that subscribe and become corporate members of the Council are the biggest, wealthiest, and most internationally oriented of U.S. corporations. For example, eight of the thirteen top U.S. corporations ranked by market capitalization are corporate members of the CFR. These eight alone are worth several trillion dollars.
There were also ten “Founders” on the CFR’s corporate membership list in 2014, each paying $100,000 a year for the benefits the CFR offers to them. In 2014 the Founders were conveniently divided into three groups, five finance capital corporations, three oil corporations, an industrial corporation, and a consulting corporation.150
• Bank of America Merrill Lynch: This company has been called the world’s largest financial services company and wealth manager. The Financial Times lists it as number one, with almost $2 trillion of assets under management.151 Other sources list it as having $2.2 trillion under management. In 2010 Bank of America was ranked by Fortune as first in equity and the fifth-largest U.S. corporation by revenue.
• JP Morgan Chase: The website quotes chairman and CEO, CFR member Jamie Dimon, as stating that the bank’s “aim is to be the world’s most trusted and respected financial services institution.” Second in assets only to Bank of America, it holds over $2 trillion in assets, according to the website. It manages the investments of many thousands of “old wealth” U.S. and foreign families. In 2010 JP Morgan Chase was ranked by Fortune as second in equity and the ninth-largest U.S. corporation by revenue; the Financial Times lists it as third in dollar value of global mergers and acquisitions in 2011.152
• Goldman Sachs: Although smaller in amount of assets owned and managed than the above two, Goldman Sachs is a leading global investment bank, offering a varied menu of securities, investment, finance, and management services. It ranked fifth on Fortune’s list of top U.S. commercial banks, and first in dollar value in global mergers and acquisitions in 2011.153 Its current chair and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, is a member of the CFR, as are several other board members, one of whom, Stephen Friedman, is currently on the CFR board of directors. Robert Rubin, a former co-chair and co-senior partner of Goldman, is currently co-chair of the CFR.
• Citi: Another leading multinational Wall Street bank, it dates back to the City Bank of New York, founded in 1812. It was for many decades the largest U.S. bank, expanding through many mergers and acquisitions, and going under varied names over the years, including First National City Bank, Citibank, and Citigroup. It has long been both politically active (campaign contributions and lobbying) and CFR connected.
• Nasdaq OMX Group: Called the “world’s largest exchange company,” it owns and operates the NASDAQ stock market and a number of other stock exchanges worldwide.
• Chevron: Formerly Standard Oil of California and therefore part of the Rockefeller oil empire, this corporation is one of the world’s leading integrated energy companies. Its own growth, together with large-scale mergers with Gulf, Texaco, and Unocal, have made it the third-largest U.S. corporation by revenue.
• Exxon Mobil: Another former Standard Oil Company, it is also one of the world’s largest oil companies. Exxon Mobil ranked first in profits ($19.3 billion) and market value ($314 billion) and second in revenues ($284.7 billion) in 2009.154
• Hess: Much smaller than Chevron and Exxon Mobil, it is still a large multinational oil corporation, one with close ties, current and historical, to the CFR. The company’s current (2011) chair and CEO, John B. Hess is a member of the CFR as are several other directors of the company.
• PepsiCo, Inc.: This is an integrated multinational food and beverage corporation, with interests in the manufacture, marketing, and distribution of snack foods, beverages and other products. It employed 274,000 people in 2013, and was the largest food and beverage company in North America measured by net revenue.
• McKinsey & Company, Inc.: This company has been called “the world’s most prestigious consultancy” by the Financial Times.155 It is also a large organization, with over 1,200 partners and 9,000 consultants worldwide. It provides what is likely the most expensive advice that top corporate and government clients can buy. The 3,200 clients that it has reportedly served during the five years ending in 2011 included ninety of the top 100 companies worldwide. Its estimated revenues are about $7 billion a year. McKinsey also maintains a secretive and low-profile family of hedge funds and private equity firms collectively known as the “McKinsey Investment Office (MIO Partners)” for its own exclusive use, with over $5 billion under management. McKinsey received unwelcome attention in recent years due to the insider trading trial and conviction of hedge fund boss Raj Rajaratnam. Two McKinsey partners, one of them, Anil Kumar, an individual member of CFR, were accused of passing confidential insider information to Rajaratnam. Kumar plead guilty to the charge.156
CFR Annual Reports point out that the corporate program “helps distinguish the Council from other think tanks…. Corporate members are an integral part of the Council.”157 With about 175 (depending upon the year) corporations and their leaders involved, this represents a significant source of income for the CFR and “an extraordinary reservoir of hands-on experience in many of the countries and with many of the issues that the Council is studying.”158 These issues centered around how to expand profit-making opportunities for U.S. corporations abroad, sometimes by working to weaken or overthrow governments that were standing in the way of the expansion of corporate capital.
During recent years, the CFR corporate program has organized over a hundred events each year. The most important is the annual corporate conference. Such conferences, starring big-name speakers, typically explore issues at the intersection of international economics and foreign policy.159 For example, Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, long active in the Council, spoke at the second annual corporate program conference in 2005.160 The largest category of corporate members were those with an especially keen interest in what Greenspan had to say. Non-bank financial institutions made up the biggest group of corporate members during this period, with over 30 percent of the total, and banks were another almost 11 percent, making finance capital the leading sector of the corporate program with 41 percent of all corporate members. Almost 25 percent were in services, media, telecommunications, and technology and 22 percent were industrial, energy, and power corporations.161 In 2010 the corporate membership program held 300 events, while over 500 events were held for the larger membership.162 How the Council helps its corporate members is illustrated by one of the CFR’s responses to the 2011 “Arab Spring,” when the corporate membership program had three conference calls. These were geared to corporate executives to help them assess current geopolitical business risks and opportunities in the Middle East and possible effects of the “turmoil” on international energy markets.163
Outreach beyond the Council’s Membership
In the 2008 Annual Report, President Haass discussed a new aspect of the CFR’s work. For much of its history, the Council had concentrated on being a resource for its members—regular, term, and corporate—along with influencing powerful “elites,” especially top government decision makers and mainstream media. In recent years this agenda had been expanded to reach beyond these constituencies to new ones at least partly outside the CFR’s membership in the “broader public”: college administrators, professors, students, state and local officials, the religious community, and non-governmental officials. As usual when it comes to the Council’s work, this new outreach program was robust, with an e-newsletter called Educator’s Bulletin reaching 11,000 subscribers, plus conference calls, academic modules for professors based on CFR publications, and regular communication with about 5,000 state and local leaders as well as about 1,000 religious leaders.164 By 2012 this program had “greatly expanded its work in the academic community…. The Academic Initiative connects educators and students at the college and graduate levels with CFR’s research and analysis.”165 In 2014 the Council’s president proposed a new focus including reaching “advanced high school” students.166