Hillary
Clinton, The Council on Foreign Relations and The
Establishment
By Matt Peppe
February 25, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- When asked by
Wolf Blitzer in January if she was "the
establishment," Hillary Clinton replied: "I just
don't understand what that means. He's been in
Congress, he's been elected to office a lot longer
than I have." Several weeks later, her Democratic
primary opponent
Sen. Bernie Sanders made the case in a debate
that the issue was who enjoyed the support of more
powerful elected officials, arguing that "more
governors, mayors, members of the House" back
Clinton.
Clinton framed the notion of "the establishment" as
consisting solely of political bodies of elected
officials. Sanders simply argued that a better
indicator of belonging to the establishment is one's
power and influence within political circles.
As part of the "two for the price of one" that
Bill Clinton promised during his rise to the
Presidency, Hillary is forced to hide from her role
in the creation of the neoliberal New Democrats, the
dominant faction of the party. During their joint
reign in the White House, the Clintons steered the
party far to the right with their draconian criminal
justice measures, assault on welfare, liberalization
of trade, and deregulation of banking. Their cronies
continue to staff the highest ranks of the party and
the Obama administration.
Clinton, in a desperate piece of deflection,
resorted to playing the
gender card: "Senator Sanders is the only person
who I think would characterize me, a woman running
to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the
establishment." This fatuous identity politics is
meant to distract from her decades-long tenure at
the top of the political system and collusion with
those who exercise control over it. Of course, as
Bernie points out, Hillary most represents and
enjoys the support of the Democratic faction of the
political establishment.
But framing the issue as simply a matter of party
politics and the electoral system misses the point.
Elected officials are merely the public face of the
ruling establishment. The broader establishment is
composed of the elite class that determines economic
policy.
There is no building that says "Establishment" on
the door, but there is a century-old institution
made up of wealthy and influential representatives
of business, Wall Street, corporate law, academia
and government. It is a creation of the elite ruling
class to ensure their control over shaping policy
for their own benefit. Their decisions result in
funneling money - and, hence, power - into the hands
of a small percentage of capitalists who exercise
control over the political process in a positive
feedback loop.
In their book
Imperial Brain Trust, Laurence Shoup and
William Minter write that: "The Council on Foreign
Relations is a key part of a network of people and
institutions usually referred to by friendly
observers as 'the establishment.' " [1]
The Council was founded after World War I in
response to growing domestic social tensions and
labor unrest. Socialism was gaining in popularity
among the American public in an economic environment
marred by exploitative working conditions and
skyrocketing inequality.
The Council's mission was to carry out long-term
planning for a national agenda. The agenda was meant
to undermine a domestic-oriented program that would
involve collective decision making to achieve
self-sufficiency, and thereby reduce the country's
dependence on foreign resources, trade, and other
governments.
Some of the many multinationals that subscribed to
the CFR's Corporation Service included General
Motors, Exxon, Ford, Mobil, United States Steel,
Texaco, First National City Bank and IBM. [2]
"The Council, dominated by corporate leaders, saw
expansion of American trade, investment, and
population as the solution to domestic problems. It
thought in terms of preservation of the status quo
at home, and this involved overseas expansion,"
Shoup and Minter write. [3]
This imperialist agenda was achieved through
manufacturing the consent of the masses (what they
called "public enlightenment"), as well as
developing foreign policies and ensuring government
officials supported and executed these policies.
The Council has been remarkably successful in its
mission. It has achieved a monopoly over foreign
policy planning, and become thoroughly integrated
with the government that carries out policy
prescriptions. Entire administrations have drawn
their foreign policy officials from the ranks of the
Council. There is a steady two-way flow of personnel
between the Council and government.
Both Bill and Chelsea are current
members of the CFR. While Hillary herself is not
a member, she is no doubt influenced by her
immediate family's ties to the Council.
Additionally, she collaborated closely with the
Council while she served as Secretary of State, as
she made clear in a 2009
speech at the Council's office in Washington:
"I am
delighted to be here in these new headquarters.
I have been often to, I guess, the mothership in
New York City. But it's good to have an outpost
of the Council right here down the street from
the State Department. We get a lot of advice
from the Council, so this will mean I won't have
as hard a go to be told what we should be doing,
and how we should think about the future."
One of
many people whose career was launched by his
association with the Council was Henry Kissinger. In
the late 1950s, he was appointed the director of a
study group on nuclear weapons, in collaboration
with several of the Council's directors. The result
was a book authored by Kissinger, Nuclear
Weapons and Foreign Policy.
Kissinger went on to serve as possibly the most
influential foreign policy official in American
history under Richard Nixon (and later Gerald Ford),
as both Secretary of State and National Security
Adviser. He helped carry out war crimes when he transmitted President
Nixon's order "anything that flies on anything that
moves" to General Alexander Haig, directing a
massive, secret bombing campaign of Cambodia hidden
from Congress and the American public.
Kissinger's tenure also saw him intimately involved
with the military coup led by General Pinochet to
overthrow and kill democratically-elected President
Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973; the invasion by
Indonesia of East Timor in 1975 and the subsequent
genocide against the native East Timorese; the South
African invasion of Angola in 1975 and attempted
installation of a puppet ruler amenable to the
apartheid regime; and the Dirty War in Argentina in
which leftist opposition members were killed an
disappeared.
Rather than being subjected to prosecution, or even
suffering a loss of prestige, Kissinger has seen his
reputation rise in the decades following his
genocidal actions.
Clinton wrote that "Kissinger is a friend, and I
relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of
state." She noted that they share "a belief in the
indispensability of continued American leadership in
service of a just and liberal order."
Clinton's abstract and idealistic rhetoric
exemplifies the bipartisan, imperialist agenda
formulated and propagated by the Council on Foreign
Relations. The humanitarianism is a guise for the
ruthless pursuit of United States political and
economic hegemony across the world. The people who
belong to this elite club have internalized the
imperialist worldview that the U.S. is an
"indispensable nation" that upholds "a just and
liberal" world order, and use this belief to
rationalize their Machiavellian exertions of power
abroad.
The American establishment that matters most is not
limited to any one party, gender, or government
organization. It is limited to people who are
involved, directly or peripherally, in formulating
and carrying out the plans of a tiny elite class -
plans that ignore the 99 percent of the Americans in
whose names they act, and the billions of people
whose lives their decisions impact. There is no one
whose social relationships and professional career
typifies this more than Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Matt
Peppe writes the Just
the Facts blog. He can be reached on Facebook
and
Twitter or by email at mdpeppe@gmail.com.
References
[1] Shoup, Laurence H. and William
Minter.
Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on
Foreign Relations & United States Foreign Policy.
Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice Press, 1977/2004. (pg.
9)
[2] Ibid. (pg. 50)
[3] Ibid. (pg. 23) |
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