Excerpt from Chapter 7, "Governments, Goblins, and Godfathers" of Judy Kennedy's book:

Naming the Powers that Be

As we will see, the ruling elite pulling the strings behind the scenes is not so obscure.  Their mechanisms for muddling are the mainstream politics of government bureaucracies and corporate boards of directors.  Yet there seems to be a gathering of faces and events that can be connected to these mechanisms, and once we put a name to the faces, it’s much easier to keep track of them.  They loosely fall into three main groupings known as (1) The Trilateral Commission; (2) The Council on Foreign Relations; and (3) The Bilderberg Group.  Though these three groups have been the focus of many conspiracy theories, their existence and their activities are really no conspiracy at all.  They’re certainly not secret societies, although the Bilderberg meetings are closed to the public.  

Zbignew Brzezinski  (former chairman of Manhattan Bank and national security adviser to President Carter), David Rockefeller, and other eminent, wealthy men founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973.  Originally there were about 300 members, all coming from the upper echelons of international banking  and industry, government, academia, and conservative factions of the media and labor organizations.  Their common goal was to advance the doctrine of world order known as “trilaterialism.”  The term “trilateral” refers to the partnership among the ruling elite of the three main economic powers of the world:  North America, Western Europe and Japan.  Their program is to protect the interests of capitalism at all costs.  Their strategy relies on some basic points of agreement:

1.      The people, governments, and economies of all the nations must serve the needs of multinational banks and corporations;

2.      Control over economic resources spells power in modern politics; and

3.      The leaders of capitalist democracies -- systems where economic control and profit, and thus political power, rest with the few – must resist movements toward a truly popular democracy.[i]

Trilaterialism has its origins in the two older institutions of managing worldview:  The Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group.  The Council on Foreign Relations is not a government  agency – it is a private organization founded in 1918 in the United States for shaping public policy along similar ideological lines.  Its European counterpart, the elite organization known as the Bilderberg Group, was founded in 1954.  This group refers to select heads-of-state and influential individuals in business and academia who meet once a year to determine specific ideological goals consistent with Trilaterialism.  The name comes from the physical location where this group first met:  The Bilderberg Hotel in Holland. 

None of these three groups alone controls the world.  Yet all three of them and their diverse membership present a picture of a tightly organized multinational coordination of world management efforts rooted in capitalist imperialism.  Of course they don’t call it “imperialism” because that was a dirty word in a time of resurgent nationalism.  But that did not keep them from openly addressing this delicate dilemma in one of their meetings.  Isaiah Bowman, at a CFR meeting in May 1942, said that “the United States had to exercise the strength needed to assure “security,” and at the same time “avoid conventional forms of imperialism.”  The way to do this, he argued, was to make the exercise of that power international in character through a united national body.[ii]  And so the United Nations was born. 

The Council on Foreign Relations strategically substituted the words “national  interests” for “capitalist imperialism” and “neocolonialism.”  So foreign policy cannot be divorced from economic reality.  U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes admitted this as early as the 1920s: 

"…foreign policies are not built upon abstractions.  They are the result of practical conceptions of national interest.  The national interest is rarely an objective fact, however, as is indicated by the truism that in every country it is always redefined after a revolution… Since those in power define the national interest as the preservation of the existing set of economic, social, and political relationships and of their own rule, the national interest in a capitalist society is little more than the interest of the upper class…"[iii]

No secrecy or conspiracy needs dismantling to discover this trend because historically managing matters of economic and political policy has always been reserved for a wealthy, elite force of individuals in society.  It’s just that as the ages progress, modern technology has contributed significantly to the compaction of such efforts.  That same technology, however, guarantees a more widespread dissemination of information to the masses, so that at least the means to make these connections is more readily available to us than before.   

By examining this information, we find that these institutions “propagate the resulting policy positions through their network of authoritative channels (university publications, public officials, forums, etc.) setting the limits of respectable foreign policy debate.”[iv]   It is no secret that several members of the Bilderberg group are high administrative heads of our leading academic institutions such as MIT, Harvard, and Columbia.  Innovation in these institutions is only encouraged if it furthers the status quo.  Therefore, mainstream education goes a long way in preserving these power structures.  The theory even trickles down into elementary grades where children learn that even in the midst of great economic disparity between social classes, we can still have what appears to be a “thriving democracy.”  Keeping up that appearance is a major way that the muddlers secure the status quo.

Because the nations joined together by the Trilateral Commission are the most prosperous and productive, a major concern of the Trilateral Commission was that these nations remain the “vital center” of managerial control over the world’s affairs and resources.  Therefore Brzezinski proclaimed the need for a world economy for which the Trilateral Commission would be the custodian.  This economy would “embrace” and “co-opt” the Third World and gradually reintegrate the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, which were originally known as Trilateral “dropouts.”[v]  This, as we see, has already happened to a large extent as predicted by Brzezinski.  Communist forces have all but crumbled in those countries to be replaced by an unprecedented influx of corporate influence:  Those ‘golden arches' are everywhere! 

"Trilaterialism is the creed of an international ruling class whose locus of power is the global corporation.  The owners and managers of global corporations view the entire world as their factory, farm, supermarket, and playground.  The Trilateral Commission is seeking to strengthen and rationalize the world economy in their interest."[vi]

The Trilateral Commission divides the world into third world and fourth world regions.  Third World countries are those nations that are basically client states to the United States tied to the U.S. by economic indebtedness, yet not so poor as to be totally uninfluential.  These are countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia that possess some political clout, substantial foreign exchange reserves and needed exports.  Fourth World countries are the poorest and weakest, easily manipulated or pacified with international welfare programs focusing on meeting basic human needs because they have no political clout.  Any trend that these countries might show towards self-reliance or greater independence is perceived as a threat to the new global economy, and promptly thwarted by the Trilateral Commission forces in acts designed to induce greater “cooperation” on the part of these countries.  And how is this “cooperation” coerced?  According to political analyst and author Holly Sklar,

"In the wake of World War II, old-style colonialism gave way to neocolonialism.  The neocolonial state has formal political independence but in reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from the outside.  Instead of a single colonial master, the neocolonial state may have many new masters:  Western governments (especially the U.S.), the International Monetary Fund, banking consortiums, global corporations.  Western powers have intervened repeatedly to sabotage and smash governments which challenged the tightly woven fabric of dependency:  Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1954; the Congo (now Zaire), 1960; Brazil, 1964; Dominican Republic and Indonesia, 1965; Bolivia, 1970-71; Chile, 1973… Debt dependency is one of the neocolonial leashes around a Third World Country’s neck.  The leash is let out to allow Western-directed development projects to gallop ahead – returning enormous profits to foreign corporations and banks.  Or, the debt leash can be pulled in tight – as part of an economic and political destabilization campaign – to strangle a rebellious nation into submission."[vii]

As nations are enslaved by indebtedness to the World Bank, so we are enslaved by our indebtedness to banks through credit and other funny money machinations.  The Trilateral Commission controls the International Monetary Fund, and as long as people and nations are enslaved by debt, the ruling elite can afford to profess encouragement of human rights and democratic ideals because they know that we’re too busy working to pay off those debts to fight for anything more.  Therefore any trilateral strategy of “democratization” is one of co-optation.  Limited democracy is governable democracy.   Reform is tolerated, but never revolution.  

So if we want to look for people who may be attempting to manipulate world affairs behind the scenes to their own benefit, we need look no further than our own government and its legally sanctioned corporations.  These people need not resort to conspiracy to do this.  The ruling elite more often muddle in plain view of everyone or anyone who has eyes to see.  Laws, loopholes, and high court decisions are written in their favor in full public view as a result of their influence.  Yet where is the public?  That is the question.

© Judy Kennedy