Introduction by Kennedy Applebaum
Quemado Institute
February 26, 2016

American investigative historian Eric Zuesse is a long-standing advocate of improved US foreign relations and an avid critic of the financial elite that dictates the anti-Russian policies of the West. He is right to lay blame for many of the world’s ills squarely on the shoulders of the American aristocracy, who harbor corrupt and warlike hegemonic ambitions that result in destruction, financially and militarily, of sovereign nations across the globe.

But there is one point on which I cannot agree with Eric Zuesse. He seems, both in his analysis of Western Russophobia below and in previous editorials I have read, to hold the United States and its aristocracy one hundred percent responsible for these evils, while ignoring the role of powerful factions in Europe. It was the Rothschilds, after all, who founded Europe’s mega-banking industry, which now controls the bulk of the world’s financial institutions.

Zuesse, in the commentary presented below, offers an analysis of the power structure’s major ruling bodies, from the Bilderberg Group, to the Trilateral Commission, to NATO, along with their impact on US-Russian relations and dictatorial oppression of the American people. But first, I offer evidence from one of his own hyperlinks that, contrary to Zuesse’s repeated allegations, the US does not dominate the global financial establishment.

The following is a profile of the Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission—an exclusive club, founded by David Rockefeller in 1974, composed of banking moguls, business tycoons, and former government officials—organized according to the city or country in which its members operate:

Composition of the Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission

trilateral.org

Trilateral Commission: Executive Committee members and their locations/base of operations:

Europe – 36 members:
Esko Aho, Finland; Erik Belfrage, Stockholm; Georges Berthoin, Paris; Jorge Braga de Macedo, Lisbon; Lord Brittan of Spennithorne, London; François Bujon de l’Estang, France; Richard Conroy, Dublin; Alfonso Cortina, Madrid; Vladimir Dlouhy, Prague; Michael Fuchs, Berlin; Antonio Garrigues Walker, Madrid; Nigel Higgins, London (Chief Executive,The Rothschild Group); Mugur Isarescu, Bucharest; Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, London; Jovan Kovacic, Belgrade; Ján Kubiš, Europe; Eli Leenaars, Amsterdam; Jean Lemierre, Paris; Thomas Leysen, Brussels; Bo Lidegaard, Copenhagen; Marianne Lie, Oslo; Franjo Lukovic, Zagreb; Mario Monti, Milan; Andrzej Olechowski, Warsaw; Ursula Plassnik, Vienna; Ferdinando Salleo, Rome; Carlo Secchi, Milan; Petar Stoyanov, Vienna; György Surányi, Budapest; Peter Sutherland, believed Europe; Jean-Claude Trichet, Paris; Raivo Vare, Tallinn; George Vassiliou, Cyprus; Marko Voljc, Brussels; Panagis Vourloumis, Athens (Senior Adviser, N.M. Rothschild); Heinrich Weiss, Düsseldorf

United States- 14 members:
C. Fred Bergsten, Washington; Catherine Bertini, Syracuse; Kenneth M. Duberstein, Washington; David R. Gergen, Cambridge Mass.; John J. Hamre, Washington; Jane Harman, Washington; Carla A. Hills, Washington; Karen Elliott House, Princeton and Harvard; Jon Huntsman, Jr., Washington; Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Harvard; Meghan L. O’Sullivan, Harvard; Adam S. Posen, Washington; James B. Steinberg, Syracuse; Paul Volcker, New York

Asia – 14 members:
Chen Naiqing, Beijing; Tarun Das, New Delhi; Barry Desker, Singapore; Toyoo Gyohten, Tokyo; Han Sung-Joo, Korea; Yasuchika Hasegawa, Tokyo; Hong Seok-Hyun, Seoul; Akinari Horii, Tokyo; Minoru Makihara, Tokyo; Roberto F. de Ocampo, Manila; Akio Okawara, Tokyo; Ryu Jin Roy, Seoul; Jusuf Wanandi, Jakarta; Tarisa Watanagase, Thailand;

Canada/Mexico/Australia – 4 members:
John R. Hewson, Australia; Roy MacLaren, Toronto; John Manley, Ottawa; Luis Rubio, Mexico City

[The official positions held by TCEC members is listed at source.]

Of the 68 members who sit on the Executive Committee, a 53% majority are based in Europe, with only 21% in the US, 21% in Asia, and 5% in Canada, Mexico and Australia. It is clear the Commission is dominated by Europe, while the United States plays a lesser role:

With this perspective in mind, Eric Zuesse makes a number of interesting and well-documented points about US aggression abroad, looming dictatorship at home, and the propaganda machine that makes these transgressions possible. Following Zuesse’s commentary, a related article by Patrick Wood is presented describing the pervasive presence of Trilateral Commission members in the United States Government.

America’s Aristocracy Facing Resistance from American Public Regarding Russia
By Eric Zuesse for Strategic Culture Foundation

Strategic Culture Foundation
February 26, 2016

On February 20^th, the anti-Russian propaganda site Newsweek headlined «How We Can Defeat Putin» and presented an essay from Evelyn Farkas, of the NATO-generated Atlantic Council, but didn’t indicate her being controlled by the same people who control NATO (the US aristocracy). (Newsweek hid her connection to NATO – gave no indication of it.)

NATO is run by the North Atlantic Council, and its main PR agencies are the Atlantic Council and the Atlantic Treaty Association, both of which receive funding from international corporations. The head of the Atlantic Council is billionaire Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former US Presidential candidate, and a member of the Bilderberg organization, which was founded in 1954 to engineer a takeover of national governments’ regulatory abilities and a replacement of national economic regulations by international economic treaties, which will supersede any national authority and will not be answerable to any voters except the controlling stockholders in international corporations. (Bilderberger David Rockefeller then created the Trilateral Commission in 1974, to extend the globally controlling aristocracy to include also Japanese aristocrats, and Huntsman is also a member of that Bilderberg spin-off: he’s a member of the Trilateral Commission’s ruling Executive Committee.)

Farkas’s propaganda-piece opened: «Russia poses a geostrategic threat to the United States and our interests. Indeed, earlier this month Defense Secretary Ash Carter listed it first among the threats faced by our nation.» She continued: «The Kremlin’s objectives are clear: 1) Retain Vladimir Putin’s position as the leader of the Russian Federation, preserving the autocratic political system and mafia-style crony economy that together make up ‘Putinism’; 2) restore Russia’s status as a great power; 3) rewrite the international rules and norms to prevent intervention in states to protect citizens; 4) maintain political control of Russia’s geographical periphery; and, if possible, 5) break NATO, the European Union and trans-Atlantic unity».

One could turn that around against the United States by saying that we Americans have a depersonalized, institutionalized, form of dictatorship, which doesn’t require continuance of the same person to be in control, but which provides foreign policies that extend little changed from one President to the next, even if the rhetoric differs considerably between individual Presidents, such as it did and does from George W Bush to Barack Obama, with little real difference in policies except this: tortures such as waterboarding might possibly now be actually forbidden here. However, Putin’s international policies have been changing far more than that. (They changed a lot after Obama overthrew the democratically elected and pro-Russian President of Ukraine in February 2014 and instituted a rabidly anti-Russian fascist regime there.)

Domestically, Obama continued Bush’s Wall Street bailouts and reduced the prosecutions of white-collar crooks (and also of higher-level «financial fraud»), even lower than was the situation when Bush was the nominal President. Also, the prosecutions of government corruption declined under Obama. This was not the type of «change» that Obama’s voters had been voting for, but it’s what we got.

The only scientific study that has been done of whether or not the US is a democracy or instead a dictatorship (rule of the public by an aristocracy, which may or may not have a king or other nominal dictator that rules answerable to that elite but not to any broader public) found that the US, at least since 1980, has been a dictatorship (the authors called it an «oligarchy»). That doesn’t sound much different from what is typically said about Russia, either.

The readers of Ms Farkas’s propaganda-article, if one judges by the reader-comments there, were far less damning against Mr Putin than they were against the con-job that had just been delivered to them by Newsweek (and so perhaps that ‘news’ site’s constant ads seeking new subscribers to the site are not producing nearly as much income as are the propaganda-services Newsweek delivers on behalf of their international-corporate advertisers). To read those comments from readers, Americans are getting jaundice from reading America’s propagandistic ‘press’. Here were two typical such comments:

«I have been reading and watching western media and Russian media equally. There is no bad guy here in geopolitics. If there is then its the US».

Another said:

«Meanwhile Putin plays chess Americans play checkers. And the Americans (Obama) are sold as chess players (at least they make themselves believe it) to start with… Now they have propaganda outlets like this one, that want to sell you a ‘checkers’ play to win the game».

Of course, such cynicism is also widespread among Russians, against their own nation’s media.

The Newsweek propagandist wrote in her article: «We must be united with our allies and partners worldwide and resolute toward Russian bad behavior». But, what about America’s «bad behavior»: unjustified and catastrophic invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2003, of Libya in 2011, and of Syria in 2013, and Obama’s keeping in power the coup-regime in Honduras that was installed there on 28 June 2009? That’s not very nice, either – and, unlike anything that can be charged against Russia, there’s no NATO-like organization against the United States to have provoked our invasions, as there is with regard to Russia, which had long ago terminated its equivalent, the Warsaw Pact (in 1991). They disbanded theirs; we continued and still continue ours, even though its alleged raison d’être likewise ended in 1991 (and NATO and its propaganda-arms now drown us with propaganda such as Newsweek published here). Clearly, the US is the international aggressor, par excellence, and it needs propagandists – the US press – in order to make the American public fear «Saddam’s WMD» (to invade Iraq in 2003) and «Russian bad behavior» (to attempt a «color revolution» against Russia’s leader, Putin, whose approval-rating among his people is nearly twice as high as Obama’s own – and yet America calls itself a ‘democracy’ that brings ‘democracy’ to places such as Ukraine, Libya, Syria, and Russia).

More and more Americans are learning that they’re suckers if they pay for their ’news’ – if they pay their hard-earned money in order to be manipulated by their insatiable corrupting aristocracy. And now, with Chrome’s free Google Translate feature, one can receive the news from the media in every country, immediately translated into English, and thereby get a read not only on America’s propaganda but on that of the countries that the US aristocracy want Americans to overthrow (in overthrows that are becoming a very bad habit of this country, and that drain America’s tax dollars for rotten weaponry and a bloated army but enrich the ‘defense’ contractors that our aristocrats invest so heavily in, so as to conquer the lands they don’t currently control). Americans are increasingly coming to recognize that they’ve been (and are being) had: by ‘their’ government and by ‘their’ ‘free press’, if not by the aristocracy that controls them both.

Related article:

Flashback: The Domination of Barack Obama By The Trilateral Commission

By Patrick Wood

Technocracy News
January 7, 2016

The Trilateral Commission has been dedicated to creating a “New International Economic Order” (NIEO) since 1973, when it was founded by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. The NIEO is modeled after historic Technocracy that was defined in the 1930s as a replacement economic system for Capitalism and Free Enterprise. Their strategy to accomplish these goals is still in play today, and very close to completion.

Upon entering office on January 20. 2009, Barack Obama appointed eleven members of the Trilateral Commission to top-level and key positions in his administration within his first ten days. This represents a very narrow source of international leadership inside the Obama administration, with a core agenda that is not necessarily in support of working people in the United States.

Obama had been groomed for the presidency by key members of the Trilateral Commission. Most notably, Zbigniew Brzezinski has been Obama’s principal foreign policy advisor.

According to official Trilateral Commission membership list, there are only eighty-seven members from the United States (the other 337 members are from other countries). Thus, within two weeks of his inauguration, Obama’s appointments encompassed more than 12 percent of Commission’s entire US membership.

Obama’s Trilateral appointees included:

• Secretary of Treasury, Tim Geithner
• Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice
• National Security Advisor, Gen. James L. Jones
• Deputy National Security Advisor, Thomas Donilon
• Chairman, Economic Recovery Committee, Paul Volker
• Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis C. Blair
• Assistant Secretary of State, Asia & Pacific, Kurt M. Campbell
• Deputy Secretary of State, James Steinberg
• State Department, Special Envoy, Richard Haass
• State Department, Special Envoy, Dennis Ross
• State Department, Special Envoy, Richard Holbrooke

There are many other links in the Obama administration to the Trilateral Commission. For instance, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is married to Commission member William Jefferson Clinton.

Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner’s informal group of advisors include E. Gerald Corrigan, Paul Volker, Alan Greenspan, and Peter G. Peterson, all members. Geithner’s first job after college was with Trilateralist Henry Kissinger at Kissinger Associates.

Trilateralist Brent Scowcroft has been an unofficial advisor to Obama and was mentor to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. And Robert Zoelick, current president of the World Bank appointed during the G.W. Bush administration, is a member.

It also must be noted that the current U.S. Trade Representative, who is the lead architect and negotiator of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the upcoming Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership , is Trilateral Michael Froman. In fact out of 12 USTR appointments starting with the Carter Administration, 9 out of 12 have been members of the Trilateral Commission.

According to the Trilateral Commissions’ website, the Commission was formed in 1973 by private citizens of Japan, Europe (European Union countries), and North America (United States and Canada) to foster closer cooperation among these core democratic industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system. The website says, “The membership of the Trilateral Commission is composed of about 400 distinguished leaders in business, media, academia, public service (excluding current national Cabinet Ministers), labor unions, and other non-governmental organizations from the three regions. The regional chairmen, deputy chairmen, and directors constitute the leadership of the Trilateral Commission, along with an Executive Committee including about 40 other members.”

Since 1973, the Trilateral Commission has met regularly in plenary sessions to discuss policy position papers developed by its members. Policies are debated in order to achieve consensuses. Respective members return to their own countries to implement policies consistent with those consensuses. The original stated purpose of the Trilateral Commission was to create a “New International Economic Order.” Its current statement has morphed into fostering a “closer cooperation among these core democratic industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system.”

Since the Carter administration, Trilateralists have held these very influential positions: Six of the last eight World Bank Presidents; Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the United States (except for Obama and Biden); over half of all US Secretaries of State; and three quarters of the Secretaries of Defense, including Ashton Carter who was appointed on February 17, 2015.

Two strong convictions guide the Commission’s agenda for the 2009-2012 triennium. First, the Trilateral Commission is to remain as important as ever in maintaining wealthy countries’ shared leadership in the wider international system. Second, the Commission will “widen its framework to reflect broader changes in the world.” Thus, the Japan Group has become a Pacific Asian Group, which includes Chinese and Indian members, and Mexican members have been added to the North American Group. The European Group continues to widen in line with the enlargement of the EU.

Undue Influence

The concept of “undue influence” screams from the rooftops when considering the number of Trilateral Commission members in the Obama administration. They control the areas of our most urgent national needs: financial and economic crisis, national security, and foreign policy.

The conflict of interest is glaring. With 75 percent of the Trilateral membership consisting of non-US individuals, what influence does this super-majority have on the remaining 25 percent?
For example, when Chrysler entered bankruptcy under the oversight and control of the Obama administration, it was quickly decided that the Italian carmaker Fiat would take over Chrysler. The deal’s point man, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, is a member of the Trilateral Commission. Would you be surprised to know that the chairman of Fiat, Luca di Montezemolo, is also a fellow member?

Congress should have halted this deal the moment it was suggested.

Many European members of the Trilateral Commission are also top leaders of the European Union. What political and economic sway do they have through their American counterparts?

If asked, the vast majority of Americans would say that America’s business is its own, and should be closed to foreign meddlers with non-American agendas.

But, the vast majority of Americans have no idea who or what the Trilateral Commission is, much less the power they have usurped since 1976, when Jimmy Carter became the first Trilateral member to be elected president.

In light of today’s unprecedented financial crisis, they would be abhorred if they actually read Zbigniew Brzezinski’s (co-founder of the Commission with David Rockefeller) statement from his 1971 book, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, which states that,

“The nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.”

Yet, this is exactly what is happening. The global banks and corporations are running circles around the nation state, including the United States. They have no regard for due process, Congress, or the will of the people.

Hidden in Plain Sight

Why have the American people been kept in the dark about a subject so great that it shakes our country to its very core?

The answer is simple: The top leadership of the media is also saturated with members of the Trilateral Commission who are able to selectively suppress the stories that are covered. They include:

• David Bradley, Chairman, Atlantic Media Company
• Karen Elliot House, former Senior Vice President, Dow Jones & Company, and Publisher, the Wall Street Journal
• Richard Plepler, Co-president, HBO
• Charlie Rose, PBS
• Fareed Zakaria, Editor, Newsweek
• Mortimer Zuckerman, Chairman, US News & World Reports

There are many other top-level media connections due to overlaps in corporate directorships and direct stock ownership.

Obama’s Climate Change Policies

Trilateral Commission member John Podesta is single-handedly responsible for Obama’a climate-change policy. According to the New York Times, “the architect of Mr. Obama’s climate change plan is none other than his senior counselor, John D. Podesta.” This could not be any more plain.

Podesta accepted an appointment as Senior Policy Advisor to Obama for Climate Change on January 1, 2014. His immediately prior position was as an appointee to a U.N. panel called the “High-Level Panel of Emminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.” This 27-member panel essentially crafted the 2030 Agenda and climate change policies that were adopted by the U.N. in September and December 2015.

Additionally, in the 1990s Podesta served as Chief-of-Staff for President William Clinton, where he invented and perfected the policy of ruling by Executive Orders. It has been openly acknowledged that Podesta coached President Obama in the same techniques.

Conclusion

There is no escaping the fact that the Trilateral Commission has dominated the United States Executive branch since the Carter Administration in 1976. The hegemony continues under President Barack Hussein Obama. The original goal of the Trilateral Commission in 1973 was to create a “New International Economic Order”, which they have largely done under the guise of Sustainable Development with the collaboration and force of the United Nations.

ED. NOTE: Names of Trilateral Commission members are in bold for easy identification.

[Source: technocracy.news/index.php/2016/01/07/flashback-domination-barack-obama-trilateral-commission/]