Americans want our rulers to mind their own business abroad – and good luck with that!

Justin Raimondo, December 07, 2009

The news
that Americans want the U.S. government to mind its own business when it comes
to foreign affairs has our Washington elite in a panic. The explanatory
notes accompanying a new
Pew poll [.pdf] describe the "rise in isolationist sentiment"
that started during George W. Bush’s second term and continues in the age of
Obama. The agonized hand-wringing is all
too apparent in the use of the "isolationist" epithet and even
in the way the question was asked: should the U.S. "mind its own business
internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their
own"? Forty-nine percent – the highest proportion "in nearly half
a century of polling" – answered yes. And that’s not all: a gob-smacking
76 percent agreed the U.S. should "concentrate more on our own national
problems and building up our strength and prosperity here at home," as
opposed to "think[ing] in international terms."

The poll took samples from two groups: common, ordinary, everyday people (i.e.,
you and me)
and members of the Council on Foreign Relations,
an elite group of foreign policy-oriented intellectuals, policy wonks, and high
muckamucks. The elite group disagreed sharply with the general public’s view
on virtually every important question: for example, none of the CFR members
thought we should mind our own business – a policy that would go against the
group’s history and orientation, which has always been pronouncedly interventionist.

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No ‘conspiracy theory,’ scheme hatched by CFR was sold to Bush, now Obama

Jerome R. Corsi - October 23, 2009

NEW YORK – The integration of the United States with Canada and Mexico, long deemed by many as little more than a fanciful “conspiracy theory,” was actually an idea promoted by the Council on Foreign Relations and sold to President Bush as a means of increasing commerce and business interests throughout North America, according to a top Canadian businessman.

Thomas d’Aquino, CEO and president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives – the Canadian counterpart to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – confirmed in an interview recently published in Canada the accuracy of what WND first reported over three years ago: namely, that the Council on Foreign Relations was the prime mover in establishing the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, or SPP.

Published by the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel Oct. 4, the d’Aquino interview verifies that the creation of the SPP was not a “conspiracy theory” but a well-thought-out North American integration plan launched by his organization, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, along with the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States.

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Andrew Gavin Marshall - August 3, 2009

The Bilderberg Group and the European Union Project

In 1954, the Bilderberg Group was founded in the Netherlands, which was a secretive meeting held once a year, drawing roughly 130 of the political-financial-military-academic-media elites from North America and Western Europe as “an informal network of influential people who could consult each other privately and confidentially.”[1] Regular participants include the CEOs or Chairman of some of the largest corporations in the world, oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, and Total SA, as well as various European monarchs, international bankers such as David Rockefeller, major politicians, presidents, prime ministers, and central bankers of the world.[2]

Joseph Retinger, the founder of the Bilderberg Group, was also one of the original architects of the European Common Market and a leading intellectual champion of European integration. In 1946, he told the Royal Institute of International Affairs (the British counterpart and sister organization of the Council on Foreign Relations), that Europe needed to create a federal union and for European countries to “relinquish part of their sovereignty.” Retinger was a founder of the European Movement (EM), a lobbying organization dedicated to creating a federal Europe. Retinger secured financial support for the European Movement from powerful US financial interests such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefellers.[3] However, it is hard to distinguish between the CFR and the Rockefellers, as, especially following World War II, the CFR’s main finances came from the Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation and most especially, the Rockefeller Foundation.[4]

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Ruth Rendely - July 30, 2009

When I was a high school junior at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, I started a United Nation’s Club. I vaguely remember that Carl Bernstein joined my club, before he graduated to become a cub reporter at the Washington Post. As a result of my love for the U.N., I subsequently became the national student chairman of the United World Federalists, a group led by Norman Cousins, that wanted a world government based on the U.N. charter. The United World Federalists aspired to put some teeth into the structure of the United Nations, so that it could eventually replace nation state armies with U.N. forces. This we hoped would prevent an atomic holocaust.

That was almost 50 years ago, and I have since learned a few things about this planet. I now believe that in my youth I was a pawn for the American version of the English Fabian Socialist movement. The Fabians helped create the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921, the United Nations in 1945, and other New World Order groups that aim for a world government based upon communist principles, but with a softer, gradualist, non-violent approach. Their ideal is to promote the greatest good for the greatest number of people, in opposition, however, to principles of individuality and freedom.

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James Perloff - 23 July 2009

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama consistently promised Americans “change.” Such promises aren’t new to the voting public.

When Jimmy Carter ran for president, he said: “The people of this country know from bitter experience that we are not going to get … changes merely by shifting around the same group of insiders.” And top Carter aide Hamilton Jordan promised: “If, after the inauguration, you find a Cy Vance as Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And I’d quit.” Yet Carter selected Vance as Secretary of State and Brzezinski as National Security Adviser; the “same group of insiders” had been shifted around; and Jordan did not quit.

Carter’s administration was dominated by members of the Trilateral Commission, which had been founded by Brzezinski and David Rockefeller. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was campaigning against Carter, he protested:

I don’t believe that the Trilateral Commission is a conspiratorial group, but I do think its interests are devoted to international banking, multinational corporations, and so forth. I don’t think that any Administration of the U.S. Government should have the top nineteen positions filled by people from any one group or organization representing one viewpoint. No, I would go in a different direction.

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Thomas R. Eddlem - 23 March 2009

Newspapers are fixated upon $160 million in bonuses given to American International Group (AIG) executives. And it’s nice to know where the millions are going (note: the bonuses could have been cancelled had the federal government let the company go bankrupt, as officials should have). But where are the trillions in TARP, TALC and Federal Reserve Bank bailout funds going?

The man in charge of administering the bailouts is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who served as a staff member of the New York City-based Council on Foreign Relations before being hired in 2003 to head the New York City branch of the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed). As the vice chairman of the Fed’s Open Market Committee, Geithner is probably a poor choice to get the nation out of it’s current economic mess. He served as Alan Greenspan’s number two man at the Fed, so Geithner is as responsible as anyone for facilitating the severity of the real estate and financial bubble and its subsequent collapse. After all, the Fed was the driving force behind the asset bubble, inflating the bubble larger and larger through artificially low interest rates and an inflationary easy-money policy.

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Old-Thinker News | March 31, 2009
By Daniel Taylor

The Council on Foreign Relations, often described as the “real state department”, has launched an initiative to promote and implement a system of effective world governance.

The program, titled “The International Institutions and Global Governance Program,” utilizes the resources of the “…David Rockefeller Studies Program to assess existing regional and global governance mechanisms…” The initial funding for the program came with a $6 million grant from the Robina Foundation, which claims that the grant is “…one of the largest operating grants ever received in Council history.”

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Mose Farber - March 9, 2009

As the state of the declining global economy worsens, the world turns to the American economic powerhouse for direction. With the Obama administration’s promises of recovery, transparency and accountability for the economy, much of the burden falls onto the shoulders of the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. The Fed, which sets the nation’s monetary policy and regulates banks, is immersed in trying to keep the U.S. financial system from cratering.

Today, Bernanke attended President Obama’s daily economic briefing to work on solving the increasing array of economic problems, and tomorrow he will set out his plan for regulating the banks in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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JAMES TRAUB (CFR) - January 3, 2009

Even before Israel launched attacks on Gaza last week, Barack Obama’s incoming national security team understood that the consuming demands of crises could all too easily eclipse the transformational agenda on foreign affairs that Mr. Obama advanced during the campaign.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, instability in Pakistan and the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran would have been more than enough to crowd out any thought of long-range planning. Now the Middle East is in flames again. And yet a wide range of foreign policy experts are urging the new president to look beyond the smoke and the bloodshed — indeed, to leverage the pervasive sense of crisis — to reshape the world’s governing structures.

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Paul Kennedy - 01/05/2009

Every so often in the history of international affairs, a great transnational turbulence shakes the foundations of the world and brings many of its older structures tumbling to the ground, as we witnessed in 1919, 1945 and 1989. In the confusion and babble that follow, it’s difficult to see through the dust and recognize the shape of the altered strategic landscape.

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John W. Wallace - New York Campaign for Liberty (24/11/08)

When I was growing up in the Inwood section of upper Manhattan, I remember when I was about 12 or 13 years old I had my first contact with discovering what a “front” was for another business.  It was called Tack’s Tackle Shop.  When it first opened, it looked like just another business. The guy in the store, Tack, was selling fishing rods, live bait and an array of fishing equipment. It didn’t take long before the kids in the neighborhood figured out that perhaps there was something else going on.  The live bait in the window wasn’t alive anymore and local hoods and gangster type people seemed to be going in and out, particularly in the evenings and none of them looked like fishermen. It wasn’t long before the place was raided by the NYCPD and my friends and I all watched from across the street on Sherman Avenue as “Tack” came out in handcuffs along with a bunch of other men.  We were later told that Tack’s Tackle Shop had actually been a front for an illegal gambling operation.

A “front group” can be any entity that is set up to appear to be a legitimate independent organization, like Tack’s Tackle Shop, when it is actually controlled from behind the scenes by another organization or group of individuals. These front groups are often legitimate businesses, social or political organizations, professional groups, advocacy groups, research organizations, etc. Organized crime has used legitimate front organizations for many decades to launder their income from various illegal activities. Pharmaceutical companies have used front organizations to advocate for the drugs they manufacture. International terrorist organizations have their front groups here in the United States and as the evidence clearly shows, so do the international bankers.

After researching the formation and activities of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) it appears that it may be a very sophisticated version of “Tack’s Tackle Shop.” The CFR was specifically set up to carry out the goals and objectives of  international bankers so that the public positions taken by the CFR would appear to be independent positions that could not be directly connected to the international bankers who personally control and fund the CFR.

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While the Center for a New American Security may well be the “farm team,” what they don’t tell you is the Council on Foreign Relations - as always - is the Majors. Typical MSM subterfuge. It is far more significant that most of the Obama team are members of the CFR - THE establishment - than a one-year-old “think tank.”

Yochi J. Dreazen - Nov 16, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Center for a New American Security, a small think tank here with generally middle-of-the-road policy views, is rapidly emerging as a top farm team for the incoming Obama administration.

When President-elect Barack Obama released a roster of his transition advisers last week, many of the national-security appointments came from the ranks of the center, which was founded by a pair of former Clinton administration officials in February 2007.

The think tank’s central role in the transition effort suggests that its positions — which include rejecting a fixed timeline for a withdrawal from Iraq — will get a warm reception within the new administration.

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Current - November 09, 2008

Echoing Vice President-Elect Joe Biden’s promise of a generated crisis and Colin Powell’s revelation of a crisis that will happen on January 21 or 22, we now have the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and Biderberger Richard Haas’ similar predictions of doom and gloom scheduled for President-Elect Obama.

***

“While foreign leaders may or may not choose to test Obama, “the one thing I’m sure of is, events will test him,” Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass said. “There will be coups. … There will be genocide. … There will be terrorism.”

In 74 days, President-elect Barack Obama will assume responsibility for guiding the nation out of two wars and through a daunting array of real and potential global crises.

Obama is likely to benefit from initial goodwill across much of the planet, where there’s profound relief that the Bush years are ending.

Still, the new president — untested in foreign affairs — faces what may be the most unsettled global scene since the 1930s and ’40s.”

Steve Watson - Nov 7, 2008

Meet some of president elect Obama’s leading foreign and domestic policy advisors and likely administration members, every one of them a prominent member of the Council On Foreign Relations.

Will these people bring about “change” or will they continue to hold up the same entrenched system forged by the corporate elite for decades?

Susan E. Rice - Council on Foreign Relations, The Brookings Institution - Served as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under Clinton from 1997 to 2001. Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright is a longtime mentor and family friend to Rice. Critics charge that she is is ill disposed towards Europe, has little understanding of the Middle East and would essentially follow the same policies of Condoleeza Rice if appointed the next Secretary of State or the National Security Adviser.

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William F. Jasper - 31 October 2008

On October 17, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) hosted a “Symposium on International Law and Justice” featuring actress Angelina Jolie, a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and co-chair, with her husband, actor Brad Pitt, of the Jolie-Pitt Foundation. According to the CFR website, the symposium “was made possible through the generous support of the Jolie-Pitt Foundation.”

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