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.

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“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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Kurt Nimmo - October 3, 2008

Back in 2000, before “everything changed,” the Council on Foreign Relations held a conference entitled “The Next Financial Crisis: Warning Signs, Damage Control and Impact” at its posh headquarters on Manhattan. “For two days, several speakers told a high-powered audience of 250 people, comprised largely of bankers, investors, corporation officials, and policymakers, mostly from the United States, but also from Europe, of the possibility that the U.S. stock market, and potentially the world financial system, would melt down,” Richard Freeman wrote in the July 28, 2000, issue of the Executive Intelligence Review.

At the time, the corporate media was heralding the alleged robust nature of the U.S. economy under Clinton, even as the so-called Dotcom bubble was deflating. Obviously, the CFR knew something very few other people knew or even vaguely gleamed — the global elite were in the preparatory stages of imploding the economy.

The CFR’s eight hour “war-game simulation of the simultaneous breakdown of major financial markets around the world” foresaw what we are now experiencing up close and personal. The CFR’s game closely paralleled what is going on now. Freeman writes…

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F. William Engdahl - September 30, 2008

The unexpected rejection by the US Congress of the Bush Administration financial rescue plan, TARP on September 29 has opened up the spectre for the first time of a 1931-style domino wave of worldwide bank failures. That is already underway across the US banking spectrum with the failure, nationalization or forced liquidation in the past two weeks of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, of the giant Washington Mutual mortgage lender, of the nation’s fourth largest deposit bank, Wachovia. That was on top of a wave of smaller bank failures that began with IndyMac in the spring. For some it is appealing and more simple to grasp the magnitude of these titanic events in the US-centered financial world by assuming it is all part of a pre-planned grand conspiracy by the Money Masters, what in the 1920s in the USA was termed the Money Trust, to control the entire financial world.

As the details of the present crisis reveal, there are huge ideological fault lines making for chaos and a potential meltdown of the Laissez Faire financial system. That present system, which was built on the back of Wall Street financial and banking deregulation since 1987 when Alan Greenspan, a devout follower and close friend of radical individualist Ayn Rand, became Wall Street’s man at the Federal Reserve for almost 19 years, is over now with the failure of the Henry Paulson $700 billion bailout scheme. Governments worldwide now face no alternative but to begin the painful process of putting the financial genie back in the bottle and re-regulating an out-of-control financial system. The failure of the UK Government and the US Government to address that fundamental issue is behind the present crisis of confidence.

A brief look at history

The Great Depression in Germany in 1931 began with a seemingly minor event—the collapse of a bank in Vienna, Creditanstalt, that May. For readers interested in more on the remarkable parallels between that crisis and that of today, I recommend the treatment in my earlier volume, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order.

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Steve Watson - Sept 26, 2008

A Council on Foreign Relations member and former policy planner under prominent Bilderberger Henry Kissinger has penned a piece in the Financial Times of London calling for a “new global monetary authority” that would have the power to monitor all national financial authorities and all large global financial companies.

“Even if the US’s massive financial rescue operation succeeds, it should be followed by something even more far-reaching – the establishment of a Global Monetary Authority to oversee markets that have become borderless,” writes Jeffrey Garten, also a former managing director of Lehman Brothers.

Garten, now a professor of business at Yale, served on the policy planning staff of Kissinger during his time as Secretary of State. He also served on the White House Council on International Economic Policy under the Nixon administration and went on to become the Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade under Bill Clinton.

Citing “globalization”, A “clash of philosophies” and the “vacuum at the centre” of the current global institutional apparatus, Garten describes his vision for a new monolithic world authority to oversee all financial activity around the globe.

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Charles Scaliger -Friday, 19 September 2008 15:04

Respected newsman and consummate insider, Fareed Zakaria paints a rosy picture of unabated globalism and global governance and tells why America’s crises are overblown.

The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008, 292 pages, hardcover.

If the American news media favors Cassandras, naysayers, and pessimists, then Fareed Zakaria, editor and columnist for Newsweek magazine and irrepressible optimist, is something of an anomaly. But the Indian-born Zakaria, who sits on the boards of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, two of America’s most elite and elitist organizations that typically operate at cross-purposes to the interests of ordinary Americans, is also an insider’s insider. From his vantage point at the pinnacle of the American establishment, this non-practicing Muslim from Bombay enjoys the privileged perspective of the select few who engineer the world we live in behind the scenes.

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It’s the strongest signal yet from the global elite about who they want in the White House.

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John McManus of the John Birch Society gives talks about the Council on Foreign Relations and NAFTA.