CFR at 100: Still Making World Safe for Super-Rich

By MARK ANDERSON

The snooty Council on Foreign Relations turned 100 this year—a full century of bridging the corporate and government worlds to make them operate more as one—basically a private “rudder” of the US ship of state. Scores of top positions in the departments of State, Defense, Treasury, in Congress, and in major media, etc., have been filled by current and erstwhile CFR members.

Think Dick Cheney, Alejandro Mayorkas, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Henry Kissinger, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Timothy Geithner, Madeleine Albright, Lamar Alexander, James A. Baker, Evan Bayh, Jimmy Carter, Mitch McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao, Bill and Chelsea Clinton—heavyweights from both parties. A New York Times editorial page editor, Leslie Gelb, went on to serve as CFR president, a post banker-power broker David Rockefeller held from 1970 to 1985. That is a grave conflict of interest.

Having had its constitutional compass “recalibrated” by the internationalist-industrialist-banking-Wall Street combine that formed the CFR in 1921, our ship of state has been in choppy seas ever since, meddling in far-flung world regions en route to a nebulous “rules-based world order” that the CFR plutocrats never stop talking about. Our young men and women in uniform are expected to fight and die defending that order, when necessary.

A new centennial video on the CFR’s website highlights the equally nebulous “Colonel” Edward Mandell House—widely known as President Woodrow Wilson’s stone-faced handler. House led Wilson around as one walks a poodle, and that’s all-the-more interesting when you consider that his one and only novel, a futuristic work entitled “Philip Dru: Administrator,” is essentially a self-portrait of House’s desire to merge monopoly capitalism with “Socialism, as dreamed of by Karl Marx” (House’s own words). Furthermore, this consummate insider was instrumental in creating the Federal Reserve System that, in effect, has branded Americans of all backgrounds as economic slaves via a usurious, debt-based money system.

And to think that House also helped lead “The Inquiry,” a gang of “the brightest minds … tasked by Wilson with crafting a lasting peace” during the 1919 Treaty of Versailles talks in Paris that formally ended World War I, the CFR video says.

As the video explains, 21 members of The Inquiry, a couple years before the CFR’s formation, “set sail with President Wilson [in January 1919 aboard the USS George Washington] to work the sidelines of the Versailles Peace Conference,” where Wilson presented his “14 points” for a post-war order and the “European powers agree to Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations.” But the US Senate rejected US entry into the League, which went on without US participation for 26 years until its dissolution 75 years ago.

The 21 select Inquiry members, besides House, included sold-his-soul-for globalism “journalist” Walter Lippmann; they were undeterred by the Senate’s refusal to join the League over justifiable national sovereignty concerns. Col. House’s clique compensated for this loss by forming the CFR “to continue encouraging American participation in world affairs.” Interestingly, the CFR’s 1921 Articles of Incorporation describes the organization as a “continuous conference” that addresses “international questions affecting the US by bringing together experts on statecraft, finance, industry, education and science.”

While “continuous conference” is an interesting choice of words, the above-noted CFR centennial video also explains that upon its incorporation, the CFR arranged as its first major event a US visit by former French Prime Minister Clemenceau. “But for the most part, early [CFR] members focused on behind-the-scenes influence,” the video’s narration adds—a rather revealing statement for an organization that bristles at the mere suggestion that is has much, if anything, to do with shadowy policy-making behind the scenes.

What soon followed was the creation of the CFR’s highly influential quarterly journal “Foreign Affairs,” in which countless articles have preached the gospel of embracing tariff-free, free trade policies, thereby downgrading the US economy, while pushing for interventionist military crusades that often have resulted in toppling foreign leaders and seizing natural resources abroad: Dirty pool, with a gilded edge.

Mark Anderson is a veteran journalist who divides his time between Texas and Michigan. Email him at truthhound2@yahoo.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2021

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