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Partisanship, Influence, and the Council on Foreign Relations

By Gordon Francis Corbett

    Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines "partisan" as, "a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person."  The Founding Fathers feared partisanship, and were right to do so.

    Consider the presidency.  A President of the United States is much more than a Constitutional administrator of, and a check upon, the will of Congress and the courts.  As his political party's titular head, he is the boss of everyone bearing his party's label in Congress.

    Corporate, philanthropic, and other interests contribute to the Republicans and the Democrats because their payments buy favor for the donors.  Influence runs from the donors to the parties' organizations, to the Speaker of the House, to the President of the Senate, otherwise known as the Vice-President of the United States, to the President of the United States, and perhaps to the judiciary.  The laws and regulations the donors instigate benefit them, at least until the next election; but making them effective strengthens the government's hold on the economy.

    Lobbies also play an important role.  At a minimum, lobbies try to persuade legislators that specific bills and policies should be enacted, changed, or abolished.  Some of these groups are innocuous.  Others are not.

    One of the most prominent and effective is the Council on Foreign Relations.  This group incorporated on 29 July 1921, but its founders came together in Paris during the Versailles Conference.  The C.F.R. says that it wants only to encourage Americans to study foreign nations and to befriend their people.

    Regardless, a perusal of its house organ's back issues shows that the C.F.R. is not a high-class combination of the National Geographic Society and Rotary.  Some "Foreign Affairs" articles do facilitate study and friendship, but others further other agendas:  managed trade, strengthening the United Nations, and other aspects of American foreign policy that office-holding C.F.R. members have created since 1945.

    Its members have dominated every presidential cabinet since Herbert Hoover's.  Since Lyndon Johnson's Administration, its members and spokesmen have appeared very frequently on television to explain official policy.  Many of those people were, or are, prominent and powerful officeholders.  For further information, see "The Shadows of Power," by James Perloff.

    Another prominent organization is The Trilateral Commission, which seeks to harmonize our government's official policies and those of foreign nations in the "Trilateral" world:  The United States, Europe, and Asia.

    President Bill Clinton was a member of both organizations, as was George W. Bush's father.  Many of the members of George W. Bush's cabinet are C.F.R. members.  National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice belongs to the C.F.R.

    Put it together, and what do we see?  Donors from industry, philanthropy, education, organized labor, and other important fields dominate what is ostensibly "our" government.  Some of them only want legislative favors to help their respective lines of work, but others want to change America.  Some want to harmonize our legal and economic systems with Europe's to prepare us for what 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie called "One World":  world government.

    A century ago, many people said that "Wall Street" ran the country.  This was a slander on the many honest financiers who worked there, but the idea was popular because so many investment houses exerted so much control over so many politicians.  If you look at G. Edward Griffin's "The Creature from Jekyll Island," you will find that all three presidential candidates in the 1912 election were beholden to different Wall Street firms.

    Today, via its influence in our government, this network of corporate, philanthropic, and partisan moguls controls American production, distribution, and exchange, just as Mussolini's Fascist party and its corporate network controlled Italy before World War II.  One of the many things distinguishing us from Mussolini's dictatorship used to be that we had no secret police.  The USA PATRIOT Act, its successors nick-named "PATRIOT II," and the Homeland Security Act are erasing that difference fast.
 
 

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