THE SHADOWS OF POWER

The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline by James Perloff is a well researched book on who controls the United States government which he refers to as the Establishment. The book has been published by Western Islands Publishing.

The “Establishment” is made up of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), formed on 29 July 1921 and its sister organisation, the Trilateral Commission (TC) formed in 1973 and includes members from America, Europe and Japan. The CFR includes many prominent persons in business, government, law, and the mass media that are from the United States of America and headquartered in the elegant Harold Pratt House in New York City. The TC consisted of leaders in business, banking, government and mass media from North America, Western Europe and Japan.

The CFR, while remaining largely unknown to the US public, has exercised decisive impact on US policy, especially foreign policy, for decades. The CFR has for generations funded election campaigns for Republican and Democratic parties alike and thereafter directly supplying personnel for upper echelon government jobs. They have controlled American Presidents from Woodraw Wilson, who came to power in 1913, to the current President Barack Obama.

In 1913 they were not a formal structure. However, one of the founders of the CFR, Bernard Baruch who was a banker brought Wilson to the Democratic Party headquarters in New York in 1912, “leading him like one would a poodle on a string”. Wilson is said to have received an indoctrination course during which he agreed, in principle, to do the following if elected: support the projected Federal Reserve; support income tax ( which in 1895 the US Supreme Court declared unconstitutional); lend an ear to advice should war break out in Europe; lend an ear to advice on who should occupy his cabinet.

In the 1920’s during the presidencies of Wilson’s successors, William Howard Taft and Calvin Coolidge, the CFR had no influence in Washington. The League of Nations, the UN’s forerunner, is the name of the world body created at Woodrow Wilson’s suggestion during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Just as the 1907 Panic was employed to justify a central bank, so was World War 1 used to justify world government. Perloff writes that “It is certainly true that a number of America’s money barons, including Wilson’s campaign backers, profited from the war”. Baruch and the Rockefellers reaped some $200 million from the war. The US’s money barons were JP Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Bernard Baruch and Paul Warburg. These families are still influential in the US today and form part of that country’s ruling family. The Rothchilds control Europe.

The Federal Reserve became law in 1913. Although it is called Federal, it is privately owned. It has never received a meaningful audit from an independent source. It makes its own policies and is not subject to the President or the Congress. Private banks within the system select two-thirds of the directors of the twelve Federal Reserve Board members; the Federal Reserve Board chooses the rest.

Because income tax had been declared unconstitutional it had to be instituted by constitutional amendment. The man who brought forward the amendment in Congress was the same senator who proposed the plan for the Federal Reserve – Nelson Aldrich. US President William Howard Taft had been against a central bank, saying he would veto a bill proposing one. Woodrow Wilson was rocketed from Princeton University to governor of New Jersey in 1911, to the Democratic Presidential nominee in 1912. Teddy Roosevelt was used to split the vote on the Progressive Party ticket. The strategy worked. The Republican ballots were split between Taft and Roosevelt, and Roosevelt became President with only 42% of the popular vote. Colonel Edward M. House was always in touch with Paul Warburg. The idea of The League of Nations known as the ‘House draft’ almost in its entirety is House’s idea, and its rewriting by Wilson was practically confined to phraseology.

The Establishment justified America’s participation in World War 2. However, Harry Elmer Barne’s Genesis of the World War (1926) and Sidney Fay‘s Origins of the World War (1928) challenged the justification of America’s involvement in World War 1. To counter Barne’s and Fay’s books, Dr Charles Beard of the American Historical Association noted that the Rockefeller Foundation had granted $139,000 to the CFR, which in turn hired Harvard professor William Langer to author a three-volume chronicle of the war, that is, World War 1.

Perloff writes “membership in the CFR is not by itself an indictment. However, when large numbers of Council men are clustered at the helm of a media outlet, then its editorial policy, news slant, and personnel selection are almost guaranteed to reflect the globalist, pro-socialist thinking that typifies the Council”. In an electoral system in which voters are unable to cast ballots for individual candidates, restricted instead to choosing a party slate across the board eliminates independent candidates (which suits the Establishment very well). The party whose nominee becomes President would designate one-sixth of all representatives in the House/Assembly and one-third of all senators. This would diminish the elective power of the voters and the balance between the executive and legislative spheres. This reduces the say of the American voters and play havoc with their system of checks and balances, thus increasing the potential for an eventual dictatorship. In an article in the Atlantic of October 1987, CFR chairman Peter G. Peterson forecast an economic crunch – if not a crash – for the near future. The 1929 depression was also engineered by the same people.

The CFR proposed constitutional amendments. The Constitution, argues James Perloff, “guarantees our liberties – our freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion; our right to choose our leaders and our right to fair trials…; our desire to keep them also justifies our vigilance”. America’s founders devised an arrangement of governmental checks and balances. The executive, legislative and judicial branches all served to restrain each other’s power. Unrestricted power leads to tyranny. George Washington declared that “government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master”. James Madison said, “The accumulation of all power – legislative, executive, and judiciary – in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny”.

By Sam Ditshego

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