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The Global Mafiocracy and the Empire of Economics
The Global Mafiocracy and the Empire of Economics
By: Andrew Gavin Marshall
26 March 2015
Dear Readers:
I am aiming to raise $500 in order to complete and publish for all to view and read a sample introduction chapter to my book about the Global Mafiocracy and the Empire of Economics. The chapter would provide a sampling of the subject matter, style and approach to discussing these complex issues in a way that is understandable and approachable to as wide an audience as possible. The sample chapter would be completed relatively soon (in the next week or two), so long as the funding objective is reached so that I can afford to put in the time to complete the draft.
So what is the subject matter and focus of the book?
– Translating the world of Economics and Finance into basic English, dismantling the 'technical' language of 'experts' into a more direct and honest dialectic
– An introduction to the Global Mafiocracy: the banks, corporations, asset management firms, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies and holding companies that collectively own each other and the wider network of global corporate and financial institutions, manifesting as a relatively small cartel of roughly 150 large financial institutions that wield unparalleled financial power in the modern world. How did the cartel evolve? What institutions are dominant within it? Who are the individuals and groups that lead these organizations? How is the cartel's wealth and power accumulated and exercised? What role does the cartel play in the world of global finance, economic and politics?
– Behind the major corporate and financial institutions are individuals and families, smaller units of concentrated power who own the largest shares and steer the operations of the global cartel. These individual oligarchs and family dynasties – from the Rockefellers in the US, to the Wallenbergs in Sweden, Agnellis in Italy, Desmarais' in Canada, to the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, Oppenheimer in South Africa, among others – control and.or influence large percentages of wealth within their respective nations and in the world of globalized financial and corporate networks. How did these dynasties and oligarchs emerge? What do they own and control? How is their wealth and power organized and exercised? What are their ideologies, beliefs, objectives?
– Empire and Economics: When people think of Empire, they often imagine the old European colonial powers venturing off to Africa, Latin America and Asia where they would militarily occupy and colonize foreign lands, regions and peoples for their own imperial benefit. While formal colonialism is largely an historical anachronism, unjustifiable and increasingly untenable in the modern world, Empire itself has never vanished. While the military and overtly political components of empire and imperialism remain relevant in the modern world (think: U.S. military, CIA, State Department, NATO, etc.) the most effective and evolved means of imperialism in the world are exercised through the economic and financial spheres. In these realms, empire is more effective because its ideology, objectives, actions and effects are hidden behind vague and obscure language, the "expertise" of economists, finance ministers, central bankers and other technocrats who claim to be separate of politics and only interested in economics. Empire is more evolved in these spheres because it has become the vanguard of the global Mafiocracy and imperial system, leading the political and often military apparatus of empire, far more institutionalized and advanced on a global scale than any parallel in political and military spheres.
– Global Financial Diplomacy and Governance: What are the institutions that manage and shape the imperial economic order? In the world of financial diplomacy and governance, those institutions which wield incredible (and increasingly expanding) power and authority remain largely unknown or misunderstood to the general public. The book will examine some of the origins, evolution and character of many of these institutions, including: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), World Trade Organization (WTO), central banks and finance ministries, among others. What are the specific roles, functions and objectives of these institutions? How do they wield power? In whose interest do they operate? Who leads them?
– State Power: The institutions that make up the world of financial diplomacy and governance rely principally upon state power for legitimacy and political might. Whether it's a central bank, a finance ministry, the IMF or other agencies, the role of powerful nation states such as the United States and other rich nations is central to the system and structures of the global Empire of Economics. The centrality of state power is made all the more apparent through an examination of the origins and evolution of less formal groupings of nations, such as the Group of Seven (G7), the Group of Five (G5), the Group of Ten (G10) and the Group of Twenty (G20), the principal political forums for the system of global governance and empire. Who attends these forums? What institutions are represented? What are the ideologies and competing interests? What effect do they have? What is the role of the 'emerging market' nations of China, Russia, Brazil, India, Turkey and South Africa within this system?
– The Global Financial Mafia: What is the relationship and interaction between state power, the various Groups of nations, international institutions, finance ministries and central banks with the global cartel of banks and corporations, and the oligarchs and family dynasties that control the cartel? In what forums do the individuals who lead these various institutions interact, cooperate, communicate, socialize and organize? At various global and national think tanks, foundations, forums, conferences and social events, politicians, finance ministers, central bankers and top technocrats meet, often in secret, with the heads of banks and corporations, patriarchs and matriarchs of powerful family dynasties and other oligarchs. Among such events and forums are: the Bilderberg Group, International Monetary Conference (IMC), World Economic Forum (WEF), the Trilateral Commission, the Institute of International Finance (IIF), and the Group of 30, among others. These forums and events provide political leaders and the heads of influential institutions with a private forum where they are able to have off-the-record, often secretive discussions on important issues of global importance to the populations of their respective nations and the planet as a whole. Collectively, this group, and the institutions which dominate it, compose the Global Mafiocracy: a global political, social and economic system dominated by relatively few nations and institutions that operate largely in the interests of a small, criminal cartel of banks and corporations, a global financial Mafia.
– Top-Down: These institutions, individuals and ideologies will be examined and discussed not as a dry, historical account, but in terms of telling a series of stories. I want to try to present this information and analysis in the same way in which it appeals most to me, a fantastic, interesting, often horrifying and shocking tale of intrigue, empire, power politics, petty tyrants, in-fighting, domination, destruction and empire. I want the people who lead and participate in this system to become as familiar to the reader as they are to me, to see an image and read stories about the personalities and complexities of those who rule and wield power. What emerges is a story, or series of stories, worthy of the the intrigue and interest in historical and fictional accounts of imperial families and ancient empires, of mythical worlds, fantasy tales and science fiction societies. Get a view of our world from the top-down.
– Bottom-Up: In parallel to the institutions, individuals and ideologies that dominate and shape our world from the top-down, there are also processes, people, protests and mass movements or revolutions that shape and re-create and re-imagine the world from the bottom up. While Europe's finance ministers meet in secret, off the record conversations in distant castles located in Luxembourg, deciding the fate of Europe and its citizens, mass protests and demonstrations and riots take place on the streets of Athens, Madrid, Lisbon, Rome and Frankfurt, in which the populations oppose and reject the decisions being made in far-off places by largely unelected technocrats who do not serve their interests. What role do protests and popular movements have in shaping and changing the modern world? How do the dominant institutions and individuals view and respond to such events and processes? Do they fear the potential of the people? What is that potential, or what could it be? What is the bottom-up story of the Global Mafiocracy and Empire of Economics?
– A Series of Stories: History, its chief actors, institutions and evolution is best understood when told as a story, with characters that readers and observers can relate to, understand, find an interest in, to be intrigued and even horrified. It would seem that the best way to explain the overly and unnecessarily complicated world of economics and finance is to explain it not as one would read in a textbook or industry publication, nor reportage in the financial press, nor through the dry and deceptively dull language and rhetoric of economics, academics, finance ministers, central bankers, technocrats and politicians. No, this is a world best understood through the stories, characters, challenges, triumphs, disasters and wars waged by the personalities and people who have shaped and changed this world. A system of human 'civilization' is, after all, ultimately a product of humans, and is, therefore, as deeply flawed, complex, conflicted and intriguing as are most human tales of the rise and fall of kings, queens, emperors, dictators, or the triumphs and tribulations of the 'common person', those on the streets, in the schools, bustling around the cities, towns and in the urban slums. Human beings understand human struggles and human stories. Thus, this book is not a history of economics and finance, it is a story of human beings, struggle, suffering, success and complexity. In short, it is a story like any other.
I need your help to write these stories and complete this book, what will be the first in a series. For now, my objective is to write a sample chapter, drawing from the many thousands of pages of research I have done in recent months and years. This chapter would be made available online for all to read, to truly gain a better understanding of the focus, approach and objectives of this book. To do this, I need your help. If this is something you would be interested in reading, please consider donating or sharing and promoting this through social media and other avenues.
My objective is to raise $500 in the short-term. If that goal is reached, the sample chapter will be completed (in rough form) and published online for all to read in April of 2015.
Thank you very much for all the support and encouragement.
Andrew Gavin Marshall
Global Power Project, Part 4: Banking on Influence with JPMorgan Chase
Global Power Project, Part 4: Banking on Influence with JPMorgan Chase
By: Andrew Gavin Marshall
The following was originally posted at Occupy.com
In May, JPMorgan Chase was listed as the largest bank in the world with assets at roughly $4 trillion — some $1.53 trillion of it in derivatives. This was reported a month after the announcement that the bank had posted a record first-quarter profit of $6.5 billion.
Jamie Dimon, the bank's CEO and Chairman, has faced a host of scandals in relation to his management of the megabank, including the loss of roughly $6 billion through the London branch of the bank — losses that Dimon was accused of hiding. A 300-page report by the U.S. Senate, investigating the "creative accounting" of JPMorgan, noted that the bank "hid losses, did not share information with its regulators, and misled the public" in what one banking regulator referred to as "make believe voodoo magic." Stated bluntly in The New York Times, JPMorgan Chase, the largest derivatives dealer in the world, "is too big to regulate."
In the midst of the scandal, the bank faced a potential "revolt" of its shareholders in a bid to strip Dimon of his dual role as CEO and Chairman. In confidential government reports which were leaked to The New York Times, the bank was accused of "manipulative schemes" which transformed "money-losing power plants into powerful profit centers" while executives made "false and misleading statements" under oath.
Yet even in the midst of scandal, Jamie Dimon was praised in a storm of support by billionaires, corporate kingpins and media barons. Calling JPMorgan Chase "as good a bank as there is," New York City mayor and billionaire media baron Michael Bloomberg went on to call Dimon "a very smart, honest, great executive." News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch praised Dimon as "one of the smartest, toughest guys around," while Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric, referred to him as a "great leader" and said he had earned the "right to hold both Chairman and CEO titles." To top it off, billionaire investor and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet, dubbed Dimon "a fabulous banker."
And the adoration goes all the way to the top rung. In 2009, The New York Times referred to Jamie Dimon as "President Obama's favorite banker." In 2010, Obama told Bloomberg BusinessWeek that he didn't "begrudge" bank CEOs like Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs for their massive bonuses of $17 and $9 million, respectively. Obama explained: "I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system." The president added, "I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen."
In May of 2012, Obama rushed to Jamie Dimon's defense in light of the financial scandals, stating that Dimon was "one of the smartest bankers we got." The Financial Times referred to Dimon as "the last king of Wall Street." And when finally faced with the decision to strip Dimon of his dual role as chairman and CEO, Obama's "favorite banker" ended up winning "a decisive victory" by maintaining both his roles.
But this is just the surface of JPMorgan Chase's financial manipulations. The bank, in fact, was at the forefront of creating Credit Default Swaps (CDS), a key aspect of the derivatives market that led to the inflation and subsequent blowout of the housing bubble. JPMorgan developed these "financial instruments" as a type of insurance policy in 1994, allowing the bank to trade its debt (in the form of loans to corporations and governments) to third parties, thus handing off the risk and removing the debts from its accounts, which allowed it to make further loans. JPMorgan opened up the first CDS desk in New York in 1997, "a division that would eventually earn the name the Morgan Mafia for the number of former members who went on to senior positions at global banks and hedge funds." Back in 2003, the same Warren Buffet who would later praise Dimon referred to credit default swaps as "financial weapons of mass destruction."
JPMorgan was also at the forefront in the United States pushing for financial deregulation, particularly the slow-motion dismantling of the Glass-Steagall Act that had been put in place in 1933 in response to the financial speculation which had helped spark the Great Depression. After hearing proposals from banks such as Citicorp, JP Morgan and Bankers Trust, which advocated the loosening of "restrictions" put in place by Glass-Steagall, the Federal Reserve Board in 1987 voted to ease many of the regulations. That same year, Alan Greenspan, who had previously been a director of JP Morgan, became the chairman of the Fed. In 1989, the Fed approved an application submitted by JP Morgan, Chase Manhattan, Citicorp and Bankers Trust to further reduce the regulations imposed by Glass-Steagall. In 1990, JP Morgan became "the first bank to receive permission from the Federal Reserve to underwrite securities."
Financial deregulation accelerated under President Clinton, much to the delight of Wall Street banks, which were then permitted to merge into megabanks, with JPMorgan merging with Chase Manhattan to form JPMorgan Chase. As early as 2006 and 2007, multiple megabanks were beginning to bet against the housing market through various hedge funds, allowing them to make profits on the housing collapse they created. JPMorgan continued to sell mortgages as it bet against the mortgage market, passing on the risk while it hedged its bets to profit from the failure and losses of others. In 2011, the bank paid a $153 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to settle allegations of "securities fraud."
In the midst of the financial crisis in 2008, JPMorgan Chase became not only a major criminal, but also a prime beneficiary. In 2007, the global investment bank Bear Stearns was named by Fortune magazine as the second "most admired" financial securities company in the United States, while Lehman Brothers was put in first place. As the financial crisis erupted, Bear Stearns executives "discovered" that they were "nearly out of cash" in March of 2008. The CEO of Bear Stearns, Alan Schwartz, made a phone call to Jamie Dimon — JPMorgan Chase was the clearing agent for Bear Stearns — asking for an overnight loan. Dimon, who also sat on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, turned there instead of providing the loan through his own bank. The president of the New York Fed – who was elected by the banks that own the New York Fed – was Timothy Geithner. Geithner began discussions with Bear Stearns, and the following morning he held a meeting with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, where they agreed to an emergency loan for Bear Stearns, providing the funds through JPMorgan Chase.
Over the following day, Geithner and Paulson informed Bear Stearns that it must sell the bank within days, and a deal was negotiated in which JPMorgan Chase would purchase Bear Stearns at $2 per share. Though Dimon had first refused to purchase the failed bank, he now engaged in negotiations with Geithner who won over Dimon by guaranteeing $30 billion for JPMorgan to purchase the sunken bank. Long story short: through the New York Fed, the U.S. government purchased billions of dollars in bad debts made by Bear Stearns, including $16 billion in credit default swaps that were downgraded to "junk" assets, while JPMorgan Chase acquired $360 billion in Bear Stearns assets with little or no risk.
With the purchase of Bear Stearns facilitated by the New York Fed, and for the benefit of JPMorgan, Geithner continued in his role as willing servant to the banks who had elected him as president. Then, in September of 2008 when the insurance conglomerate American International Group (AIG) plunged into crisis and sought support from the government, the Fed and Treasury initially refused. AIG turned to JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, who went to the government to pressure for state support. The New York Fed, with Geithner at the helm, again organized a secret bailout of the institution, valued at $85 billion. In October, the government added an extra $38 billion to the AIG bailout, and the New York Fed provided a further $40 billion in November. Overall, U.S. taxpayers bailed out the insurance giant with $150 billion.
Because many banks kept junk assets with AIG which didn't affect its balance sheets, the insurance giant was allowed to continue making risky loans. Meanwhile, the New York Fed, noted Bloomberg journalist David Reilly, acted as "a black-ops outfit for the nation's central bank," and as a "quasi-governmental institution [which] isn't subject to citizen intrusions such as freedom of information requests." The AIG bailout, wrote Reilly, revealed what could be described as a "secret banking cabal." Through AIG, bailout funds went to American, French, German, British, Swiss, Dutch and even Canadian banks. Goldman Sachs received over $12 billion, and billions also went to Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wachovia, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase.
JPMorgan Chase was using bailout money from the government to purchase other banks and companies. As one executive at the bankcommented in regards to a $25 billion bailout from the government, "I think there are going to be some great opportunities for us to grow in this environment." The banks repaid the bailout loans from other bailout funds they got from government, siphoning off taxpayer moneyback and forth and rewarding them for their risky behavior. One university study noted that banks with political access – whether through lobbying efforts or board membership on the Fed – were more likely to get bailout funds, and in bigger numbers, than other banks. Notably among the most politically connected banks were Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley.
According to a 2012 study by the International Monetary Fund and Bloomberg magazine, JPMorgan Chase continues to receive government support far beyond the bailouts, as it is a major recipient of corporate welfare and state subsidies. In fact, according to the study, the biggest bank in the world gets roughly $14 billion per year in state subsidies and welfare, largely helping "the bank pay big salaries and bonuses."
The Biggest and Most Connected Bank
Not only is JPMorgan Chase the biggest bank in the world with over $4 trillion in assets, but its power and influence extends far beyond financial matters. It is a major political force in the world, highly integrated within the network of global elites who make up the plutocratic ruling class. As the subject of study for the Global Power Project, I examined 55 people at JPMorgan Chase, including all members of the executive committee, the board of directors and the international advisory council.
Of the 55 individuals examined at the bank, a total of 13 (or roughly 24%) of the individuals were either members or held leadership positions (previously or presently) with the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR has been at the heart of the foreign-policy elite of the United States since it was created in 1921. Further, a total of eight JPMorgan officials held leadership positions in the World Economic Forum, the second most represented institutional affiliation of the bank. Holding yearly conferences that bring together thousands of participants from elite financial, corporate, political, cultural, media and other institutions, the WEF is one of the principal forums for the global elite, with JPMorgan operating right there at the center.
The next most represented institution is the Trilateral Commission, with 5 individuals at JPMorgan Chase holding membership in the international think tank – or "global policy group" – uniting elites from North America, Western Europe and Japan (and now also including China, India, and other Pacific-rim nations). The Trilateral Commission itself was founded in 1973 by the CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank – which later merged into JPMorgan Chase – David Rockefeller.
In descending order, the other most highly represented institutions having cross membership between leadership positions with JPMorgan Chase are: the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (4), the Business Council (4), Citigroup (4), Bilderberg (4), the Group of Thirty (4), Sara Lee Corporation (3), Harvard (3), American Express (3), American International Group (3), the Business Roundtable (3), Rolls Royce (3), the Center for Strategic and International Studies – CSIS (3), the European Round Table of Industrialists (3), the Peterson Institute for International Economics (2), the U.S.-China Business Council (2), and the National Petroleum Council (2).
Institutions which hold two individual cross leadership positions with JPMorgan Chase include: the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the University of Chicago, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., General Electric, Asia Business Council, the U.S. President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the Coca-Cola Company, National Bank of Kuwait Advisory Board, INSEAD, China-United States Exchange Foundation, Mitsubishi, the Carlyle Group, and the IMF.
Meet the Elites at JPMorgan Chase
It's worth taking a look at some specific individuals who serve in a leadership and/or advisory capacity to JPMorgan Chase to get an idea of the composition of some of these global plutocrats.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, sits on the boards of directors of: the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Harvard Business School, and Catalyst. He is a Trustee of the New York University School of Medicine, a member of the Executive Committee of the Business Council, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum, a member of the Financial Services Forum, and a member of the International Advisory Panel of the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
Members of the board of JPMorgan Chase include James A. Bell, former President of Boeing and a current member of the board of Dow Chemical; Crandall C. Bowles, a director of Deere & Company and the Sara Lee Corporation, a former director of Wachovia, a Trustee of the Brookings Institution, on the Governing Board of the Wilderness Society, and a member of the Business Council and the Economic Club of New York. Other JPM board members include Stephen B. Burke, CEO of NBC Universal and Executive Vice President of Comcast Corporation; David M. Cote, the Chairman and CEO of Honeywell International who sits on President Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, on the advisory panel to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), and is a member of the Trilateral Commission; and Lee Raymond, director of the Business Council for International Understanding, who sits on the advisory panel to KKR, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and former Chairman of the National Petroleum Council as well as former Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, from which he retired in 2006 with a compensation package of $398 million.
JPMorgan Chase has an International Council which provides advice to the bank's leadership on economic, political and social trends across various regions and around the world. The International Council is chaired by Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK, who also sits as an adviser to Zurich Financial. The Council includes Khalid A. Al-Falih, the President and CEO of Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabian Oil Company), the world's largest oil company, who also sits on the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is also on JPMorgan's International Council, and sits as Chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), a partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Annan is also on the boards of the United Nations Foundation, the World Economic Forum, and he is a member of the Global Board of Advisors of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Council includes the third richest man in Mexico, Alberto Bailléres, as well as the Chairman and CEO of Telecom Italia, Franco Bernabé, who was the former CEO of Eni, one of the world's largest oil companies (and Italy's largest corporation), as well as the former Vice Chairman of Rothschild Europe. Bernabé sits on the board of PetroChina, China's largest oil company. Bernabé is also a member of the European Round Table of Industrialists (a group of roughly 50 major European CEOs who directly advocate and work with EU political leaders in designing and implementing policy), he was a former Advisory Board member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the board of FIAT, and is actively a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Meetings.
Martin Feldstein, a prominent Economics professor at Harvard and the President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research, is another member of the International Council. Feldstein was the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Ronald Reagan and sat on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (an "independent" group that advises the president on intelligence matters) under President George W. Bush (from 2007-2009). President Obama appointed Feldstein to the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, and he also sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a member of the Trilateral Commission, a participant in Bilderberg Meetings, and is a member of the International Advisory Board of the National Bank of Kuwait.
Gao Xi-Qing is the Vice Chairman, President and Chief Investment Officer of the China Investment Corporation (CIC), China's sovereign investment fund. He was referred to by the Atlantic as "the man who oversees $200 billion of China's $2 trillion in dollar holdings." Another notable Chinese member of the International Council is Tung Chee Hwa, the former Chief Executive and President of the Executive Council of Hong Kong, a core policy-making institution in the government of Hong Kong. Tung Chee Hwa is also the Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a major political advisory group in the People's Republic of China, once chaired by Mao Zedong. Tung Chee Hwa as well is the founder and Chairman of the China-United States Exchange Foundation, and a former member of the International Advisory Board of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Carla A. Hills is the only woman on the JPMorgan International Council, and is Chairman and CEO of Hills & Company International, a global consulting firm. She was the former United States Trade Representative in the George H.W. Bush administration, where she was the primary negotiator for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She is also the Co-Chair of the Council on Foreign Relations, and sits on the International Boards of Rolls Royce and the Coca-Cola Company, as well as sitting on the board of directors of Gilead Sciences. Hills is a Counselor and Trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a major American think tank where she also sits as Co-Chair of the Advisory Board (alongside Zbigniew Brzezinski, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission). In addition, Hills is a member of the Executive Committee of both the Trilateral Commission and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, as well as sitting on the boards of the International Crisis Group and the US-China Business Council, as Chair of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and Chair of the Inter-American Dialogue.
Henry Kissinger – former U.S. Secretary of State, National Security Adviser to President Richard Nixon, and Secretary of State to President Ford – also sits on the International Council of JPMorgan. Kissinger was a former adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, who recruited Kissinger as director of the Special Studies Project of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in the 1950s. Kissinger was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1977-1981, is a member of the Trilateral Commission, a former member of the Steering Committee and continuous participant in the Bilderberg Meetings, and is founder and chair of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting and advisory firm. Kissinger Chaired the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America during the Reagan administration, which provided justification for Reagan's wars in Central America, and he was also a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1984-1990, advising both Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Alongside Zbigniew Brzezinski, Kissinger was a member of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy of the National Security Council and Defense Department, established in the late 1980s to develop a long-term strategy for the United States in the world. Kissinger has also been a member of the Defense Policy Board, providing "independent" advice to the Pentagon leadership on matters of foreign policy, from 2001 to the present, for both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Kissinger is also a Counselor and Trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Honorary Governor of the Foreign Policy Association, an Honorary Member of the International Olympic Committee, an adviser to the board of directors of American Express, and is a Trustee Emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition, Kissinger is a director of the International Rescue Committee, the Atlantic Institute, and is on the advisory board of the RAND Center for Global Risk and Security, as well as Honorary Chairman of the China-United States Exchange Foundation.
Mustafa V. Koc is also a member of the International Council, and is Chairman of Koc Holding AS, Turkey's largest multinational corporation. He also sits on the International Advisory Board of Rolls Royce, the Global Advisory Board of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Meetings, a former member of the International Advisory Board of the National Bank of Kuwait, and is Honorary Chairman of the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen's High Advisory Council.
Gérard Mestrallet is the Chairman and CEO of GDF Suez, one of the largest energy conglomerates in the world, and is on the board of Suez Environment (one of the major water privatization companies in the world), and also sits on the supervisory board of AXA, a major global French financial conglomerate. He is also an advisory board member of Siemens, and is a member of the European Round Table of Industrialists and the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum.
John S. Watson is the Chairman and CEO of Chevron Corporation. He is on the board of the American Petroleum Institute and is a member of the National Petroleum Council, the Business Roundtable, the Business Council, the American Society of Corporate Executives, and the Chancellor's Board of Advisors of the University of California Davis. He is also a member of the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum.
The Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International, Jacob A. Frenkel, is Chairman and CEO of the Group of Thirty, and a member of the International Council. He is also a former Vice Chairman of American International Group (from 2004 to 2009, when it was rescued with the massive government bailout); the former Chairman of Merrill Lynch International (from 2000 to 2004), and the former Governor of the Bank of Israel (from 1991 to 2000). Frenkel was an Economic Counselor and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund (from 1987 to 1991) and prior to that he was the David Rockefeller Professor of International Economics at the University of Chicago (from 1973 to 1987). In addition, Frenkel is the former Editor of the Journal of Political Economy, former Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, former Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Inter-American Development Bank, and a former member of the International Advisory Board of the Council on Foreign Relations. Frenkel is currently a member of the board of directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a member of the Trilateral Commission, member of the International Advisory Council of the China Development Bank, member of the board of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, member of the Economic Advisory panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, member of the Council for the United States and Italy, member of the Investment Advisory Council of the Prime Minister of Turkey, and sits on the board of Loews Corporation.
To sum: it should be clear, from the evidence, that the leadership of JPMorgan Chase is not an isolated group of individuals involved in finance and exclusively relegated to the banking world, but a highly networked and influential group consisting of central figures in the global plutocracy – referred to as the "Transnational Capitalist Class" – with significant economic, social and political power. To refer to JPMorgan Chase simply as "a bank" is like referring to the United States as just "a country." A geopolitical force unto itself, and a conglomerate embedded within a transnational network of elite institutions and individuals, JPMorgan Chase goes beyond the financial indicators. Put simply, it is one of the most powerful banks in the world.
Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada. He is Project Manager of The People's Book Project, head of the Geopolitics Division of the Hampton Institute, the research director of Occupy.com's Global Power Project, and has a weekly podcast with BoilingFrogsPost.
Global Power Project, Part 2: Identifying the Institutions of Control
Global Power Project, Part 2: Identifying the Institutions of Control
By: Andrew Gavin Marshall
The following is Part 2 of my exclusive research series for Occupy.com
Part 1: Exposing the Transnational Capitalist Class
The Global Power Project, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today's global power oligarchy. In Part 1, which appeared last week, I provided an overview examining who and what constitute the global ruling elite – often referred to as the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC). In this second part, I will attempt to identify some of the key, dominant institutions that have facilitated and have in turn been supported by the development of this oligarchic class. This is not a study of wealth, but a study of power.
In an article for the journal International Sociology, William K. Carroll and Jean Philippe Sapinski examined the relationship between the corporate elite and the emergence of a "transnational policy-planning network," beginning with its formation in the decades following World War II and speeding up in the 1970s with the creation of "global policy groups" and think tanks such as the World Economic Forum, in 1971, and the Trilateral Commission, in 1973, among many others.
The function of such institutions was to help mobilize and integrate the corporate elite beyond national borders, constructing a politically "organized minority." These policy-planning organizations came to exist as "venues for discussion, strategic planning, discourse production and consensus formation on specific issues," as well as "places where responses to crises of legitimacy are crafted," such as managing economic, political, or environmental crises where elite interests might be threatened. These groups also often acted as "advocates for specific projects of integration, often on a regional basis." Perhaps most importantly, the organizations "provide bridges connecting business elites to political actors (heads of states, politicians, high-ranking public servants) and elites and organic intellectuals in other fields (international organizations, military, media, academia)."
One important industry association, according to researchers Carroll and Carson in the journal Global Networks (Vol. 3, No. 1, 2003), is the International Chamber of Commerce. Launched by investment bankers in 1919, immediately following WWI, the Paris-based Chamber groups roughly 7,000 member corporations together across 130 countries, adhering to largely conservative, "free market" ideology. The "primary function" of the ICC, write Carroll and Carson, "is to institutionalize an international business perspective by providing a forum where capitalists and related professionals… can assemble and forge a common international policy framework."
Another policy group with outsized global influence is the Bilderberg group, founded between 1952 and 1954, which provided "a context for more comprehensive international capitalist coordination and planning." Bringing together roughly 130 elites from Western Europe and North America at annual closed meetings, "Bilderberg conferences have furnished a confidential platform for corporate, political, intellectual, military and even trade-union elites from the North Atlantic heartland to reach mutual understanding."
As Valerie Aubourg examined in an article for the journal Intelligence and National Security (Vol. 18, No. 2, 2003), the Bilderberg meetings were organized largely at the initiative of a handful of European elites, with heavy financial backing from select American institutions including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the CIA. The meetings incorporate leadership from the most prominent national think tanks, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment and others from across the North Atlantic 'community.'
Hugh Wilford, writing in the journal Diplomacy & Statecraft (Vol. 14, No. 3, 2003), identified major philanthropic foundations such as the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations as not only major sources of funding but also providers for much of the leadership of the Bilderberg meetings, which saw the participation of major industrial and financial firms in line with those foundations (David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan is a good example). Bilderberg was a major force in helping to create the political, economic and strategic consensus behind constructing a common European market.
With the support of these major foundations and their leadership, the Bilderberg meetings became a powerful global tool of the elites, not only in creating the European Union but in designing the process of globalization itself. Will Hutton, a former Bilderberg member, once referred to the group as "the high priests of globalization," and a former Bilderberg steering committee member, Denis Healey,once noted: "To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair…we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing."
The large industrial foundations have played a truly profound – and largely overlooked – role in the shaping of modern society. The 'Robber Baron' industrial fortunes of the late 19th century – those of Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman, Vanderbilt, etc. – sought to shape a new order in which they would maintain a dominant influence throughout society. They founded major American universities (often named after themselves) such as Vanderbilt, or the University of Chicago which was founded by John D. Rockefeller.
It was through their institutions that they sought to produce new elites to manage a new society, atop of which they sat. These universities became the harbingers of modern social sciences, seeking to "reform" society to fit the needs of those who dominated it; to engage in social engineering with the purpose of social control. It was in this context that the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and later the Ford Foundation and others were founded: as engines of social engineering. One of their principal aims was to shape the development of the social sciences – and their exportation around the world to other industrial and imperial powers like Great Britain, and beyond. The social sciences were to facilitate the "scientific management" of society, and the foundations were the patrons of "social control."
The Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford foundations were instrumental in providing funding, organization and personnel for the development of major American and international think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations, which became essential to the emergence of a dominant and entrenched U.S. business class linking academia, political, strategic, corporate and financial elites. The Rockefeller and Ford foundations in particular constructed the field of modern political science and "Area Studies" with a view to educating a class of people who would be prepared to help manage a global empire.
They were also prominent in developing the educational system for black Americans designed to keep them relegated to labor and "vocational" training. They helped found many prominent universities in Africa, Asia and Latin America to train indigenous elites with a "Western" education in the social sciences, to ensure continuity between a domestic and international elite, between core and periphery, empire and protectorate.
Another major policy planning group is the Trilateral Commission, created out of the Bilderberg meetings as a separate transnational think tank and founded by Chase Manhattan CEO (and Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations) David Rockefeller along with academic-turned-policymaker Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973. The Trilateral Commission linked the elites from Western Europe, North America and Japan (hence "trilateral"), and it now also includes members from China, India and a range of other Pacific-East Asian countries.
Consisting of a membership of roughly 350 individuals from finance, corporations, media, think tanks, foundations, academia and political circles, the Trilateral Commission (TC) has been immensely influential as a forum facilitating the development and integration of a "transnational elite." The aim of the TC was "to foster closer cooperation among these core industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system."
The most famous report issued by the Trilateral Commission in the mid-1970s suggested that due to the popular activism of the 1960s, there was a "crisis of democracy" that it defined as an "excess of democracy," which needed to be reduced in order for "democracy to function effectively." According to the Trilateral Commission, what was needed was increased "apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups" to counter the "crisis" being caused by "a highly educated, mobilized, and participant society."
Moving elsewhere, the World Economic Forum, founded in 1971, convenes annually in Davos, Switzerland and was originally designed "to secure the patronage of the Commission of European Communities, as well as the encouragement of Europe's industry associations" and "to discuss European strategy in an international marketplace." The WEF has since expanded its membership and mandate, as Carroll and Carson noted, "organized around a highly elite core of transnational capitalists (the 'Foundation Membership') – which it currently limits to '1000 of the foremost global enterprises'." The meetings include prominent individuals from the scientific community, academics, the media, NGOs and many other policy groups.
Another major policy planning group emerged in the mid-1990s with an increased focus on environmental issues, called the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), which "instantly became the pre-eminent business voice on the environment" with a 1997 membership of 123 top corporate executives, tasked with bringing the "voice" of big business to the process of international efforts to address environmental concerns (and thus, to secure their own interests).
Among other prominent think tanks and policy-planning boards helping to facilitate and integrate a transnational network of elites are many nation-based organizations, particularly in the United States, such as with the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), among many others. The advisory boards to these organizations provide an important forum through which transnational elites may help to influence the policies of many separate nations, and most importantly, the world's most powerful nation: the United States.
The Council on Foreign Relations, founded in 1921, refers to itself as "an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher," with roughly 4,700 members. It is largely based in New York with affiliate offices in Washington D.C. and elsewhere. The CFR is, and has been, at the heart of the American foreign policy establishment, bringing together elites from academia, government, the media, intelligence, military, financial and corporate institutions.
The CFR worked in close cooperation with the U.S. government during World War II to design the post-War world over which America would reign supreme. The Council was active in establishing the "Grand Areas" of the American Empire, and in maintaining extensive influence over the foreign policy of the United States.
As Carroll and Carson noted, there is a prominent relationship between those individuals who sit on multiple corporate boards and those who sit on the boards of prominent national and transnational policy-planning groups, "suggesting a highly centralized corporate-policy network."
Studying 622 corporate directors and 302 organizations (five of which were the major policy-planning groups: ICC, Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission, World Economic Forum and World Business Council for Sustainable Development), Carroll and Carson assessed this network of transnational elites with data leading up to 1996, and concluded: "The international network is primarily a configuration of national corporate networks, integrated for the most part through the affiliations of a few dozen individuals who either hold transnational corporate directorships or serve on two or more policy boards."
Out of the sample of 622 individuals, they found roughly 105 individuals (94 "transnational corporate linkers" and 11 others "whose corporate affiliations are not transnational but who sit on multiple global policy boards") making up "the most immediate structural contributions to transnational class formation." At the "core" of this network were 17 corporate directors, primarily European and North American, largely linked by the transnational policy groups, with the Trilateral Commission as "the most centrally positioned." This network, they noted, "is highly centralized in terms of the individuals and organizations that participate in it."
In undertaking a follow-up study of data between 1996 and 2006, published in the journal International Sociology (Vol. 25, No. 4, 2010), Carroll and Sapinski expanded the number of policy-planning groups from five to 11, including the original five (ICC, Bilderberg, TC, WEF, and WBCSD), but adding to them the Council on Foreign Relations (through its International Advisory Board), the UN Global Compact (through its advisory board), the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), founded in 1983, the EU-Japan Business Round Table, the Transatlantic Business Dialogue, and the North American Competitiveness Council.
The results of their research found that among the corporate directors, "policy-board membership has shifted towards the transnationalists, who come to comprise a larger segment of the global corporate elite," and that there was a growing group of elites "made up of individuals with one or more transnational policy-board affiliations." As Carroll and Sapinski concluded:
"The corporate-policy network is highly centralized, at both the level of individuals and that of organizations. Its inner circle is a tightly interwoven ensemble of politically active business leaders; its organizational core includes the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Conference, the European Round Table of Industrialists and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, surrounded by other policy boards and by the directorates of leading industrial corporations and financial institutions based in capitalism's core regions."
Organizations like the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) are not think tanks, but rather, industry organizations (exclusively representing the interests and individuals of major corporations), wielding significant influence over political and social elites. As Bastiaan van Apeldoorn wrote in the journal New Political Economy (Vol. 5, No. 2, 2000), the ERT "developed into an elite platform for an emergent European transnational capitalist class from which it can formulate a common strategy and – on the basis of that strategy – seek to shape European socioeconomic governance through its privileged access to the European institutions."
In 1983, the ERT was formed as an organization of 17 major European industrialists (which has since expanded to several dozen members), with the proclaimed objective being "to revitalize European industry and make it competitive again, and to speed up the process of unification of the European common market." Wisse Dekker, former Chairman of the ERT, once stated: "I would consider the Round Table to be more than a lobby group as it helps to shape policies. The Round Table's relationship with Brussels [the EU] is one of strong co-operation. It is a dialogue which often begins at a very early stage in the development of policies and directives."
The ERT was a central institution in the re-launching of European integration from the 1980s onward, and as former European Commissioner (and former ERT member) Peter Sutherland stated, "one can argue that the whole completion of the internal market project was initiated not by governments but by the Round Table, and by members of it… And I think it played a fairly consistent role subsequently in dialoguing with the Commission on practical steps to implement market liberalization." Sutherland also explained that the ERT and its members "have to be at the highest levels of companies and virtually all of them have unimpeded access to government leaders because of the position of their companies… So, by definition, each member of the ERT has access at the highest level to government."
Other notable industry associations include the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), formerly called the Business Council on National Issues (BCNI), a group comprised of Canada's top 150 CEOs who were a major force for the promotion and implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The CCCE remains one of the most influential "interest groups" in Canada.
In the United States there are prominent industry associations like the Business Council, the Business Roundtable, and the Financial Services Forum. The Business Council describes itself as "a voluntary association of business leaders whose members meet several times a year for the free exchange of ideas both among themselves and with thought leaders from many sectors."
Likewise, the Business Roundtable describes itself as "an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies with more than $7.3 trillion in annual revenues," which believes that "businesses should play an active and effective role in the formation of public policy."
Finally, the Financial Services Forum proclaims itself to be "a non-partisan financial and economic policy organization" which aims "to pursue policies that encourage savings and investment, promote an open and competitive global marketplace, and ensure the opportunity of people everywhere to participate fully and productively in the 21st-century global economy."
These are among some of the many institutions which will be researched and examined in greater detail throughout the Global Power Project. In the next installment, I will be examining not only the societal and economic results of these dominant institutions of power, but the specific individuals — and in some cases family dynasties — that wield significant influence nationally and globally.
Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada. He is Project Manager of The People's Book Project, head of the Geopolitics Division of the Hampton Institute, Research Director for Occupy.com's Global Power Project and host of a weekly podcast show at BoilingFrogsPost.
Engineering Empire: An Introduction to the Intellectuals and Institutions of American Imperialism
Engineering Empire: An Introduction to the Intellectuals and Institutions of American Imperialism
By: Andrew Gavin Marshall
Originally posted at The Hampton Institute
The following is my first original piece for The Hampton Institute, "a working class think tank," at which I chair the Geopolitics Division. This essay is meant as an introduction to modern American geopolitics, and a reference piece for future research and published material through The Hampton Institute's Geopolitics Division.
Educating yourself about empire can be a challenging endeavor, especially since so much of the educational system is dedicated to avoiding the topic or justifying the actions of imperialism in the modern era. If one studies political science or economics, the subject might be discussed in a historical context, but rarely as a modern reality; media and government voices rarely speak on the subject, and even more rarely speak of it with direct and honest language. Instead, we exist in a society where institutions and individuals of power speak in coded language, using deceptive rhetoric with abstract meaning. We hear about 'democracy' and 'freedom' and 'security,' but so rarely about imperialism, domination, and exploitation.
The objective of this report is to provide an introduction to the institutional and social structure of American imperialism. The material is detailed, but should not be considered complete or even comprehensive; its purpose is to function as a resource or reference for those seeking to educate themselves about the modern imperial system. It's not an analysis of state policies or the effects of those policies, but rather, it is an examination of the institutions and individuals who advocate and implement imperial policies. What is revealed is a highly integrated and interconnected network of institutions and individuals – the foreign policy establishment – consisting of academics (so-called "experts" and "policy-oriented intellectuals") and prominent think tanks.
Think tanks bring together prominent academics, former top government officials, corporate executives, bankers, media representatives, foundation officials and other elites in an effort to establish consensus on issues of policy and strategy, to produce reports and recommendations for policy-makers, functioning as recruitment centers for those who are selected to key government positions where they have the ability to implement policies. Thus, think tanks function as the intellectual engines of empire: they establish consensus among elites, provide policy prescriptions, strategic recommendations, and the personnel required to implement imperial policies through government agencies.
Among the most prominent American and international think tanks are the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Bilderberg meetings, the Trilateral Commission, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Atlantic Council. These institutions tend to rely upon funding from major foundations (such as Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, etc.) as well as corporations and financial institutions, and even various government agencies. There is an extensive crossover in leadership and membership between these institutions, and between them and their funders.
Roughly focusing on the period from the early 1970s until today, what emerges from this research is a highly integrated network of foreign policy elites, with individuals like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and Joseph Nye figuring prominently in sitting at the center of the American imperial establishment over the course of decades, with powerful corporate and financial patrons such as the Rockefeller family existing in the background of American power structures.
Meet the Engineers of Empire
Within the U.S. government, the National Security Council (NSC) functions as the main planning group, devising strategy and policies for the operation of American power in the world. The NSC coordinates multiple other government agencies, bringing together the secretaries of the State and Defense Departments, the CIA, NSA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and various other government bodies, with meetings directed by the National Security Adviser, who is generally one of the president's most trusted and influential advisers. In several administrations, the National Security Adviser became the most influential voice and policy-maker to do with foreign policy, such as during the Nixon administration (with Henry Kissinger) and the Carter administration (with Zbigniew Brzezinski).
While both of these individuals were top government officials in the 1970s, their influence has not declined in the decades since they held such positions. In fact, it could be argued that both of their influence (along with several other foreign policy elites) has increased with their time outside of government. In fact, in a January 2013 interview with The Hill, Brzezinski stated: "To be perfectly frank – and you may not believe me – I really wasn't at all conscious of the fact that the defeat of the Carter administration [in 1980] somehow or another affected significantly my own standing… I just kept doing my thing minus the Office of the National Security Adviser in the White House." [1]
David Rothkopf has written the official history of the National Security Council (NSC) in his book, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, published in 2005. Rothkopf writes from an insiders perspective, being a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, he was Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Policy and Development in the Clinton administration, and is currently president and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, an international advisory firm, CEO of Foreign Policy magazine, previously CEO of Intellibridge Corporation, and was also a managing director at Kissinger Associates, an international advisory firm founded and run by Henry Kissinger. In his book on the NSC, Rothkopf noted that, "[e]very single national security advisor since Kissinger is, in fact, within two degrees of Kissinger," referring to the fact that they have all "worked with him as aides, on his staff, or directly with him in some capacity," or worked for someone in those categories (hence, within "two degrees").[2]
For example, General Brent Scowcroft, who was National Security Advisor (NSA) under Presidents Ford and George H.W. Bush, was Kissinger's Deputy National Security Advisor in the Nixon administration; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's NSA, served on the faculty of Harvard with Kissinger, also served with Kissinger on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board during the Reagan administration, both of them are also members (and were at times, board members) of the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as members of the Trilateral Commission, and they are both currently trustees of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Other NSA's with connections to Kissinger include: Richard Allen, NSA under Reagan, who worked for Kissinger in the Nixon administration; William P. Clark, NSA under Reagan, who worked for Kissinger's former aide, Alexander Haig at the State Department; Robert McFarlane, also NSA under Reagan, worked with Kissinger in the Nixon administration; John Poindexter, also NSA for Reagan, was McFarlane's deputy; Frank Carlucci, also NSA in the Reagan administration, worked for Kissinger in the Nixon administration; Colin Powell, NSA for Reagan (and Secretary of State for George W. Bush), worked for Carlucci as his deputy; Anthony Lake, Clinton's NSA, worked directly for Kissinger; Samuel Berger, also NSA for Clinton, was Lake's deputy; Condoleezza Rice, NSA for George W. Bush, worked on Scowcroft's NSC staff; and Stephen Hadley also worked for Kissinger directly.[3]
The foreign policy establishment consists of the top officials of the key government agencies concerned with managing foreign policy (State Department, Pentagon, CIA, NSC), drawing upon officials from within the think tank community, where they become well acquainted with corporate and financial elites, and thus, become familiar with the interests of this group of people. Upon leaving high office, these officials often return to leadership positions within the think tank community, join corporate boards, and/or establish their own international advisory firms where they charge hefty fees to provide corporations and banks with strategic advice and use of their international political contacts (which they acquired through their time in office). Further, these individuals also regularly appear in the media to provide commentary on international affairs as 'independent experts' and are routinely recruited to serve as 'outside' advisors to presidents and other high-level officials.
No less significant in assessing influence within the foreign policy establishment is the relative proximity – and relationships – individuals have with deeply entrenched power structures, notably financial and corporate dynasties. Arguably, both Kissinger and Brzezinski are two of the most influential individuals within the foreign policy elite networks. Certainly of no detriment to their careers was the fact that both cultivated close working and personal relationships with what can be said to be America's most powerful dynasty, the Rockefeller family.
Dynastic Influence on Foreign Policy
At first glance, this may appear to be a rather obscure addition to this report, but dynastic power in modern state-capitalist societies is largely overlooked, misunderstood, or denied altogether, much like the concept of 'empire' itself. The lack of discourse on this subject – or the relegation of it to fringe 'conspiratorial' views – is not reason enough to ignore it. Far from assigning a conspiratorial or 'omnipotent' view of power to dynastic elements, it is important to place them within a social and institutional analysis, to understand the complexities and functions of dynastic influence within modern society.
Dynastic power relies upon a complex network of relationships and interactions between institutions, individuals, and ideologies. Through most of human history – in most places in the world – power was wielded by relatively few people, and often concentrated among dynastic family structures, whether ancient Egypt, imperial Rome, ancient China, the Ottoman Empire or the European monarchs spreading their empires across the globe. With the rise of state-capitalist society, dynastic power shifted from the overtly political to the financial and economic spheres. Today's main dynasties are born of corporate or banking power, maintained through family lines and extended through family ties to individuals, institutions, and policy-makers. The Rockefellers are arguably the most influential dynasty in the United States, but comparable to the Rothschilds in France and the UK, the Wallenbergs in Sweden, the Agnellis in Italy, or the Desmarais family in Canada. These families are themselves connected through institutions such as the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, among others. The power of a corporate-financial dynasty is not a given: it must be maintained, nurtured, and strengthened, otherwise it will be overcome or made obsolete.
The Rockefeller family has existed at the center of American power for over a century. Originating with the late 19th century 'Robber Baron' industrialists, the Rockefellers established an oil empire, and subsequently a banking empire. John D. Rockefeller, who had a personal fortune surpassing $1 billion in the first decade of the 20th century, also founded the University of Chicago, and through the creation and activities of the Rockefeller Foundation (founded in 1913), helped engineer higher education and the social sciences. The Rockefeller family – largely acting through various family foundations – were also pivotal in the founding and funding of several prominent think tanks, notably the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Society, Trilateral Commission, the Group of Thirty, and the Bilderberg Group, among many others.
The patriarch of the Rockefeller family today is David Rockefeller, now in his late 90s. To understand the influence wielded by unelected bankers and billionaires like Rockefeller, it would be useful to simply examine the positions he has held throughout his life. From 1969 until 1980, he was the chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank and from 1981 to 1999 he was the chairman of the International Advisory Committee of Chase Manhattan, at which time it merged with another big bank to become JPMorgan Chase, of Rockefeller served as a member of the International Advisory Council from 2000 to 2005. David Rockefeller was a founding member of the Bilderberg Group in 1954, at which he remains on the Steering Committee; he is the former chairman of Rockefeller Group, Inc. (from 1981-1995), Rockefeller Center Properties (1996-2001), and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, at which he remains as an advisory trustee. He is chairman emeritus and life trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, and the founder of the David Rockefeller Fund and the International Executive Service Corps.
David Rockefeller was also the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1970 to 1985, of which he remains to this day as honorary chairman; is chairman emeritus of the board of trustees of the University of Chicago; honorary chairman, life trustee and chairman emeritus of the Rockefeller University Council, and is the former president of the Harvard Board of Overseers. He was co-founder of the Global Philanthropists Circle, is honorary chairman of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP), and is an honorary director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. David Rockefeller was also the co-founder (with Zbigniew Brzezinski) of the Trilateral Commission in 1973, where he served as North American Chairman until 1991, and has since remained as honorary chairman. He is also the founder and honorary chairman of the Americas Society and the Council of the Americas.
It should not come as a surprise, then, that upon David Rockefeller's 90th birthday celebration (held at the Council on Foreign Relations) in 2005, then-president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn delivered a speech in which he stated that, "the person who had perhaps the greatest influence on my life professionally in this country, and I'm very happy to say personally there afterwards, is David Rockefeller, who first met me at the Harvard Business School in 1957 or '58." He went on to explain that in the early 20th century United States, "as we looked at the world, a family, the Rockefeller family, decided that the issues were not just national for the United States, were not just related to the rich countries. And where, extraordinarily and amazingly, David's grandfather set up the Rockefeller Foundation, the purpose of which was to take a global view." Wolfensohn continued:
So the Rockefeller family, in this last 100 years, has contributed in a way that is quite extraordinary to the development in that period and has given ample focus to the issues of development with which I have been associated. In fact, it's fair to say that there has been no other single family influence greater than the Rockefeller's in the whole issue of globalization and in the whole issue of addressing the questions which, in some ways, are still before us today. And for that David, we're deeply grateful to you and for your own contribution in carrying these forward in the way that you did. [4]
Wolfensohn of course would be in a position to know something about the influence of the Rockefeller family. Serving as president of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005, he has since founded his own private firm, Wolfensohn & Company, LLC., was been a longtime member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group, an honorary trustee of the Brookings Institution, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Wolfensohn's father, Hyman, was employed by James Armand de Rothschild of the Rothschild banking dynasty (after whom James was named), and taught the young Wolfensohn how to "cultivate mentors, friends and contacts of influence."[5] In his autobiography of 2002, Memoirs, David Rockefeller himself wrote:
For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure–one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. [6]
In the United States, the Rockefeller family has maintained a network of influence through financial, corporate, educational, cultural, and political spheres. It serves as a logical extension of dynastic influence to cultivate relationships among the foreign policy elite of the U.S., notably the likes of Kissinger and Brzezinski.
Intellectuals, 'Experts,' and Imperialists Par Excellence: Kissinger and Brzezinski
Both Kissinger and Brzezinski served as professors at Harvard in the early 1950s, as well as both joining the Council on Foreign Relations around the same time, and both also attended meetings of the Bilderberg Group (two organizations which had Rockefellers in leadership positions). Kissinger was a director at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1956 until 1958, and thereafter became an advisor to Nelson Rockefeller. Kissinger was even briefly brought into the Kennedy administration as an advisor to the State Department, while Brzezinski was an advisor to the Kennedy campaign, and was a member of President Johnson's Policy Planning Council in the State Department from 1966 to 1968. When Nixon became president in 1969, Kissinger became his National Security Advisor, and eventually also took over the role of Secretary of State.
In 1966, prior to entering the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger wrote an article for the journal Daedalus in which he proclaimed the modern era as "the age of the expert," and went on to explain: "The expert has his constituency – those who have a vested interest in commonly held opinions; elaborating and defining its consensus at a high level has, after all, made him an expert." [7] In other words, the "expert" serves entrenched and established power structures and elites ("those who have a vested interest in commonly held opinions"), and the role of such an expert is to define and elaborate the "consensus" of elite interests. Thus, experts, as Henry Kissinger defines them, serve established elites.
In 1970, Brzezinski wrote a highly influential book, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, which attracted the interest of Chase Manhattan Chairman (and Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations) David Rockefeller. The two men then worked together to create the Trilateral Commission, of which Kissinger became a member. Kissinger remained as National Security Advisor for President Ford, and when Jimmy Carter became President (after Brzezinski invited him into the Trilateral Commission), Brzezinski became his National Security Advisor, also bringing along dozens of other members of the Trilateral Commission into the administration's cabinet.
In a study published in the journal Polity in 1982, researchers described what amounted to modern Machiavellis who "whisper in the ears of princes," notably, prominent academic-turned policy-makers like Walt Rostow, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. The researchers constructed a 'survey' in 1980 which was distributed to a sample of officials in the State Department, CIA, Department of Defense and the National Security Council (the four government agencies primarily tasked with managing foreign policy), designed to assess the views of those who implement foreign policy related to how they measure influence held by academics. They compared their results with a similar survey conducted in 1971, and found that in both surveys, academics such as George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski were listed as among the members of the academic community who most influenced the thinking of those who took the survey. In the 1971 survey, George Kennan was listed as the most influential, followed by Hans Morgenthau, John K. Galbraith, Henry Kissinger, E.O. Reischauer and Zbigniew Brzezinski; in the 1980 survey, Henry Kissinger was listed as the most influential, followed by Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Stanley Hoffmann. [8]
Of the fifteen most influential scholars in the 1980 survey, eleven received their highest degree from a major East Coast university, eight held a doctorate from Harvard, twelve were associated with major East Coast universities, while seven of them had previously taught at Harvard. More than half of the top fifteen scholars had previously held prominent government positions, eight were members of the Council on Foreign Relations, ten belonged to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and eight belonged to the American Political Science Association. Influence tended to sway according to which of the four government agencies surveyed was being assessed, though for Kissinger, Morgenthau and Brzezinski, they "were equally influential with each of the agencies surveyed." The two most influential academic journals cited by survey responses were Foreign Affairs (run by the Council on Foreign Relations), read by more than two-thirds of those who replied to the survey, and Foreign Policy, which was read by more than half of respondents. [9]
In a 1975 report by the Trilateral Commission on The Crisis of Democracy, co-authored by Samuel Huntington, a close associate and friend of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the role of intellectuals came into question, noting that with the plethora of social movements and protests that had emerged from the 1960s onwards, intellectuals were asserting their "disgust with the corruption, materialism, and inefficiency of democracy and with the subservience of democratic government to 'monopoly capitalism'." Thus, noted the report: "the advanced industrial societies have spawned a stratum of value-oriented intellectuals who often devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority, and the unmasking and delegitimation of established institutions, their behavior contrasting with that of the also increasing numbers of technocratic policy-oriented intellectuals."[10] In other words, intellectuals were increasingly failing to serve as "experts" (as Henry Kissinger defined it), and were increasingly challenging authority and institutionalized power structures instead of serving them, unlike "technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals."
The influence of "experts" and "technocratic policy-oriented intellectuals" like Kissinger and Brzezinski was not to dissipate going into the 1980s. Kissinger then joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), taught at Georgetown University, and in 1982, founded his own consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, co-founded and run with General Brent Scowcroft, who was the National Security Advisor for President Ford, after being Kissinger's deputy in the Nixon administration. Scowcroft is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, CSIS, and The Atlantic Council of the United States, which also includes Kissinger and Brzezinski among its leadership boards. Scowcroft also founded his own international advisory firm, the Scowcroft Group, and also served as National Security Advisor to President George H.W. Bush.
Kissinger Associates, which included not only Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, but also Lawrence Eagleburger, Kissinger's former aide in the Nixon administration, and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the Reagan administration, and briefly as Deputy Secretary of State in the George H.W. Bush administration. These three men, who led Kissinger Associates in the 1980s, made a great deal of money advising some of the world's leading corporations, including ITT, American Express, Coca-Cola, Volvo, Fiat, and Midland Bank, among others. Kissinger Associates charges corporate clients at least $200,000 for "offering geopolitical insight" and "advice," utilizing "their close relationships with foreign governments and their extensive knowledge of foreign affairs."[11]
While he was Chairman of Kissinger Associates, advising corporate clients, Henry Kissinger was also appointed to chair the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America by President Reagan from 1983 to 1985, commonly known as the Kissinger Commission, which provided the strategic framework for Reagan's terror war on Central America. As Kissinger himself noted in 1983, "If we cannot manage Central America… it will be impossible to convince threatened nations in the Persian Gulf and in other places that we know how to manage the global equilibrium." [12] In other words, if the United States could not control a small region south of its border, how can it be expected to run the world?
Between 1984 and 1990, Henry Kissinger was also appointed to Reagan's (and subsequently Bush Sr.'s) Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, an organization that provides "advice" to the President on intelligence issues, which Brzezinski joined between 1987 and 1989. Brzezinski also served as a member of Reagan's Chemical Warfare Commission, and from 1987 to 1988, worked with Reagan's U.S. National Security Council-Defense Department Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, alongside Henry Kissinger. The Commission's report, Discriminate Deterrence, issued in 1988, noted that the United States would have to establish new capabilities to deal with threats, particularly in the 'Third World,' noting that while conflicts in the 'Third World' "are obviously less threatening than any Soviet-American war would be," they still "have had and will have an adverse cumulative effect on U.S. access to critical regions," and if these effects cannot be managed, "it will gradually undermine America's ability to defend its interest in the most vital regions, such as the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and the Western Pacific."[13]
Over the following decade, the report noted, "the United States will need to be better prepared to deal with conflicts in the Third World" which would "require new kinds of planning." If the United States could not effectively counter the threats to U.S. interests and allies, notably, "if the warfare is of low intensity and protracted, and if they use guerrilla forces, paramilitary terrorist organizations, or armed subversives," or, in other words, revolutionary movements, then "we will surely lose the support of many Third World countries that want to believe the United States can protect its friends, not to mention its own interests." Most 'Third World' conflicts are termed "low intensity conflict," referring to "insurgencies, organized terrorism, [and] paramilitary crime," and therefore the United States would need to take these conflicts more seriously, noting that within such circumstances, "the enemy" is essentially "omnipresent," meaning that the enemy is the population itself, "and unlikely ever to surrender."[14]
From Cold War to New World Order: 'Containment' to 'Enlargement'
At the end of the Cold War, the American imperial community of intellectuals and think tanks engaged in a process that continues to the present day in attempting to outline a geostrategic vision for America's domination of the world. The Cold War had previously provided the cover for the American extension of hegemony around the world, under the premise of 'containing' the Soviet Union and the spread of 'Communism.' With the end of the Cold War came the end of the 'containment' policy of foreign policy. It was the task of 'experts' and 'policy-oriented intellectuals' to assess the present circumstances of American power in the world and to construct new strategic concepts for the extension and preservation of that power.
In 1990, George H.W. Bush's administration released the National Security Strategy of the United States in which the Cold War was officially acknowledged as little more than a rhetorical deception. The document referenced U.S. interventions in the Middle East, which were for decades justified on the basis of 'containing' the perceived threat of 'communism' and the Soviet Union. The report noted that, "even as East-West tensions diminish, American strategic concerns remain." Threats to America's "interests" in the region, such as "the security of Israel and moderate Arab states" – otherwise known as ruthless dictatorships – "as well as the free flow of oil – come from a variety of sources." Citing previous military interventions in the region, the report stated that they "were in response to threats to U.S. interests that could not be laid at the Kremlin's door." In other words, all the rhetoric of protecting the world from communism and the Soviet Union was little more than deception. As the National Security Strategy noted: "The necessity to defend our interests will continue." [15]
When Bush became president in 1989, he ordered his national security team – headed by Brent Scowcroft – to review national security policy. Bush and Scowcroft had long discussed – even before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait – the notion that the U.S. will have to make its priority dealing with "Third World bullies" (a euphemism referring to U.S. puppet dictators who stop following orders). At the end of the Cold War, George Bush declared a 'new world order,' a term which was suggested to Bush by Brent Scowcroft during a discussion "about future foreign-policy crises." [16]
Separate from the official National Security Strategy, the internal assessment of national security policy commissioned by Bush was partly leaked to and reported in the media in 1991. As the Los Angeles Times commented, the review dispensed with "sentimental nonsense about democracy." [17] The New York Times quoted the review: "In cases where the U.S. confronts much weaker enemies, our challenge will be not simply to defeat them, but to defeat them decisively and rapidly… For small countries hostile to us, bleeding our forces in protracted or indecisive conflict or embarrassing us by inflicting damage on some conspicuous element of our forces may be victory enough, and could undercut political support for U.S. efforts against them." [18] In other words, the capacity to justify and undertake large-scale wars and ground invasions had deteriorated substantially, so it would be necessary to "decisively and rapidly" destroy "much weaker enemies."
Zbigniew Brzezinski was quite blunt in his assessment of the Cold War – of which he was a major strategic icon – when he wrote in a 1992 article for Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, that the U.S. strategic discourse of the Cold War as a battle between Communist totalitarianism and Western democracy was little more than rhetoric. In Brzezinski's own words: "The policy of liberation was a strategic sham, designed to a significant degree for domestic political reasons… the policy was basically rhetorical, at most tactical." [19] In other words, it was all a lie, carefully constructed to deceive the American population into accepting the actions of a powerful state in its attempts to dominate the world.
In 1992, the New York Times leaked a classified document compiled by top Pentagon officials (including Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney) devising a strategy for America in the post-Cold War world. As the Times summarized, the Defense Policy Guidance document "asserts that America's political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union." The document "makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy." [20]
In the Clinton administration, prominent "policy-oriented intellectuals" filled key foreign policy positions, notably Madeleine Albright, first as ambassador to the UN and then as Secretary of State, and Anthony Lake as National Security Advisor. Anthony Lake was a staffer in Kissinger's National Security Council during the Nixon administration (though he resigned in protest following the 'secret' bombing of Cambodia). Lake was subsequently recruited into the Trilateral Commission, and was then appointed as policy planning director in Jimmy Carter's State Department under Secretary of State (and Trilateral Commission/Council on Foreign Relations member) Cyrus Vance. Richard Holbrooke and Warren Christopher were also brought into the Trilateral Commission, then to the Carter administration, and resurfaced in the Clinton administration. Holbrooke and Lake had even been college roommates for a time. Madeleine Albright had studied at Columbia University under Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was her dissertation advisor. When Brzezinski became National Security Adviser in the Carter administration, he brought in Albright as a special assistant. [21]
Anthony Lake was responsible for outlining the 'Clinton Doctrine,' which he elucidated in a 1993 speech at Johns Hopkins University, where he stated: "The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement – enlargement of the world's free community of market democracies." This strategy "must combine our broad goals of fostering democracy and markets with our more traditional geostrategic interests," noting that, "[o]ther American interests at times will require us to befriend and even defend non-democratic states for mutually beneficial reasons." [22] In other words, nothing has changed, save the rhetoric: the interest of American power is in "enlarging" America's economic and political domination of the world.
In 1997, Brzezinski published a book outlining his strategic vision for America's role in the world, entitled The Grand Chessboard. He wrote that "the chief geopolitical prize" for America was 'Eurasia,' referring to the connected landmass of Asia and Europe: "how America 'manages' Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail African subordination."[23] The "twin interests" of the United States, wrote Brzezinski, were, "in the short-term preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation." Brzezinski then wrote:
To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.[24]
The officials from the George H.W. Bush administration who drafted the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance report spent the Clinton years in neoconservative think tanks, such as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Essentially using the 1992 document as a blueprint, the PNAC published a report in 2000 entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century. In contrast to previous observations from strategists like Brzezinski and Scowcroft, the neocons were not opposed to implementing large-scale wars, declaring that, "the United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars." The report stated that there was a "need to retain sufficient combat forces to fight and win, multiple, nearly simultaneous major theatre wars" and that "the Pentagon needs to begin to calculate the force necessary to protect, independently, US interests in Europe, East Asia and the Gulf at all times."[25]
Drafted by many of the neocons who would later lead the United States into the Iraq war (including Paul Wolfowitz), the report recommended that the United States establish a strong military presence in the Middle East: "the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."[26]
When the Bush administration came to power in 2001, it brought in a host of neoconservatives to key foreign policy positions, including Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. As one study noted, "among the 24 Bush appointees who have been most closely identified as neocons or as close to them, there are 27 links with conservative think tanks, 19 with their liberal counterparts and 20 with 'neocon' think tanks," as well as 11 connections with the Council on Foreign Relations.[27]
The 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy announced by the Bush administration, thereafter referred to as the "Bush doctrine," which included the usual rhetoric about democracy and freedom, and then established the principle of "preemptive war" and unilateral intervention for America's War of Terror, noting: "the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively. The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats, nor should nations use preemption as a pretext for aggression. Yet in an age where the enemies of civilization openly and actively seek the world's most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather."[28] The doctrine announced that the U.S. "will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, [but] we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively against terrorists."[29]
A fusion of neoconservative and traditional liberal internationalist "policy-oriented intellectuals" was facilitated in 2006 with the release of a report by the Princeton Project on National Security (PPNS), Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century, co-directed by G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter. Ikenberry was a professor at Princeton and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He had previously served in the State Department Policy Planning staff in the administration of George H.W. Bush, was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Anne-Marie Slaughter was Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, has served on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, the New America Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, New American Security, the Truman Project, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and has also served on the boards of McDonald's and Citigroup, as well as often being a State Department adviser.
While the Bush administration and the neoconservatives within it had articulated a single vision of a 'global war on terror,' the objective of the Princeton Project's report was to encourage the strategic acknowledgement of multiple, conflicting and complex threats to American power. Essentially, it was a project formed by prominent intellectual elites in reaction to the myopic and dangerous vision and actions projected by the Bush administration; a way to re-align strategic objectives based upon a more coherent analysis and articulation of the interests of power. One of its main critiques was against the notion of "unilateralism" advocated in the Bush Doctrine and enacted with the Iraq War. The aim of the report, in its own words, was to "set forth agreed premises or foundational principles to guide the development of specific national security strategies by successive administrations in coming decades."[30]
The Honourary Co-Chairs of the Project report were Anthony Lake, Clinton's former National Security Adviser, and George P. Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of Labor and Secretary of the Treasury in the Nixon administration, U.S. Secretary of State in the Reagan administration, president of Bechtel Corporation, and was on the International Advisory Council of JP Morgan Chase, a director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a member of the Hoover Institution, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and was on the boards of a number of corporations.
Among the co-sponsors of the project (apart from Princeton) were: the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Oxford, Stanford, the German Marshall Fund, and the Hoover Institution, among others. Most financing for the Project came from the Woodrow Wilson School/Princeton, the Ford Foundation, and David M. Rubenstein, one of the world's richest billionaires, co-founder of the global private equity firm the Carlyle Group, on the boards of Duke University, the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, President of the Economic Club of Washington, and the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum. [31]
Among the "experts" who participated in the Project were: Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Eliot Cohen, Francis Fukuyama, Leslie Gelb, Richard Haas, Robert Kagan, Jessica Tuchman Matthews, Joseph S. Nye, James Steinberg, and Strobe Talbott, among many others. Among the participating institutions were: Princeton, Harvard, Yale, CSIS, the Brookings Institution, Council on Foreign Relations, Carnegie Endowment, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, World Bank, the State Department, National Security Council, Citigroup, Ford Foundation, German Marshall Fund, Kissinger Associates, the Scowcroft Group, Cato Institute, Morgan Stanley, Carlyle Group. Among the participants in the Project were no less than 18 members of the Council on Foreign Relations, 10 members of the Brookings Institution, 6 members of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and several representatives from foreign governments, including Canada, Australia, and Japan.[32]
The Road to "Hope" and "Change"
After leaving the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright founded her own consulting firm in 2001, The Albright Group, since re-named the Albright Stonebridge Group, co-chaired by Albright and Clinton's second National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, advising multinational corporations around the world. Albright is also chair of Albright Capital Management LLC, an investment firm which focuses on 'emerging markets.' Albright is also on the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, chairs the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Pew Global Attitudes Project, and is president of the Truman Scholarship Foundation. She is also on the board of trustees of the Aspen Institute, a member of the Atlantic Council, and in 2009 was recruited by NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen to chair the 'group of experts' tasked with drafting NATO's New Strategic Concept for the world.
Kissinger, Scowcroft, and Albright are not the only prominent "former" statespersons to have established consulting firms for large multinational conglomerates, as the far less known Brzezinski Group is also a relevant player, "a consulting firm that provides strategic insight and advice to commercial and government clients," headed by Zbig's son, Ian Brzezinski. Ian is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and also sits on its Strategic Advisors Group, having previously served as a principal at Booz Allen Hamilton, a major global consulting firm. Prior to that, Ian Brzezinski was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Europe and NATO Policy in the Bush administration, from 2001 to 2005, and had previously served for many years on Capitol Hill as a senior staff member in the Senate. Zbigniew Brzezinski's other son, Mark Brzezinski, is currently the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, having previously been a corporate and securities associate at Hogan & Hartson LLP, after which he served in Bill Clinton's National Security Council from 1999 to 2001. Mark Brzezinski was also an advisor to Barack Obama during his first presidential campaign starting in 2007. Among other notable advisors to Obama during his presidential campaign were Susan Rice, a former Clinton administration State Department official (and protégé to Madeleine Albright), as well as Clinton's former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake. [33]
No less significant was the fact that Zbigniew Brzezinski himself was tapped as a foreign policy advisor to Obama during the presidential campaign. In August of 2007, Brzezinski publically endorsed Obama for president, stating that Obama "recognizes that the challenge is a new face, a new sense of direction, a new definition of America's role in the world." He added: "Obama is clearly more effective and has the upper hand. He has a sense of what is historically relevant and what is needed from the United States in relationship to the world."[34] Brzezinski was quickly tapped as a top foreign policy advisor to Obama, who delivered a speech on Iraq in which he referred to Brzezinski as "one of our most outstanding thinkers."[35] According to an Obama campaign spokesperson, Brzezinski was primarily brought on to advise Obama on matters related to Iraq. [36]
Thus, it would appear that Brzezinski may not have been exaggerating too much when he told the Congressional publication, The Hill, in January of 2013 that, "I really wasn't at all conscious of the fact that the defeat of the Carter administration somehow or another affected significantly my own standing… I just kept doing my thing minus the Office of the National Security Adviser in the White House." While Brzezinski had advised subsequent presidents Reagan and Bush Sr., and had close ties with key officials in the Clinton administration (notably his former student and NSC aide Madeleine Albright), he was "shut out of the George W. Bush White House" when it was dominated by the neoconservatives, whom he was heavily critical of, most especially in response to the Iraq War. [37]
In the first four years of the Obama administration, Brzezinski was much sought out for advice from Democrats and Republicans alike. On this, he stated: "It's more a case of being asked than pounding on the doors… But if I have something to say, I know enough people that I can get in touch with to put [my thoughts] into circulation." When Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited Washington, D.C. in early 2013, Brzezinski was invited to a special dinner hosted by the Afghan puppet leader, of which he noted: "I have a standard joke that I am on the No. 2 or No. 3 must-visit list in this city… That is to say, if a foreign minister or an ambassador or some other senior dignitary doesn't get to see the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Adviser, then I'm somewhere on that other list as a fallback."[38]
Today, Zbigniew Brzezinski is no small player on the global scene. Not only is he an occasional and unofficial adviser to politicians, but he remains in some of the main centers of strategic planning and power in the United States. Brzezinski's background is fairly well established, not least of all due to his role as National Security Adviser and his part in the creation of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller in 1973. Brzezinski was also (and remains) a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a director of the CFR from 1972 to 1977. Today, he is a member of the CFR with his son Mark Brzezinski and his daughter Mika Brzezinski, a media personality on CNBC. Brzezinski is a Counselor and Trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and he is also co-Chair (with Carla A. Hills) of the Advisory Board of CSIS, composed of international and US business leaders and current and former government officials, including: Paul Desmarais Jr. (Power Corporation of Canada), Kenneth Duberstein (Duberstein Group), Dianne Feinstein (U.S. Senator), Timothy Keating (Boeing), Senator John McCain, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, and top officials from Chevron, Procter & Gamble, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Exxon Mobil, Toyota, and United Technologies.[39]
And now we make our way to the Obama administration, the promised era of "hope" and "change;" or something like that. Under Obama, the two National Security Advisors thus far have been General James L. Jones and Tom Donilon. General Jones, who was Obama's NSA from 2009 to 2010, previously and is now once again a trustee with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Just prior to becoming National Security Advisor, Jones was president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for 21st Century Energy, after a career rising to 32nd commandant of the Marine Corps and commander of U.S. European Command. He was also on the boards of directors of Chevron and Boeing, resigning one month prior to taking up his post in the Obama administration.
Shortly after Jones first became National Security Advisor, he was speaking at a conference in February of 2009 at which he stated (with tongue-in-cheek), "As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger, filtered down through General Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger… We have a chain of command in the National Security Council that exists today."[40] Although said in jest, there is a certain truth to this notion. Yet, Jones only served in the Obama administration from January 2009 to October of 2010, after which he returned to more familiar pastures.
Apart from returning as a trustee to CSIS, Jones is currently the chairman of the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security and is on the board and executive committee of the Atlantic Council (he was previously chairman of the board of directors from 2007 to 2009). Jones is also on the board of the East-West Institute, and in 2011 served on the board of directors of the military contractor, General Dynamics. General Jones is also the president of his own international consulting firm, Jones Group International. The Group's website boasts "a unique and unrivaled experience with numerous foreign governments, advanced international relationships, and an understanding of the national security process to develop strategic plans to help clients succeed in challenging environments." A testimonial of Jones' skill was provided by Thomas Donohue, the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: "Few leaders possess the wisdom, depth of experience, and knowledge of global and domestic economic and military affairs as General Jones."[41]
Obama's current NSA, Thomas E. Donilon, was previously deputy to General James Jones, and worked as former Assistant Secretary of State and chief of staff to Secretary of State Warren Christopher in Clinton's administration. From 1999 to 2005, he was a lobbyist exclusively for the housing mortgage company Fannie Mae (which helped create and pop the housing bubble and destroy the economy). Donilon's brother, Michael C. Donilon, is a counselor to Vice President Joseph Biden. Donilon's wife, Cathy Russell, is chief of staff to Biden's wife, Jill Biden. [42] Prior to joining the Obama administration, Thomas Donilon also served as a legal advisor to banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. [43]
CSIS: The 'Brain' of the Obama Administration
While serving as national security advisor, Thomas Donilon spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in November of 2012. He began his speech by stating that for roughly half a century, CSIS has been "the intellectual capital that has informed so many of our national security policies, including during the Obama administration… We've shared ideas and we've shared staff."[44]
Indeed, CSIS has been an exceptionally influential presence within the Obama administration. CSIS launched a Commission on 'Smart Power' in 2006, co-chaired by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Richard Armitage, with the final report delivered in 2008, designed to influence the next president of the United States on implementing "a smart power strategy." Joseph Nye is known for – among other things – developing the concept of what he calls "soft power" to describe gaining support through "attraction" rather than force. In the lead-up to the 2008 presidential elections, Nye stated that if Obama became president, it "would do more for America's soft power around the world than anything else we could do."[45]
Joseph Nye is the former Dean of the Kennedy School, former senior official in the Defense and State Departments, former Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and a highly influential political scientist who was rated in a 2008 poll of international relations scholars as "the most influential scholar in the field on American foreign policy," and was also named as one of the top 100 global thinkers in a 2011 Foreign Policy report. Nye is also Chairman of the North American Group of the Trilateral Commission, is on the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the board of trustees of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and a former director of the Institute for East-West Security Studies, the International Institute of Strategic Studies, and a former member of the advisory committee of the Institute of International Economics.
Richard Armitage, the other co-chair of the CSIS Commission on Smart Power, is the President of Armitage International, a global consulting firm, and was Deputy Secretary of State from 2001-2005 in the George W. Bush administration, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration, and is on the boards of ConocoPhillips, a major oil company, as well as ManTech International and Transcu Group, and of course, a trustee at CSIS.
In the Commission's final report, A Smarter, More Secure America, the term 'smart power' was defined as "complementing U.S. military and economic might with greater investments in soft power," recommending that the United States "reinvigorate the alliances, partnerships, and institutions that serve our interests," as well as increasing the role of "development in U.S. foreign policy" which would allow the United States to "align its own interests with the aspirations of people around the world." Another major area of concern was that of "[b]ringing foreign populations to our side," which depended upon "building long-term, people-to-people relationships, particularly among youth." Further, the report noted that "the benefits of free trade must be expanded" and that it was America's responsibility to "establish global consensus and develop innovative solutions" for issues such as energy security and climate change. [46]
The forward to the report was authored by CSIS president and CEO, John Hamre, who wrote: "We have all seen the poll numbers and know that much of the world today is not happy with American leadership," with even "traditional allies" beginning to question "American values and interests, wondering whether they are compatible with their own." Hamre spoke for the American imperial establishment: "We do not have to be loved, but we will never be able to accomplish our goals and keep Americans safe without mutual respect." What was needed, then, was to utilize their "moment of opportunity" in order "to strike off on a big idea that balances a wiser internationalism with the desire for protection at home." In world affairs, the center of gravity, wrote Hamre, "is shifting to Asia." Thus, "[a]s the only global superpower, we must manage multiple crises simultaneously while regional competitors can focus their attention and efforts." What is required is to strengthen "capable states, alliances, partnerships, and institutions." Military might, noted Hamre, while "typically the bedrock of a nation's power," remains "an inadequate basis for sustaining American power over time."[47]
In their summary of the report, Nye and Armitage wrote that the ultimate "goal of U.S. foreign policy should be to prolong and preserve American preeminence as an agent for good." The goal, of course, was to 'prolong and preserve American preeminence,' whereas the notion of being 'an agent for good' was little more than a rhetorical add-on, since for policy-oriented intellectuals like those at CSIS, American preeminence is inherently a 'good' thing, and therefore preserving American hegemony is – it is presumed – by definition, being 'an agent for good.' Nye and Armitage suggested that the U.S. "should have higher ambitions than being popular," though acknowledging, "foreign opinion matters to U.S. decision-making," so long as it aligns with U.S. decisions, presumably. A "good reputation," they suggested, "brings acceptance for unpopular ventures." This was not to mark a turn away from using military force, as was explicitly acknowledged: "We will always have our enemies, and we cannot abandon our coercive tools." Using "soft power," however, was simply to add to America's arsenal of military and economic imperialism: "bolstering soft power makes America stronger."[48]
Power, they wrote, "is the ability to influence the behavior of others to get a desired outcome," noting the necessity of "hard power" – military and economic strength – but, while "[t]here is no other global power… American hard power does not always translate into influence." While technological advances "have made weapons more precise, they have also become more destructive, thereby increasing the political and social costs of using military force." Modern communications, they noted, "diminished the fog of war," which is to say that they have facilitated more effective communication and management in war-time, "but also heightened the atomized political consciousness," which is to say that it has allowed populations all over the world to gain access to information and communication outside the selectivity of traditional institutions of power.[49]
These trends "have made power less tangible and coercion less effective." The report noted: "Machiavelli said it was safer to be feared than to be loved. Today, in the global information age, it is better to be both." Thus, "soft power… is the ability to attract people to our side without coercion," making "legitimacy" the central concept of soft power. As such, if nations and people believe "American objectives to be legitimate, we are more likely to persuade them to follow our lead without using threats and bribes." Noting that America's "enemies" in the world are largely non-state actors and groups who "control no territory, hold few assets, and sprout new leaders for each one that is killed," victory becomes problematic: "Militaries are well suited to defeating states, but they are often poor instruments to fight ideas." Thus, victory in the modern world "depends on attracting foreign populations to our side," of which 'soft power' is a necessity. [50]
Despite various "military adventures in the Western hemisphere and in the Philippines" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "the U.S. military has not been put in the service of building a colonial empire in the manner of European militaries," the report read, acknowledging quite plainly that while not a formal colonial empire, the United States was an imperial power nonetheless. Since World War II, "America has sought to promote rules and order in a world in which life continues to be nasty, brutish, and short for the majority of inhabitants." While "the appeal of Hollywood and American products can play a role in inspiring the dreams and desires of others," soft power is not merely cultural, but also promotes "political values" and "our somewhat reluctant participation and leadership in institutions that help shape the global agenda." However, a more "interconnected and tolerant world" is not something everyone is looking forward to, noted the authors: "ideas can be threatening to those who consider their way of life to be under siege by the West," which is to say, the rest of the world. Smart power, then, "is neither hard nor soft – it is the skillful combination of both," and "means developing an integrated strategy, resource base, and tool kit to achieve American objectives, drawing on both hard and soft power." [51]
Other members of the CSIS Commission on Smart Power included: Nancy Kassebaum Baker, former US Senator and member of the advisory board of the Partnership for a Secure America; General Charles G. Boyd, former president and CEO of the Business Executives for National Security, former director of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR); as well as Maurice Greenberg, Thomas Pickering, David Rubenstein and Obama's newest Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel.
It's quite apparent that members of the CSIS Commission and CSIS itself would be able to wield significant influence upon the Obama administration. Joseph Nye has even advised Hillary Clinton while she served as Secretary of State. [52] Perhaps then, we should not be surprised that at her Senate confirmation hearing in January of 2009, Clinton declared the era of "rigid ideology" in diplomacy to be at an end, and the foreign policy of "smart power" to be exercised, that she would make decisions based "on facts and evidence, not emotions or prejudice."[53]
Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clinton declared: "We must use what has been called smart power, the full range of tools at our disposal – diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural – picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation." She quoted the ancient Roman poet Terence, "in every endeavor, the seemly course for wise men is to try persuasion first," then added: "The same truth binds wise women as well."[54]
While Joseph Nye had coined the term "soft power" in the 1990s, Suzanne Nossel coined the term "smart power." Nossel was the chief operating officer of Human Rights Watch, former executive at media conglomerate Bertelsmann, and was a former deputy to UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke in the Clinton administration. She coined the term "smart power" in a 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, after which time Joseph Nye began using it, leading to the CSIS Commission on Smart Power. At the Senate hearing, Senator Jim Webb stated, "the phrase of the week is 'smart power'." Nossel commented on Clinton's Senate hearing: "Hillary was impressive… She didn't gloss over the difficulties, but at the same time she was fundamentally optimistic. She's saying that, by using all the tools of power in concert, the trajectory of American decline can be reversed. She'll make smart power cool."[55]
Following the first six months of the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton was to deliver a major foreign policy speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, where she would articulate "her own policy agenda," focusing on the strengthening of "smart power." One official involved in the speech planning process noted that it would include discussion on "U.S. relations with [and] management of the great powers in a way that gets more comprehensive." The speech was long in the making, and was being overseen by the director of the State Department's Policy Planning Council, Anne-Marie Slaughter. [56]
Slaughter was director of Policy Planning in the State Department from 2009 to 2011, where she was chief architect of the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, designed to better integrate development into U.S. foreign policy, with the first report having been released in 2010. She is also a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, was co-Chair of the Princeton Project on National Security, former Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, served on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations (2003-2009), the New America Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, New American Security, the Truman Project, and formerly with CSIS, also having been on the boards of McDonald's and Citigroup. Slaughter is currently a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, the CFR, a member of the board of directors of the Atlantic Council, and has been named on Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers for the years 2009-2012.
In preparation for her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, according to the Washington Post blog, Plum Line, Clinton "consulted" with a "surprisingly diverse" group of people, including: Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paul Farmer, Joseph Nye, Francis Fukuyama, Brent Scowcroft, Strobe Talbott (president of the Brookings Institution), John Podesta, and Richard Lugar, as well as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, then-National Security Advisor General James Jones, and President Obama himself.[57]
When Clinton began speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., she stated: "I am delighted to be here in these new headquarters. I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it's good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice form the Council, and so this will mean I won't have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future." Many in the world do not trust America to lead, explained Clinton, "they view America as an unaccountable power, too quick to impose its will at the expense of their interests and our principles," but, Clinton was sure to note: "they are wrong." The question, of course, was "not whether our nation can or should lead, but how it will lead in the 21st century," in which "[r]igid ideologies and old formulas don't apply." Clinton claimed that "[l]iberty, democracy, justice and opportunity underlie our priorities," even though others "accuse us of using these ideals to justify actions that contradict their very meaning," suggesting that "we are too often condescending and imperialistic, seeking only to expand our power at the expense of others."[58]
These perceptions, explained Clinton, "have fed anti-Americanism, but they do not reflect who we are." America's strategy "must reflect the world as it is, not as it used to be," and therefore, "[i]t does not make sense to adapt a 19th century concert of powers, or a 20th century balance of power strategy." Clinton explained that the strategy would seek to tilt "the balance away from a multi-polar world and toward a multi-partner world," in which "our partnerships can become power coalitions to constrain and deter [the] negative actions" of those who do not share "our values and interests" and "actively seek to undermine our efforts." In order to construct "the architecture of global cooperation," Clinton recommended "smart power" as "the intelligent use of all means at our disposal, including our ability to convene and connect… our economic and military strength," as well as "the application of old-fashioned common sense in policymaking… a blend of principle and pragmatism." Noting that, "our global and regional institutions were built for a world that has been transformed," Clinton stated that "they too must be transformed and reformed," referencing the UN, World Bank, IMF, G20, OAS, ASEAN, and APEC, among others. This "global architecture of cooperation," said Clinton, "is the architecture of progress for America and all nations."[59]
Just in case you were thinking that the relationship between CSIS and the Obama administration was not strong enough, apparently both of them thought so too. CSIS wields notable influence within the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, which is chaired by the president and CEO of CSIS, John Hamre. A former Deputy Defense Secretary in the Clinton administration, Hamre is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, sits on the board of defense contractors such as ITT, SAIC, and the Oshkosh Corporation, as well as MITRE, a "not-for-profit" corporation which "manages federally funded research and development centers." The Defense Policy Board provides the Secretary of Defense, as well as the Deputy Secretary and Undersecretary of Defense "with independent, informed advice and opinion on matters of defense policy;" from outside 'experts' of course. [60]
Also on the board is Sam Nunn, the chairman of CSIS, co-chair and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), former U.S. Senator from 1972-1996, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and currently on the boards of General Electric, the Coca-Cola Company, Hess Corporation, and was recently on the boards of Dell and Chevron. Other CSIS trustees and advisors who sit on the Defense Policy Board are Harold Brown, Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, Brent Scowcroft, General Jack Keane, and Chuck Hagel. [61]
Harold Brown was the Secretary of Defense in the Carter administration, honorary director of the Atlantic Council, member of the boards of Evergreen Oil and Philip Morris International, former partner at Warburg Pincus, director of the Altria Group, Trustee of RAND Corporation, and member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. James Schlesinger was the former Defense Secretary in the Nixon and Ford administrations, Secretary of Energy in the Carter administration, was briefly director of the CIA, a senior advisor to Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb Inc., and was on George W. Bush's Homeland Security Advisory Council. He is currently chairman of the MITRE Corporation, a director of the Sandia National Corporation, a trustee of the Atlantic Council and is a board member of the Henry M. Jackson Foundation.
Brent Scowcroft, apart from being Kissinger's deputy in the Nixon administration, and the National Security Advisor in the Ford and Bush Sr. administrations (as well as co-founder of Kissinger), is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Atlantic Council, and founded his own international advisory firm, the Scowcroft Group. General Jack Keane, a senior advisor to CSIS, is the former Vice Chief of Staff of the US Army, current Chairman of the board for the Institute for the Study of War; Frank Miller, former Defense Department official in the Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton administrations, served on the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration, joined the Cohen Group in 2005, currently a Principal at the Scowcroft Group, and serves on the U.S.-European Command Advisory Group, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Director of the Atlantic Council, and he serves on the board of EADS-North America (one of the world's leading defense contract corporations).
Kissinger's record has been well-established up until present day, though he has been a member of the Defense Policy Board since 2001, thus serving in an advisory capacity to the Pentagon for both the Bush and Obama administrations, continues to serve on the steering committee of the Bilderberg meetings, is a member of the Trilateral Commission and he is currently an advisor to the board of directors of American Express, on the advisory board of the RAND Center for Global Risk and Security, honorary chairman of the China-United States Exchange Foundation, the board of the International Rescue Committee, and is on the International Council of JPMorgan Chase.
Another member of the Policy Board who was a trustee of CSIS was Chuck Hagel, who is now Obama's Secretary of Defense. Prior to his new appointment, Hagel was a US Senator from 1997 to 2009, after which he was Chairman of the Atlantic Council, on the boards of Chevron, Zurich's Holding Company of America, Corsair Capital, Deutsche Bank America, MIC Industries, was an advisor to Gallup, member of the board of PBS, member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a member of the CSIS Commission on Smart Power. Hagel also served on Obama's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, an outside group of 'experts' providing strategic advice to the president on intelligence matters.
Other members of the Defense Policy Board (who are not affiliated with CSIS) are: J.D. Crouch, Deputy National Security Advisor in the George W. Bush administration, and is on the board of advisors of the Center for Security Policy; Richard Danzig, Secretary of the Navy in the Clinton administration, a campaign advisor to Obama, and is the current Chairman of the Center for a New American Security; Rudy de Leon, former Defense Department official in the Clinton administration, a Senior Vice President at the Center for American Progress, and is a former vice president at Boeing Corporation; John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; William Perry, former Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration, who now sits on a number of corporate boards, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, on the board of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), and has served on the Carnegie Endowment; Sarah Sewall, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance in the Clinton administration, on the board of Oxfam America, and was a foreign policy advisor to Obama's election campaign; and Larry Welch, former Chief of Staff of the US Air Force in the Reagan administration. More recently added to the Defense Policy Board was none other than Madeleine Albright.
Imperialism without Imperialists?
The 'discourse' of foreign affairs and international relations failing to adequately deal with the subject of empire is based upon a deeply flawed perception: that one cannot have an empire without imperialists, and the United States does not have imperialists, it has strategists, experts, and policy-oriented intellectuals. Does the United States, then, have an empire without imperialists? In the whole history of imperialism, that would be a unique situation.
Empires do not happen by chance. Nations do not simply trip and stumble and fall into a state of imperialism. Empires are planned and directed, maintained and expanded. This report aimed to provide some introductory insight into the institutions and individuals who direct the American imperial system. The information – while dense – is far from comprehensive or complete; it is a sample of the complex network of imperialism that exists in present-day United States. Regardless of which president or political party is in office, this highly integrated network remains in power.
This report, produced exclusively for the Hampton Institute, is to serve as a reference point for future discussion and analysis of 'geopolitics' and foreign policy issues. As an introduction to the institutions and individuals of empire, it can provide a framework for people to interpret foreign policy differently, to question those quoted and interviewed in the media as 'experts,' to integrate their understanding of think tanks into contemporary politics and society, and to bring to the surface the names, organizations and ideas of society's ruling class.
It is time for more of what the Trilateral Commission dismissively referred to as "value-oriented intellectuals" – those who question and oppose authority – instead of more policy-oriented imperialists. The Geopolitics Division of the Hampton Institute aims to do just that: to provide an intellectual understanding and basis for opposing empire in the modern world.
Empires don't just happen; they are constructed. They can also be deconstructed and dismantled, but that doesn't just happen either. Opposing empire is not a passive act: it requires dedication and information, action and reaction. As relatively privileged individuals in western state-capitalist societies, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to understand and oppose what our governments do abroad, how they treat the people of the world, how they engage with the world. It is our responsibility to do something, precisely because we have the opportunity to do so, unlike the majority of the world's population who live in abject poverty, under ruthless dictators that we arm and maintain, in countries we bomb and regions we dominate. We exist in the epicenter of empire, and thus: we are the only ones capable of ending empire.
Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada. He is Project Manager of The People's Book Project, head of the Geopolitics Division of the Hampton Institute, Research Director for Occupy.com's Global Power Project and hosts a weekly podcast show at BoilingFrogsPost.
[1] Julian Pecquet, "Brzezinski: Professor in the halls of power," The Hill's Global Affairs, 22 January 2013:
[2] David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (Public Affairs, New York: 2005), page 19.
[3] David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (Public Affairs, New York: 2005), pages 19-20.
[4] James D. Wolfensohn, Council on Foreign Relations Special Symposium in honor of David Rockefeller's 90th Birthday, The Council on Foreign Relations, 23 May 2005: http://www.cfr.org/world/council-foreign-relations-special-symposium-honor-david-rockefellers-90th-birthday/p8133
[5] Michael Stutchbury, The man who inherited the Rothschild legend, The Australian, 30 October 2010: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/the-man-who-inherited-the-rothschild-legend/story-e6frg6z6-1225945329773
[6] David Rockefeller, Memoirs (Random House, New York: 2002), pages 404 – 405.
[7] Henry A. Kissinger, "Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy," Daedalus (Vol. 95, No. 2, Conditions of World Order, Spring 1966), page 514.
[8] Sallie M. Hicks, Theodore A. Couloumbis and Eloise M. Forgette, "Influencing the Prince: A Role for Academicians?" Polity (Vol. 15, No. 2, Winter 1982), pages 288-289.
[9] Sallie M. Hicks, Theodore A. Couloumbis and Eloise M. Forgette, "Influencing the Prince: A Role for Academicians?" Polity (Vol. 15, No. 2, Winter 1982), pages 289-291.
[10] Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York University Press, 1975), pages 6-7.
[11] Jeff Gerth and Sarah Bartlett, "Kissinger and Friends and Revolving Doors," The New York Times, 30 April 1989:
[12] Edward Cuddy, "America's Cuban Obsession: A Case Study in Diplomacy and Psycho-History," The Americas (Vol. 43, No. 2, October 1986), page 192.
[13] Fred Iklé and Albert Wohlstetter, Discriminate Deterrence (Report of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy), January 1988, page 13.
[14] Fred Iklé and Albert Wohlstetter, Discriminate Deterrence (Report of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy), January 1988, page 14.
[15] National Security Strategy of the United States (The White House, March 1990), page 13.
[16] The Daily Beast, "This Will Not Stand," Newsweek, 28 February 1991:
[17] George Black, "Forget Ideals; Just Give Us a Punching Bag: This time, fronting for oil princes, we couldn't invoke the old defense of democracy; fighting 'evil' sufficed," The Los Angeles Times, 3 March 1991:
[18] Maureen Dowd, "WAR IN THE GULF: White House Memo; Bush Moves to Control War's Endgame," The New York Times, 23 February 1991:
[19] Zbigniew Brzezinski, "The Cold War and its Aftermath," Foreign Affairs (Vol. 71, No. 4, Fall 1992), page 37.
[20] Tyler, Patrick E. U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop: A One Superpower World. The New York Times: March 8, 1992. http://work.colum.edu/~amiller/wolfowitz1992.htm
[21] David Rothkopf, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power (Public Affairs, New York: 2005), pages 17-18, 162, 172-175.
[22] Anthony Lake, "From Containment to Enlargement," Remarks of Anthony Lake at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, D.C., 21 September 1993:http://www.fas.org/news/usa/1993/usa-930921.htm
[23] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (Basic Books, 1997), pages 30-31.
[24] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (Basic Books, 1997), page 40.
[25] Rebuilding America's Defenses (Project for the New American Century: September 2000), pages 6-8: http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm
[26] Rebuilding America's Defenses (Project for the New American Century: September 2000), page 25: http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm
[27] Inderjeet Parmar, "Foreign Policy Fusion: Liberal interventionists, conservative nationalists and neoconservatives – the new alliance dominating the US foreign policy establishment," International Politics (Vol. 46, No. 2/3, 2009), pages 178-179.
[28] U.S. NSS, "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," The White House, September 2002, page 15.
[29] U.S. NSS, "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," The White House, September 2002, page 6.
[30] Inderjeet Parmar, "Foreign Policy Fusion: Liberal Interventionists, Conservative Nationalists and Neoconservatives – the New alliance Dominating the US Foreign Policy Establishment," International Politics (Vol. 46, No. 2/3, 2009), pages 181-183.
[31] G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century – Final Report of the Princeton Project on National Security (The Princeton project on National Security, The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, 27 September 2006), pages 79-90.
[32] G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty Under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century – Final Report of the Princeton Project on National Security (The Princeton project on National Security, The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, 27 September 2006), pages 79-90.
[33] The Daily Beast, "The Talent Primary," Newsweek, 15 September 2007:
[34] "Brzezinski Backs Obama," The Washington Post, 25 August 2007:
[35] Russell Berman, "Despite Criticism, Obama Stands By Adviser Brzezinski," The New York Sun, 13 September 2007:
[36] Eli Lake, "Obama Adviser Leads Delegation to Damascus," The New York Sun, 12 February 2008:
[37] Julian Pecquet, "Brzezinski: Professor in the halls of power," The Hill's Global Affairs, 22 January 2013:
[38] Julian Pecquet, "Brzezinski: Professor in the halls of power," The Hill's Global Affairs, 22 January 2013:
[39] Annual Report 2011, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Strategic Insights and Bipartisan Policy Solutions, page 8.
[40] General James L. Jones, "Remarks by National Security Adviser Jones at 45th Munich Conference on Security Policy," The Council on Foreign Relations, 8 February 2009:
[41] Company Profile, Jones Group International website, accessed 9 May 2013:
[42] WhoRunsGov, "Thomas Donilon," The Washington Post:
[43] Matthew Mosk, "Tom Donilon's Revolving Door," ABC News – The Blotter, 10 October 2010: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/national-security-advisor-tom-donilon/story?id=11836229#.UYsp6IJU1Ox
[44] Tom Donlinon, "Remarks by National Security Advisor Tom Donilon — As Prepared for Delivery," White House Office of the Press Secretary, 15 November 2012:
[45] James Traub, "Is (His) Biography (Our) Destiny?," The New York Times, 4 November 2007: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04obama-t.html?pagewanted=all
[46] Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye, Jr., "CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America," Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007: page 1.
[47] Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye, Jr., "CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America," Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007: pages 3-4.
[48] Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye, Jr., "CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America," Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007: pages 5-6.
[49] Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye, Jr., "CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America," Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007: page 6.
[50] Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye, Jr., "CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America," Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007: page 6.
[51] Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye, Jr., "CSIS Commission on Smart Power: A Smarter, More Secure America," Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007: page 7.
[52] Thanassis Cambanis, "Meet the new power players," The Boston Globe, 4 September 2011:
[53] David Usborne, "Clinton announces dawn of 'smart power'," The Independent, 14 January 2009:
[54] Hendrik Hetzberg, "Tool Kit: Smart Power," The New Yorker, 26 January 2009:
[55] Hendrik Hetzberg, "Tool Kit: Smart Power," The New Yorker, 26 January 2009:
[56] Ben Smith, "Hillary Clinton plans to reassert herself with high-profile speech," Politico, 14 July 2009:
[57] Originally posted at Slum Line, "Hillary Consulted Republicans, Neocons, And Liberals For Big Foreign Policy Speech," Future Majority, 14 July 2009:
[58] Hillary Clinton, "Foreign Policy Address at the Council on Foreign Relations," U.S. Department of State, 15 July 2009:
[59] Hillary Clinton, "Foreign Policy Address at the Council on Foreign Relations," U.S. Department of State, 15 July 2009:
[60] Marcus Weisgerber, "U.S. Defense Policy Board Gets New Members," Defense News, 4 October 2011:
[61] Marcus Weisgerber, "U.S. Defense Policy Board Gets New Members," Defense News, 4 October 2011:
On June 11, the Global Elite Gather in Montreal: Will the Maple Spring Say Hello?
On June 11, the Global Elite Gather in Montreal: Will the Maple Spring Say Hello?
By: Andrew Gavin Marshall
From June 11-14, Montreal will be hosting the International Economic Forum of the Americas at the 2012 Conference of Montreal, which will bring roughly 150 speakers from the global elite to speak to an audience of other elites and sympathetic media spokespersons. This year's conference will include as the keynote speaker, Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve System (the U.S. central bank), who was once considered for nearly 20 years to be "the most powerful banker in the world," and as such, was largely responsible for causing the global financial crisis, along with the heads of the central banks of Portugal, Spain, France, Brazil, Mexico and Canada. There will be delegates from 24 countries around the world gathering at the Hilton Bonaventure Montreal Hotel to discuss the theme of "A Global Economy in Transition: New Strategies, New Partnerships" in front of roughly 3,000 participants. Along with formal discussions, "the Conference of Montreal will also enable the world's various economic and political players present on this occasion to strengthen their relationships and develop new business opportunities."
Here is the website in English: The Conference of Montreal
Here is the website in French: Conférence de Montréal
Here is a Facebook Event for a protest/manifestation at the Forum.
This conference will include key policy-makers and power-holders in Canada, North America, and around the world. It provides a forum through which the global elite may meet, talk, debate, shape consensus, and discuss policy-objectives of their respective nations and institutions. The ideology of those present is relentlessly pro-globalization, pro-Capitalist, and pro-power. The speakers are often advocates of neoliberalism, globalization, fiscal austerity, privatization, corporatization, imperialism and social control. This conference takes place in the midst of Quebec students standing up against educational austerity and protesting against policies which benefit the rich at the expense of the many. Will the 'Maple Spring' say hello to the global elite as they gather in Montréal?
The event, which is hosted by Power Corporation, owned by the billionaire Desmarais family, and a host of other corporate sponsors, receives 25% of its funding from public sources, including the Government of Canada and the Province of Québec, which alone contributes nearly $200,000 to a Conference hosted by billionaires. But remember, while public subsidies are available for billionaires to discuss how to make billions more, there is no money for education, social services, health care, or your future.
What is the Conference of Montreal / International Economic Forum of the Americas?
The stated "Mission" of the IEFA/Conference de Montréal is "to heighten knowledge and awareness of the major issues concerning economic globalization, with a particular emphasis on the relations between the Americas and other continents." The Conference "strives to foster exchanges of information, to promote free discussion on major current economic issues and facilitate meetings between world leaders to encourage international discourse by bringing together Heads of State, the private sector, international organizations and civil society." Among the stated "Objectives" are:
* To give its participants access to privileged information while fostering free and extensive discussions on various aspects of economy, with contributors and experts from among the best qualified;
* To promote relations between governments, international organizations, business people, members of the civil society, workers associations and universities;
* To allow its participants from various areas in the world to have business meetings during which they can develop their company or organization internationally
The International Economic Forum of the Americas/Conference of Montreal began in 1994 "at a time when the globalization of the economies was beginning to emerge at an increased rate" with the founding of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the end of the Cold War, development of NAFTA and other free-trade agreements, and thus, there was "the idea that Montreal could be the host city for an international yearly economic conference concerned with this phenomenon of the globalization of economies." The first Conference took place in 1995.
The 18th annual conference of the International Economic Forum of the Americas will include "some of the most important international decision makers have already confirmed their attendance." The focus of this year's Forum will include: "the financial crisis and its impact on the world economy"; "International trade, and in particular the new Americas-European Union economic space, including the Canada-European Union trade agreement: this important trade agreement, which should be finalized in 2012" and will include "a number of executives from Canadian and European companies [who] will take the opportunity to meet at the 2012 Conference of Montreal to form new business ties for this new and important economic space"; and of course, "developing and extracting natural resources." The full program can be reviewed here: Program 2012.
This year's speakers list includes representatives and leaders from: the C.D. Howe Institute, the World Economic Forum, Bombardier Inc., Citibank, the European Commission, McKinsey & Company, Rio Tinto Alcan, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Rector of the University of Montreal, the President of the Canadian Bankers Association, the Governor of the Bank of Canada (a former Goldman Sachs executive), J.P. Morgan Chase, BNP Paribas, Governor of the Bank of Portugal, former Canadian Ambassador to Egypt, Power Corporation of Canada, Canadian Ambassador to the United States, President and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Royal Bank of Canada, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Conference Board of Canada, the World Bank, Scotiabank, PepsiCo, McGill University, Canadian Council of Chief Executives, Deutsche Bank, the Chairman of the Bank for International Settlements (the central bank to the world's central banks and the most powerful financial institution in the world), the Brookings Institution, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the World Policy Institute and the World Bank, among many others.
At the 2007 Conference of Montreal, Premier Jean Charest stated that, "Quebec is deeply committed to the process of globalization," and that, "Quebec has built an economy open to the world which has allowed us to reach a very high standard of living because globalization has worked for us." By "us" he means his friends and informal advisers at Power Corporation and the Forum. In his speech to the Conference, Charest stated that, "We believe very much in equality of opportunity." Apparently, this is not the case for students.
The Founding Chairman of the International Economic Forum of the Americas is Gil Rémillard, Counsel for the law firm Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP, and between 1985 and 1994 he held several different positions in the Quebec government, including Minister of International Relations, Minister of Public Security, Minister of Justice, Attorney General, and the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs.
The Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Forum is Paul Desmarais Jr., Co-CEO of Power Corporation of Canada alongside his brother André Desmarais, both sons of one of Canada's richest billionaires, Paul Desmarais Sr, collectively making up Canada's most powerful family. Paul Desmarais Jr. sits on a number of corporate boards, including: Power Corporation of Canada, Power Financial Corporation, Investors Group Inc., The Great-West Life Assurance Company, Great-West Lifeco Inc., London Insurance Group Inc. and London Life Insurance Company; in the United States: Great-West Life & Annuity Insurance Company; in Europe: Pargesa Holding S.A. (Switzerland) and Groupe Bruxelles Lambert S.A. (Belgium). He is a member of the Board of Directors of Gesca Ltd, Les Journaux Trans-Canada Inc. and La Presse Ltd in Canada; Suez and TotalFinaElf in France, among others.
Another member of the Board of Governors of the Forum is the wife of Paul Desmarais Jr., Hélène Desmarais, Chair of the Board of Directors of HEC Montréal (Canada's leading business school), Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Montreal Enterprises and Innovation Centre (CEIM), Vice-President of the Board of Directors and member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal (which praised the passing of Bill 78), and is a member of the Board of directors of The Montreal Economic Institute, a right-wing think tank which has been promoting more neoliberalism in Québec and blaming the student strike for the "financial cost" it has made to Québec; and she is a board member of the C.D. Howe Institute, one of Canada's most influential think tanks.
Another member of the board of governors of the Forum is Heather Munroe-Blum, Principal and Vice Chancellor of McGill University, who is also a member of the Trilateral Commission and is on the board of directors of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). Other members include the presidents of the Chamber of Commerce of Canada and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE), the CEO of Rio Tinto Alcan, a major mining company; the CEO of GDF Suez, a French electricity and gas company; the CEO of Hydro-Quebec; and the executives of the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, UNESCO, the OECD, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Organization of American States (OAS), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the International Energy Agency (IEA), as well as Louis Lévesque, Canada's Deputy Minister of International Trade.
The Forum's official 'Partners' include first and foremost, the Desmarais-owned Power Corporation of Canada, followed by the Royal Bank of Canada, Rio Tinto Alcan, Cisco, Total, GDF Suez, McKinsey & Company, SNC Lavalin, Hydro-Quebec, BNP Paribas, Bell, Citibank, Desjardins Group, the Government of Canada and the Government of Quebec, with media partners including the Financial Post and La Presse (owned by the Desmarais family).
The 'Power' Behind the Conference of Montreal
The Desmarais family is unquestionably Canada's most powerful family. The Desmarais family, wrote Christa d'Souza for the London Telegraph, are "Canada's equivalent of the Rockefellers or Vanderbilts." Founded in 1925, Power Corporation of Canada is an investment company involved in communications, business, and especially finance. In the 1960s, the company began to invest in energy, finance, industry, and real estate. In 1968, financier Paul Desmarais took over the leadership of Power Corporation, and rapidly expanded the assets held by the company, including by the 1970s: Canada Steamship Lines (transportation); Consolidated Bathurst (pulp and paper); Investors Group, Great-West Life, Montreal Trust (financial services); and Gesca (communications). Power Corporation expanded across Canada, Europe, and into China. Paul Desmarais stepped aside as Chairman and CEO in 1996, though remaining as the controlling shareholder, and had his two sons, Paul Jr. and André, become Chairman and President and Co-CEOs. Power Corporation owns Gesca, a communications company which in turn owns La Presse as well as six other daily newspapers in Quebec.
Paul Desmarais Sr. is one of Canada's richest individuals, which is, of course, no surprise, and as Konrad Yakabuski wrote for the Globe and Mail, "Desmarais has been personally consulted by prime ministers on every major federal economic and constitutional initiative since the 1970s. Most of the time, they've taken his advice." Power Corporation has taken large stakes in major European companies such as Bertelsmann, Total and Suez. In the mid-1960s, a protégé of Desmarais was a young Montreal lawyer named Brian Mulroney, who would later become Canada's Prime Minister. Paul Sr. groomed his sons, and especially André, who is now perhaps the most well-known Canadian businessman in China. André also married the daughter of another Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien. Desmarais Sr. also got involved in French banking through Paribas, and later, Pargesa, which handled investments in a wide range of European corporations, and shot Desmarais into the accepted ranks of French nobility and the old-monied European elite. Paul Desmarais Jr. is close friends with the recent French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and socializes with Spanish royalty, the Rothschilds, and other European oligarchs. The Desmarais family have strong connections to Canada's four major political parties: the Liberals, Conservatives, Bloc Quebecois, and the NDP. This has included close ties to Lucien Bouchard, former leader of the Parti Québecois and Premier of Quebec; Jean Chrétien, former Canadian Prime Minister; Brian Mulroney, former Canadian Prime Minister who worked for Power Corporation; Bob Rae, an NDP leader; and Paul Martin, another Liberal Prime Minister who worked for Power Corporation. In the 1990s, the international advisory board of Power Corporation included former Prime Ministers Brian Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau. Brian Mulroney was sure to create friendly ties between the Desmarais family and soon-to-be Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who put two Desmarais-connected politicians in his cabinet, Peter Mackay and Maxime Bernier.
Quebec author Robin Philpot wrote a scathing critique of the power of the Desmarais family several years ago, suggesting that, "Over the last several years, [Paul Desmarais Sr.] has spun his web to such an extent that it now enables him to call the shots," especially in promoting his right-wing economic vision, with "a disproportionate influence on politics and the economy in Quebec and Canada." Of course, it's not only Canadian politicians with whom Desmarais is close, but French and American politicians as well, including Sarkozy, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Desmarais owns seven of the ten French-language newspapers in Quebec, and has been close to nearly every Quebec premier, apart from Parti Québécois leaders Jacques Parizeau and Bernard Landry. Philpot alleged that Desmarais "has a lot of influence on Premier Jean Charest," who is the current premier imposing tuition increases. When Desmarais received the French Légion d'honneur (Legion of Honour) from Nicolas Sarkozy, Jean Charest was in attendance, of which Philpot stated, "He took him along like a poodle." Philpot added, "It's a very unhealthy situation for a government to be indebted to a businessman that has his own interest at heart. They get their hands tied."
In rural Quebec, the Desmarais family has an estate the size of Manhattan, with a private golf course and pheasant shooting range, as well as a music pavilion where opera is performed. This is the home of Paul Desmarais Sr. Guests, such as former U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, come play golf on this vast estate, and are flown in on helicopters belonging either to Power Corporation or Desmarais personally. The Desmarais family has even had the internationally renowned Cirque du Soleil perform on their massive 15,000-acre estate. King Juan Carlos of Spain has even been a guest from time to time. André Desmarais is himself a member of the Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller, and is also on the International Advisory Board of David Rockefeller's former bank, JP Morgan Chase, alongside other notables such as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Both brothers have regularly attended meetings of the Bilderberg Group, of which David Rockefeller is a top official (founded in 1954 as an elite think tank linking Western Europe and North America). A son of Paul Desmarais Jr., Paul Desmarais III, is a banker with Goldman Sachs. At times, the influence of the family is shyly acknowledged. As French President Sarkozy stated upon awarding Paul Desmarais Sr. with the French Legion of Honour, "If I am the president of France today, it is thanks in part to the advice, the friendship and the loyalty of Paul Desmarais."
Here is a video documenting a party thrown for the wife of Paul Desmarais, Sr., including notable guests Quebec Premier Jean Charest and former U.S. President George H.W. Bush
Protesting Power: Students Protest Outside Shareholder Meeting of Power Corporation
On May 15, 2012, as Power Corporation (with total revenue of $7.2 billion) held its shareholder meeting announcing its first quarter earnings of $264 million, and its main subsidiary company, Power Financial, announced quarterly profits of $455 million, demonstrators met outside to ensure that Power was met with protest. The National Post reported that, "one of Canada's wealthiest and most politically connected families has come under attack as the force and rhetoric of Quebec's student protests move from the streets into corporate shareholder meetings."
Riot police guarded the hotel's main entrance as protesters chanted (in French): "We must fight the thieves in ties," and "Your wealth is our poverty." A student group had called for the demonstration, but Quebec Finance Minister Raymond Bachand commented, "There are radical groups that systematically want to destabilize the Montreal economy… They are anti-capitalists, Marxists." As Paul Desmarais Jr. was announcing the company's profits and stating, "we have a solid risk management strategy," police on horseback outside were pushing the protestors back: "risk management." A reporter asked Desmarais about "the protests that have shaken Quebec's political class and caused millions worth of dollars in lost productivity," to which he replied, "How could you not be concerned right now in terms of what's going on?" He added:
Like all citizens, we are concerned. But we want this issue to be resolved hopefully in a respectful fashion. Let's start with respect. With a democratic way. Within the rule of law. And that we come to an agreement that makes sense and where everybody invests in the future of our students. But everybody's got to participate in that.
The two brothers, Paul Jr. and André, told reporters that, "they were being unfairly criticized as the company's annual meeting became the latest target in the ongoing protests in Quebec." Paul commented: "We're a very caring company and I think a very caring family and we care about the society around us and we've always demonstrated that." Police outside used pepper spray on protesters, one of whom commented, "I think Power Corp. is a very good example of the one per cent and it shows how private companies can be more powerful than some countries." Desmarais would not directly answer when questioned about whether or not he supported Charest's tuition hike, instead saying, "Frankly I'm not elected. Why should I meddle in things of people who are elected to resolve these problems. Our job is to manage our company." The two brothers explained that, "they were reluctant to publicly comment on public issues except when they're asked to by governments on financial issues." That is to say, they will not publicly comment on the private advice they give to our politicians.
So the name is Power, and it fits. The Desmarais family spend their leisure time with King Juan Carlos of Spain (who recently had to apologize for going on an elephant hunting trip in Africa while 50% of youth in Spain are unemployed), they have had Cirque du Soleil perform on their family estate (larger than the island of Manhattan) with guests that include presidents and prime ministers, and have close business and even family ties to every Canadian Prime Minister since Pierre Trudeau, and almost every Quebec premier, especially the current "poodle" Jean Charest. They are billionaires who sit on the boards of the major Canadian and international think tanks which set policy for our nations. The International Economic Forum of the Americas / Conference of Montreal is simply another venue through which elites gather to form consensus and debate, discuss, and promote policies which benefit the few at the expense of the many. Their rhetoric is replete with talk of "democracy" and "fairness," but their actions speak louder than their words, their bank accounts weigh more heavily than their hearts, and their ideas more easily become policy. The elite do not go and protest in the streets, demanding justice and equality, because they call up their friends, our politicians, who they have cocktails with in social gatherings, play golf with, travel with, intermarry with, and who grant their favoured politicians financially bountiful positions on corporate boards when they leave political life. They do not have to agitate in the streets to have their voices heard because they are the patrons of our politicians and policy-makers, they are the real constituents of our constitutional "democracies," they are the captains of corporations, barons of business, and Kings of Capital.
So this year, let the real masters of our political, economic, and social world hear the voices of the real people. Let students and others peacefully assemble and protest outside the Hilton Bonaventure Hotel from June 11-14, and have the elites inside hear the people say that we know who they are, those who rule our nations and undermine our democratic ideals.
They are the bankers and corporate executives, the heads of our universities and owners of our media, our politicians and their advisers, the patrons and "intellectuals" of the think tanks that lobby governments and set policies, the heads of foundations and civil society monopolists. Most especially it is the bankers who sit atop a vast network of social, political, and economic institutions. The bankers are the modern monarchs of our globalized state-Capitalist society. In Canada, our country is dominated by the 'big five' banks: Royal Bank of Canada (RBC Group), Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD), the Bank of Montreal (BMO), and the Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank).
Peter Kruyt is Chairman of the Board of Governors of Concordia University in Montreal, and is also Vice-President of Power Corporation. The Chancellor of Concordia University is L. Jacques Ménard, the President of BMO Financial Group, as well as being on the boards of a number of other corporations and schools. The rest of the board of governors of Concordia is dominated by bankers and business executives. The Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University is Heather Munroe-Blum, who sits on the board of directors of the Royal Bank of Canada as well as the board of governors of the International Economic Forum of the Americas, as well as sitting on a number of other boards. The Chairman of McGill University is Stuart Cobbett, who also sits on the board of Citibank Canada. Another member of the board of governors of McGill University is Kathy Fazel, who is also an executive with the Royal Bank of Canada. Another member of McGill's board is Daniel Gagnier, former Chief of Staff to Quebec Premier Jean Charest. Another board member is Samuel Minzberg, who sits on the board of HSBC Bank Canada. Clearly, bankers and business executives run our schools.
In 2008 and 2009, Canada's banks received a "secret bailout" from the Bank of Canada (run by a former executive at Goldman Sachs) and the Federal Reserve of the United States (owned by JP Morgan Chase and all the other big U.S. banks). Canada's banks are always said to be the "best in the world," and a model to follow, since they magically weathered the financial crisis untouched. As it turns out, that was BS. Canada's banks were bailed out to the tune of $114 BILLION. That amounts to $3,400 for every single Canadian man, woman, and child, or 7% of Canada's 2009 GDP. So Quebec students want to maintain tuition costs at less than $2,500, and we are called "entitled brats." But Canada's big banks, which are making record-high profits, and getting record-low tax cuts, sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in cash reserves, while their increased profits come from the increased debt of the Canadian population, and yet, they get the equivalent of $3,400 from each and every Canadian, which we then have to pay for through increased taxes and increased costs (such as tuition). But it's the students who are "entitled."
TD Bank told the Government of Quebec in 2007 to increase university tuition. In 2008, TD Bank got $26 billion in support from the Bank of Canada (meaning Canadians citizens have to pay for that through taxes… just to pay the interest on that debt!), and $8 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve (which U.S. taxpayers have to pay for). In March of 2012, TD Bank and Royal Bank (Canada's two biggest banks) announced record profits. That same month, it was announced that the average Canadian household debt was $103,000, making income security for Canadians an "elusive dream." More than half of the jobs created since 2008 have gone to people aged 55 and over. Increases in hourly wages did not keep pace with inflation last year, and thus, income inequality is growing. Nearly two million Canadians have student loans totaling $20 billion, with the average student debt in Canada at $27,000 upon graduation. We are told that 70% of new jobs will require a university education. A four-year degree for a student in Canada costs an average of $55,000, expected to rise to $102,000 by 2030. This was reported by TD Bank, which then stated, "we argue that students have to recognize an investment in higher education is really a long-term one." Things are much harder for students and youth today than for previous generations. Increasing tuition in Quebec could inflate an already over-inflated student debt bubble which could do for youth what the mortgage crisis did for housing, and would end of costing the government more in the end; thus, "there is no need for additional funding for Quebec universities." Meanwhile, all the banks have inflated a massive housing bubble in Canada which itself could pop in the near-term future, recreating here what took place in the US in 2008.
So, who is really "entitled" here? Is it the students and youth, who are simply demanding a chance to have a future, to not be disciplined and chained down with debt before we even leave our home, get a degree, or have our first job? Or is it the banks, that control the economy, inflate bubbles that create crises, get bailed out by our governments (which we have to pay for), that tell our governments to increase tuition, that get tax cuts from our governments and sit on hundreds of billions of dollars in cash reserves, and who make record profits? These banks support and sponsor the International Economic Forum of the Americas, as does the Government of Quebec and the Government of Canada. So our governments have money to support a conference held by billionaires, bankers, and financiers… so that they can all get together once a year and talk about how "ineffectual" government support is, so that they can praise the "free market" while their "invisible hand" reaches into our pockets, as our politicians sit comfortably in theirs. They spew and steam about "handouts" to poor people, and then take $114 billion from the Canadian people, who are already deep in debt. These reverse-Robin Hoods take money from the poor and give it to themselves… and then charge us interest.
This system is simply too insane to consent to. Canada's elites, like most elites, represent a class of parasites, living off and at the expense of the people, while their local and global connections to and profits from organized crime enshrine them as a type of 'Mafiocracy' ruling class.
Perhaps the Maficocracy should hear the voices of the Maple Spring.
From June 11-14, 2012, the International Economic Forum of the Americas gathers in Montreal, Quebec.
On June 11, at 8:30 a.m., the Maple Spring will say hello!
Let your voice be heard peacefully:
June 11-14
Hilton Bonaventure Hotel
900, de la Gauchetière W.
Montreal, Quebec
Peace and Solidarity!
For more information on the 'Maple Spring', see:
The Québec Student Strike: From 'Maple Spring' to Summer Rebellion?
What Really Happened at the Montréal May Day Protest? From Peaceful Protest to Police Brutality
Ten Points Everyone Should Know About the Quebec Student Movement
From the Chilean Winter to the Maple Spring: Solidarity and the Student Movements in Chile and Quebec
Quebec Steps Closer to Martial Law to Repress Students: Bill 78 is a "Declaration of War on the Student Movement"
Writing About the Student Movement in Québec: You're Damn Right I'm "Biased"! … Confessions of a Non-Neutral Observer
The Maple Spring and the Mafiocracy: Struggling Students versus "Entitled Elites"
Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People's Book Project. He also hosts a weekly podcast show, "Empire, Power, and People," on BoilingFrogsPost.com.
Student Strikes, Debt Domination, and Class War in Canada: Class War and the College Crisis, Part 4
Student Strikes, Debt Domination, and Class War in Canada: Class War and the College Crisis, Part 4
By: Andrew Gavin Marshall
Part 1: The "Crisis of Democracy" and the Attack on Education
Part 2: The Purpose of Education: Social Uplift or Social Control?
Part 3: Of Prophets, Power, and the Purpose of Intellectuals
Part 5: Canada's Economic Collapse and Social Crisis
Part 6: The Québec Student Strike: From 'Maple Spring' to Summer Rebellion?
There is a process under way in Canada, led by the corporate and financial elite, and directed against the general population, the poor, and the young, intending to provide for the rich and powerful, to punish the poor and steal from the rest, to plunge into poverty, to repress, control, and dominate: this process is called 'Class War' and it's waged by the super-rich against the supposedly superfluous rest. It's objective is simple: to preserve, protect, and expand the control and domination of the wealthy over the majority.
In Quebec, where the class warfare has taken on a specific assault on the students and youth, there are finally growing signs and actions that the youth are starting to fight back. The provincial government of Quebec – the French-speaking province of Canada – has decided to double the costs of tuition over the next few years. These moves have prompted hundreds of thousands of students across Quebec to go on strike in protest of the increased fees. Since Quebec currently has the lowest tuition costs in Canada for residents, a great deal of the media and commentary on the issue is related to lambasting Quebecers for their concept of "entitlements" and for "complaining" that they have to pay what others pay. The debate is focused around the 'need' for the government of Quebec to reduce its debt – balance its budget – framing increased tuition costs as a necessity to be accepted, and when resisted, to dismiss the protesters as unrealistic and petty.
So is it true that Quebec has the lowest tuition fees in Canada? Yes. However, Quebec residents also pay the highest income taxes in all of Canada.[1] One of the major claims by the Quebec government as to why tuition must be increased is the claim that Quebec's universities are among the most "under-funded" in Canada, and therefore they need to increase their funding so as to increase their "competitiveness." However, according to the Quebec government itself, total government spending on education (in 2008-2009) amounted to 1.94% of GDP, compared to 1.76% for Ontario, and 1.65% for Canada as a whole. At the same time, total university spending per student in Quebec was at $29,242, compared to $26,383 in Ontario, and $28,846 for Canada as a whole.[2] Thus, Québec's universities are funded to a greater degree than the rest of Canada, so that argument does not hold weight.
Quebec's universities are funded more than other Canadian universities, while Quebec residents pay more in taxes than the rest of Canada, so why the increase in tuition? As tuition fees for universities increase, government spending on education decreases. As the Canadian Federation of Students notes:
In the past fifteen years, tuition fees in Canada have grown to become the single largest expense for most university and college students. The dramatic tuition fee increases during this period were the direct result of cuts to public funding for post-secondary education by the federal government and, to a somewhat lesser extent, provincial governments. Public funding currently accounts for an average of approximately 57% of university and college operating funding, down from 84% just two decades ago. During the same period tuition fees have grown from 14% of operating funding to over 34%.[3]
This marks a move "away from a publicly funded model and towards a privatised user fee system," which has caused "post-secondary education to become unaffordable for many low- and middle-income Canadians." In the mid-1960s, nearly all of Canada's university funding was provided by the federal and provincial governments, and tuition fees were either incredibly minimal or non-existent. This process began to change in the early 1980s, with the rise of neoliberalism in the global political economy, which saw moves toward cutting social spending by governments. As government funding decreased, tuition costs rose, and as a result, between the early 1980s and the early 1990s, tuition fees in Canada nearly doubled. In 1995, the Liberal federal government of Canada cut $7 billion in spending for the provinces, leading to "the largest tuition fee increases in Canadian history." Quebec had, however, resisted the push toward making students pay more, which was taking place in all the other Canadian provinces. In the early 1990s, average undergraduate tuition fees in Canada were $1,464; today the average has more than tripled to $5,138.[4]
So why is this process taking place? Why must government spending on education (and other social programs) be reduced, while personal costs for all of these services be increased? The answer is not in "efficiency" or "balancing budgets," but rather, in class warfare.
In April of 2007, TD Bank (one of Canada's 'big five' banks which dominate the economy) released a "plan for prosperity" for the province of Quebec, which recommended, among other things, raising the cost of tuition: "by raising tuition fees but focusing on increased financial assistance for those in need, post secondary education (PSE) institutions will be better-positioned to prosper and provide world-class education and research."[5] In one Canadian province, Nova Scotia, the government hired a former chief economist from the Bank of Montreal, Tim O'Neill, to assess higher education finances, and unsurprisingly, advocated higher tuition fees.[6] Banks, of course, have a major interest in promoting increased tuition costs, because they provide student loans and profit off of the interest on student debt, like some malevolent ever-growing succubus draining the life force and potential of future generations which are doomed to debt slavery. So naturally, our governments take the advice of the banks, because they know whom their real masters are.
It should be noted, as well, that this is not merely a problem in Quebec or Canada. Tens of thousands of students in the United Kingdom are planning a walk out in protest of increasing tuition fees, which "are pricing students out of education."[7] The Occupy Movement in the United States is moving into universities, as campuses in California experienced demonstrations and protests against "state budget cuts to education and the resulting hikes in tuition."[8] In Spain, more than 30,000 students took to the streets of Barcelona protesting the 'austerity cuts' to education, and were then of course met with state repression.[9] Perhaps most impressive is a mass student movement that has developed in Chile over the past year.
The College Crisis
What is the 'college crisis'? It's quite simple: our society is producing more educated, professionalized youths than ever before, who are then graduating into a jobless market, and what's more, they are graduating with extensive debt. The professional education students receive, in combination with the heavy overbearing debt load and the immense dissatisfaction with the lack of opportunities for them, creates a large, mobile, educated, activated, and very pissed off group of people. This is what is referred to as a 'poverty of expectations,' whereby the inculcated expectations of a group or sector of society cannot be met by the society in which they live. In any society, in any period of history, this is a recipe for social unrest, resistance, rebellion, and, potentially, Revolution.
Naturally, the elites of any society fear such a scenario, so they always come up with various methods of managing these increasingly problematic conditions. The solutions, invariably, are always aimed at finding methods and means for undermining the ability and effectiveness of the target group to mobilize and organize for their cause; in this case, students. Cutting education budgets and increasing tuition fees is a very effective means to create more 'desirable' conditions for elites. How so? Any form of 'austerity' is essentially an act of class war, waged by the upper class against the rest. Austerity means that budgets will be cut and costs will be increased, whether through taxation, direct prices for services and necessities, or more often, both. The stated purpose of 'austerity measures' is to reduce debt (spending) and increase profitability (or revenue), with the purported aim of eliminating the debt over time. This is, however, not the true purpose of austerity, and appropriately so, it is never the result. The result is actually to increase debt, and impose a regimen of what amounts to 'social genocide': increasing the burden, costs, taxes, and hardships upon the wider population. For the poor, it means despair; for the middle class, it means poverty; and for the rich, it means prosperity and power.
The current crisis stems from developments that took place in the 1960s which saw an increase in activism and engagement among the general population, and especially the youth. Universities were breeding grounds for activism and movements which sought to create social uplift. The elite response to this scenario, in the United States specifically but also across the Western world as a whole, was to declare a "Crisis of Democracy" in which too many people were making too many demands upon the system, in which all forms of authority were under attack, and the legitimacy of those authorities were called into question. Elites of both the left and right saw this acceleration of democratic participation and activism as an assault upon their conception of what "democracy" should be – namely, a state that serves their interests alone. From the right, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – and from the liberal internationalists, the Trilateral Commission – launched a major national and global attack upon the surge of democratic activism in what the Trilateral Commission referred to as an "excess of democracy." The result of this attack: neoliberalism and debt. The two documents that were most influential in this attack on democracy were the "Powell Memo" of 1971 sent to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce which outlined a detailed program for how big business could reorganize society for its own interests, and the Trilateral Commission's 1975 report, "The Crisis of Democracy," which outlined an elite ideology which saw the problem of society being in an "excess of democracy" and that what is required is to correct the balance in favour of elites and increase apathy and passivity among the population. The Chamber of Commerce represents all the major business interests in the United States, while the Trilateral Commission (founded in 1973 by banker David Rockefeller), represents roughly 350 elites in the areas of academia, finance, business, government, foreign policy, media and foundations from North America, Western Europe, and Japan.
The result of this was to decrease government funding for education, increase tuition and other costs, increase debt for students and the general population as a whole (through credit cards, mortgages, loans, etc.), and to merge higher education and big business: the corporatization and privatization of universities.
As part of this process, knowledge was transformed into 'capital' – into 'knowledge capitalism' or a 'knowledge economy.' Reports from the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the 1990s transformed these ideas into a "policy template." This was to establish "a new coalition between education and industry," in which "education if reconfigured as a massively undervalued form of knowledge capital that will determine the future of work, the organization of knowledge institutions and the shape of society in the years to come."[10]
Knowledge was thus defined as an "economic resource" which would give growth to the economy. As such, in the neoliberal era, where all aspects of economic productivity and growth are privatized (purportedly to increase their efficiency and productive capacity as only the "free market" can do), education – or the "knowledge economy" – itself, was destined to be privatized.[11]
Solving the 'College Crisis'
In February of 2011, it was reported that the average debt for a Canadian family had reached over $100,000, spending 150% of their earnings. Thus, for every $1,000 in after-tax income, the average Canadian family then owes $1,500. The debt figures include mortgages, student loans, credit card debts, and lines of credit. In 1990, the average Canadian family was able to put roughly $8,000 into savings, in 2012, that number was at $2,500. So while the public is constantly told that the 'recession' is over, this is simply not true for the general population, though it may appear to be true in the quarterly reports of Canada's multinational corporations and banks. A 2011 report indicated that, "17,400 households were behind in their mortgage payments by three or more months in 2010, up by 50 per cent since the recession began. Credit card delinquencies and bankruptcy rates also remain higher than before the recession."[12]
By February of 2012, this rate of income-to-debt had not only failed to improve, but even got slightly worse, hitting a new record.[13] The state for Canadian families is indeed getting worse. More than half of the jobs created since the "end" of the "recession" went to those aged 55 and older, leaving the youth struggling to find jobs, while older workers have to either stay working longer, return from retirement because they can't survive off of their pensions, and thus, young people are living at home longer and staying in school longer. The slight increases in hourly earnings has not kept up with inflation, and thus amounts to a loss of earnings, and income inequality continues to grow between the super-rich and everyone else.[14]
Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of Canada (Canada's central bank), is also Chairman of the Financial Stability Board, run out of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland – the central bank to the world's central banks – and which operates under the auspices of the G20. Carney had previously served as Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, the Canadian Department of Finance, and spent thirteen years with Goldman Sachs prior to that.
The Bank of Canada, like all central banks, serves the dominant elite interests of the nation, but also of the international financial elite more broadly. The board of directors of the Bank of Canada includes William Black, former CEO of Maritime Life, who sits on the boards of Dalhousie University, the Shaw Group, Standard Life of Canada, and Nova Scotia Business, Inc.; Philip Deck, CEO of Extuple, Inc. (a technology finance corporation), former managing partner with merchant banking company HSD Partners, and is on the board of a major Canadian think tank, the C.D. Howe Institute; Bonnie DuPont, former Vice President at Enbridge Inc., former director of the Canadian Wheat Board, a current director of agribusiness firm Viterra Inc, UTS, on the board of governors of the University of Calgary, member of the Institute of Corporate Directors, and is past president of the Calgary Petroleum Club; Jock Finlayson, Vice President of the Business Council of British Columbia, former Vice President of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (an interest group made up of Canada's top 150 CEOs), and a member of the Canada West Foundation; Daniel Johnson, a director of Bombardier, IGM Financial, Mackenzie Financial Corporation, Investors Group, and former Minister of Industry and Commerce in the Province of Quebec; David Laidley, Chairman Emeritus of Deloitte & Touche LLP, on the boards of Nautilus Indemnity Limited, ProSep Inc., EMCOR Group, Aviva Canada Inc., the Cole Foundation, and on several boards at McGill University. The rest of the directors of the Bank of Canada are almost exclusively businessmen or former government officials (two women in total), and all of them are white; so, naturally, they truly represent the struggling Canadian family.
In March of 2012, the Bank of Canada warned that household debt "remains the biggest domestic risk" to Canada's economy. While part of the Bank's role is to set interest rates, it has kept interest rates very low (at 1%) in order to encourage lending (and indeed, families have become more indebted as a result). Yet, the Bank says, interest rates will have to rise eventually. Economists at Canada's major banks (CIBC, RBC, BMO, TD, and ScotiaBank) naturally support such an inevitability, as one BMO economist stated, "while rates are unlikely to increase in the near term, the next move is more likely to be up rather than down, and could well emerge sooner than we currently anticipate." The chief economist at CIBC stated that, "markets will pick up on the slightly improved change in tone on the economy, and might move forward the implied date for the first rate hike." This translates into: the economy is doing well for the big banks, therefore they will demand higher interest rates on debts, and plunge the Canadian population into poverty; the "invisible hand of the free market" in action.[15] Increased interest rates mean increased payments on debts, which means increased suffering for the indebted, who make up the general population.
As the Bank of Canada warns that interest rates will increase, perhaps as soon as this year, the Canadian people – heavily indebted – will suffer immensely and will likely fail to meet their interest payments. Since such a large majority of the debt and interest is in mortgages, this would potentially cause a major housing crisis, which is already at bubble proportions (especially in Vancouver, now the most expensive city to live in within North America), and will drag the middle class and the rest of the Canadian economy down with it. Even TD Bank has said the housing market is over-valued (i.e., artificially inflated), and warned of a coming "correction" (i.e., economic crisis).[16]
As the gap widens between the rich and everyone else in nearly every OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) country, Canada is no exception. The top 10% of Canadian earners make ten times as much as the bottom 10%. The top 1% in Canada saw their share of total income increase from 8.1% in 1980 to 13.3% in 2007, while the top 0.1% saw their share increase from 2% to 5.3%. Tax policies in Canada strengthen the wealth gap. In 1981, the tax rate for the top margin of earners was 43%, and in 2010, it was 29%. As the Secretary General of the OECD stated in December of 2011, "The social contract is starting to unravel in many countries… This study dispels the assumptions that the benefits of economic growth will automatically trickle down to the disadvantaged and that greater inequality fosters greater social mobility." Thus, "inequality will continue to rise."[17]
In a 2008 OECD study, Canada was singled out as one of the countries with the worst rates of widening inequality, stating that, "In the last 10 years, the rich have been getting richer, leaving both middle and poorer income classes behind." The top 3.8% of Canadian households controlled 66.6% of all financial wealth by 2009, with rates set to increase. As the Conservative government in Canada continues to implement corporate tax cuts, this disparity will increase, with the Harper government providing $60 billion in corporate tax breaks, while maintaining a $30 billion budget deficit (public debt). Despite all the tax cuts for corporations, the money that is not spent on taxes tends to go to shareholders and very little goes toward investments or job creation, meaning that the benefits do not "trickle down," but rather, as to be expected, trickle up. For Prime Minister Harper's tax policies and programs, "The higher the income, the bigger the tax break." The senior economist at the International Trade Union Confederation stated that, "The growing gap between the rich and the rest of us has many causes, including higher remuneration for top earners, much higher profits as a share of the economy, less bargaining power for workers, and less progressive taxes… Conservative tax policies will clearly aggravate the problem."[18]
The Conference Board of Canada released a study in the fall of 2011 which stated that, "income inequality has been rising more rapidly in Canada than in the U.S. since the mid-1990s," and on a global scale, "Canada has had the fourth-largest increase in income inequality among its peers." The President of the Conference Board explained, "Even though the U.S. currently has the largest rich-poor income gap among these countries, the gap in Canada has been rising at a faster rate."[19]
Among the OECD countries, the one with the highest rates of inequality was none other than the Petri-dish experiment of neoliberalism, Chile, followed by Israel, Italy, Portugal, the U.K., and the United States. While the top 10% of Canadian earners had an average income of $103,500, the bottom 10% had an average annual income of $10,260.[20]
While Canada is often hailed as the most promising nation to come out of the economic-financial crisis of 2008, since its banks were largely left out of the housing derivative market (and thus, were protected), the facts on the ground represent a different reality. As the Economist reported in 2010, of the 31 OECD nations, Canada ranked as the 22nd worst country in terms of child poverty, with one in ten Canadians (roughly 3 million) being poor, 610,000 of them being children. In November of 2010, it was reported that roughly 900,000 Canadians were dependent upon food handouts, a 9% increase from the previous year, with roughly 300,000 homeless people. The majority of the poor are single mothers, immigrants, aboriginal and disabled Canadians. Through the 1980s and 1990s (with the implementation of neolibral policies), welfare payments to these groups were slashed, with British Columbia as the most enthusiastic supporter of exacerbating child poverty, which stood at 10.4% by 2010.[21]
The cost of poverty is quite extensive:
* By 2011, poverty was said to cost the government between $72-86 billion per year;
* In the city of Hamilton, Ontario, there is a 21 year-difference in life expectancy between those who live in high and low-income neighborhoods;
* In March of 2010, nearly 900,000 Canadians had to go to food banks for food, 38% of them being children, an increase of 28% since March of 2008, the "highest level of food bank use ever";
* In 2010, there were between 150-300,000 "visible" homeless in Canada, with another 900,000 "hidden" homeless, and 1.5 million families in "core housing need" and 3.1 million families in unaffordable housing;
* In 2010, 59% of Canadians (over 20 million Canadians) lived from paycheck to paycheck, "saying they would be in financial difficulty if their paycheque was delayed by a week";
* In 2009, the average annual income of Canada's best paid CEOs was $6.6 million, "155 times higher than the average worker's income ($42,988);
* A third of all income growth in Canada over the past two decades has gone to the richest one percent of Canadians."[22]
Canada's Youth: A "Bankrupted Generation"
By January of 2009, Canadian students had a debt to the federal government of over $13 billion, with student loan debt increasing by $1.2 million every day. The Canadian Federation of Students said the obvious answer to this growing crisis was to make education "affordable." Studies show the effects of student debt, reducing "the ability of new graduates to start families, work in public service careers, invest in other assets, volunteer, or even just take a lower paying job in their own field to get a foot in the door." On top of the $13 billion owed to the Federal Government, Canadian students owed an additional $5 billion to provincial governments, and the figures do not include debt owed to banks, credit card companies or parents.[23] In short, Canada's student youth are a "lost generation."
In September of 2010, the Canadian Council on Learning published a report which indicated that, "students who graduate from college and university with high debt loads are putting off buying a house, having children or investing for the future." The average debt load of a Canadian university graduate in 2009 was $26,680, and the average debt for college graduates was $13,600. These figures, it should be noted, do not take into account mortgages, credit card debt, lines of credit, or car loans.[24] This represented a doubling in the amount of student debt from 1990, and in 2005, the number of Canadian students needing loans to pay for their education had increased to 57%.[25]
In October of 2011, it was reported that Canadian student debt (to the Federal Government) will surpass $15 billion by 2013, which is the current ceiling set by the government in student loans. Thus, if it reaches the ceiling, the government will no longer (in theory) be able to provide student loans. The solution, according to the Canadian Federation of Students, does not mean eliminating the debt ceiling, which will only make the problem worse, but rather, in reducing the costs of education itself. As the national chairperson of the CFS stated, "The reality is that the job market is grim and students are facing their first interviews with a mortgage-sized debt." Thus, once they begin work, they do not contribute to the economic growth of the country, but rather merely have to focus on paying interest and repaying debts. The cost of university education in Canada is estimated to be at $60,000, and some studies suggest that this will rise to $140,000 for those born in 2011. The average yearly undergraduate tuition fees were a 4.3% increase from the previous year, reaching $5,366.[26]
In 2011, almost two million Canadians had a student debt totaling $20 billion, and as the chairman of the Canadian Federation of Students stated, "We have an entire generation of people who now more than ever have to complete some form of post-secondary education just to get a job interview, with more than 70% of all new jobs requiring some degree or diploma. We are on the verge of bankrupting a generation before they even enter the workplace." As job losses continue, and especially as the youth job market continues to decline, the number of full-time students tends to increase, and the availability of part-time work for students continues to decline. A post-secondary education no longer increases a "return on investment" through a lifetime, as it was once assumed. The overall student debt is not the most pressing immediate problem, but rather the "crippling interest rate attached to these government loans" which plunge youth into a deep crisis. So while interest rates are very low (in other lending, as set by the Bank of Canada at 1%), the government is charging 8% interest on student loans. Margaret Johnson, president of Solutions Credit Counselling Service Inc. in Vancouver stated that, "When the loan goes into default, the interest starts to compound. And then you have an absolute nightmare. The average debt I'm seeing is anywhere between $30,000 and $60,000. The payments are so high on some of these loans that the young person cannot live and make a payment. Instead of lowering the interest rate — or eliminating it, which I think is the best solution — the government extended the repayment term to 14 years. The fact that so many loans are in arrears proves this isn't the answer."[27]
Some things are worth repeating: the average debt for every Canadian household is over $100,000 and the average debt for a university graduate in Canada is over $26,000; nearly one million Canadians depend upon food banks for their food, poverty and inequality are increasing, homelessness is increasing; the rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poor or poorer, and there is a horrible job market with few jobs available, let alone available to youth. So the "solution" – we are told – to the supposed "problem" of "competitiveness" in our universities… is to increase the burden, the cost, and the debt of students, families, and the general population; to increase tuition and student debt, to increase interest rates on all debts, and to plunge the population into abject poverty. It seems then, that Canadians, and the Western world in general (as these policies are being pushed throughout the G8 nations on the whole) are about to get a hard lesson in what our countries of the industrialized and supposedly "democratic" north have been doing to the rest of the world (Africa, Asia, Latin America) for decades and, indeed, centuries. What has been done abroad is now coming home to roost.
The conditions, restrictions, programs and policies that our nations have imposed upon Africa, Asia, and Latin America for the past four decades have plunged those countries into poverty, allowed for the unhindered control and extraction of their resources for our corporations, put their nations into the debt of our banks, exploited their populations for cheap labour, and propped up ruthless dictators to repress the people if they ever get wise and want to change their society. While our nations of course continue in their raping and pillaging of the world, now they have also turned their attention – and absolute disregard for humanity – to their domestic populations. The same banks, international institutions, nations, organizations and even individuals who promoted the policies which led to the impoverishment and punishment of much of the world's population are now telling us that these same policies are the "solutions" to our current crises, just as they told the populations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. If we listen to these same people, submit to the same policies, and accept the same ideologies which have caused so much destruction and devastation around the world, and expect different results at home, we deserve what we get. Naturally, then, we must stop accepting and consenting to the hegemony and power of our elites and their institutions and ideologies. This means that we have to actively create alternatives, not simply protest against their programs, or demand reforms, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The boat is sinking, it doesn't matter how it looks on the way down. It's time for a new system altogether. One cannot demand from others to create a new system, but must actively create it themselves.
In the next part of this series, "Class War and the College Crisis," I will be discussing the coming economic crisis for Canada, which has thus far been hailed as the "safest" nation emerging from the 2008 "recession," a myth that will soon be broken. As Canada, and much of the rest of the world, begin their rapid descent into an economic depression, the above-mentioned statistics regarding debt, poverty, and inequality will get worse. As the social and economic crisis deepens, our governments will continue to show in whose interests they truly rule: with batons, tear gas, beatings, mass arrests, detention camps, and the growth and development of a police state surveillance society, our governments will reveal that they rule for bankers, corporations, and oligarchs. The democratic façade will wash away. It is within these circumstances that Canadians, and the wider world in general, must seek to create a true democratic system. First, however, we must recognize and understand the system in which we live for what it is: a State-Capitalist society ruled by a power-mad oligarchy. The next part of this series will be taking a look at what this power-mad oligarchy is doing and will be doing to Canada's economy and society in the coming years. Here's a hint: it doesn't benefit YOU!
Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People's Book Project. He also hosts a weekly podcast show, "Empire, Power, and People," on BoilingFrogsPost.com.
[1] CRA, What are the income tax rates in Canada for 2012? Canada Revenue Agency:
[2] Finances Québec, "A Fair and Balanced University Funding Plan: To Give Québec the Means to Fulfill its Ambitions," The Government of Québec, 2011-2012 Budget, page 7.
[3] CFS, Tuition Fees, The Canadian Federation of Students:
[4] Ibid.
[5] Press Release, "TD Economics outlines plan for prosperity in Quebec report," Newswire, 10 April 2007:
[6] CNW, "Déjà Vu: O'Neill Report Recycles Dated, Discredited Tuition Fee Myths," Newswire, 17 September 2010:
[7] Alison Kershaw, "Thousands of students to stage walkout protest," The Independent, 12 March 2012:
[8] Carla Rivera and Larry Gordon, "Occupy protests bring small yet intense crowds to state campuses," Los Angeles Times, 1 March 2012:
[9] Giles Tremlett, "Fighting breaks out in Barcelona as students protest over education cuts," The Guardian, 29 February 2012:
[10] Mark Olssen and Michael A. Peters, "Neoliberalism, Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy: From the Free Market to Knowledge Capitalism," Journal of Education Policy (Vol. 20, No. 3, May 2005), page 331.
[11] Ibid, pages 338-339.
[12] CTV News Staff, "Average Canadian family debt hits $100,000," CTV News, 17 February 2011:
[13] Why are Canadian families falling further into debt?, The Globe and Mail, 14 February 2012:
[14] Tavia Grant, "Financial security 'elusive' for many Canadian families," The Globe and Mail, 22 March 2012: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economy-lab/daily-mix/financial-security-elusive-for-many-canadian-families/article2377592/
[15] Gordon Isfeld, "Bank of Canada says household debt 'biggest risk' to economy," The Leader Post, 9 March 2012:
[16] John Morrissy, "Household debt a mounting concern as rates appear set to rise," The Montreal Gazette, 23 March 2012:
[17] CBC, Wealth gap widens to 30-year high, CBC News, 5 December 2011:
[18] Les Whittington, "Tax policies may aggravate gap between rich and poor," Toronto Star, 27 May 2011:
[19] Tavia Grant, "Income inequality rising quickly in Canada," The Globe and Mail, 13 September 2011:
[20] CTV News Staff, "OECD report finds income inequality rising in Canada," CTV News:
[21] Poverty in Canada: Mean Streets, The Economist, 25 November 2010:
[22] CTV News Staff, "Canada Student Loan debt tops $13B, figures show," CTV News, 21 January 2009:
[23] CTV News Staff, "Canada Student Loan debt tops $13B, figures show," CTV News, 21 January 2009:
[24] CBC, "Student debt limits post-grad options," CBC News, 22 September 2010:
[25] QMI Agency, "Student debt doubled over 20 years: Study," Toronto Sun, 22 September 2010:
[26] Sharon Singleton, "Action needed on student debt: CFS," Toronto Sun, 17 October 2011:
[27] Mary Teresa Bitti, Student debt bankrupting a generation, The Financial Post, 4 June 2011: