any of these three main components get too weak or too strong in the CFR, the organization begins to lose what it considers to be its true character. So as Council leaders managed the gradual changes needed to maintain and increase their power, prestige, and influence, they had to choose future leaders as well as new members accordingly.
The changes after 1970 also took place under the chairmanship of David Rockefeller, the epitome of an old plutocratic figure. The colossal wealth and resulting power of Rockefeller gave him, in the eyes of many, a supernatural aura. What Stewart Alsop wrote about David’s brother Nelson (also a CFR member) applies to the entire plutocracy, and especially to David Rockefeller: “People who meet Nelson Rockefeller are always aware of the dollar sign that floats conspicuously above his head. It is there but one must not mention it. Having that invisible dollar sign hovering above his head tends to hedge a Very Rich man off from his fellows, as divinity doth hedge a king.”35
Wall Street’s Think Tank has two main sections. Part I will follow up on and deepen the sketch of the CFR offered above with one chapter on the Council as a capitalist-class organization and another that details the changes at the CFR beginning in 1970. The domestic and international networks of the Council will also be reviewed.
Part II will cover the CFR worldwiew and its central role in creating the current imperial neoliberal geopolitical world order, with an overview and a number of case studies, including a detailed examination of the U.S. war on and occupation of Iraq. The final chapter will discuss the dangers posed to our planet and humanity’s future by the irrational national and global system of neoliberal geopolitics that the Council has been so important in creating and maintaining.
PART I
Wall Street’s Think Tank 1976–2014
The CFR is a central element of a large network of people and institutions that organize the strategic planning and ideological control needed to maintain and expand the wealth and power of the U.S. plutocracy. The first chapter in this section will put the Council on Foreign Relations in its proper class context, as an organization of, by, and for the dominant sector of the U.S. capitalist class. The second chapter will illustrate how the Council operates as an organization, presented together with a detailed examination of its recent (since 1976) organizational history. The third chapter focuses on the CFR’s domestic networks, elaborating the Council’s links to the federal government, other major think tanks, top corporations, leading universities, important media, and lobbying bodies. The fourth chapter covers the organization’s international networks, discussing its close ties to a variety of powerful individuals and groups that have influence in their home countries, regionally or globally.
Part I as a whole illustrates how the Council is indeed “Wall Street’s think tank,” an organization with great range and power, in service to a ruling financialized monopoly capitalist class.
1
THE U.S. CAPITALIST CLASS AND THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
The first revolutionary act is to call things by their true names.
—ROSA LUXEMBURG
The economic-owning class is always the political ruling class.
—EUGENE V. DEBS
In the realm of political economy, societal and state domination, powerful classes and the organizations they control have the most to hide about their great power and how the world actually works. In contrast, the emancipatory potential of social science resides in its honesty and truth-telling, in illustrating how such power actually operates for the benefit of the few and to the detriment of the vast majority of the people. This is its subversive effect, its resistance function. In the case of the Council on Foreign Relations, understanding the truth involves above all comprehending that this organization is run by and for a plutocracy, the capitalist class of the United States of America.
The United States is first and foremost a class society, a key fact often left out in educational, political, and media discussions about the country. Classes are socioeconomic and power groupings of people that have common relationships with one another and different relationships with other classes. In a capitalist-class society, wealth and income are key aspects of life: having or not having a well-paying, secure job and ownership or non-ownership of capital largely determine one’s socioeconomic class. Access to capital and jobs has a huge influence on the daily existence and life chances of people in every societal group. From the time an individual is born, access or lack of access to wealth, capital, property, and employment affects family life, where he or she lives, with what possessions, and in what conditions. It influences the individual’s educational opportunities and health including access to doctors, securing healthy food, and limiting exposure to hazards such as crime and pollution. The United States is a particular type of class society, a racialized one, where some groups are stigmatized as inferior because of their race, a belief spreading to all segments of society. Once this oppressive idea becomes widespread, the resulting divisions within the working class can be used by the rulers to divide and conquer, preventing unity among the workers. People with a darker skin color than Europeans are frequent victims of this discrimination. Gender is another point of division fostered by those with capital; women are routinely paid significantly less for the same work, for example, and are discriminated against in other ways, assuring that there is no equality in the workplace, and most women are, like people of color, kept in the lower ranks of workers generally. In this system, class realities are largely downplayed or completely avoided in public discourse, and racial and gender issues are highlighted. The capitalist class always wants to highlight differences and divisions within the underlying population. In this racialized and gendered class system, class, race, and gender are all central to people’s lived experience.
The two great major classes in today’s United States are a numerically small capitalist class and a very much larger working class. The capitalist class is characterized by ownership of large amounts of wealth, much of which is capital, obtained mainly through investment in and control of the corporations that organize production, distribution, and the financing of the economy. The working class lacks such ownership and needs to enter the labor market to secure employment. Since they are without significant capital, the worker must sell to others his or her ability to labor, usually to the capitalists, in order to survive on the resulting wages. This inequality of ownership does three things. It allows the capitalist to exploit the individual worker—profits are extracted from the laborer’s efforts. It confers tremendous economic and political power upon the capitalist. And it generates overt and covert conflicts over wages, hours, working conditions, and sometimes the system itself. This conflict must of necessity take a collective form, which is class struggle. With these facts in mind, class can be summed up as a relationship of exploitation, dispossession, oppression, and conflict between owners and workers, while each class has a potential relationship of internal solidarity.
Although the capitalist-worker class relation is central in any capitalist society, there is another group, well-educated professionals, that is also important. This group, which stands between the two key classes, is usually and inaccurately called the “middle class,” but will be called here the “professional class.” These professionals, with their education, intellect, and skills, are very important to capitalists and they are often appropriately rewarded. Some of them even profit enough from their work and connections to gradually, step by step, rise to fill capitalist occupations and become capitalists themselves. Many others aspire to this status, subordinating themselves to the capitalist class, both as a technique of survival and in hope of gaining a measure of power and status with greater rewards.
The capitalist class of the United States is defined here as people and families with financial or productive assets of at least $10 million, or a position as a top officer or director of a Fortune 500 corporation, or as a principal