A meeting ground for powerful members of the U.S. corporate and foreign policy establishments. . . .
—DAVID C. KORTEN
The Council counts among its members probably more important names in American life than any other private group in the country
—THEODORE WHITE
The Council on Foreign Relations is the ultimate networking and socializing institution of the U.S. capitalist ruling class. But it does not operate in isolation; rather, it is at the center of an extensive network of key institutions in a number of interconnected realms of U.S. social life: politics, think tanks, finance and economics, higher education, philanthropy, media, and culture. The U.S. capitalist class has a core and a periphery. The CFR and its members are at the core of the dominant sector of this class, but the network extends broadly. The nearly 5,000 individuals who are members and leaders of the Council collectively have hundreds of thousands of ties—social, economic, and political relationships that bind them into a community of the powerful. This is one reason why so many people want to join and participate in the Council and its activities. Those at the core of the large clique that makes up the CFR’s inner circle have common traits, access to the same general information, and mostly homogeneous opinions. They have close and frequent interactions—a daisy chain of connections to various organizations—resulting in strong ties and relationships with one another and powerful positions in their own groups, the political economy, and the larger society. Those with less close links may reflect the phenomena of the “strength of weak ties.” This phenomena points out the reality that to make new connections, gain new insights, and acquire new information, members of the core clique must look beyond it to others less closely attached. Such weak ties then become stronger. The end result is a verification of the folk wisdom in the statement that advancing in life is often based on “not what you know but who you know.”
The approach in this chapter will be to compare lists of the key individuals, the decision makers, of what are widely considered to be central organizations in a given profit or nonprofit field, with the 2011 to 2014 CFR membership lists and the historical list of all Council directors. This procedure will document the vast number of interlocks between the CFR and most of the key institutions of U.S. society and political economy. Interlocks represent sociological anchors of a community of interest; they develop and cement the personal and institutional relationships that create the common ideology, cohesion, coordinated action, and unified political-economic influence and power of the capitalist class and its allies. At the same time, intra-ruling class conflict is reduced. Showing how the Council is at the center of a vast domestic network of the powerful, including a majority of the most important think tanks, represents additional concrete evidence that it is the most powerful organization in the United States and the world. Other think tanks around the globe have been established and grown up “under the shadow of American intellectual hegemony.”266 One recent work on think tanks elaborates as follows on this theme:
The United States remains . . . the superpower of policy research: the prime exporter of concepts and intellectual frameworks, the most important source of transnational funding, the model that others take as their point of reference in the post–Cold War world. It is this intellectual “soft power” that leaves the USA “bound to lead” global political and economic order. . . . Across Europe, for example, students of foreign policy read the CFR journal Foreign Affairs, and take the arguments they find there as a starting point for their own work. . . . No European policy review attracts similar attention.267
The CFR is the world’s most powerful private organization because it is the most influential U.S. think tank in a world under U.S. ideological hegemony and because it is a very active membership and meeting organization with close relationships to the U.S. government and a vast number of other powerful institutions. These characteristics magnify the power of the Council and the small percentage of the population it represents by intensifying the connections among the powerful, allowing them to reach consensus and unity on interests and strategic direction, and then to project their power into many institutions and sectors of American life.
Using interlocking directorate/network analysis, and 2011 and 2012 lists, but covering the entire 1976–2014 period in the case of government ties, we will review the connections with the Council’s large inner circle of allied institutions within the United States, together with a less well-connected wider circle, reflecting the “strength of weak ties.” The data developed from this network analysis will illustrate the central role played by the Council in bringing together a very powerful network of people and institutions that dominates both the United States and much of the world. Our next chapter will focus on the CFR’s extensive transnational connections among the powerful worldwide. We will begin with the Council’s close ties to the U.S. government since 1976.
Only three months after leaving the Obama administration, former treasury secretary Timothy F. Geithner, a newly minted Council senior “Distinguished Fellow,” was on the lecture circuit, reportedly receiving $400,000 for just three lectures given to audiences at key finance capitalist meetings. Geithner offered his prognostications on topics such as Federal Reserve policy and geopolitical risk at three meetings organized by CFR finance capital corporate members: Deutsche Bank, the Blackstone Group, and Warburg Pincus.268 Being rewarded by large sums of money for a few hours of talking are just one of the perks that flow to a group of people, the “in-and-outers,” who circulate through what is, in effect, a revolving door into and out of public service and the private sector. Their value to the private sector, and hence the giant speaking fees, is based both on the knowledge of how things work at the top and ongoing relationships with those in charge.
Geithner had been active in the Council for years: he was a member by 1996, a Senior Fellow by 2001, joining the Chairman’s Advisory Council by 2005.269 Specifics of how being part of the CFR network influences key government policy behind the scenes surface occasionally in the mainstream media, and a recent example is an analysis of Geithner’s diary while he was in office. In its analysis, the Financial Times found that during an eighteen-month period, while he was treasury secretary, Geithner’s most frequent telephone calls were to leading CFR members. The most calls (49) were to Laurence D. “Larry” Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager. Fink is a CFR member and became a Council director in 2013. Second was CFR co-chair Robert Rubin (33 calls), the next highest were Council members Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase (17 calls), and Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs (13 calls). Also noted were “frequent conversations” with CFR members and former treasury secretaries Henry Paulson and Larry Summers.270 Geithner’s frequent calls to Rubin are consistent with the oft-repeated suggestion that Geithner is a Rubin protégé.271 The larger point is that Council-connected people and the largest financial firms are those who have special relationships with and access to those holding state power.
Geithner and other former officials are part of a charmed network; they can open doors or pick up the phone and gain access to the powerful. This access is very valuable, because it allows one to put one’s case directly to the policymaker. Geithner was soon hired as president of Warburg Pincus, making a large yearly income and large stock options a sure thing for the ex-secretary.272 Geithner’s activities point out the role and power of the “in-and-outers,” individuals who trade on their connections. Though of questionable morality, such corrupt behavior is not illegal today.
The CFR is a nation-state oriented organization in the sense that it successfully influences, even controls, through a variety of means, governments at all levels, but especially the federal government of the United States. A look at the high numbers of Council members who have occupied top- and also mid-level positions in the federal government, as well as advisory boards and “blue ribbon” policy commissions, produces concrete evidence of the pervasive influence of the CFR and the dominance of its favored policy perspectives in the federal government. The “in-and-outer” is a key part of this influence.
In the words of the CFR’s Annual Report, 1977 was a year of “special transition.” James E. Carter became president and tapped four members of the Council’s leadership to serve in top positions in his administration. As Bayless Manning, then president of the CFR, expressed it: “Four members of its Board of Directors were called to serve in President Carter’s administration and in consequence resigned from the Council’s Board: Michael Blumenthal, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cyrus Vance, and Paul Warnke.”273 These four men joined the Carter administration as secretary of treasury, national security adviser, secretary of state, and director of the arms control and disarmament agency, respectively.
By itself, this was not so remarkable, since it is a commonplace that CFR members and leaders are frequently brought into every new administration in leading positions. What is striking in this case is who replaced these four and two others who also gave up their positions on the CFR board at that time. The six who were elected as new directors in 1977 were: George H. W. Bush, Lloyd Cutler, Philip Geyelin, Lane Kirkland, Henry Kissinger, and Marina von Neumann Whitman. Thus as several key Democrats left the CFR board, they were replaced by other Democrats (Kirkland was also an AFL-CIO leader), and some key Republicans, among them the outgoing secretary of state (Kissinger), and a future vice president and president (Bush). What was a “special transition” for the CFR signaled that business as usual was to be the order of the day both at the CFR and the U.S. government: individuals having much the same connections and worldview were switching positions in the realms of private and public power. This illustrates in a concrete way the close interconnections between the CFR and the U.S. government. In fact, the single institution that appears to be most interpenetrated with the CFR is the federal government of the United States, which has hundreds of members of the Council working in it. As of July 1, 2011, for example, the CFR had 529 of its members serving in “government.”274 Given the CFR focus on foreign policy, one can safely assume that the great majority of these members are working in the federal government. In its 1998 Annual Report, the Council itself pointed out that its members “include nearly all current and former senior U.S. government officials who deal with international matters.”275
As shown in some detail below, CFR members and leaders have, in all administrations, dominated policymaking. Fully seventy-seven of ninety-six (80.2 percent) top federal government policymakers for foreign policy during these years were also, at some point in their careers, Council members.
Democratic administrations are generally closer to the Council and its members than Republican ones. This pattern begins to show itself right at the beginning of our period with the administration of James E. Carter. All twelve of his top foreign policymakers were CFR members at some time in their careers. Walter Mondale, his vice president, was elected to membership prior to 1977 and continues as a member today. Carter’s first secretary of state, Cyrus R. Vance, and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski were both longtime members and directors of the CFR prior to holding their offices, and Vance was vice chairman of the Council for a number of years. Carter’s secretaries of the treasury W. Michael Blumenthal and G. William Miller, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, CIA director Stansfield Turner, and World Bank head Robert S. McNamara were all longtime members of the CFR prior to taking office, and Brown and Blumenthal also served as directors of the Council. Carter’s two United Nations ambassadors, Andrew Young and Donald McHenry, also belonged to the Council, and both became CFR directors after leaving government. Carter’s other secretary of state, Edmund Muskie, was also a CFR member for many years, but only after taking office. Carter himself only became a member of the CFR after he left office, but he has continuously been a member since 1983.
The pattern for Republican administrations was also established early in our period by President Ronald Reagan. Although not as close to the CFR in terms of top personnel, and Reagan himself was never a CFR member, there were nevertheless solid connections in that fourteen of nineteen top foreign policy officials were Council members. Vice President George H. W. Bush, who had been a member for a number of years,-was a Council director from 1977 to 1979. Both of Reagan’s secretaries of state, Alexander M. Haig and George P. Shultz, were longtime members, and Shultz was a Council director immediately prior to assuming the role of secretary of state.
During his eight years in office, Reagan had a total of six national security advisers. Two of these, Colin L. Powell and Frank C. Carlucci, had been in the CFR prior to taking office. Three others, Richard V. Allen, William P. Clark Jr., and Robert C. McFarlane, became CFR members later. Only one, John M. Poindexter, was never a Council member. One of Reagan’s two secretaries of the Treasury, Donald T. Regan, was in the Council prior to taking office and the other, James A. Baker III, joined after taking office. Similarly, both of this conservative president’s secretaries of defense, Casper W. Weinberger and Frank C. Carlucci, were members of the Council, Weinberger joining while in office, Carlucci prior to being in office.
Both of Reagan’s CIA directors, William J. Casey and William H. Webster, were longtime CFR members, as was one of his two ambassadors to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and she became a CFR director immediately upon leaving government.
Reagan’s appointees to the World Bank, Alden W. Clausen and Barber Conable, were not Council members, nor was his second UN ambassador, Vernon Walters.
As mentioned above, George H. W. Bush had been a CFR member and director prior to becoming vice president under Reagan. During his own presidency, ten of eleven top foreign policymakers were Council members and four also had been CFR directors. Bush’s vice president, Danforth Quayle, was not a member of the Council. Both of Bush I’s secretaries of state were in the CFR, James A. Baker III after his service in government, and Lawrence S. Eagleburger before, during, and after. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft was a longtime Council member before taking office, and a CFR director immediately prior to taking office. Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas F. Brady, was a member of the Council prior to taking office, as was his secretary of defense, Richard B. Cheney, who also had been a CFR director. Lewis T. Preston and Robert M. Gates, World Bank and CIA heads respectively, were members prior to taking office. Finally, both of Bush I’s UN ambassadors, Thomas R. Pickering and Edward J. Perkins, were Council members, and Pickering was later a CFR director.
Like the Carter and Bush I administrations, the Clinton administration was very closely connected to the CFR; fifteen of Clinton’s top seventeen foreign policy officials were in the CFR and five had also been or were soon to be directors. William J. Clinton was himself a CFR member before he became president, although his vice president, Albert A. Gore Jr., was not a member. Both of Clinton’s secretaries of state, Warren M. Christopher and Madeleine K. Albright, were longtime members; Christopher was a director and vice chair of the Council before joining the Clinton administration, and Albright became a CFR director after leaving government. Both of Clinton’s National Security Advisers, W. Anthony Lake and Samuel R. Berger, were longtime members of the CFR.
Of Clinton’s three secretaries of the treasury, the first, Lloyd M. Bentsen, was not a CFR member, but Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers were, with Rubin later becoming a director and co-chair of the Council. All three of Clinton’s choices for Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, William J. Perry, and William S. Cohen, were CFR members, and Aspin and Cohen were directors. Cohen was a director when Clinton called on him to serve in the government.
Clinton appointed three directors of the CIA, all members of the CFR. R. James Woolsey and John M. Deutch were longtime members when appointed, and the third, George J. Tenet, became a member about the same time he became head of the CIA. Clinton’s World Bank president, James Wolfensohn, and his three UN ambassadors, Albright, William B. Richardson, and Richard Holbrooke, were all Council members years prior to entering office, and Holbrooke was a CFR director.
George W. Bush was never a member of the CFR, but fourteen of the seventeen top foreign policy officials he appointed were or had once been Council members, and three were or soon became directors. His vice president, Richard B. Cheney, was a longtime member and was a two-time director between 1987 and 1995. Both of Bush’s secretaries of state, Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, had long been members of the Council when they were appointed, and Powell became a CFR director in 2006, right after leaving government. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and one of Bush’s secretaries of the treasury, Henry M. Paulson Jr., were Council members. On the other hand, the other two Bush II secretaries of the treasury were not in the CFR.
George W. Bush had two secretaries of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld and Robert M. Gates. Rumsfeld was a CFR member during the 1970s but later dropped out of the organization. Gates has been a continuous Council member since 1985. Bush’s appointees to head the CIA, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden, were CFR members prior to entering office, as were both of his appointees to head up the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Zoellick, who had also been a Council director. Three of the four men Bush appointed to be UN ambassador, John D. Negroponte, John R. Bolton, and Zalmay Khalilzad, were CFR members prior to their appointments.
Barack Obama’s administration continues to exemplify a strong CFR presence in government. Obama has never been a member of the CFR, and his vice president, Joseph R. Biden, was only briefly a member in the late 1980s. All three of Obama’s national security advisers, James L. Jones Jr., Thomas E. Donilon, and Susan E. Rice, have been CFR members. Both Donilon and Rice were especially close to the CFR. Donilon served for years on the Council Chairman’s Advisory Council as vice chair, and upon leaving government service became a “distinguished fellow” at the CFR. Susan E. Rice, who also served as Obama’s first UN representative, has been active in the organization for years. She was a term member by 1994, a regular member by 1996, and a speaker at CFR meetings by 1998.276 From 2002 to 2004 she was on the Nominating and Governance subcommittee of the Council Board of Directors and was on the Chairman’s Advisory Board of the CFR during 2003–2004.277 Samantha Power, Obama’s 2013 choice to replace Rice as U.S. ambassador to the UN, is not currently a CFR member.
Although Obama’s first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is not a member, her husband, Bill, has been a member for more than twenty years, and their daughter Chelsea had become a member by 2013.278 Obama’s second secretary of state, John Forbes Kerry, became a CFR member in the early 1990s. He married his second wife, the near billionaire Teresa Heinz (who inherited the Heinz food fortune), in 1995, the same year she was elected to Council membership.279
Former secretary of the treasury Timothy F. Geithner has belonged to the Council for eighteen years, and Obama’s second appointment to this office, Jack Lew, almost as long. Obama’s first secretary of defense, Robert Gates, has been active in the CFR for over two decades, and he headed up a CFR Independent Task Force with Zbigniew Brzezinski on Iran and Iraq in the mid-1990s. Obama’s second secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, who was also Obama’s first CIA director, is not a CFR member, but Obama’s second CIA director, General David H. Petraeus, has been a CFR member for at least twenty-eight years. His third CIA chief, John O. Brennan, is not a Council member, but on the other hand, Obama’s third secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, has been a CFR member for at least fifteen years, and his fourth, Ashton B. Carter, has been a Council member since 1984, and also served on the Trilateral Commission. The World Bank head during most of Obama’s first term was Robert B. Zoellick, a CFR member for twenty-three years, who was also a Council director from 1994 to 2001, but Obama’s pick to replace him, Jim Yong Kim, is not a CFR member.
Of the seventeen top foreign policymakers in the Obama administration, one (Zoellick) has been a CFR director and a total of eleven have been CFR members, with the exception of one, all prior to joining the Obama government.
So far, only the top foreign policy positions in a given administration have been discussed, but many of the other cabinet-level positions in a given administration have also been held by CFR people. In the Obama administration, for example, Janet A. Napolitano (Homeland Security), John E. Bryson and Penny S. Pritzker (Commerce), Ernest J. Moniz (Energy), Sylvia Mathews Burwell (Health and Human Services), and Mary Jo White (Securities and Exchange) are all Council members. Bryson and Burwell are former CFR directors, and Pritzker was a Council director when tapped for public office by Obama.
Additional important examples of the close interpenetration of the CFR and the federal government are the composition of the advisory boards for the Department of State, Department of Defense, and CIA. In the case of the Department of State, its Foreign Affairs Policy Board was established in late 2011 to provide the Secretary of State and other top leaders with “bipartisan,” and “independent, informed advice and opinion concerning matters of U.S. foreign policy.”280 In early 2013 it had twenty-five members, and twenty of them (80 percent) were CFR members, including six current or former Council directors. These six included one of the CFR’s co-chairs, Carla Hills, current director Ann Fudge, and former directors Thomas R. Pickering, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Helene Gayle, and Laura Tyson. Several members of the group are also directors of leading corporations or are wealthy, so capitalist-class representation is also high.
The Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee first became famous during the years when longtime CFR member Richard Perle headed the committee and used his position to influence the decision to go to war on Iraq. In 2009 this policy board had twenty-five members, seventeen of whom (68 percent) were CFR members or CFR Fellows. These included former Council directors Harold Brown and Henry A. Kissinger, as well as CFR member Chuck Hagel, who became Secretary of Defense in 2013.
The CIA set up its own fourteen-member “External Advisory Board” in 2009, ten of whom (71.4 percent) belonged to the Council. These included former CFR directors Madeleine K. Albright, Warren Rudman, and Thomas R. Pickering.
Another example of the unequaled power of the broad Council network is the 2006–12 Project on National Security Reform (PNSR), a “nonpartisan nonprofit” “blue ribbon” organization mandated by the U.S. Congress. Its purpose was to recommend improvements to the U.S. national security system in order to combat new threats by becoming more agile and efficient. Funded by Congress, foundations, and corporations, the PNSR saw itself, in the words of its website, as an “authoritative resource and trusted advisor that defines and develops the means to bridge the gap between the current state and needed future state of national security.” No fewer than eighteen federal government departments and agencies, as well as twenty-seven think tanks and similar organizations, and a large number of universities, corporations, and law firms contributed to PNSR’s work, which resulted in many recommendations to the government. The PNSR’s website lists the names of the “Guiding Coalition” of “former senior federal officials and others with national security experience. The bipartisan group sets the strategic direction for the Project, examines progress, discusses objectives, and reviews findings and recommendations . . . [communicating] the final findings and recommendations of PNSR to officials in government, the policy community and the public.” Thirty-two individuals are listed as having been on the “Guiding Coalition” during its period of operation. Although not one of the thirty-two lists the CFR as one of their affiliations, fully twenty-one of the them (65.6 percent) were members of the Council. Several were even more active than mere membership would indicate; three (Joseph S. Nye Jr., Thomas R. Pickering, and Brent Scowcroft) were current or former CFR directors, and one, Robert D. Blackwill, was, in 2011, the Council’s Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy.281
Finally, a 2011 book by Jordan Tama, a CFR member—Terrorism and National Security Reform: How Commissions Can Drive Change During Crises—lists all U.S. “blue ribbon” official U.S. government national security commissions during the period 1981–2006, a total of fifty-one.282 Although the words “Council on Foreign Relations” do not appear in the index to Tama’s book, he does list who chaired or co-chaired each of the commissions. Comparing the fifty-seven chairs/co-chairs of these government bodies to lists of Council members from 1981 to 2006 reveals that thirty-eight (66.7 percent) were members of the CFR. Eight of these heads of commissions were Council directors: Brent Scowcroft, Henry A. Kissinger, Bobby Inman, Les Aspin, Harold Brown, William Crowe, John Deutch, and James R. Schlesinger.
In summary, fully seventy-seven of the ninety-six (80.2 percent) top government policy positions during the 1976–2014 years have been filled by CFR members, and twenty-two (22.9 percent) were also CFR directors. If we add representation on top advisory organizations and policy boards, we find another ninety-six positions of which sixty-eight (70.8 percent) were filled by CFR members. These are extremely high numbers, not approached by any other private organization in the country.
The number of nonprofit think tanks in the United States has exploded since the 1970s, and they now collectively employ thousands of fellows and assistants whose intellectual output occupies a good deal of public space on the Internet, in newspapers, and magazines, as well as airtime on television and radio. Think tanks, especially the CFR, play a central role in developing new policy ideas and shaping key debates, setting agendas, and guiding both public and professional opinion.
The Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program of the University of Pennsylvania ranked the U.S. and other nations’ think tanks in 2009, publishing the results in early 2010.283 Among the “Security and International Affairs” think tanks, the CFR was ranked number 1 in the world.284 But when domestic as well as foreign policy were included, James McGann, senior fellow and director of the program, ranked these thirteen think tanks at the top:
1.Brookings Institution
2.Carnegie Endowment
3.Council on Foreign Relations
4.RAND Corporation
5.Heritage Foundation
6.Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
7.Cato Institute
8.Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
9.American Enterprise Institute
10.Hoover Institution
11.Peterson Institute for International Economics
12.Freedom House
13.Aspen Institute285
The mistake that caused McGann to rank the Council as the third most important U.S. think tank instead of number 1, is his failure to consider several key facts about the CFR. First, that it is a membership organization with almost 5,000 members, all of them paying dues and many of whom make yearly donations and participate in many of the CFR activities, including study groups and meetings. Second, this membership base, connected to an organized think tank with a large number of staff scholars, together with its corporate and government connections, is what gives the Council its unique strength as the world’s most powerful think tank. The membership activities, think tank work, meetings program, corporate service, media work, and government connections all function together. In an earlier book about think tanks, McGann stated that in 2005 the CFR had a total of 185 research staff members, compared to Brookings Institution’s 319, and Brookings had a slightly larger annual budget.286 What he left out was that in 2005 the Council had as members 794 professors, Fellows, and researchers, 496 government officials, as well as 275 university and college administrators, completely dwarfing the numbers working with and for Brookings and also Carnegie, neither of which is a membership organization.287 In his 2007 study, McGann asked the key executives (mainly presidents) of twenty leading think tanks to write essays about their own organizations, which he published in his book.288 But McGann failed to check into the connections between the top leaders of these different organizations and the CFR. Had he done so, he would have discovered that twelve of the twenty top officials of the other think tanks were members of the Council as well. These included Edward P. Djerejian of the Baker Institute, Strobe Talbott of Brookings, John J. Hamre of Center for Strategic and International Studies, Ellen Laipson of the Stimson Center, John Raisian of Hoover, Herbert I. London of Hudson, C. Fred Bergsten of the Institute of International Economics, Dimitri K. Smies of the Nixon Center, and James Thomson of RAND.289
Returning to McGann’s list of top think tanks above, we find that seven of the above-listed top think tanks—Brookings, Carnegie, CSIS, Wilson, Peterson, Freedom House, and Aspen—have extensive links with and are closely connected to the CFR, part of its inner circle. Three others—RAND, Hoover, and American Enterprise Institute—have fewer links and are most accurately considered part of Council’s wider circle. The last two of this top group, Heritage and Cato, each have at least one connection to the CFR, but the links are relatively few.
McGann’s list of leading U.S. think tanks totaled fifty. A discussion of the top twelve’s connections to the CFR follows, then we will briefly examine the leadership of sixteen more of the think tanks, all among the top thirty-five on McGann’s list. This will illustrate that the CFR has wide and deep connections to the great majority of top U.S. think tanks. At least twenty-six out of the top thirty-five are part of either the Council’s inner or wider circle.290
1.The Brookings Institution traces its origins to 1916; it was the first private organization devoted to the analysis of public policy issues at the national level. Its 2011 Annual Report pointed out five main foci of its work: economic studies, foreign policy studies, global economy and development, governance, and metropolitan policy.291 It had assets of $410 million (a little less than the Council’s assets) and spent $88 million in 2010, more than the $55 million spent by the CFR in that year. It had over 300 resident and non-resident fellows. Brookings’ Annual Report stated that it “strives for impact in at least three ways: designing policy recommendations, shaping critical debates, and setting the longer-term agenda.”292
Brookings is very closely interlocked with the CFR, indicating a strong commonality in ideology and political approach, and they occupy buildings that stand next door to each other in Washington. All five of its top leaders are Council members, including its chair, John L. Thornton. Its president, Strobe Talbott, is a former CFR director (1988–93). David Rubinstein, one of its vice chairs, is also vice chair of the CFR and a current Council director. Fourteen of its forty-five current trustees (31.1 percent) are CFR members, and two of them are current Council directors. Twenty of its forty honorary trustees (50 percent), are CFR members, and four of them are current or former CFR directors. Major funding sources in 2010 included the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, the Carnegie Corporation, Microsoft, and ATT, all organizations with ties to the Council. There are also many historic and current connections between Brookings and CFR scholars. One of these scholars, Richard N. Haass, worked for the Council, then at Brookings, then at the Department of State, then became president of the CFR. In December 2002, when working as director of policy planning at State, he stated in a speech he gave at the CFR: “The Council remains the blue chip think tank in the field. I can say this in all honesty because when I worked next door at a fellow—some might say rival—institution we often measured success by how many of our scholars appeared in the pages of Foreign Affairs or participated in Council study groups and task forces.”293
2.The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was founded in 1910 as a nonpartisan international think tank dedicated to cooperation between nations. It now has offices in five world cities. Its funding comes from branches of the federal government—including the Departments of State, Defense, and Energy—foreign governments, individuals, leading corporations, and foundations, many of them closely connected to the Council. Seven of its twenty-six trustees (26.9 percent) are CFR members, including Stephen R. Lewis Jr., its vice chair and president, and Paul Balaran, its vice president.
3.The RAND Corporation was founded in 1948 as a spin-off of Douglas Aircraft Company. This nonprofit is focused on improving policy and decision making through research, analysis, and development. Its national security and economic and social issues research work is funded by government agencies, foundations, and corporations. Two out of its twelve top leaders (16.7 percent) are members of the CFR, including Michael D. Rich, RAND’s president and CEO.
4.The Heritage Foundation is made up of “policy entrepreneurs” whose mission is to “formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.” None of its twenty-three trustees are members of the CFR, but at least one of its top scholars, Kim R. Holmes, director of foreign and defense policy, is a longtime CFR member, accepted in 1995.294
5.The Center for Strategic and International Studies was founded near the height of the Cold War in 1962. It focuses on foreign policy and national security issues and, like the CFR, has a large number of former top government officials among its ranks. It is closely interlocked with the CFR; twenty-four of its forty trustees (60 percent) are also members of the Council, including chairman Sam Nunn, vice chairman David M. Abshire, and president/CEO John J. Hamre. Nine of the twenty-four CFR members who are CSIS trustees are also current or former directors of the CFR, including Carla A. Hills, one of the Council’s current co-chairs, and David M. Rubenstein, the current CFR vice chair. Its budget for 2010 was $29.8 million, about 62 percent of what the CFR spent during that year.
6.The Cato Institute was founded in 1977. It is a libertarian think tank dedicated to “individual liberty, free markets and peace.” None of its twenty trustees are members of the CFR, but at least one of its scholars, Ted G. Carpenter, is a longtime Council member, and has participated in a CFR study group.295 This think tank advocates small government, and is, in general, supported by smaller corporations, which could be called the more competitive sector of U.S. capitalism. The major exception to this is the strong support given to Cato by the Koch brothers, who own and control large corporations and are two of the richest individuals in the world. Charles Koch is one of the founders of Cato and David Koch is on the board of trustees.
7.The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars was founded as an “official memorial to our nation’s 28th president,” and its trustees are appointed to six-year terms by the president of the United States. The Wilson Center tries to “inform the nation’s public policy debates” and bridge the world of academia and public policy. Two of its fifteen trustees (13.3 percent) are CFR members. At least some of its working committees are much closer to the Council. In 2008, for example, the Wilson Center formed an international committee to promote “greater understanding” between the United States and China. The U.S. members included five current or former CFR directors: Henry A. Kissinger, Maurice R. Greenberg, Carla A. Hills, Robert E. Rubin, and George P. Shultz.
8.The American Enterprise Institute has been called the premier conservative think tank. It was established during the Second World War to lobby against the possibility that price and production controls would be continued as anti-depression measures after the war. Since then it has continued to promote its goals of “strengthening free enterprise” and “expanding liberty.”296 AEI focuses on both domestic and foreign policy. Three of its twenty-seven trustees (11.1 percent) are CFR members, including Lee R. Raymond, former head of ExxonMobil, who reportedly gave $1.6 million to AEI. Another trustee is a former Council director, former vice president Richard B. Cheney. There are also CFR-connected people among its senior scholars; Council members Norman Ornstein and Newt Gingrich are two examples.
9.The Hoover Institution is located on the campus of Stanford University in California, and most of its trustees are based in that state. Hoover stresses that it collects knowledge, generating and disseminating the ideas that “define a free society and free markets,” including representative government and private enterprise. None of the eighteen trustees on its executive committee are in the CFR, but a number of their Hoover Fellows are, including former Council director George P. Shultz. At least seven other Council members are among the list of Hoover Fellows, including former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, former national security adviser Richard V. Allen, and former secretary of defense William J. Perry.
10.Freedom House was founded as an interventionist group to counter isolationist sentiments in 1941. Later it became a bipartisan anti-Soviet organization that was also against McCarthyism. Today it focuses on promoting political freedoms, democracy, and human rights that it sees as vital to the U.S. “national interest.” Its chair, William H. Taft IV, and both vice chairs, Ruth Wedgwood and Thomas A. Dine, are CFR members. Its thirty-nine-member board of trustees includes eighteen CFR members (46.2 percent), two of whom, Lee Cullum and Betty Bao Lord, have also served as Council directors.
11.Peterson Institute for International Economics was founded in 1981 by soon-to-be CFR chair Peter G. Peterson. This private nonprofit, nonpartisan organization studies and makes recommendations on the international economy. With an annual budget of about $10 million, it states that it has “helped provide the intellectual foundation for many of the major international financial initiatives of the past three decades.” These include reforms of the IMF, international banking, currency and trade policies. Its forty-three-member board of directors includes twenty CFR members (46.5 percent). Its leadership includes not only Peterson, but also other top CFR leaders like David Rockefeller, Carla A. Hills, Richard E. Salomon, and Maurice R. Greenberg, as well as a number of other current or former directors of the Council. Longtime active CFR member C. Fred Bergsten has been the Institute’s director since it was founded.
12.The Aspen Institute is based in four locations in the United States with an international network of partners in other nations. Aspen’s mission is to “foster values-based leadership” and to provide a “neutral and balanced venue” for discussion and action. It does this through seminars, fellowships, policy programs, and public conferences, bringing a “diversity of perspectives” together. Walter Isaacson, its president and CEO, and vice chair Henry E. Catto are both Council members. Twenty-four of its sixty-one (39.3 percent) trustees are also CFR members, a number that includes one current (Vin Weber) and one former (Madeleine Albright) Council director.
•The German Marshall Fund is ranked number 15; its co-chairs, Guido Goldman and Marc Leland, are both CFR members.
•The U.S. Institute of Peace is ranked number 16; its chair, J. Robinson West, and its vice chair, George E. Moose, are both Council members.
•The Center for American Progress is ranked number 17; its list of fellows include Council member and former senator Tom Daschle, former CFR vice president Lawrence J. Korb, former CFR director Laura D’Andrea Tyson, and a number of Council members, including Harvard professor and former Obama economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers.
•The Open Society Institute/Open Society Foundations is ranked number 18. This “democracy promotion” think tank is also a foundation, with billionaire George Soros as its chair, founder, and chief funder. Soros was accepted as a Council member by 1988 and has also been a CFR director. President Arych Neler is also a CFR member.
•The Center for Global Development is ranked number 19; its board includes CFR members Timothy D. Adams, C. Fred Bergsten, Lawrence Summers, and Henrietta Holsman Fore.
•The Center for Transatlantic Relations is ranked number 20; its director, Daniel Hamilton, is a CFR member.
•Human Rights Watch is ranked number 21. Its chair is James F. Hoge, a Council member and former editor of Foreign Affairs. Its executive director (Kenneth Roth) and two of its vice chairs (Joel Motley and John J. Studzinski) are all Council members.
•The Pew Center on Global Climate Change/C2ES is ranked number 23. The Pew Center, recently renamed C2ES, has at least three CFR members on its board of directors: Theodore Roosevelt IV, Elieen Claussen, and Frank E. Loy.
•The Stimson Center is ranked number 24. CFR members Berry Blechman and Michael Krepon founded this organization in 1989. Its board includes Alton Frye, a former senior vice president of CFR, Thomas Pickering, a former CFR director, and Council member Lincoln Bloomfield.
•The Carter Center is ranked number 27. CFR member and former U.S. president Jimmy Carter founded this organization. Other trustees include Council members Richard C. Blum and Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Gault has also been a CFR director.
•The EastWest Institute is ranked number 28; its founder, president, and CEO is John Edwin Mroz, a member of the CFR.
•The Atlantic Council is ranked number 30. Historically, the Atlantic Council has focused on North American-European relations primarily, but today it is a broader organization that also conducts studies on Africa and on the Near, Middle, and Far East. It has a large board of directors, consisting of 147 individuals, sixty-two of them CFR members (42.2 percent). Twelve of its thirteen honorary directors (92.3 percent) and eleven of its fifteen lifetime directors (73.3 percent) are also CFR members. Looking at the total list of eighty-five CFR members among the leadership of the Atlantic Council, seven were or are CFR directors.
•International Crisis Group is ranked number 31. This organization has as its chair Thomas R. Pickering, a former director of the CFR. Its executive committee includes former Council director George Soros and member Morton Abramowitz. The chair of its advisory board is CFR member and leading Council donor Rita E. Hauser. Hauser, a Republican, is also chair of the International Peace Institute and was appointed to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
•Hudson Institute is ranked number 32. Its chair emeritus is Council member Walter P. Stern. One of its vice chairs is CFR member Marie-Josee Kravis.
•World Resources Institute is ranked number 34. Its chair, vice chair, and two of its directors—James A. Harmon, Harriet Babbitt, Bill Richardson, and Theodore Roosevelt IV respectively—are all CFR members.
•Center for New American Security is ranked number 35. Eleven of its directors are Council members, including former CFR director Karen Elliott House.
A number of other important organizations involved in policy formation do not appear on McGann’s list of key think tanks but are within the CFR’s inner circle of sister organizations. Thirteen of these are briefly reviewed below.
•The National Committee on U.S. China Relations is an organization important in the development and dissemination of U.S. China policy. All of the top leaders of the NCUSCR (president, chair, four vice chairs, treasurer, secretary) are CFR members, including chair Carla A. Hills, and twenty-seven of its forty-member board of directors (67.5 percent) were also in the Council, three of them (Albright, Kissinger, and Gerstner), former CFR directors. A number of these same people were part of a 2007 Independent Task Force on China policy organized by the CFR.
•Foreign Policy Association was founded in 1918. Its stated aim is to instruct the attentive public about foreign policy issues. It has a “great decisions” program with content that is placed in teacher’s guides for schools and also used for television programs. In 2011, seventeen of it fifty-four directors (31.5 percent) were Council members. These directors included former CFR vice chair Maurice R. Greenberg, and former CFR executive vice president John Temple Swing, who is also the president emeritus of the FPA.
•The Business Council was formed by top corporate executives in 1933. At first it advised only the secretary of commerce, but it has expanded its role over the years, advising many branches of the federal government. It also provides personnel for special panels and committees that, in its words “help develop policy for the federal government.” In 2012 four of the fourteen members (28.6 percent), of the BC’s executive committee were CFR members. These included current Council directors Henry R. Kravis and James W. Owens. CFR member James Dimon chairs the BC and Council member Kenneth Chenault is also a BC executive council member.
•The Business Roundtable was established in 1972 as an association of CEOs of leading corporations. It aims to play an “active and effective role in the formation of public policy” by presenting government with “reasoned alternatives.” Its members represent corporations that make up nearly one-third of the total value of the U.S. stock market. In 2012 four CFR members sat on the eighteen-member executive committee (22.2 percent) of the Roundtable. These included Dimon and Chenault, mentioned above, and also Ajaj Bunga and Randall L. Stephenson.
•The Committee for Economic Development was founded by corporate leaders during the Second World War to conduct research and formulate policy recommendations “designed to sustain long term growth” in the economy. Among other things, the CED favors a freer global trading system. As of 2012, six of its seventeen executive committee members (35.3 percent) were also in the CFR, among them the president and co-chair of the CED, Charles E. M. Kolb and Roger W. Ferguson Jr., respectively.
•The U.S. Chamber of Commerce stresses its small business connections, but this organization largely reflects the interests of its large corporate members. The top leadership of the Chamber is composed of very wealthy men with close ties to the biggest U.S. corporations. For example, the Chamber’s current president and CEO (since 1997) is Thomas J. Donahue. He is also a director of the Union Pacific Corporation. At Union Pacific, Donohue’s fellow board members include the retired chairman of Conoco Phillips, a general partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, the former chairman and CEO of Weyerhaeuser, and former executives from DuPont, Phelps Dodge, and Louisiana Pacific. The Chamber’s board chairman, Thomas D. Bell Jr., has been a corporate executive at Ball Corporation (an industrial corporation with about 14,000 employees), Young and Rubicam (an advertising agency with about 16,000 employees), Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation, Norfolk Southern, and SecurAmerica. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is (since 2004) a corporate member of the Council and its president Donahue and chair Ball are members of the CFR.
•The Nixon Center/The Center for the National Interest (CNI) was founded by Richard Nixon and was named for him until 2011 when it became he CNI. It publishes the bimonthly magazine The National Interest. Though not considered a leading U.S. think tank, this organization’s leadership is very close to the CFR: every one of its top five leaders is a member of the Council, including two former directors, Maurice Greenberg and Henry Kissinger. Greenberg also served as a chairman of the Nixon Center. The president of the organization, the Russian immigrant Dimitri Simes, is a Council member. A number of its scholars are also in the CFR, including Geoffrey Kemp, General Charles G. Boyd, and Lt. General Wallace C. Gregson Jr.
•The Project for the New American Century was a short-lived (1997–2006) far right-wing neoconservative think tank that was especially influential in the George W. Bush administration. Its stated goal was to “promote American leadership” and “greatness” through “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” This involved increasing the U.S. military budget to “retain its militarily dominant status” worldwide, and using the military threat and force “to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.” PNAC pushed for a war on Iraq, sending a letter to President Clinton to that effect in 1998, and continued its efforts until success in 2003, when a number of its own people were leading policymakers—for example, Richard B. Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. (We will return to this organization in chapter 6 on the origins and war aims of the U.S. in Iraq.) Of the sixty-eight signatories or contributors to the PNAC’s reports and statements, fully forty-three (63.2 percent) were CFR members as of the year 2000. These included four current or former CFR directors: Richard B. Cheney, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Vin Weber, and Robert B. Zoellick.
•The Chicago Council on Global Affairs has been called the “Midwest’s leading think tank.”297 Its top leaders are CFR members: chairman of the board Lester Crown, vice chair Michael H. Moskow, and president Ivo H. Daalder. Among its top corporate contributors are JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and the Boeing Company, all corporate members of the CFR. Its fellows include former CFR senior fellow Rachel Bronson, who is also a member of the Council. Forbes magazine called billionaire Lester Crown Chicago’s richest man; he is a major stockholder of military contractor General Dynamics Corporation and sits on its board.
•United against Nuclear Iran: In July, 2014, the Obama administration confounded the legal community by successfully going to court to protect UNAI from having to defend itself in a private defamation lawsuit. The government argued that UANI, a private neo-conservative organization, should be shielded under the state secrets privilege, depriving a private citizen of his day in court. Although UANI is not formally connected to the American government, a review of the 42 leaders of the organization reveals many former intelligence and defense operatives from NATO nations and Israel. Seventeen of the 27 American citizens helping to lead UANI are CFR members (63%), and include a former Council president and four former directors.
•International Rescue Committee is a non-governmental relief, “human rights” and development organization, based in the United States but operating in forty countries, founded in 1933. Among its 2012 list of twelve officers and former chair are seven CFR members (58.3 percent). Its twenty-eightmember board of directors includes seven Council members (25 percent), one of which (Mary M. Boies) is a current director of the CFR. Among the IRC’s Overseers are seven current or former CFR directors and a number of other Council members.
•The Asia Society was founded in 1956 by John D. Rockefeller III. It states that its mission is to promote understanding between Asia, especially China, and the United States. It conducts strategic, economic, educational, and cultural studies. Its financial statement shows $107.7 million in assets, a large proportion likely contributed by Rockefeller. Both of its co-chairs, Ronnie C. Chan and Henrietta H. Fore, are CFR members, as are fifteen of its fifty-two trustees (28.8 percent). A review of its trustees, officers, fellows, and experts found forty-five CFR members who are also part of the Asia Society.
•The Japan Society was founded in 1907, and, like the Asia Society, funded in part by John D. Rockefeller III. It has fewer but still substantial ties to the CFR, with ten Council members out of forty-three of its trustees (23.3 percent).
The dividing line between the work of think tanks, policy organizations, and lobbying groups can be fuzzy, but it is clear that lobbying groups generally focus on a narrower and more immediate agenda than think tanks. Three prominent lobbying groups are known to be connected to the CFR’s network:
•The Concord Coalition is the most closely connected to the Council. Founded in 1992 by CFR chair Peter Peterson and Council member Senator Warren Rudman along with Senator Paul Tsongas, this organization aims at “educating the public” to support cutting “unsustainable entitlement programs” benefiting workers, such as Social Security and Medicare. In this way the taxes of the rich and corporations can be cut further. Concord uses patriotic language and imagery to try to convince people to support reducing an already too weak social safety net. Almost half of its thirty-one top officers and directors are CFR members, including its president (Peterson), co-chairs—Rudman and former Senator Bob Kerrey—and several vice chairs, among them Robert E. Rubin and Paul A. Volcker. The Coalition gives an annual “Economic Patriot” Award to those willing to sign on to and spread propaganda for its policies. In his memoirs, Peterson mentions six recipients of this award, all members of the CFR.298
•Americans for Tax Reform is led by its president and prime mover, CFR member Grover Norquist. The ATR is anti-government and wants to starve the government of resources by pressuring officeholders and candidates to commit in writing to oppose all tax increases. In the 112th Congress, 238 House members and forty-one senators have taken this pledge; at the same time at the state level thirteen governors and 1,249 state legislators have also pledged. Norquist is also on the board of the National Rifle Association, the Nixon Center, and the American Conservative Union.
•American Israel Public Affairs Committee is generally recognized as the most influential pro-Israel/Zionist lobbying organization in the United States. AIPAC focuses mainly on Congress, using funding and mass action to assure continued U.S. support for all Israeli policies, and to make sure that the U.S. national interest is defined in a pro-Israel way. It has a large, sixty-three-person board of directors. Four of these individuals (6.3 percent) are members of the CFR. These common members include two who are well known: Martin S. Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, and Dennis Ross, a longtime government “expert” on the Middle East.
The corporation is a central institution of capitalism. The ownership of shares, the holding of high position in corporations, and the profits that are then received are among the main sources of capitalist-class wealth and power in society. The question of ownership and control of the corporations is a complex and controversial topic, and a full discussion is beyond the scope of the present work. It can nevertheless be said that the most detailed studies have convincingly shown that in most cases each corporation has a group of cooperating major stockholders—extended family-, bank-, or investment group-based or all of these together, often a kinship-economic group—that make the key strategic decisions for the great majority of large, medium, and small corporations.299 Making such decisions is the function of the board of directors of each corporation. Top professional managers are hired to make day-to-day tactical judgments and often have input on the larger-scale strategic decisions. These super managers also receive very large salaries and perks like gifts of stock in the company. This is part of the assimilation process into the capitalist class, and top managers gradually join the society of the plutocracy and become closely allied with the leading owners of a given corporation.
The state also generally protects, with taxpayer funds, these large, often Council-connected monopoly corporations. The bailouts that took place in 2008 represent examples of “too big to fail” corporations rescued by the government. Lehman Brothers, for example, was a corporate member of the CFR at the highest level.300 It represented an exception in that it was allowed to fail, but massive government bailouts were granted to a large number of other Council-related financial institutions. These bailed-out corporations included AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, all of which were corporate members of the Council in 2008.301 These same corporations control some of the world’s largest investment funds. A Financial Times article in July 2013 lists the twenty top managers of alternative investments for pension funds. Twelve of them were CFR corporate members in 2012, led by Goldman Sachs, the Blackstone Group, BlackRock, UBS, Credit Suisse, and JPMorgan Chase. These twelve Council corporate members alone had alternative assets under management of almost $1.2 trillion.302
The top 500 corporations of the United States are listed each year by Fortune magazine. In 2010 Fortune listed the twenty-seven largest corporations by market value and equity.303 These tend to be the most transnational of U.S.-based corporations and collectively control trillions of dollars of assets. Of these, twenty-four (88.9 percent) have some links to the Council, and eighteen of these have closer ties and could be considered part of the CFR’s inner circle, and will be discussed below.
Many of other top 500 Fortune corporations, as well as smaller ones, are also well connected to the CFR as corporate members or through officers or directors who are CFR members. The section below will show that the CFR is, in general, most closely connected to the largest and most internationally oriented U.S. corporations; it does not list every leading corporation that is connected to the Council, for such a list would be very long. One limited measure of such relationships is participation in the CFR’s corporate membership program.
•Coca-Cola is a “Premium” corporate member of CFR and has seven Council members among its seventeen directors. These members include Coke chair and CEO Muhtar Kent, also a Council director beginning in 2012, and former CFR director Donald F. McHenry (1984–93). Coke’s largest single stockholder is Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s conglomerate, and Buffett’s son, Howard G. Buffett, sits on the board of Coke.
•IBM is high among U.S. corporations when ranked by market value. IBM and its owning Watson family have long-standing ties to the CFR. IBM is a corporate member of the Council at the Premium level. Five of its fourteen directors are CFR members, including two former directors of the Council, Shirley Ann Jackson and Joan E. Spiro, and a current CFR director, James W. Owens.
•General Electric has long been among the top U.S. corporations in both market value and equity. GE is a Premium corporate member of the CFR, and five of its sixteen board members are also Council members. One, Ann Fudge, is a current CFR director.
•ATT is a Premium corporate member of the CFR. Its chair and CEO, Randall L. Stephenson, is a Council member, as are three other board members, one of which, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, is a former CFR director. ATT closely cooperates with the National Security Agency in its massive, unconstitutional program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.
•Citigroup in 2010 was the third-biggest corporation by equity on the Fortune list. The Financial Stability Board has identified Citigroup as one of twenty-nine “Global Systemically Important Financial Institutions” (G-SIFIs) whose failure could trigger a global financial crisis. It has long had a close relationship to the CFR. In 2004, for example, eight of of its seventeen directors were Council members. In 2011 there was an almost entirely different group of directors, but still four of twelve were members, including chair Richard D. Parsons. Another Citi director, former President Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, was previously a member of the Council’s International Advisory Board.304 Citi is among the “Founders” corporate members of the CFR.
•Goldman Sachs is another G-SIFI, and among the world’s largest investment banks. In 2012 four of Goldman’s twelve directors are also in the CFR, including its chair and CEO, Lloyd C. Blankfein. In 2004, three of nine were Council members, including CFR director Steven Friedman. Goldman is also one of the few among the top Founders group of CFR corporate members
•Merck is a Premium corporate member of the CFR. It has four directors who are Council members, including Kenneth C. Frazier, its chair and CEO. One of its directors, Thomas H. Glocer, is also a current director of the CFR.
•JPMorgan Chase is a G-SIFI, and ranks very high in equity and market value among U.S. corporations. JPMorgan Chase is one of the world’s leading investment banks, with a full range of services, including asset management and private equity investing for wealthy clients. It is among the top of the Founders group of CFR corporate members. In 2004 six of its twelve directors, including its chair and CEO, were CFR members. In 2012, three of its twelve directors were also CFR members, and these included Jamie Dimon, the chair and CEO of the company.
•Morgan Stanley is another of the top tier of U.S. and world investment banks, a G-SIFI. It also has close ties to the Council. The CFR’s current Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Kenneth Castiglia, is also CFO and Treasurer of Morgan Stanley. This corporation has three CFR members among its thirteen directors. One of these, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, is a former Council director, and another, James W. Owens, is a current CFR director. It is a CFR corporate member, at the “President’s Circle” level.
•American International Group was historically close to the CFR under Maurice R. Greenberg, who was CEO of AIG for many years, and was at the same time vice chair of the Council. But since the current capitalist crisis, beginning in 2008, and the giant government bailout of the firm, a different group of directors now runs this firm. Whereas AIG was a corporate member of the CFR at the highest level in 2007, it has dropped its corporate membership and not renewed it. Three of its fourteen current directors are members of the Council, showing a continuing linkage, but not as central as before 2008.
•Wells Fargo Bank is one of the largest U.S. banks by both equity and market value, and is another G-SIFI. But Wells was also, in the words of the Financial Times, “the epitome of domestically focused American banking.”305 As a bank that generates only a small fraction of its $81 billion revenues from foreign operations, and only 2 percent of its 260,000 employees based outside the United States, Wells does not have the same keen interest in foreign affairs as the other major American banks, and consequently has much less interest and involvement in the CFR. This is obviously changing, since the same FT article cited above states that Wells has big plans to expand abroad. Supporting this suggestion about Wells Fargo’s likely evolution is the fact that in 2004 none of Wells fifteen directors were members of the CFR, but by 2012 three of its sixteen directors were members. Two of these, CFR members Elaine L. Chao and Frederico F. Pena, were former high federal government officials. Wells still has not joined the Council as a corporate member, but it has two corporate interlocks (and thus a kind of alliance) with Chevron, which is a CFR corporate member. Both Chevron and Wells Fargo are based in San Francisco, far from the traditional CFR centers of New York and Washington, but, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the Council has been working to expand its reach and become more active in the western part of the United States.
•Johnson & Johnson is one of the leading U.S. corporations in the health care sector. Three of its twelve directors are CFR members, as is Robert W. Johnson IV of the owning family. J & J is not, however, a corporate member of the Council.
•Exxon Mobil is near the top of the corporate ladder as measured by market value and equity. It is in the Founders group of CFR corporate members, and two of its 12 directors are members of the CFR. Lee Raymond, its former longtime chair and CEO, is also a Council member.
•Chevron is ranked near the top in both market value and equity among U.S. corporations. This oil giant is among the few Founders among the CFR’s corporate members. Based in San Francisco, far from CFR headquarters in New York, Chevron nevertheless has two of its board members in the CFR.
•Bank of America was formerly San Francisco–based, but is now headquartered in North Carolina. This G-SIFI bank does not have the same long history of close ties to the CFR that several of the other inner circle banks have. Currently, only two of its thirteen directors are members of the Council, but by 2009 BofA had also joined the top Founders group of Council corporate members.
•ConocoPhillips is a major petroleum company, and a Premium corporate member of the Council. Two of this company’s fourteen directors belong to the CFR.
•Comcast, a telecommunications firm, is not a corporate member of the CFR, but two of its board members are in the Council.
•Proctor & Gamble, one of the nation’s largest companies by equity and market value, is not a corporate member of CFR. It does have one member of its eleven-person board who is a member of the Council, Kenneth Chenault, head of American Express, and another, former president of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo, who was on the CFR’s International Advisory Board.306
Not listed among the Fortune 500 corporations, but important players in the U.S. and international economy, are the private equity and investment firms that are part of the large, powerful, and less-regulated “shadow-banking” system of non-bank financial institutions. The “shadow banking sector represents 25–30 percent of the world’s financial sector,” states one expert, European Commissioner Michel Barnier.307 These firms engage in loans, take over corporations for profit, and speculate through hedge funds as well as structured investment vehicles. The big banks also engage in similar activities, but are under greater government regulation as well as protection. Another role played by the shadow-banking sector is to create new ways to expand and intensify capitalism, spreading commodification, exploitation, and dispossession into different sectors of the economy in order to broaden the scope and range of exchange value, increasing capital’s profit at the expense of the broad working class. New speculative instruments like credit default swaps and the securitization of loans are invented. “Undervalued” firms are purchased, often with borrowed money, and made “more efficient.” In practice this often means layoffs and speedups for the firm’s workers, as more profits are squeezed out no matter what the effect on individuals and local communities.
The shadow-banking sector has grown tremendously over the past few decades of neoliberal financial globalization. Hedge fund industry assets were only a few billion dollars in the early 1990s, for example, but reached nearly $500 billion by 2000. Hedge fund assets then took off, more than doubling to over $1 trillion by 2005 and doubling again to over $2 trillion by 2012.308 In 2013 private equity firms raised $485 billion from speculators and investors and had a record $1.7 trillion available for investment.309 Much of this business represents gambling pure and simple, producing little to benefit society, yet producing vast wealth for a few. The lightly regulated and unregulated shadow-banking system, together with some overleveraged investment banks, was a key source of instability that helped lead to the 2008 financial crisis.
Following are the six private equity firms most closely connected to the CFR; these also are among the largest and most important.
•The Blackstone Group is a corporate member at the Premium level and has been close to the CFR since Blackstone was founded in 1983. In 2013 the Financial Times ranked it number one in the world as a manager of “alternative” investments—hedge funds, commodities, infrastructure funds, real estate funds, private equity—for pension funds.310 One of its two founders, Peter Peterson, chaired the Council from 1985 to 2007 and the other, Steven Schwarzman, is a longtime CFR member. Its current vice chair, J. Tomilson Hill, is on the Council board and heads up the CFR’s investment committee. Brian Mulroney, the former Canadian prime minister, is on the Blackstone board. He was also on the Council’s International Advisory Board in 2007.311 Blackstone has had a close cooperative relationship with Kissinger Associates, and the headquarters of both firms share a building in New York City. Blackstone manages $218 billion for wealthy investors, and also purchased about 40,000 single-family dwellings, many of them foreclosed properties, for over $7 billion in a major speculative move during 2012–13. Blackstone is renting many of these homes, “helping to diminish supply and drive up real estate values in some areas.”312 Such speculation increases prices for rank-and-file people, making it more difficult for them to afford to purchase a home. Blackstone, together with Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and JPMorgan Chase, is also marketing a new bond, a security backed by the cash flow from the rental income of these dwellings. This is a new type of securitization, a “fresh asset class” in the words of the Financial Times, that has also been given a triple-A, nearly risk-free credit rating.313 Schwarzman and others in the top leadership of Blackstone have made vast fortunes, and are billionaires. Schwarzman made $374.5 million in 2013 alone, for example.314
•BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager with over $4 trillion assets under management.315 It has 120 investment teams working in thirty nations seeking out the highest returns, and its over 10,000 employees manage over 7,000 portfolios belonging to clients in over a hundred countries. It is a corporate member of the CFR at the “President’s Circle” level.316 BlackRock’s chair and CEO is CFR member Laurence D. Fink, who also serves on the Council’s board. Another CFR member, Jessica P. Einhorn, a former board member of the CFR, is also on BlackRock’s board.317
•The Carlyle Group, founded in 1987, is a global investment firm that had 420 investment specialists working in nineteen nations with a total of $107.6 billion under management in 2011. It is a private partnership owned by senior Carlyle officials and two large institutional investors: Calpers, the California Public Employees Retirement System, which owns 5.1 percent, and Mubadala Development, owned by the Abu Dhabi government, which owns 7.5 percent. In 2004, four of the nine members of the senior management team running the company were CFR members, including current Council director and vice chair David M. Rubenstein, former CFR director Louis V. Gerstner Jr., and CFR members James Baker III (former secretary of state) and Frank Carlucci (former secretary of defense). Rubinstein made $250 million from Carlyle in 2013 alone.318 Carlyle is majority owner of Booz Allen Hamilton, a CFR corporate member, and a major contractor for the National Security Agency. Booz was the former employer of Edward Snowden, and Booz is where Snowden got the information revealing the unconstitutional domestic and foreign surveillance activities of this agency. The connection between Booz, the NSA, and Carlyle likely allows the latter shadow bank to gain insider information about foreign and domestic corporations, data likely to be of great value in private equity purchases and on the trading floors of globalized casino capitalism.
•Apollo Management is a Premium level corporate member of the Council. Its top leadership, Leon D. Black, a founder and current chair, and CEO and managing partner Joshua Harris are both CFR members, as is another director, Paul Fribourg. Black reportedly made $546.3 million from his work directing Apollo in 2013.319
•Kohlberg Kravis Roberts is one of the largest in this group of firms, and is a corporate member of the CFR at the “President’s Circle” level. KKR is closely connected to the CFR through Henry R. Kravis, one of its co-CEOs, and James W. Owens, a senior adviser. Kravis was a Council director (2006–12) and Owens began being a CFR director in 2006. KKR has a number of other connections with the Council. For example, CFR member and former general David H. Petraeus was hired by KKR in 2013 as chair of its “Global Institute,” which functions as a kind of in-house think tank to develop the right investment response to emerging geopolitical, macroeconomic, and technological changes worldwide. Kravis made $150 million from KKR in 2013.320
In March of 2013, the Financial Times reported that KKR and Apollo Management “have accelerated investments in companies using so-called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking to extract gas reserves.”321 Reporting on speeches by KKR co-founder and former CFR director Henry Kravis and Apollo co-founder and Council member Leon Black at a “SuperReturn” Conference in Berlin, the Financial Times stated that Kravis especially played down any negative impact that fracking might have. In regard to fracking, Kravis argued that “a large amount of study has gone into it and there is no proof yet that it’s something that’s going to hurt the water tables.”322
•Warburg Pincus is a Premium corporate member of the CFR. Charles R. Kaye, one of the two co-presidents of this firm, is a Council member. Former secretary of the treasury Timothy Geithner, long an active CFR member, became president of this firm in 2013.
Although think tanks like the Council handle large-scale strategic policy development and recommendations for action for the capitalist class as a whole, in our neoliberal era multinational corporations often feel the need for additional expert advice on best how to handle the specific issues and contradictions that arise as they expand their operations into other nation-states, pursuing profits and accumulation across geographic space. In order to meet this need, a number of strategic for-profit consulting firms have been founded since the mid-1970s, sometimes called political risk consultancies. In practice, these firms combine research and analysis, the past experience of their principals and staff, and connections with domestic and foreign leaders to develop recommendations on the risks and opportunities of a given course of action in a specific national political economy. They also develop strategies to meet or evade regulatory, customs, and tax requirements in various nations. These “in-and-outers” trade on their intellectual expertise and government connections at home and abroad to profit by serving the needs of major transnational corporate players. Ten such firms, all with close ties to the CFR, are reviewed below.
•Kissinger Associates, founded by Henry A. Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft with loans from Goldman Sachs and other banks in 1982, is known for its secrecy. Due to its prominence, however, enough research has been done to allow reporting in some depth about the organization. For a substantial price, Kissinger Associates (KA) will assist corporate clients on investment opportunities, potential strategic partners, and government relations in nations worldwide. Its list of strategic partners is known to include the Blackstone Group and the international law firm of Covington & Burling, where Eric Holder, President Obama’s first attorney general, was a lawyer prior to assuming office. Key clients include American Express, American International Group, Freeport-McMoRan, Hollinger, and JPMorgan Chase. Other known clients include Atlantic Richfield, Coca-Cola, Heinz, Merck, Volvo, and Warburg Pincus. Among these fourteen corporations, only two—Hollinger and Volvo—were not corporate members of the CFR in recent years. At the level of individuals, both Kissinger and Scowcroft have been longtime members of the Council and have served on its board. CFR member Thomas (Mack) McLarty, a former White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton, joined KA in 1999 to open an office in Washington. Directors of KA have included other Council members such as William E. Simon, a former secretary of the treasury, and William D. Rogers, a former undersecretary of state. Foreign directors include several individuals active in the Bilderberg and Trilateral Commission meetings, such as Lord Carrington and Lord Roll of Britain, Etienne Davignon of Belgium, and Saburo Okita of Japan.
Prominent KA staff over the years have included many CFR members, all of whom have also served in important roles as “in-and-outers” in the U.S. government: Secretary of the Treasury Timothy F. Geithner, Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, governor of New Mexico and energy secretary Bill Richardson, president of Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Richard W. Fisher, Deputy Director of the CIA Jami Miscik, Ambassador and Assistant Secretary of State J. Stapleton Roy, member of the International Economic Advisory Committee of the Department of State Nelson Cunningham, and L. Paul Bremer, Director of Reconstruction in Iraq. In short, KA is very closely connected to the U.S. government as well as the CFR. Kissinger’s personal views toward rank-and-file people, likely reflecting a wider CFR/capitalist-class perspective, were expressed when he once pointedly told his assistant, General Alexander Haig, another longtime member of the CFR, that “military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used . . .” as pawns in foreign policy ploys, including, of course, in wars.323
•Albright Stonebridge Group, founded by longtime CFR members Madeleine K. Albright (who has also been a Council director) and Samuel R. Berger in 2001, has worked in more than ninety-five different countries on six continents, with teams operating in at least a dozen major cities. Albright and Berger are still the co-chairs and are joined by three other Council members to make up a ten-person board of directors. They call themselves “a global strategy firm that helps corporations, associations and nonprofit organizations around the world meet their core objectives in a highly competitive, complex and ever-changing marketplace.” The firm is also affiliated with Albright Capital Management, “an emerging markets investment firm led by a team of seasoned investment professionals.” Under “capabilities” on their website, ASG lists six key aspects of their work: “navigate government regulations; assess market risks; develop regulatory strategies; create sustainable partnerships, seize growth opportunities; promote corporate citizenship.” One 2014 example of its work was advising the Elliott Management hedge fund and other holdout creditors in their sovereign debt conflict with Argentina.324
Like Kissinger, Albright also has little regard for the lives of rank-and-file soldiers or, for that matter, innocent civilians. In the 1990s she favored a war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and was looking for an excuse to start such a war. While UN ambassador, with the United States involved in enforcing a no-fly zone in Iraq, Albright had the following exchange with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton, which he later recounted in his memoirs: “Hugh, I know I shouldn’t even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event—something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2’s fly low enough—and slow enough—so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?” Shelton recounted that he was very angry at the question, but offered this reply: “Why of course we can, just as soon as we get your ass qualified to fly it, I will have it flown just as low and as slow as you want to go.” Shelton added that he was shocked at the disrespect of Albright and told her: “Remember, there is one of our great Americans flying that U-2, and you are asking me to intentionally send him or her to their death for an opportunity to kick Saddam. The last time I checked, we don’t operate like that here in America.”325
As secretary of state, Albright also got critical attention with her answer to fellow CFR member Leslie Stahl’s question as broadcast on 60 Minutes on May 12, 1996. Stahl asked if the price of 500,000 dead Iraqi children due to U.S. sanctions was “worth it.” Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but . . . we think the price is worth it.”
•Hills and Company International Consultants was formed by CFR co-chair Carla A. Hills with her husband, Roderick M. Hills, in 1993, immediately after Carla Hills had been George H. W. Bush’s trade representative. Their corporate website states that the business was established to “help businesses expand trade and investment worldwide.” They achieve this through developing a strategy for negotiation with the power players in a given nation. They then work to “persuade key figures in public and private sectors in a foreign market to take the steps necessary to accomplish the client’s objectives.” Building on Carla Hills’s trade representative experience, Hills and Company stresses their expertise in the areas of World Trade Organization rules and procedures, bilateral and regional trade agreements, tax, tariff, health, regulatory, and product labeling matters, as well as customs classification and economic sanctions issues. They cite successes in working in China, Russia, Brazil, India, Japan, Pakistan, Argentina, Taiwan, Costa Rica, the Philippines, and Egypt. Hills and Company clients include Chevron, AIG, Boeing, Bechtel, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Novartis, Qualcomm, and Mars Incorporated.
Carla A. Hills is the chair of Hills and Company, which has five principals, including Roderick M. Hills. Carla Hills has been a director of a number of large Council-connected corporations and her husband of even more. Another principal, vice chair Thomas R. Pickering, is a former Council director, and has been a U.S. ambassador both to the UN as well as to a number of countries. He also served as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the Clinton administration. Hills and Company principal Alexander F. Watson is another CFR member, who, like Carla Hills, worked in the office of the U.S. Trade Representative and was also an assistant secretary of state.
•Oxford Analytica, a British-based corporate member of the CFR, calls itself “a global analysis and advisory firm which draws on a macro expert network to advise its clients on strategy and performance in complex markets.” They claim a confidential contributor network of “over 1,400 leading scholars, former policymakers, regulators, and industry leaders, focused on geopolitical and macroeconomic issues. Most are based in top universities and research institutions around the globe.” Founded in 1975, it is the oldest of the nine strategic consulting firms discussed here. Of the ten individuals listed as making up its board of directors in 2013, two former corporate executives, Lawrence C. McQuade and Tracy R. Wolstencraft, are members of the Council.326 Additionally, five members of its international advisory board are also Council members, including former ambassador and undersecretary of state John Negroponte.
•Control Risks Group is also a British based-firm that is a CFR corporate member. Beginning as a professional adviser to the insurance industry, in the 1990s it expanded its focus to serve multinational corporations and now has thirty-four offices and over 2,000 employees around the world. It specializes in political, security, and integrity global risks. Its team of political risk analysts assesses how political risk issues might impact a specific business. Security risk involves providing threat assessment, security design, travel security, executive protection, and emergency crisis management. Integrity risk focuses on preventing corruption, including agent screening, managing whistleblower hot-lines, and conducting investigations of malfeasance.
•Eurasia Group calls itself the “world’s largest political risk research and consulting firm,” with over 400 clients, a staff of 150, and a network of 500 experts in eighty nations worldwide. The Eurasia Group is recognized as the first risk consultancy to bring the discipline of political science to Wall Street in a systematic way, allowing them to rank the “top ten risks” on a yearly basis, and to apply both quantitative and qualitative risk assessments to measure stability in emerging markets. Their methodology is supposed to provide an early warning system, anticipating trends and predicting if a given country can withstand economic, political, security, and social shocks. The firm began in the 1990s with a focus on the nations of the former USSR and of Eastern Europe, but soon expanded worldwide, covering not just governance and security issues, but also regulatory ones, as well as regional relations and social trends. In 2011 Eurasia Group also launched a partnership with Bank of America to provide research to wealthy clients and use geopolitical analysis to develop investment portfolios. It also acquired Intellibridge, a strategic advisory firm founded by CFR members Anthony Lake and David Rothkopf.
The top leadership of the Eurasia Group includes CFR members as well as foreign nationals. Its president, Ian Bremmer, and Cliff Kupchan, one of the members of its operating committee, both belong to the Council. On Eurasia’s advisory board are former CFR director Thomas Pickering (also vice chair of Hills and Company); Enzo Viscusi, a vice president of Eni Corporation; Win Neuger, vice chair of PineBridge Investments; and Edward L. Morse, managing director of Citigroup, all of them Council members.
•GartenRothkopf is a partnership of Council members Jeffery E. Garten and David Rothkopf. GartenRothkopf advertises itself as a cutting-edge “international advisory firm that helps leaders capitalize on transformational trends in energy, climate, risk and the global economy.” With investor, executive, and official clients on four continents, they claim on their website a “distinct set of capabilities at the intersection of economics, markets, technology, and policy to systematically identify unforeseen risks and unconventional opportunities.” Its largest areas of practice are in emerging markets and the rapidly developing field of energy choice and climate change.
After working on Wall Street as managing director of Lehman Brothers and Blackstone, Jeffery E. Garten was the Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade in the first Clinton administration. He then served for a decade as Dean of the Yale School of Management, then as a professor in the same school. He serves or has served on the board or advisory board of Aetna, Credit Suisse Asset Management, Toyota, Alcan, Calpine, and the Chicago Climate Exchange (a greenhouse gas trading exchange). He has also authored several books and a number of articles, including for Foreign Affairs.
David Rothkopf is also an author of several books, including the 2008 work Superclass:The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, and over 150 articles. He served, as did Garten, as an undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration. After leaving government, he was the managing director of Kissinger Associates, then was co-founder and chairman of Intelibridge.
•The Scowcroft Group was founded by Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to both presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, besides serving as vice chair of Kissinger Associates. Later he founded and today manages TSG, which calls itself an “international business advisory firm” that develops and executes strategies carefully tailored to individual countries. Its website states that “our team of Principals brings extensive strategic planning and risk management experience in global business and government, coupled with extraordinary regional expertise in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Western and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Latin America.”
The ten principals of the Scowcroft Group include five Council members, including its founder, who is a former CFR director.
•RiceHadleyGates is based in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. There are four principals in this firm, all CFR members. Condoleezza Rice, Steven J. Hadley, and Robert Gates all served in high positions in the George W. Bush administration, as National Security Advisers, as Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense. Anja Manuel was a lower-level State Department official in the same administration. Like the other firms of this type, it offers corporations “advice based on extensive experience in the international arena. We work with companies to develop and implement their strategic plans and help them expand in emerging markets, including in Asia, the Middle East and the Americas.” Two of their white papers, available on their website, discuss growth opportunities in India and Sub-Saharan Africa.327
•The Cohen Group was founded by former Defense Secretary and CFR director William S. Cohen when he left the Clinton administration in early 2001. The objectives of the firm are: “helping multinational clients explore opportunities overseas as well as solve problems that may develop. The Cohen Group has the unique ability to provide our clients with truly comprehensive tools for understanding and shaping their business, political, legal, regulatory, and media environments.”
The Cohen Group has a strategic alliance with the international law firm DLA Piper, one of the largest law firms in the world. Both the Cohen Group and DLA Piper have multiple connections to the CFR. Besides Cohen himself, Marc Grossman, a vice chair at the Cohen Group, is a Council member, and former ambassador and undersecretary of state Nicholas Burns is both a CFR member and a senior counselor at Cohen. Former Senator George J. Mitchell, DLA Piper’s former chairman, was a Council director, and former U.S. senator and CFR member Tom Daschle is a policy adviser at this law firm.
The Council is closest to seven of America’s leading universities. Although it has ties to many others, the seven that follow are most central to the CFR’s work and the training of future leaders and members of this organization.
•Harvard and Yale are the two richest, highest-ranked, and most prestigious U.S. universities, and among the oldest. Harvard has the biggest endowment, for example, and Yale has the second largest. These two private schools are also the “go-to” universities for the CFR. Top Council leaders are far more likely to have attended Harvard and Yale than any other university: Rockefeller, Rubin, and Dillon went to Harvard; Vance, Rubin, Hills, and Salomon went to Yale. The same goes for staff members. The 1998 CFR Annual Report offers detailed biographies of 36 CFR Fellows.328 Among them they list sixty-five earned college degrees (undergraduate and graduate). Twelve of these degrees were from Yale, ten from Harvard, six from various schools in England (Oxford, Cambridge, King’s College), and three each from the University of Chicago and Stanford. Over half of all the earned degrees of these CFR Fellows were from these few key schools, with no other school having more than two.
Viewed from another perspective, Harvard and Yale’s own leadership is also connected to the CFR. Two of ten fellows of the Harvard Corporation are members of the Council, and one of these is the CFR’s co-chair, Robert Rubin. Of the thirty individuals on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, four are members of the CFR. In the case of Yale, four of the seventeen Fellows of the Yale Corporation are members of the Council, and one of them, Fareed Zakaria, is a CFR director.
Finally, large numbers of professors from these two universities belong to the Council. A quick review of faculty lists of only four Harvard departments—Economics, Government, Kennedy School, and History—easily identified twenty-two members that were in the CFR. These included well-known names like Samuel P. Huntington, Stanley Hoffman, Ernest R. May, Richard N. Cooper, Kenneth S. Rogoff, Lawrence H. Summers, Joseph S. Nye, Graham T. Allison, and Stephen M. Walt.
•The University of Chicago was founded with funds from John D. Rockefeller Sr. Six out of forty-six trustees are CFR members. One of these, David M. Rubenstein, is a current Council vice chair, and another, Thomas J. Pritzker, also a CFR member, is the brother of Penny Pritzker, who was a CFR director prior to joining the Obama administration. David Rockefeller, who graduated from this university with a PhD in 1940, is Chairman Emeritus of this university. At least one top scholar in the field of international affairs, John J. Mearsheimer, is also a member of the CFR.329
•Stanford University has the third-biggest endowment among U.S. universities, behind only Harvard and Yale. Four of its thirty-two trustees were members of the Council in 2012, including former CFR director Penny S. Pritzker. Condoleezza Rice is also a professor at Stanford.
•Princeton has had a long relationship with the Council, even though only one of Princeton’s forty trustees is a member of the CFR. Longtime CFR leaders Hamilton Fish Armstrong and Allen W. Dulles both graduated from this university, and its library holds their personal papers and a massive collection of the Council’s historical archives. At least two top scholars in the field of international affairs, Robert Keohane and G. John Ikenberry, are Princeton professors and CFR members.330
•Columbia University has as its president, Lee C. Bollinger, who along with two other of Columbia’s twenty-four trustees were CFR members in 2012. At least two top scholars in the field of international affairs, Kenneth Waltz and Robert Jervis, are Columbia professors and CFR members.331
•Johns Hopkins has four among its forty-five trustees who are members of the CFR, including Council vice chair David M. Rubenstein. Its School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) has a large representation of Council members, Fellows and former Fellows. Vali R. Nasr, the dean of the SAIS, is a CFR member, and a former Council Senior Fellow for the Middle East. Kenneth H. Keller, the director of the Bologna Center of SAIS, is a Council member and former CFR Senior Fellow for science and technology. The fourteen Foreign Policy Institute Fellows at SAIS include six Council members, among them former CFR director Zbigniew Brzezinski and authors Francis Fukuyama and James Mann.
Private philanthropic foundations represent a key way that the rich can avoid taxes and at the same time serve their own interests and gain recognition and legitimacy for their so-called charitable activities. Giving to charity undercuts the demand that government fully fund health and welfare programs that directly serve people’s needs, which is what the state should be doing. Instead, private philanthropy creates dependency on the capitalist class. Support for educational activities also allows foundations, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to promote the privatization of education through charter schools and make donations of computers that over time directly expands the need for computers and the bottom line of Microsoft Corporation.
The educational activities of the CFR have been major beneficiaries of private foundations largess, representing a key funding source historically. In recent decades such funding has become less crucial, but still very useful to the CFR. Council funds come from a mix of older foundations, based on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century wealth, and newer foundations, based on mid- and late twentieth-century wealth. The National Endowment for Democracy is a special case, as it is funded by Congress. It is among the top tier of those institutions with the most links to the CFR. In this top tier are five private foundations that have at least six directors or trustees who are also members of the CFR. These collectively hold about $11.5 billion in assets.
•The Rockefeller Foundation is the private foundation most closely tied to the CFR. It had $3.5 billion in assets in 2012. Council member David Rockefeller Jr. is the chair of the Rockefeller Foundation’s governing Board of Trustees. It consists of thirteen individuals, two of them not citizens of the United States. Of the eleven eligible for CFR membership, five are current (2012) members, and one more is a former CFR member, making a total of 54.5 percent former or current members.
•Carnegie Corporation of New York is also highly interlocked with the Council. It had $2.8 billion in assets, and nineteen trustees in 2012. Ten of them (52.6 percent) belong to the CFR. These include vice chair Kurt L. Schmoke, two university presidents, and former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn.
•The National Endowment for Democracy is funded by the U.S. Congress. Founded in 1983, in recent years NED has spent about $100 million annually on over 1,000 projects of non-governmental organizations in over ninety nations. A large percentage of these projects are to foster the neoliberal geopolitical capitalist penetration of these countries, under the cover of promoting democracy. In the year prior to the 2014 conflict in the Ukraine, for example, it spent millions on sixty-five different projects in that nation, including $359,945 to fund a “Center for International Private Enterprise,” at least partly to build up the lobbying power of Ukrainian businesses. Many of the Ukrainian projects are to train local activists, including election-related training. The twenty-three-member board of directors of NED include ten CFR members (43.5 percent). Two of them—Vin Weber and Robert B. Zoellick—are former or current Council directors and two—Elliott Abrams and Stephen Sestanovich—are CFR Senior Fellows.
•The Bloomberg Philanthropies were organized and funded by CFR member and billionaire Michael Bloomberg. They have $4.2 billion in assets, and eight on their twenty-two-person board of directors (36.4 percent) are Council members.
•The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, with nearly $1 billion in assets, has nineteen trustees. Six (31.5 percent) are CFR members. These include the fund’s president, Stephen Heintz, and two members of the Rockefeller family: David Rockefeller Jr. and Nelson’s son Steven, both members of the Council.
Most Americans get the information they need to think and act politically directly or indirectly from leading media. The most influential print media were ranked in 2004–2005 by Erdos & Morgan, a business-to-business research firm. Using a representative sample of over 450,000 U.S. opinion leaders the survey documented the print media leaders used to get the information needed in their work. Erdos & Morgan then ranked the top ten “most influential media.” Ranked first was the CFR’s own magazine, Foreign Affairs. The top eight on the list are:
2.CQ Weekly
3.New York Times
4.Wall Street Journal
5.The Economist
6.Harvard Business Review
7.Washington Post
8.New York Times Sunday Edition
As is the case for large American corporations, it is not possible, within space limitations, to cover all the Council’s connections to other influential media. But it can be said that the CFR has a multitude of connections with a wide range of media in the United States, ranging from the major television networks to magazines to news services to scholarly publications.332
•CQ Weekly and The Economist. These two leading media enterprises are both majority owned by British capital, the Economist Group. This Group is in turn owned by the Financial Times (FT), along with the Rothschild, Cadbury, and Schroder family interests. Almost all of the Group’s board of directors are British citizens and thus not eligible for CFR membership. One exception is group director Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who is a U.S. citizen and a CFR member. At least a few Council Fellows have a close relationship with the FT. Senior Fellow Sebastian Mallaby is a contributing editor to the FT, and Senior Fellow Edward Alden is a former Washington Bureau Chief of the FT. The FT also often prints op-ed articles from CFR leaders like Richard N. Haass.
•The New York Times has long had a close relationship with the CFR. At least three members of the Sulzberger-Oakes owning family of the Times have been members of the Council in recent decades: C. L.Sulzberger, John B. Oakes, and John G. H. Oakes.333 One of the Times’s current directors, Robert Denham, out of ten, is a member of the CFR. A number of top staff members also belong to the CFR, such as Opinion Editor Andrew M. Rosenthal, Assistant Managing Editor Craig R. Whitney, Foreign News Editor Susan D. Chira, White House Correspondent David E. Sanger, and leading columnists or editorial writers Thomas L. Friedman, Nicholas D. Kristof, David C. Unger, and Andrew Ross Sorkin.
•News Corp (Fox News and Wall Street Journal) have a number of connections to the Council, beginning with Rupert Murdoch, billionaire chair, key owner, and CEO of News Corp, and a member of the CFR. Murdoch is a controversial figure even in corporate ruling-class circles. Philip Stevens, a Financial Times commentator, stated in 2011 that News Corp was guilty of criminality on an “industrial scale,” a “family fiefdom” that was “. . . out of control—devoid of even the most basic ethical standards.”334 Two other Council members also sit on the News Corp board, former Goldman Sachs banker John L. Thornton and investment banker Stanley S. Shuman, who is a director emeritus. The Deputy Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal, Alan S. Murray, is also a CFR member, as are Journal writers Daniel Henninger and Peggy Noonan, who was Ronald Reagan’s primary speechwriter. Prior to Murdoch’s takeover of the Journal, CFR members Peter R. Kann and Karen Elliott House were the chair/CEO and president/publisher of the Journal until they retired in 2006. House is also a former director of the Council.
•Harvard Business Review’s editor-in-chief, Adi Ignatius, is a member of the CFR.
•The Washington Post also has key connections to the Council. Four CFR members are directors of this media group, including Ronald L. Olsen, a former Council director. Some of the Post’s leading writers are also CFR members, such as Walter Pincus, Jim Hoagland, and David R. Ignatius. In 2008 the Post purchased Foreign Policy magazine from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Two Council members, Samuel P. Huntington and Warren D. Manshel, were among the founders of this magazine in 1970, and CFR members have been central figures in its operation since then.
Although this chapter does not include every single organization concerned with the U.S. political economy and foreign policy, it has shown in detail that the CFR is connected to a very large number of leading institutions across a wide swath of U.S. political, economic, media, and intellectual life. This highlights a central reality, namely that the CFR is unique: it stands at the center of a vast network of the most powerful people and institutions of the United States. There is no other organization in the nation with even nearly its level of connections. Its inner circle is very large and often deep, and it also has a wider circle of influence beyond that inner circle, making the totality of its network truly impressive. The Council is thus able to acquire information, communicate ideas, and coordinate the formation of top-level opinion on what should be the foreign and economic policies and strategy of the United States, the framework for discussion and debate. The CFR becomes the formal expression of an exclusive community of, by, and for the capitalist class. It is the central place where this community debates and develops their common worldview, spreading it far and wide through its many members and allied organizations, so that their views become accepted wisdom. The Council’s activities are thus a key way that the ideological hegemony of the capitalist class is established and maintained, while developing and implementing the policies that make this class a ruling class, a class for itself.
There are only a relatively few important domestic institutions not connected or minimally tied to the Council, and those are generally on the far-right side of the political spectrum. One example is the Koch Brothers economic and political empire. What those on the right generally have in common is an ideological opposition to the state having a large role in the political economy of the nation. The CFR, on the other hand, strongly favors a powerful state, and its leaders and members directly and indirectly influence it, benefiting from government protection, intervention, and largess. Those outside the CFR circle that are at least a little left of center, such as most of today’s labor movement, are apparently considered increasingly irrelevant by the Council.