck with invasions, covert action, proxy wars, and coups—numerous nations including Somalia, Angola, Bolivia, Guatemala, Iraq, Iran, Greece, the Philippines, and the Koreas—I’d have felt the same horror and shame.
To see people happily enjoying a beach, and then running in trauma from cluster bombs made by obliging American CEOs, scientists, investors, and laborers, approved by American policymakers, shipped by obliging American transporters, and launched by American puppets in Ukraine was a moment of fury. These Americans all got paychecks for what they did. But “just doing one’s job” is no excuse for performing work that leads to immoral, unjust outcomes. Their income is red with blood.
For me personally, the beach scene was a jarring blow of American reality that emphasized my own powerlessness within my nation, for I’d gone to college with plans to learn the Russian language and study international relations with the hope of improving relations between the two nations. But the USG doesn’t want friends abroad. It wants puppets and servants.
[Action taken on video to protest the USG’s role in bombing the Crimean beach and to point out the uselessness of a US education and the inability of knowledge to play any role in shaping US foreign policy in order to prevent those people from dying and suffering on the beach.]
I’ve already devoted numerous previous essays to describing the onslaught of provable lies issued by the USG, US media, and US think TANKS, who together form the US propaganda machine. These are lies that falsely portray Putin as malicious and aggressive by pointing to words he never said and ideas he never implied to use as “proof” of his belligerent intentions. The purpose of these lies is to promote US violence and US weapon shipments to Ukraine in a proxy war against Russia. Only with such lies can the USG portray its own immoral, belligerent behavior as moral.
In this essay, I’d like to talk about the mentality of the elite breed of Americans who’ve undemocratically selected themselves to be our top foreign policymakers for the past two centuries, because what struck that Crimean beach on Sunday was more than cluster bombs: US Greed, Self-Righteousness, Ignorance, Irrationality, Callousness, Prejudice, and Groupthink were all raining down hard upon those people, upon the water, the sand, and the many forms of life within the Black Sea—all of whom deserve our respect. I talk about those mental vices in the manuscript I’m completing, but here, let’s focus on the Hive, the insulated, isolated swarm of US officials and their colleagues who create the horrible thing called US foreign policy and who have now moronically brought the United States undeniably into war against Russia.
A. Plutocracy (rule by the wealthy) and the Council on Foreign Relations. The role of greed in US foreign policy began on Day 1 of US history, in its first foreign policies towards the Native Americans. This greed continued to be fed by the acquisition of half of Mexico, the Civil War, the coup in Hawaii, and the oppression-and-slaughter-in-the-name-of-liberation in Cuba and the Philippines—the gateway to the huge markets of China.
In 1921, greed took another step forward when a bunch of big bankers, corporate lawyers, and wealthy business leaders evidently felt that the USG desperately needed their help in order to create US foreign policy that would match their own perspective on life and place top priority on serving their interests. They created the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and funded it with their millions, millions made off the backs of other people’s labor and other people’s resources. The CFR was not the beginning of plutocracy in the United States, it was a continuation of it, a hardening and solidification of plutocracy that coordinated their efforts so as to greatly enhance plutocrats’ essentially propagandistic grip over society and their dominating power over the USG and the world.
The two major dynasties of US wealth at the time were those of the banking magnates, railway owners, and monopoly makers—the Morgans, who originally dominated the CFR, and the Standard Oil monopoly makers, the Rockefellers, who dominated the CFR after WWII.[4] Since then, the CFR has continued to be an organization that primarily serves the peculiar mentalities and interests of the ultra-wealthy, particularly the New York City financial sector.
Laurence Shoup and William Minter’s research, as revealed in Imperial Brain Trust and Wall Street’s Think Tank, reveals staggering facts. In the period 1976–2013, approximately the years of the Carter through the Obama administrations:
- 62 percent—nearly two-thirds—of the 167 directors of the Council on Foreign Relations “had assets of over $10 million, were longtime officers or directors of major US corporations, or [were] a principal of a major law firm. They inherited or married wealth or made all or key parts of their careers as power wielders in the capitalist-class-dominated corporate world. A number of these individuals are also known to be billionaires or near billionaires.”[5]
This fact is annoying enough to those of us who find such wealth to be a supreme indicator of selfishness and injustice. After all, somewhere along the way to those riches, people and environment were exploited: something was priced unfairly high for customers, wages were unfairly low for workers, resources were undervalued, or negative side effects such as pollutants weren’t paid for and cleaned up.
If trade of labor and resources is fair and money is given in an even exchange for that labor and resources, one person shouldn’t be getting a whole lot richer while the rest struggle to survive. Tremendous wealth for only one side of an exchange only comes about if the scales have been tipped and the system rigged to favor that side. The same holds true for why the Native Americans are now so impoverished. They were cheated and are still being cheated today.
The statistic about CFR directors’ affluence and corporate power takes on much greater significance with regard to the nature of US democracy when you combine it with these statistics about the top foreign policymaking officials running the US government, officials who include presidents, vice presidents, secretaries of state, defense, and treasury, CIA directors, National Security Advisors, and World Bank presidents:
- From 1945 through 1972—the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, 45 percent of the top US foreign policy officials, including the infamous Henry Kissinger, were CFR members.[6]
- Even more shocking, from 1977 through 2014—the Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr, and Obama administrations, of the 96 top US foreign policymaking officials, 77 of them—80 percent—were CFR members.[7]
In other words, nearly every single one of the big names that were ever mentioned in foreign policy news during that time were CFR members, with membership begun generally prior to their holding public office, which means they already possessed wealth and power unrepresentative of the American population. This small sampling of CFR members’ names from those administrations may sound familiar: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert McNamara, Alexander Haig, George Schultz, Colin Powell, Frank Carlucci, James Baker III, Casper Weinberger, William Casey, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, John Negroponte, Richard Cheney, Brent Scowcroft, Robert Gates, George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Susan Rice, Zalmay Khalilzad, and David Petraeus.[8]
Now combine those facts with this quote from Stephen Kinzer, whose observations suggest the true purpose of US national security:
“The list of private American citizens who are seeking to make money from Azerbaijani oil or to encourage investment here reads like a roster of the national security establishment. Among the most prominent names are former Secretaries of State Henry A. Kissinger and James A. Baker 3rd, former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, former Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, former White House chief of staff John Sununu, and two former national security advisers, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski.”[9]
Who can look at these facts about CFR wealth and CFR membership in the US foreign policymaking establishment and possibly deny that we live in a plutocracy—government of the people, by the wealthy, for the wealthy?
Who can deny that American students are being cheated when they’re encouraged to get college degrees without being told that they’ll never be qualified for foreign policy making positions unless they’re able to make at least a million dollars or obsequiously serve those who do? They’re not even likely to have their ideas published in books unless they’re CFR members.
So why are political science, international relations, peace studies, and other related majors even offered to college students without explaining the wealth prerequisite to them? Why aren’t people from the lower and middle classes told that they’re wasting their money and time on these majors? This is a complete scam.
[Action taken in video in protest of all the lies and for making us think that if we worked hard we could help shape US foreign policy and bring kindness, understanding, and justice to the world.]
You can’t expect students to read about this wealth prerequisite for foreign policymaking power in the US Constitution, because it’s not there. The US Constitution also fails to include the plutocratic fact that US presidential candidates have to possess or receive millions of dollars in order to be considered serious candidates or else they’ll be laughed off stage. In a plutocracy, wealth equates to eligibility.
Not all CFR members have $10 million in assets, but it’s undeniably an organization of the ultra-wealthy. As Shoup and Minter report, the CFR is an organization that networks and serves the financial interests of ultra-wealthy Americans and then shamelessly promotes these Americans’ interests as “US interests.” Unbelievably, it is this organization that has completely dominated the creation of US foreign policymaking since at least the 1940s![10]
Proof of this policy domination is apparent in the CFR membership within top US foreign policymaking positions, in the specific policies proposed by the CFR and then enacted by the USG, and even in statements by policymakers and the media such as when the New York Times referred to Richard Haass’s position as former CFR president as having been that of “the de facto dean of the US foreign policy establishment.”[11] As Shoup and Minter point out, even foreign nations know that the CFR is the real US foreign policymaking organization, and foreign governments will meet with CFR members—whether they’re officially within the USG or not—to discuss future US foreign policy.[12]
B. The Mono-Mind in Power for 245 Years, Despite Lacking Credentials for the Job. The USG likes to harp on the fact that Russia’s President Putin has been in power as president or prime minister for 25 years rather than the US-approved period of either 4 or 8 years. But what does it matter if we have these elections? What difference does it make if we have this Republican or that Democrat as US president—no matter what their gender, no matter what their ethnicity—when they all have the same mono-mind on foreign policy? One wants war done this way, the other wants war done that way.
It’s been the same ignorant, psychologically immature mentality in power—it’s been the same mono-mind on the throne—for 245 years. How can a mono-mind deliver democracy? How can it deliver truth? Every US administration proudly marches to the same tune of the Cultural Script—the repetitively staged drama in US foreign policy—that justifies the immoral infliction of violence and hostility by the “good guys” upon the “bad guys” as allegedly essential in order for morality to allegedly triumph over evil.[13] US policymakers euphemistically label their agreement on this unsophisticated perspective “bipartisanship,” as if it’s so worldly wise that everyone can shake hands on it, when it’s really nothing more than the monopartisanship that results from the insularity of their breed and their deliberate exclusion of the values, perspectives, and intelligence of the vast majority of Americans who are forced to endure the suffocating plutocratic domination of the Democratic and Republican political factions.
How do we know it’s been one breed in power for centuries? Just take a look at the names of top officials in each presidential administration, their former and future occupations, their wealth, and the policies they advocate! Administration after administration since the 1800s, you see the same bankers, big businessmen, and corporate lawyers steering foreign policy! Not only that, the same names reappear, with families intermarrying and assumptions of self-righteousness reinforced by approvals from social ties within the same breed. When you read the details of the types of people repeatedly running the show called US foreign policy, it’s absolutely disgusting! What they all have in common is ultra-wealth. It’s a giant club that does not represent Americans and that doesn’t even grasp our varied values and perspectives on life.
Why is this breed of people steering the ship? Sure, they’re good at making money. They’re clever at persuading foreign nations to take out loans with interest. Their schemes are brilliant to take advantage of foreign nations’ poverty, such as Ukraine’s, to force them to privatize their utilities and land in order to qualify for a loan with interest. They’re quite skilled in laying off workers and suppressing wages to raise dividends for investors. They’re top notch at helping corporations skirt health, worker safety, and environmental law to save on profits. And they masterfully coordinate the usage of false propaganda with their own goals of demonizing foreign competitors to take over their share of markets.
But what on Earth do any of these money-making, business, and marketing skills have to do with creating foreign policy that is just, ethical, democratic, understanding, and peaceful? It’s like asking a con-artist to be a priest. Is there even a hint that these people have above-average capabilities and ethics in the field of foreign policy?
And what reason do we have to possibly believe that they create foreign policy better than a team consisting of non-violent conflict resolution experts, peace studies professors, musicians, environmental scientists, actresses, psychologists, ministers, nurses, mothers, mechanics, and truck drivers? Each of these are experts at a certain set of skills that are far more helpful to the creation of effective foreign policy than the skill of making millions.
The truck driver’s top priorities are to stay in the lines, obey the rules of the road, respect other drivers on the road, drive defensively—not aggressively, don’t attack other drivers, keep one’s own vehicle safe, don’t harm others’ vehicles, respectfully treat each vehicle as an equal, don’t hog the road, and, above all, avoid fatalities. These are goals that US foreign policymakers are not only incapable of achieving but for which they fail to even strive to attain. Truck drivers’ training and occupation give them foreign policy skills and instincts far superior to that of big bankers, financiers, businessmen, corporate lawyers, and marketing strategists who obsessively think in terms of rivalry, competition, hogging the road, and pushing others into the ditch.
C. Biden Administration Plutocrats. Let’s look at the characteristics of several Biden administration officials described in a 2021 ABC News article. Several had expanded their already colossal earnings to an astounding degree since working in the Obama administration in 2009. Some of these officials have left their positions since 2021, but at that time, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s assets were $1.5 million. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jen O’Malley Dillon had assets between $2.2 million to $4.7 million. Jill Biden also had a chief of staff, Julissa Reynoso, whose assets were between $4.1 million and $14.8 million. Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s assets totaled between $4.4 million and $12.2 million.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had assets between $7.5 million and $27.5 million. Domestic Policy Council Director Susan Rice reported assets between $36 million and $149 million. National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, whose assets multiplied 25–30 times since 2009 thanks in part to his job at the investment firm BlackRock, reported assets of between $45.2 million and $205.7 million. And coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients, now White House Chief of Staff, had assets that totaled between $89.3 million and $442.8 million.[14] [This paragraph was corrected in this written form of the essay. In the video, I confuse some information for Deese with Zients.]
Does the Democratic Party think that only millionaires are capable of leading the United States? Are only the wealthy allowed at the lunchroom clique called the US foreign policymaking establishment? Or is it that millionaires, whose minds are particularly attuned to wealth, are more likely to be the venal type who can be bribed to do the bidding of those who work their strings? Do those who work the parties want spineless people in power they can buy and manipulate?
So the members of Biden’s administration, like all the ones before it, are good at accumulating personal fortunes. Frankly, I’m not impressed. The skill of making a personal fortune is not transferrable to foreign policy. In fact, the skill of making money is a liability: it’s a weakness, not a strength, because it shows a dysfunctional, overly keen interest in wealth that could very likely lead these people to perceive both US tax dollars and foreign nations—their resources, markets, and laborers—as food at a feast, ready to be devoured.
The questionable suitability of these individuals for public office becomes even more suspect when you examine how these people make their money, which companies they’re tied to financially, and which ones will benefit from their services after they leave public office. It doesn’t matter whether these officials abide by superficial “ethics” laws that require them to give up their stocks and financial ties for the few years they’re in office. They know they’ll have open arms awaiting them when they return to the private sector.
Zients worked for the private equity investment firm Cranemere, whose chair is a CFR member. Deese worked for the private equity investment firm BlackRock— the world’s largest asset manager and a CFR corporate member that already met with Ukraine’s President Zelensky in December 2022 about reconstruction. Funny how US taxpayers fund US bombing and proxy missile attacks and then US taxpayers fund US reconstruction of what’s been bombed.
Secretary of State Blinken founded and Psaki advised WestExec Advisors— which helps bridge connections between the US Defense Department and information technology companies such as Google and Amazon—both CFR corporate members[15]—to help facilitate drone warfare.[16] Defense Secretary Austin was on the board of weapons manufacturer Raytheon.
Sullivan gave strategic advice about marketing and government policy for Macro Advisory Partners.[17] Hunter Biden sat on the board of Ukraine’s private natural gas company Burisma. Victoria Nuland advised Albright Stonehenge Fund and was the CEO of Center for a New American Security, funded by the weapon industry, the high-tech industry, and the defense ministries of Estonia, Finland, Norway, the UK, and the US.[18] If we were to discuss the stocks owned by these officials, we’d find even more cause for concern as well as more CFR corporate connections.
Every one of these connections should be cause for investigation with regard to the ulterior financial and strategic interests that may be represented by these US officials and, what’s more, with regard to the narrow psychological worldview they represent—a worldview unrepresentative of the American people but highly representative of those who see goals and solutions in terms of weapons, drones, high-tech warfare, fossil fuels, investment abroad, and profits. The conflicts of interests that are grossly apparent here aren’t only about money and bribes. These conflicts of interest also pertain to psychological and social conditioning; to a commonality and constriction of mentality that wreaks havoc on the USG’s ability to create foreign policy based upon justice, law, understanding, caring, and peace as these policymakers instead submerge the US foreign policy mission to base goals of pursuing extraordinary wealth, superiority, and victory over rivals.
Yet a Biden White House spokesperson reassured ABC News, “‘These White House officials are experienced government leaders whose past private sector experience is part of a broad and diverse skill set they bring to government service.’” Broad and diverse? They’re all millionaires! They’re good at making money, but what’s that got to do with creating international relations based upon justice, equality, mutual understanding, and peace? The spokesperson defended them further, “‘They have returned to government because of their deep commitment to public service, their desire to help bring our nation out of this time of crisis, and their strong belief that government can work for the American people.’”[19]
Cut the crap. If these officials really wanted to serve people, why do they hoard their wealth? If they’re trying to bring the nation out of crisis, why are they bringing it into war with Russia and soon China? They’ve come back to finish the job they did in 2014, when they supported Ukraine’s coup against a democratically-elected leader in their persistent attempts to sever Ukraine from Russia to serve their own avaricious goals and to alleviate their own prejudiced fears. How can they be working for the American people when they don’t ask us what we think but only tell us what we should be thinking? They’ve no commitment to public service other than a kleptocratic commitment to use public funds to serve private interests and to feed the psychological needs of their own imbalanced minds.
Precisely what skill sets are they bringing? Knowledge of how to invest in Ukraine’s rich agricultural land?[20] Knowledge of how to skirt the law? To hide the names of one’s clients? To decide for other nations who their leaders should be?[21] The current war with Russia didn’t start in 2022, it began in 2014 with Ukraine’s coup. Why wasn’t the Obama administration’s role in that coup investigated?
Millionaires may be good at making money and shipping weapons to encourage the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, but those aren’t the types of skills we should be empowering. Their money-oriented lifestyles and mentalities indicate that they’re likely lacking in several qualities and values that are essential to foreign policymaking skills and to the survival of humanity.
D. Grover Cleveland Administration Plutocrats. The plutocratic grip of the ultra-wealthy has been a feature of the USG since at least the 1800s. As a typical example, consider Grover Cleveland’s two terms as US president (1885–1889, 1893–1897). By 1892, many Americans were already dissatisfied with both the Democratic and Republican parties, finding that both were in the grips of corporate interests. So this has been a known fact for 130 years, and here we are still stuck with these two corporate-run, corporate-funded, wealth-oriented parties.
Cleveland’s entire administration was tightly linked to the J. P. Morgan banking dynasty. So what “skill set” does this bring? Cleveland himself was a Morgan man, having been a railroad lawyer whose major clients included the Morgan-dominated New York Central Railroad. Gee! A railroad lawyer! How about that! Could this be why he had the “skill” to call in the military to crush the Pullman Strike? Is it at all possible he was geared to favor wealthy railway owners who preferred that wages be low and safety conditions be non-existent so as to accumulate more profit? And is it possible that much of the land taken from the Native Americans as a result of the notorious Dawes Act that he signed was skillfully sold to more railway owners or wealthy miners? With similarities to IMF loan conditions today, the act essentially forced the Native Americans to privatize their land, abandon tribal ownership, and lose a lot of land in the fraudulent process of destroying their culture.
Cleveland had been a partner in the law firm of Bangs, Stetson, Tracey, and MacVeagh. Tracey was J.P. Morgan Sr.’s brother-in-law. Stetson was J.P. Morgan Sr.’s personal attorney. Cleveland’s secretary of war and secretary of the Navy were both tied with the Morgans, through banking and the New York Central Railroad. Even Cleveland’s secretary of state Richard Olney, who supported a military response to workers’ strikes, was a lawyer on the board of the Morgan-run Boston and Maine Railroad. He later helped J. P. Morgan & Company organize the General Electric Company—a company infamous for its involvement in the weapon industry, environmental destruction, leaking nuclear power plants, and nuclear reactors placed in Japanese earthquake zones.
Olney believed that the time had arrived when “‘it behooves us to accept the commanding position . . . among the powers of the earth.’ And, ‘the present crying need of our commercial interests,’ he added, ‘is more markets and larger markets’ for American products, especially in Latin America.”[22] So it’s not enough to destroy the North American Indians. Let’s destroy the South American Indians.
These men, with their “skill set” of dominating their fellow Americans and foreigners alike in order to make money, have never given up control of the helm of US foreign policymaking. With social and financial links to big bankers, US foreign policymakers skew the entire mission of US foreign policy to the promotion of banking profits rather than the domestic and foreign public good. And they’ve got the “skill set” to interfere in politics at home and abroad to get their preferred dealmakers into leadership positions.
Note that the CIA itself has origins in Morgan interests—not American interests. The forerunner of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, was led by none other than banker magnate Jack P.Morgan’s private eye, “Wild Bill” Donovan, whom Morgan had hired to protect him from Communists, who viewed bankers as arch enemies worthy of assassination.[23] From the start, the CIA had a biased perspective on society that felt the need to protect established wealth and the systems that uphold it.
E. Incessant Rockefeller and Morgan Connections. President Grover Cleveland’s multiple connections with the Morgans seem bizarre and quite unhealthy for a government professing to be representative of the entire American public, but the real shock comes when Murray Rothbard, a central figure of US libertarianism, shows in detail that these types of multiple connections through business, law, banking, and family are typical of most—if not all—US presidential administrations!
This insulated, isolated hive is like a lunchroom clique in school that excludes everyone else, assumes its superior to everyone else, and only circulates with its own kind. These dynamics never disappear! And while it was bad enough in school, it’s downright dangerous in government. The relationships are incestuous in the sense that there’s an inbreeding of financial interests and, even worse, an inbreeding of a certain type of mentality leading to dangerous narrow-mindedness and unfamiliarity with the perspectives and values of other Americans and foreigners.
The USG and US media don’t like to talk about class and divisions of wealth, probably to muffle up the plutocratic nature of the USG. Instead, the USG will talk about divisions of race and religion. And so we can have this “diversity” within the USG that proudly parades people of different races and genders now occupying more positions. African Americans! Asian Americans! Latinos! Women! But guess what! You won’t find diversity of class! All of these colors and genders on parade are rich! Greed and the competitive, materialist mentality of the ultra-wealthy remain at the helm of US foreign policy.
In describing several presidential administrations’ ties with wealthy American social circles, Rothbard provides the disturbing details:
“Indeed, much of the political history of the United States from the late nineteenth century until World War II may be interpreted by the closeness of each administration to one of these sometimes cooperating, more often conflicting, financial groupings: Cleveland (Morgan), McKinley (Rockefeller), Theodore Roosevelt (Morgan), Taft (Rockefeller), Wilson (Morgan), Harding (Rockefeller), Coolidge (Morgan), Hoover (Morgan), and Franklin Roosevelt (Harriman-Kuhn, Loeb-Rockefeller).”[24]
Every administration in this list from 1893 to 1945 was in the “sphere of influence” of one of these families! The presidential administrations were serving, it would seem, at the bidding of wealthy clans.
F. Council on Foreign Relations: the King Bee of the Hive. Nowhere is the hive more apparent than in the Council on Foreign Relations, already introduced above, which represents the plutocrats who hijacked US democracy with their predatory capitalism while all the while pretending, or perhaps believing, that they uphold democracy. I call it the King Bee rather than the Queen Bee because women, “qualified women,” that is, weren’t even allowed in the organization until 1970. My suspicion is that the required qualifications pertain to wealth and power: these women have to match the men in their dedication to the pursuit of wealth, their prejudiced outlook on the USG’s adversaries, and their self-serving belief that US foreign policy helps the world when it helps investors access more markets and resources abroad.
Shoup’s Wall Street’s Think Tank describes in detail the numerous influential organizations tightly associated with the CFR—with CFR members in leading positions in these organizations or with corporations being CFR corporate members themselves. A small sampling of Shoup’s extensive listing includes:
- Think TANKS, such as the Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, German Marshall Fund, Center for New American Security, and Open Society Institute of CFR member George Soros;
- Private policy groups, such as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs;
- Leading lobbying groups;
- Leading corporations, such as ExxonMobil, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, ATT, and defense contractors Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Electric;
- Leading commercial and investment banks, such as JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Citibank/Citigroup;
- Private equity and other non-bank investment firms, including Blackstone, BlackRock, and the Carlyle Group;
- For-profit strategic risk and advisory corporations, including Kissinger Associates, Albright Stonebridge Group, and RiceHadleyGates;
- Leading universities, including Harvard and Yale;
- Major foundations, including the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy; and
- Leading media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Robert Murdoch’s Fox News and Wall Street Journal.[25]
No wonder the US propaganda machine can so easily issue lies about Putin that reverberate from media to university professor to think TANK analyst! Shoup and Minter emphasize that for decades the CFR has long placed a priority on shaping public opinion and artificially setting narrow parameters of discussion.
If these bankers, financiers, corporate lawyers, and CEOs want to have a club where they chat about foreign policy, that’s fine. However, they do not have a right to impose their views onto US foreign policy. They do not have a right to use their power and wealth to persuasively steer US foreign policy or to shape, frame, and limit media discussion and public opinion. And they do not have the right for the class of people they represent to overlap to such a great degree with US policymakers. They represent less than 2 percent of the US population.
Yet the CFR is essentially one-and-the-same as the US foreign policymaking establishment. Even when foreign policymakers are not CFR members, the CFR has enormous influence over US foreign policymakers, they’re considered the “go to” place for policy ideas and for foreign policy appointments.
Why? Because of their money?
I suppose the rest of us might as well return to the caves from whence we came because without those millions in assets, surely our brains are just too dumb to function above the bare minimum. It’s a wonder we know how to use a fork and spoon. Nonetheless, we can’t stay in the cave! We’re supposed to keep working down in the mines for the masters or pursuing college degrees that lead to nowhere to pump the system with our money. This caste system called US democracy needs us to purchase things and get the work done so they can profit off our lives.
But seriously: do CFR members and their affluent colleagues mistaken their wallets for their brains? With CFR directors having $10 million in assets, where do you think their brains are going to be focused?
Let’s demand right now that US foreign policymakers have these credentials and skills:
- knowledge of US foreign policy history—including policies towards Native Americans, the history of US political interference, election interference, and coups abroad, the motivations behind those who promoted these policies, and the consequences of US policies,
- in-depth knowledge of the histories, cultures, and religious and ethical beliefs of other nations,
- knowledge of foreign languages,
- awareness and appreciation for differing perspectives on a variety of economic systems, including capitalism, socialism, Islamic economic ideology, and traditional Native American economic ideology,
- personal familiarity with a representative range of people from a variety of socioeconomic classes and ideologies both abroad and domestically,
- experience living, even as guests or volunteer workers, at home and abroad in the homes of the middle class and the poor,
- a high level of personal awareness of environmental problems at home and abroad caused by corporations, by weapons manufacturing, use, and wastes, by the nuclear, fossil fuel, and chemical industries, and by wars,
- in-depth knowledge of and talent in non-violent conflict resolution,
- in-depth knowledge of and talent in cooperative negotiation techniques based not upon bribes and threats but upon egalitarian relations and mutual understanding, and with the goal, not of domination of one side by the other, not of an agreement between elites who do not represent their people, but of cooperative, mutual satisfaction of all sides of conflict and all those who are represented,
- high sensitivity to others’ thoughts and feelings, including foreign adversaries,
- abilities to engage amicably in cooperative dialogue with those of different perspectives, including foreign adversaries,
- knowledge of human development—including child raising, human relations, and human dynamics,
- understanding of psychological imbalances related to obsessions with wealth, black-and-white thinking, prejudice, preoccupations with competition and rivalry, self-worth, aggression, domination, and excessive fears of domination,
- in-depth understanding of and respect for international law and the US Constitution,
- a firm grounding in ethics that is not based upon selfishness, greed, ignorance, or prejudice against adversaries.
In closing, let’s interview some CFR members to see if they’re qualified to work in US foreign policymaking. OK, you first, what are your qualifications? Oh, these credentials don’t exist? But you’re good at banking? You’re good at laying off employees to bring in higher dividends to investors? Oh, and you’re quite skilled at compelling foreign nations to privatize their land and utilities so that US companies and investors can step in? And you’re clever at provoking riots abroad and using money to pay off assassins for a coup? Oh, and I see your specialty is using US taxpayer money to bomb nations’ infrastructure so that US taxpayer money can then pay Bechtel to reconstruct. Ah, and you’re good at spinning a story about foreign policy to demonize a foreign leader, get a US puppet in power, and help your clients’ profits soar. Well, I’m sure that’s all very nice in some sort of abstract way and I appreciate your interest, but we’re looking for people who are a better fit for this job of US foreign policymaker.
Kristin Y. Christman graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Dartmouth College with a BA in Russian, and she holds Master’s degrees in Slavic languages from Brown University and in public administration from SUNY Albany, Pi Alpha Alpha National Honor Society for Public Affairs and Administration.She has also studied at the University of Leningrad in the former USSR and at the University of Salamanca, Spain. While her college degrees proved to be pretty pointless and led nowhere, Kristin has been independently researching and writing about US foreign policy and peace since 9/11. Her YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@kristinchristman777 , focuses primarily on US-Russian relations and US propaganda in the Ukraine crisis, the Paradigm for Peacemodel, and the Weaknesses of the National Security Strategy 2022, with corresponding essays published on https://countercurrents.org. In 2023, Kristin became an associate of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF).
[1] Michael Oren Fitzgerald and Judith Fitzgerald, eds, Indian Spirit, rev. ed(New York: MJF Books, 2006), 29.
[2] Kristin Christman, “Weaknesses of the National Security Strategy 2022, Part 11. My secession is legal, yours isn’t: Defending the UN Charter,” July 11, 2023, https://countercurrents.org/authors/kristin-christman/ and https://www.youtube.com/@kristinchristman777.
[3] Russia Today, “GRAPHIC VIDEO shows moment Ukrainian cluster munitions strike Crimean beach,” Jun. 25, 2024, https://www.rt.com.
[4] Murray Rothbard, “Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy,” Mises Institute, 23-25, https://mises.org/library. This article first appeared in World Market Perspective (1984).
[5] Laurence Shoup, Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2019 (New York: Monthly Review, 2018), 49.
[6] Laurence Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Authors Choice, 2004), 58.
[7] Shoup, Wall Street’s Think Tank, 95.
[8] Shoup, Wall Street’s Think Tank, 95-99.
[9] Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army(New York: Nation Books, 2007), 168-69.
[10] Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, 135.
[11] Michael Crowley, “Richard Haass to Step Down as Council on Foreign Relations Chief,” New York Times, Oct. 19, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com.
[12] Shoup, Wall Street’s Think Tank, 74.
[13] Kristin Christman, “Russia, Ukraine, and the United States: Trapped in a Cultural Script,” Apr. 11, 2022, https://countercurrents.org/authors/kristin-christman/ and https://www.youtube.com/@kristinchristman777;
Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward, Born to Win (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1971), 93-94.
[14] Soo Rin Kim and Libby Cathey, “Obama-era officials return to White House worth millions,” Mar. 21, 2021, https://abcnews.go.com.
[15] Council on Foreign Relations, “Corporate Members,” https://www.cfr.org/membership/corporate-members.
[16] Lee Fang, “Former Obama Officials Help Silicon Valley Pitch the Pentagon for Lucrative Defense Contracts,” Intercept, Jul. 22, 2018, https://theintercept.com.
[17] Jonathan Guyer, “What Will Be Revealed in Jake Sullivan’s Financial Disclosures?” American Prospect, Mar. 15, 2021, https://prospect.org.
[18] Center for a New American Security, donor list, https://www.cnas.org.
[19] Kim and Cathey, “Obama-era officials return.”
[20] Frédéric Mousseau and Eve Devillers, “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land,” Oakland Institute, 2023, https://www.oaklandinstitute.org.
[21] BBC, “Ukraine Crisis: Transcript of Leaked Nuland-Pyatt Call,” Feb. 7, 2014, https://www.bbc.com.
[22] Rothbard, “Wall Street, Banks,” 10.
[23] Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Grove, 2001), 210-17;
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 3-4, 10.
[24] Murray Rothbard, A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2005), 188.
[25] Shoup, Wall Street’s Think Tank, 101-30.