The transnational equivalent of the CFR is the Trilateral Commission.
—ARUNDHATI ROY
Although national power structures persist and remain dominant, over the past few decades a small but increasingly integrated transnational capitalist class has gradually been developing. There is now in some respects a worldwide ruling class, a tiny percentage of the population that dominates the lives of billions. The core group is mainly made up of corporate businessmen: billionaires and multimillionaires, most of them living in the United States, Europe, the larger Asian nations, and the Middle East, making up a financialized international capitalist class. In her book Plutocrats, Chrystia Freeland argues that the members of this capitalist class, led by the U.S. contingent, are closely connected internationally: “America still dominates the world economy, and Americans still dominate the super-elite. . . . The rise of the 1 percent is a global phenomenon, and in a globalized world economy, the plutocrats are the most international of all, both in how they live their lives and in how they earn their fortunes.”335
The CFR is one of the central organizations that consolidates this developing capitalist class network; it provides a key link between the financialized capitalist class of the United States and the rest of the world’s globalizing plutocracy. In this chapter the Council’s wide-ranging international connections and relationships with the foreign plutocracy are explored through examination of the close ties between the Council and a number of different organizations: the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the annual World Economic Forum meetings at Davos, the Group of Thirty, the International Crisis Group, the CFR’s own International Advisory Board and Global Board of Advisors, the Council’s foreign corporate members, and a newer organization, the Council of Councils.
In a sense, the Council on Foreign Relations has always been well connected internationally, dating to its founding during the First World War era. Its sister organization was then, as now, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, a body mainly of the British nobility and that nation’s industrial, commercial, and financial plutocracy. Since the mid-1950s the CFR’s international ties have greatly intensified. The initial spark for this development was the founding of the European-based Bilderberg Group, a secretive discussion and consensus-seeking organization that in 1954 began meeting for a long weekend once a year. The point of the original meetings was to call together a Western European–U.S. forum to begin to articulate a common program of cooperation and coordination, including NATO-related issues, developing European unity, and containing the left, the Soviet Union, and communism. Over time, additional concerns such as relations with the varied nations of the third world, including the Middle East, and more general world economic questions around trade, investment, and development also became major foci of discussion. The official Bilderberg website explains the origins, name, and method of operation of the organization:
Bilderberg takes its name from the hotel in Holland where the first meeting took place in May 1954. That pioneering meeting grew out of the concern expressed by leading citizens on both sides of the Atlantic that Western Europe and North America were not working together as closely as they should on common problems of critical importance. It was felt that regular, off-the-record discussions would help create a better understanding of the complex forces and major trends affecting Western nations in the difficult postwar period. . . . At the meetings no resolutions are proposed, no votes taken, and no policy statements issued. . . . Invitations to Bilderberg conferences are extended by the Chairman following consultation with the Steering Committee members. . . . There are usually about 120 participants of whom about two-thirds come from Europe and the balance from North America. About one-third is from government and politics, and two-thirds from finance, industry, labour, education and communications. Participants attend Bilderberg in a private and not an official capacity.336
The somewhat defensive tone of this official description, stressing that there are no resolutions, votes, or policy statements was likely prompted by attacks on Bilderberg by some on the far-right wing of the U.S. political spectrum, which has tried to impose its own bizarre worldview onto the topic, arguing that the Bilderberg meetings (and the CFR’s for that matter) are a conspiracy aiming to create a “New World Order” of global socialism.337 This only begins to make any sense if “socialism” is defined as government; that is, the collectivization of necessary modern-day functions, such as building and maintaining roads, water and sewer systems, schools, regulation of utilities, and so on. It is certainly true that the Bilderberg Group and the Council want pliable, capitalist-dependent national governments that protect them with police, jails, and military forces, that develop infrastructure, including financial infrastructure, and help capitalists with bailouts, corporate welfare, government contracts, conquering new markets, and much more. This hardly represents socialism, which is more accurately described as a new, more advanced form of civilization, a fully egalitarian and participatory democratic political economy and society of, by, and for the overwhelming majority of the people, the workers.
As stated above, the key leaders of the Bilderberg meetings are the chairman and steering committee members, who select the participants and agenda for each meeting. A review of the biographies of the seven chairmen who have served since 1954 reveals an interesting fact: six of the seven are from the European nobility. In addition, Joseph Retinger, a Pole whom David Rockefeller stated was of “aristocratic origins,” was the one who urged Prince Bernhard, a prime early organizer and first chairman (1954–76), to form the Bilderberg organization to promote cooperation and coordination among the “Atlantic community.”338 The Bilderberg Group and its meetings are therefore best viewed as a project organized and led by the European nobility.
German-born HRH Prince Bernhard was the husband of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. Bernhard was born into a landed noble family in 1911. His family lost some of their estates and their associated revenue after the First World War, but retained other lands, and Bernhard spent much of his youth on a family estate in East Prussia, an area now part of Poland. Bernhard was briefly a member of the Nazi Party while a university student in the 1930s, but left it after he graduated. In the mid-1930s he worked as Secretary of the Board of Directors of IG Farben, then one of the world’s largest monopoly corporations. His life dramatically changed when he married then Princess Juliana in 1937. Various Nazis, both family members and friends, reportedly attended the wedding, but henceforth Bernhard was loyal to the Netherlands. This meant he was opposed to the Nazis and German domination of Europe. Even though his brother was a German officer in the Second World War, Bernhard fought with the British, flying both fighters and bombers in missions against his former country. By 1944 he was the well-respected commander of the Dutch Armed Forces.
After the war, Bernhard continued in military roles and served on numerous corporate boards, including that of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. After over twenty years as chair of the Bilderberg meetings, Bernhard had to resign in 1976 due to a scandal. As Inspector General of the Dutch armed forces, in 1974 he sent a letter to Lockheed Aircraft Company demanding a “commission” of $1.1 million in exchange for arranging the purchase of Lockheed airplanes by the Dutch government. The bribe was paid, but once it was exposed in 1976, Bernhard had to resign as chair of Bilderberg, creating a temporary crisis in the organization.339
Bernhard was succeeded as chair by the president of West Germany, Walter Scheel, who had been a Luft waffe pilot in the Second World War, then in turn foreign minister, chancellor, and president. Scheel served only a few years as chair of Bilderberg. The next three Bilderberg chairmen were all members of the British landed nobility, an earl and two barons. The first was Alec, the 14th Earl of Home, a Conservative leader of the House of Lords, the heir to extensive family estates in the English countryside, and a Knight of the Order of the Thistle. The second was Baron Eric Roll of Ipsden, a banker who became director of the Bank of England. The third was Peter, the sixth Baron of Carrington, also known as Baron Carrington of Upton. He was a Knight in the order of St. Michael and St. George and also served as chancellor of these two Orders. A Conservative Party politician, Carrington entered the House of Lords in 1940. He became Defense Secretary in 1970, chair of the Conservative Party in 1972, Foreign Secretary in 1979, and Secretary-General of NATO in 1984.
The most recent two chairs have been Etienne François Jacques Davignon, Viscount Davignon of Belgium, and Henri de la Croix de Castries of France. Davignon was the chair of the top Belgian bank Société Générale de Belgique as well as Brussels Airlines and was also a director of several other large multinational corporations. Castries, the current chair, is a member of a French landed noble family from Languedoc in southern France. The Castrieses are “Nobles of the Sword,” and a family member (General Christian de Castries) was the commander at the decisive 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. Henri de Castries is the chair and CEO of AXA, the French multinational insurance company, with 1.1 trillion euros currently under management.
Bilderberg steering committee members, together with a small group listed as “Honorary Secretaries-General” past and present, include an impressive number of chairmen and CEOs of leading transnational banks, investment companies, conglomerates, media outlets, and industrial firms, together with some politicians and think tank leaders. By 2011 a few top leaders from China and Russia were also attending the meetings, but no one from these nations is on the steering committee or listed as Honorary Secretary-General. In both 2011 and 2012 current CFR cochair Robert E. Rubin participated in the meetings. Although women have been severely underrepresented, in 2011 both the Queen of the Netherlands and the Queen of Spain attended, indicating that women are all right in Bilderberg circles (as long as they are queens). David Rockefeller and Boston Brahmin Senator John Forbes Kerry also attended in 2011, but Rockefeller is omitted from the 2012 list of participants, likely the first meeting he failed to make since 1954.
A comparison of the fifty-two U.S. citizens participating as top leaders in the Bilderberg meetings (on the steering committee or listed as an Honorary Secretary-General) with CFR membership lists reveals the striking fact that 48 of them (92 percent), have been members of the CFR. This includes thirteen who were also directors of the Council: Joseph E. Johnson, Kenneth W. Dam, Arthur H. Dean, Louis V. Gerstner, Winston Lord, Charles McC. Mathias, George J. Mitchell, Bill D. Moyers, David Rockefeller, Gabriel Hauge, Richard C. Holbrooke, Henry A. Kissinger, and Marina von Neumann Whitman. Hauge, whom President Eisenhower sent to Bilderberg meetings as his personal representative, was also a longtime treasurer of the CFR; Lord was also president; and of course Rockefeller was chair of the Council for fifteen years.340 Clearly, the Bilderberg Group, organized by some of the leading nobles of Europe, together with their multinational corporate allies, consider the CFR to be the U.S. organization to be in consultation with when discussing and attempting to develop mutual understanding and consensus on what they consider the key issues of the future.
In 1972 CFR leaders David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski attended the Bilderberg meeting in Belgium. The two had concluded that because of Japan’s increasing global economic power, it was essential to have Japanese participation in international forums like Bilderberg. They proposed to the Bilderberg leadership that Japanese leaders be invited, but they were, in Rockefeller’s words, “politely but firmly told no.”341 After the Bilderberg meeting was over, Rockefeller, Brzezinski, and several other Council members decided to establish a “trilateral” organization that would bring together leaders and key thinkers from Western Europe, North America, and Japan. Rockefeller then convened a large meeting at his country home in the summer of 1972, which included representatives from all three regions. Brzezinski agreed to serve as the director of the new organization, with Rockefeller as the North American chair. Thus the Trilateral Commission (TC), a private, by invitation-only, international agenda-setting and policy-planning organization, was founded with many Bilderbergers involved.342 It soon became a part of the processes that resulted in the eventual birth of our present neoliberal geopolitical world order.
In the case of the Bilderberg meetings, European nobility are in charge, with help from the leaders of the biggest transnational corporations and the CFR. In the case of the TC, U.S. and especially Council leaders have been in control. Another difference is that whereas both groups have only one formal meeting a year, the TC organizes small ongoing policy study groups with representatives from all three regions, the purpose of which is to consider a key problem and write a report outlining the issues and the common solution. In this, the TC is a lot like the CFR, except it has trilateral instead of only U.S. participation in studies. At a deeper level, the establishment of the TC involved recognition that Europe and Japan had fully recovered from the disaster of the Second World War, and therefore a more shared form of leadership and a wider system for the management of contradictions within the global capitalist class and among the leading capitalist nations, including Japan, was necessary.
Since that time, the TC has continued to attempt to marry the influential with the intellectual, identifying the central ideological and programmatic problems of the larger U.S. alliance system (roughly corresponding to the U.S. informal empire) and formulating neoliberal policy proposals to address them. These proposals included a concerted offensive against third world revolution by pursuing the integration of the neocolonies into the international capitalist system and developing a common front against challenges from the left. The TC, like the CFR, privately brings together key capitalist-class leaders, especially those representing transnational finance capital and their professional-class allies to identify and handle developing conflicts and develop consensus on maintaining and expanding the system. This includes assuring economic growth, influencing government leaders, and educating the attentive publics in each nation so that overall public opinion and governmental policies will come to reflect their private consensus. In the specific case of the TC the purpose is to promote the ideological outlook of the largest multinational corporations and engineer an enduring consensus among the ruling classes of the three main geopolitical centers of world power to “manage interdependence,” safeguarding mutual interests in a rapidly changing and globalizing world. Its practice consists of regular meetings and a series of publications, most of them pamphlet-size, but some book-length.
One of the TC’s early books, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (1975), drew unwelcome attention. As was usual for a TC publication, it was co-authored by three people, one each from North America, Europe, and Japan. The author from North America was Harvard professor and CFR member Samuel P. Huntington. Huntington wrote the section covering the United States. Recognizing the reality that capitalism always desires less democracy and that, in fact, genuine capitalism can best be achieved when all forms of democracy are abolished, Huntington wrote that U.S. citizens were at fault for taking democracy seriously and that there was an ongoing problem of an “excess of democracy,” a “democratic distemper” in the United States.343 This, he believed, had been caused by an “internal democratic surge” during the 1960s, and the solution was a “greater degree of moderation in democracy” in order to, among other things, reduce government expenditures as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, thus weakening government so that private capitalism could play a larger role.344 The bluntness of Huntington’s assessment and direct advocacy of the neoliberal gospel violated a taboo among the powerful of U.S. society, namely that the rhetoric of the United States as a wonderful and exceptionally democratic society should never be openly challenged. As a result, there was a controversy over the book, even within the Trilateral Commission itself.
The flavor of more recent TC concerns can be captured by a review of the sessions held at one of the Commission’s annual meetings, held in Tokyo in April 2012, which was also addressed by Japanese prime minister Noda. The meeting’s ten sessions were on the following topics:
1.Governance Challenges in Japan
2.Geopolitics of the South China Sea
3.Future Regional Architecture for East Asia
4.European Financial and Economic Crisis
5.Long-term Solutions for Global Economic and Financial Crisis
6.G-20
7.Changing Middle East
8.Impact on Global Economy of China’s Economic Policy
9.Role of Business in Global Affairs
10.U.S. Presidential Politics and Economic Policy
The initial purpose of the TC was to bring together key players from the three main centers of the capitalist world economy, areas that were also the key global geopolitical power centers: North America (Canada and the United States), Western Europe (members of the European Union), and Japan. At first, the TC had about 180 members, with the largest number from Western Europe and the smallest number from Japan. By 1986 this number had grown to 330, and by 2011 the total number of Commissioners reached 408: 168 Europeans, 128 North Americans, and 112 from Pacific-Asia. By 2011 its scope had also expanded to include many more nations, especially in Asia, including China and India, but also in Eastern Europe and Mexico.345
A review of the 2011 list of the North American Group of the TC found that 92 were U.S. citizens, 23 were Canadians, and 13 were Mexicans. Of the 92 U.S. citizens, 68 (74 percent) were also CFR members. The North American chair was CFR director Joseph S. Nye Jr., and eighteen other Commissioners were or had been at one time directors of the Council. These included Harvard professor and former assistant secretary of defense Graham T. Allison Jr.,, former secretary of defense Harold Brown, Sylvia Mathews Burwell of the Gates Foundation, journalist Lee Cullum, former Reagan chief of staff Kenneth M. Duberstein, David Rockefeller’s daughter Peggy Dulany, John Hopkins University Dean Jessica P. Einhorn, Harvard Professor and former Reagan economic adviser Martin S. Feldstein, former ambassador and speaker of the house Thomas S. Foley, CFR co-chair Carla A. Hills, journalist Karen Elliott House, former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger, former CFR president Winston Lord, former CFR chair David Rockefeller, CFR vice chair David M. Rubenstein, and former Fed chair Paul A. Volcker.346
These extensive connections between the Council and the TC illustrate that they and CFR work closely together to pursue their common interests and ideological agenda. The Bilderberg group has also been well connected to the Commission, especially through Rockefeller, Kissinger, and Lord, all of whom have been key leaders of all three organizations, and Conrad Black of Canada, active in both the Commission and Bilderberg. A number of the European members of Bilderberg have also been leaders of the TC, such as Mario Monti and Giovanni Agnelli of Italy, Viscount Etienne Davignon of Belgium, Lord Roll of Ipsden representing Britain, Baron Edmond de Rothschild of France, and Peter Sutherland of Ireland.
The key behind-the-scenes influence of the TC is further indicated by the fact that after Barack Obama became president in 2009, he tapped a large number of Trilateral Commissioners, all but one of them CFR members, to be part of his administration. The one exception was soon voted onto the Council’s membership roll. These Commissioners included secretary of the treasury Timothy F. Geithner; UN Representative Susan Rice; national security advisers James L. Jones and Thomas E. Donilon; special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke; deputy secretary of state James B. Steinberg; director ot the National Economic Council Lawrence H. Summers; secretary of defense Ashton Carter, Health and Human Services secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, and director of policy planning at the Department of State Anne-Marie Slaughter. This continued a tradition started by former president James E. Carter, who, like presidents George H. W. Bush and William J. Clinton, were members of both the CFR and the TC and staffed their administrations with numerous members of both organizations.
The European Group of the TC was originally dominated by five NATO nations: Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Spain. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was expanded to include Cyprus and nations formerly part of the Soviet bloc: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Bulgaria, and Romania. The makeup of the twenty-five-nation European Group is complex, including former top officials, academics, journalists, think tank leaders, industrialists, and many finance capitalists. The latter include at least three leaders of the Rothschild banking empire and several representing Goldman Sachs, as well as the heads of a number of national banks (Poland, Belgium, Romania, Finland, Netherlands) and top officials of several private banks and investment companies. Some Commission members also entered public service as president (Estonia), minister of foreign affairs (Denmark), minister for defense (Norway), and other lesser offices in different countries.347
The behind-the-scenes role of the Commission is also important in a number of European countries. When Italy was facing a political/economic crisis in November 2011, for example, its leaders tapped Mario Monti, chair of the European group of the TC, as the new president of the Italian council of ministers. Monti, a former Goldman Sachs banker and a Bilderberger, had been active in the TC for at least two decades. An unelected leader, Monti was described in the mainstream press as a “technocrat,” leaving out his close connections to ruling monopoly finance capitalist-class circles in Europe and the United States through the activities of Bilderberg and the TC. Jean-Claude Trichet, former president of the European Central Bank and chairman of the Group of Thirty (see below), replaced Monti as the chair of the European group of the TC. Similarly, when Greece also needed an unelected technocrat to control a crisis situation, Greek leaders chose another Trilateral Commissioner, Lucas Papademos, a former vice president of the European Central Bank.
The Asian contingent of the TC also has seen great changes since the TC was founded in 1973. In 2000 the Japanese Group was renamed the Pacific Asian Group and by 2009 had expanded to thirteen nations, including the People’s Republic of China, India, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. The chairmanship remained in Japanese hands, and all five of the Pacific Asian Group’s topmost leaders have been Japanese, three of them from leading monopoly financial/industrial corporate combinations, Fuji/Xerox, Mitsui, and SONY. China still apparently plays a limited role; in 2011 only nine Commissioners were from China, whereas 49 were from Japan and 16 from South Korea (out of 112 total).
A review of available information on the funding of the TC’s work confirms the general perception of the organization outlined above. Mainly U.S.-based multinational corporations and ruling-class foundations supply the overwhelming majority of its funding. During the 1982–85 years 53 percent of funding was from major monopoly corporations (among them Coca-Cola, Atlantic Richfield, Exxon, Boeing, GM, Mobil, Phillips Petroleum, Squibb, Deere, Xerox, and Weyerhaeuser), and 32 percent from large foundations (including Ford, Hewlett, Rockefeller, GM, Shell, Heinz, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Chevron Fund, the Annenberg Fund). The remainder came from wealthy individuals like David Rockefeller.348
The World Economic Forum (WEF), held every year in Davos, Switzerland, with additional meetings at regional locations, is an independent transnational capitalist-class organization of corporate, political, intellectual, and civil society leaders. It started in 1971 as a forum and platform for European business leaders only, then was gradually expanded to include other interest groups and regions of the world, and now has a global scope. Its “Foundation Membership” is limited to 1,000 of the foremost global corporations.349 It is a key place for a global capitalist class to convene, gain access to key people, network, and cultivate relationships. This is done through dialogue at varied types of meetings, and through initiatives, programs, and taskforces that set global, regional and industry agendas. The motto of the WEF is being “committed to improving the state of the world.”
The central figure in the WEF from its beginning has been Klaus Schwab, a Swiss-born engineer, businessman, and intellectual with a distinct philosophy, a set of ideas that are at the center of the WEF’s public presence and propaganda. At the core of Schwab’s philosophy is the key concept of the “stakeholder” in corporate economic life. For Schwab, corporations must respond to and serve not just the shareholders, creditors, and top managers of a given firm, but also employees, customers, suppliers, the state, and society at large. The problem is that the corporate participants do not adhere to these concepts. A large number of WEF member corporations or their top leaders have often been involved in illegal and unethical activities, such as mortgage fraud, fixing LIBOR rates, insider stock trading, bribery, municipal bond fraud, and environmental crimes. Even under a lax regulatory and enforcement regime, they have been forced to pay tens of billions of dollars in fines. It is thus obvious that as a group they can hardly be said to be following the core “stakeholder” responsibility ethic that the WEF is supposedly promoting. The attempt by the WEF to prettify capitalism and imperialism so as to appear humane and legitimate has clearly failed, because this system, by its very nature, is inhumane and cruelly destructive of the very things the WEF presumably is trying to uphold. Unmentioned in the hallowed halls of Davos are the exploitation of workers, imperialist wars like that of the United States in the Middle East, and the fact that global corporations are behind the rapid destruction of the ecological systems that form the basis of life on earth.
“Public private partnerships,” “social entrepreneurship,” “mutual responsibility,” “communitarian spirit,” “global corporate citizenship,” and “organic community” are buzzwords used at the WEF to attempt to put a “progressive” gloss on the neoliberal world of austerity, exploitation, dispossession, and destruction imposed by the globalized capitalist class on the people and ecologies of our planet.
In early 2010, Schwab expressed disappointment at how the values inherent in the “stakeholder” philosophy were being ignored by many business leaders who were only trying to maximize profit and shareholder value in the short term, treating people as replaceable objects, creating selfishness. Schwab recommended a rethinking of “morals and ethics,” warning that as “social peace” is undermined, “social crisis”—that is, the class struggle—awaits.350 But it turns out that when push comes to shove Schwab himself acts like a businessman trying to maximize profit, not as a stakeholder with a concern about protecting the community and society at large. In the official history of the WEF, published in 2009, it states that during the WEF meetings of 2007, just before the “great recession” struck,
Klaus Schwab grew increasingly concerned about the likelihood of a major global recession after listening to the voices of experts such as New York University Economics Professor Nouriel Roubini and global investor George Soros. An opinion piece in the Financial Times in March by frequent Davos participant and Forum friend William Rhodes, the Senior Vice Chairman of Citigroup and CEO and President of Citibank, prompted Schwab to conclude that, if an insider such as the veteran banker was worried, he had to act. The Forum moved to restructure its investment portfolio, the Foundation’s reserves, to shift mainly into Swiss government bonds. This was a fortuitous decision. It saved the Forum from experiencing the fate of so many foundations that lost substantial parts of their endowment when the financial markets slumped in the autumn of 2008.351
This illustrates that the WEF is subject to capitalist laws and acts like any other business interested in short-term preservation. What is actually needed, and the WEF is unwilling to consider, is a different system, one less unstable and not subject to the ups and downs of the capitalist business cycle. The WEF aims to preserve the existing dog-eat-dog capitalist system with a bit more trickle-down and a bit more “responsibility” on the part of the big capitalists. But the nature of the system assures that even Klaus Schwab will quickly drop existing WEF investments for secure Swiss government bonds, leaving others, especially those less well connected, to take the losses—including unemployment and austerity—when their unstable system falls into recession.
The two experts Roubini and Soros, and the banker Rhodes mentioned above are all members of the CFR, and Soros was a Council director. While no lists of all WEF participants could be located, and in any case would be quite lengthy, the official history covers the highlights of the WEF from 1971 to 2009. At least two-dozen Council members and leaders are mentioned as having an important role in the WEF over these years. A number of them were also CFR directors, including Henry A. Kissinger, Martin S. Feldstein, Robert Zoellick, Richard C. Holbrooke, Richard B. Cheney, Fareed Zakaria, and Colin Powell. Others, like Condoleezza Rice, John F. Kerry, Henry M. Paulson, William J. Clinton, and Michael Bloomberg, though not Council directors, have been both active Council members and WEF participants.352
Leading global monopoly corporations play a big part of the WEF as “industry partners” and “strategic partners.” The top-level “strategic partners” pay almost $700,000 to send five executives to attend the annual meeting.353 The “industry partners” pay a smaller, but still stubstantial amount to attend. These corporations spend large sums of money to attend Davos because it is the biggest high-level global business conference, a place where top executives can meet and network with a large number of partners, clients, potential clients, and top government officials in the space of a few days.354 Many of the attending organizations are corporate members of the CFR and part of the Council network. For example, there are 100 corporate “Strategic Partners” of the WEF as of 2009 and listed in its official history. Of these 100, twenty-eight are also listed as corporate members of the CFR in its 2010 Annual Report.355 The twenty-eight active in both the CFR and WEF include such leading corporations as Bank of America, Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, ATT, Chevron, BP, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Coca-Cola, McKinsey, News Corp, Standard Charter Bank, UBS, and Volkswagen.
Based in Washington, the G30 was founded in 1978 on the initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation, which also provided the initial funding. It is a private, nonprofit international body of senior representatives from the private and public sectors of the financial capitalist world. They meet twice a year to discuss important developments and also organize study groups that issue policy papers. As of 2012, the G30 had thirty-two listed members, the two extra participants being the chair emeritus, Paul A. Volcker, a former director of the CFR, and the executive secretary, Geoffrey Bell of the United Kingdom. The thirty regular members include twelve from Europe, seven from the United States, and five from Asia. Six of the seven U.S. members are also members or former members of the Council. Two, Jacob A. Frenkel of Israel who chairs the G30’s board of trustees, and Ernest Zedillo of Mexico, have also been on the CFR’s International Advisory Board (discussed below). Other members of the G30, such as Volcker; Zedillo; E. Gerald Corrigan, managing director of Goldman Sachs; William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Martin S. Feldstein of Harvard; and Roger W. Ferguson Jr., former vice chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, are all also members of the Trilateral Commission.
This private nonprofit transnational organization is based in Brussels, with field offices all over the world. It is mainly made up of representatives of NATO nations, with the United States having by far the biggest numerical national representation among the ICG’s leadership. Founded in 1995, in 2012 the ICG had forty-five trustees, fourteen from the United States, fourteen from Western European nations, three from Canada, and the rest from varied other countries. Eleven of the fourteen U.S. ICG trustees (78.6 percent) are members of the CFR, and four of these are current or former members of the Council’s board of directors. The chair (2012) of the ICG is CFR member and former Council director Thomas R. Pickering, a former U.S. ambassador to a number of nations, including El Salvador during the Reagan administration. CFR co-chair Carla Hills is a trustee of ICG, and former Council director George Soros is a trustee and one of the founders of the ICG. The ICG’s senior advisers also include former CFR director and Trilateral Commission co-founder Zbigniew Brzezinski plus seven individuals who also have served on the CFR’s International Advisory Board.
The ICG touts its role as a supposedly “independent” and “nonpartisan” organization “committed to preventing and resolving deadly conflict.” Its actual role is to promote “humanitarian intervention” in the affairs of third world nations, often to further attempts to control them and successfully impose neoliberal globalization. Kosovo, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Haiti, and Colombia have been among the nations singled out for the ICG’s attention.356 The ICG, however, played no humanitarian role nor spoke out in favor of protecting people from military attacks when NATO intervened in Afghanistan in 2001 or when the United States and its allies invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003. These were two so-called deadly conflicts of which the ICG evidently approved.
The ICG’s funding helps explain its practice of ignoring some deadly conflicts. Over 50 percent of its $20 million annual budget comes from governments, mostly NATO members; about 25 percent from big foundations like Ford, Gates, Carnegie, Hewlett, Merck, Mott, and Open Society (which is mainly funded by George Soros); and the rest from corporations, such as Chevron, BHP Billiton, and Royal Bank of Scotland, and capitalist-class notables like Soros.
Established in 1995 with David Rockefeller as chairman, later led by Peter G. Peterson, the Council’s International Advisory Board (IAB) held meetings annually “to offer perspectives on a broad range of matters of concern to the Council. IAB members . . . comment on institutional programs and strategic directions, and on practical opportunities for collaboration between the Council and institutions abroad. They also provide invaluable international insights into U.S. foreign policy.”357
The IAB was in existence from 1995 until at least 2009. Information about its deliberations and recommendations is unavailable to those outside the Council, and references to it disappear from CFR annual reports after 2009. Then, three years later in 2012, the Council announced the formation of a new international advisory board with the same essential goals, this one called the Global Board of Advisers. The CFR’s website had this to say about the new group:
The Global Board of Advisers (GBA) consists of prominent individuals, including business leaders, noted academics, and former government officials from developed and emerging-market countries. The prestigious group provides CFR with insight about their regions and also offers a mechanism for members of the GAB to join discussions on international relations and the U.S. role in the world. The GAB is chaired by David M. Rubenstein, CFR Board vice chairman.358
Rubenstein is the CFR’s logical choice to chair the GBA. As a key owner and managing director of the giant private equity firm the Carlyle Group, he has a strong personal interest in information about international economic and political developments in many nations, regions, and worldwide. Such information can help guide Carlyle’s global investments, including acquisitions.
The representatives on the IAB and GBA together total eighty-eight individuals from forty-three nations. They come from Europe (34.1 percent), Asia (26.1 percent), the Middle East (17 percent), Africa (10.2 percent), Latin America (9.1 percent), and Canada (4.5 percent). This geographic breakdown is indicative of where the CFR sees its geopolitical priorities, a topic that will be developed further in chapter 5.
A group of ninety individuals from forty-three nations is too big a group to adequately discuss in one chapter. However, about 60 percent of them come from the fifteen nations with the most representatives (three or more), indicating that these are the key nations with which the CFR most wants to consult and network. These consist of seven European nations, three Asian countries, two Middle Eastern ones, plus Nigeria, Mexico, and Canada. Below, we will discuss two individuals from each of these fifteen nations, in order to provide ample and accurate illustrations of the kinds of people the Council has chosen for its global dialogue.359 These are first and foremost individuals who are multinational capitalist leaders, often heading the largest corporations, and neoliberal-oriented politicians. Secondarily, the ranks of the IAB and GBA have included political insiders of mainly middle-ofthe road ideological persuasions, people who can offer insights into national and regional trends.
Two individuals, one a major corporate capitalist-class leader and one a leading political figure, can stand for the British direct connection to the Council. Both are nobles and members of the House of Lords. Baron Edmund John Philip Browne of Madingley was chief executive of British Petroleum from 1995 to 2007 and one of the most highly paid executives in the United Kingdom. He was also a director of Goldman Sachs. BP is involved in over eighty nations and is one of the top European corporations by revenue. Not only is it an oil major, BP is also involved in the fields of petrochemicals, biofuels, solar power, and wind farms. Blackrock is a major shareholder of BP.
Peter Carrington, Baron Carrington of Upton, has also been a leader of the Bilderberg Group and Secretary-General of NATO. He was discussed earlier in this chapter in the section on the Bilderberg Group.
Two individuals, one a major corporate capitalist-class leader and another who was a noble and a neoliberal political figure, illustrate the kinds of people the CFR connects with from Germany. Gerhard Cromme, whom the Financial Times called “Germany’s most influential industrialist,” has been on the board of directors of a number of Europe’s biggest multinationals, including ThyssenKrupp, Siemens, GDF Suez, Volkswagen, Lufthansa, and BNP Paribas Bank.360 Cromme was also chair of the European Roundtable of Industrialists from 2001 to 2005. This fifty-person body of corporate leaders is a powerful lobbying force in the EU.
Count Otto Lambsdorff was from a family that had estates in the Baltic countries and was part of a historic group of conquering colonists known as “Baltic Germans.” After the Second World War, the family lost its lands and Otto went into politics, becoming an elected member of the Bundestag and a leader of the neoliberal Free Democratic Party, which began to reject Keynesianism as early as 1977. He was Federal Minister of Economics in the early 1980s, but had to resign for accepting bribes from the Flick industrial combine, in exchange for arranging tax breaks. A Bonn State Court also convicted him of tax evasion. These ethical and legal lapses did not prevent the CFR from inviting him to join their advisory board, and he was also made a top leader of the Trilateral Commission in the 1980s and 1990s, serving on the executive committee and as European chair.
Two of the Russians who have served on the IAB/GBA are well-connected, affluent individuals. Vladimir Potanin’s wealth was estimated at $17.8 billion by Forbes in 2011, much of it in a controlling ownership interest in the formerly state-owned nickel mining giant Norilsk Nickel. Potanin gained control of this enterprise during the Yeltsin era when Potanin organized loans to the new, post-Soviet Russian government, receiving first mining leases, then shares in return. This turned out to be a form of privatization, the transfer of state-owned property to Potanin and his insider partners, for a very low price. Norilsk Nickel operates the world’s largest heavy metals smelting complex in Siberia, ranked by one source as one of the most polluted sites in the world. The area around the complex is an ecological disaster area, and workers as well as about 130,000 local residents are exposed to high levels of air pollution, which, together with acid rain, has killed all of the forests for miles around the industrial site. Life expectancy of workers there is ten years less than the Russian average.361
The other Russian, Mikhail Fridman, was recently ranked twentieth on Forbes’s list of the world’s billionaires. His wealth is new, dating to the 1990s privatization schemes following the fall of the USSR. During this period, Fridman helped form the Alfa Group, which was able to take over and consolidate a diverse set of properties in the fields of oil, retail, telecom, and banking, and even acquire holdings in nearby nations like Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine. He has political connections to the Kremlin and President Putin, and political favoritism likely figures largely in his newfound billionaire status. In October 2014 the Financial Times reported that Fridman has attracted very high profile advisers for his oil investment projects, including Lord Browne of BP (discussed above) and Morgan Stanley.362
A member of one of the most prominent families of France, Christophe de Margerie, was chair and CEO of Total SA, which operates in 130 countries and is one of the world’s six oil and gas supermajors. Among other ventures, Total is currently investing in an oil shale/tar sands mining venture in Utah’s Uintah Basin. De Margerie, the grandson of the founder of the Taittinger champagne and luxury goods house, died in a plane crash in Russia in October 2014. He was also a member of the European Roundtable of Industrialists, and was on the board of directors of Vivendi, a transnational mass communications corporation based in Paris.
The second French representative, Michel Rocard, was that country’s prime minister from 1988 to 1991, was part of the right wing of the French Socialist Party. He opposed President Mitterrand’s initial program of nationalization, generally had poor relations with Mitterrand, and was forced to resign. He later became a member of the European Parliament.
Two Italians who have served on the IAB/GBA are major multinational corporate capitalists. Giovanni Agnelli, the richest man in modern Italian history, was the principal stockholder and longtime chairman of Fiat. The Agnelli family has been labeled “Italy’s royal family,” and Giovanni, also called Gianni, was known for many years as the true “king of Italy.”363 His grandfather founded the company and his mother came from a noble family from Perugia. During the Second World War Agnelli wore the black shirt of fascism and was wounded twice fighting for the German Nazi armies against the USSR on the Eastern Front. He was on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group and was a participant in their meetings beginning in 1958. He was close to David Rockefeller, and served for years on both the International Advisory Committee of the Chase Manhattan Bank and on the Trilateral Commission.
Paolo Scaroni, the former CEO of Eni, the Italian oil and gas giant, was educated in the United States (MBA, Columbia), and worked for Chevron and McKinsey prior to taking over as head of Eni. He is a member of the powerful European Roundtable of Industrialists. In 1992, he pleaded guilty to a bribery charge and was sentenced to one year in prison, but never served the sentence.364 He was paid 4.6 million euros as his salary for 2010. Under Scaroni’s leadership, Eni is reportedly planning to continue its history of operating in nations that other major oil and gas majors find too difficult. Scaroni stated in May 2013, for example, that the countries that his company is now most interested in expanding into include Vietnam, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Pakistan.365 Eni operates in 79 nations, and besides oil and gas is involved in contracting, energy, nuclear power, mining, chemicals, plastics, textiles, and news media. In 2014 Scaroni was appointed the deputy chairman of the Rothschild financial advisory group.
Both of the Swedes who have served on the IAB, Percy Barevik and Jacob Wallenberg, are businessmen connected to the Wallenberg family, a family known as “the Rockefellers of Sweden.” They play key roles is what is said to be Europe’s largest family-run business empire, estimated to control, directly or indirectly, about a third of Sweden’s entire GDP. Barevik and Wallenberg have been on the board of directors of the large transnational conglomerate known as ABB (Asea Brown Boveri). Based in Switzerland, ABB is one of the world’s largest transnational conglomerates, with 135,000 employees and operations in over a hundred countries. Barevik was the CEO and chair of ABB between 1988 and 2002. He was called one of the world’s most respected business leaders in 1998, a “visionary executive” whose aim was to globalize his company and world capitalism.366 Barevik explained that his “vision was to create a truly global company that knows no borders, has many home countries, operates with mixed nationality teams and offers opportunities for all nationalities.”367
One of ABB’s largest stockholders is the Wallenberg family investment company, Investor AB, which owns a controlling interest in several large Swedish corporations and smaller positions in a number of other firms. Its chair is Jacob Wallenberg, a leading member of the royal family of Swedish business. Educated in the United States at the Wharton Business School, Jacob was the president and CEO of Stockholm’s Enskilda Bank, another key part of the Wallenberg empire. He is also a director of Coca-Cola, a Knight of the Order of Seraphim, and sits on the current steering committee of the Bilderberg Group. Jacob is also a member of the European Roundtable of Industrialists. A brother, Peter Wallenberg, is a Trilateral Commissioner.
Juan March Delgado, one of the richest men in Spain, is part of the March family, the “Rockefellers of Spain.” Juan March Delgado is the grandson of the founder of the family’s wealth, Juan March Ordinas, who was already one of the richest men in Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. During that struggle, the March family were key backers of the fascist military rebellion led by General Francisco Franco. March Ordinas is even reported to have arranged Franco’s flight from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco to organize the rebellion, and personally financed the airlift of the African-based troops to Spain. The family wealth is organized around their Banca March, headquartered in Mallorca. This bank, although relatively small, is known to be one of the most strongly capitalized in the world and placed first in the European Union during the stress tests of 2012.368 Juan March Delgado has served as a director of Banca March and other family enterprises (the March Group) for several decades, and has also been chair of the family foundation and the Juan March Institute for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. The March Group of enterprises, controlled through the Banca March, operates in construction, services, metallurgy, and security.
Javier Solana de Madariaga is from a well-known Spanish noble family. Presently affiliated with the Brookings Institution, he is a former Secretary-General of both the European Union and NATO. He has also been a member of the Trilateral Commission.
Mukesh D. Ambani has been the chair, CEO, and largest stockholder of Reliance Industries Ltd., a key part of the Reliance Group, an energy, industrial, and materials conglomerate and India’s most valuable company by market value. Reliance operates in five major segments: exploration/production, refining/marketing, petrochemicals, retail, and telecommunications. It is a corporate member of the Council. Ambani is India’s richest individual, ranking high on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires. He has also been on the board of directors of other Reliance corporations, as well as Bank of America, has been a co-chair of both the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the India-China Chief Executives Forum.369 The Economist reports that Ambani and Reliance Industries also has an “uncomfortable degree of clout” in the Indian government, quoting a former cabinet minister who states that Ambani’s “influence is huge. Whatever is happening he knows. He is able to post [bureaucrats] to positions and get ministers appointed who are favorable to him.”370
Ambani is also famous as the owner/builder of his home in South Mumbai, called Antilia, that cost about $1 billion and is one of the largest and most expensive personal residences in the world. This mansion is twenty-seven stories high, has 400,000 square feet of space, and employs a full-time staff of over six hundred. It has three helipads, an air traffic control facility, spaces to park 168 cars, three floors of hanging gardens, a theater, swimming pool, ballroom, yoga studio, and health spa. Ratam Tata, another top Indian capitalist leader (the Tata Group is also a CFR corporate member), criticized Ambani as a kind of new maharajah, lacking empathy for the poor. Tata should not talk, however, since the Tata Group’s Global Beverage arm owns a controlling interest in twenty tea plantations in Assam, where 30,000 mostly illiterate plantation workers work long hours for extremely low pay—the average is $24 a month—and suffer from abject poverty, a lack of union rights, poor housing and health conditions, including unsafe pesticide use. 371
A second Indian representative is Anand Mahindra, a Harvard Business School MBA. His Mahindra Group is a multinational conglomerate with operations in a hundred nations worldwide. Mahindra’s business is wide-ranging and includes finance, insurance, aerospace, industrial equipment, information technology, leisure, hospitality, real estate, retail, agribusiness, construction equipment, energy; it is also India’s largest manufacturer of tractors and utility vehicles. Forbes estimated his net worth at $825 million in 2011.
Zhang Xin was educated in England, and has an MA from Cambridge University. She worked for financial institutions like Barings, Goldman Sachs, and Travelers Group, then returned to China, founding a commercial real estate development company called SOHO. She is now a billionaire, ranked number fifteen among the richest Chinese on Forbes list with $3.6 billion. Forbes and Fortune rank her among the world’s most powerful women.
Hong Kong’s C. H. Tung is a graduate of the University of Liverpool and inherited the family shipping company, Orient Overseas, from his father. A conservative businessman with strong connections to the Chinese government, he became the first head of government in Hong Kong after the transfer to China.
Two of Japan’s representatives on the IAB/GBA, Yorihiko Kojima and Toyoo Gyohten, are connected to Mitsubishi, a key monopoly finance capitalist corporation. Mitsubishi is what the Japanese call a keiretsu, a conglomerate whose companies and shares are interlocked with a bank playing the central coordinating role. The Mitsubishi Bank—part of the larger Mitsubishi UFJ Financial group; it merged with the Bank of Tokyo in 1996, and acquired a 21 percent stake in Morgan Stanley in 2008—has this central role for Mitsubishi. Mitsubishi consists of dozens of companies, employing about 350,000 employees. Some of their economic activities include mining, shipbuilding, telecommunications, heavy industry, oil and gas, real estate, food and beverage, chemicals, steel, and aviation. Yorihiko Kojima is the president, chair, and CEO of Mitsubishi. He has served as vice chair of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives and is a former board member of Sony. Toyoo Gyohten has had a career as a private finance capitalist (Goldman Sachs and senior adviser, Bank of Tokyo) and also in government (Japanese Ministry of Finance, IMF, Asian Development Bank, Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, Group of Thirty). He has also been a member of the Trilateral Commission.
Saudi business families have historically played a key role in the country, one business source states that a few families, organized as corporate conglomerates, have accounted for 90 percent of all companies in the Kingdom.372 Among these top wealthy and powerful families are the Al Olayan and Alturki clans; both have been represented on the IAB/GAB.
Lubna Sulaiman Al Olayan was educated at Cornell and Indiana University, receiving an MBA from the latter institution. Following work for Morgan Guaranty in New York, she returned to Saudi Arabia, becoming the CEO and president of Olayan Financing Company, which was founded by her father. Olayan Financing is one of the top businesses in Saudi Arabia and is the holding company for the Olayan Group’s operations worldwide. This conglomerate consists of over fifty companies engaged in manufacturing, distribution, and services. Olayan Financing also has hefty stakes in various multinational corporations, including MetLife, First Boston, AIG, and Credit Suisse. It reportedly has a 3.6 percent ownership stake in Credit Suisse, for example. The Olayan family’s net worth is reported to be $12.4 billion.
The Olayan Group grew powerful through partnerships with key U.S. multinational corporations: JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola, Blackstone, Bechtel, Kimberly-Clark, General Foods, Pillsbury, Hunt Wesson, Cummins Engine, and others. Lubna Al Olayan is also a board member or an adviser for a number of foreign multinational corporations, including Schlumberger, the Saudi Hollandi Bank, Citigroup, and the Rolls-Royce Group. Listed among the world’s most powerful women by both Time and Forbes, she cochaired the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2005. Her husband, John Xefos, is a senior partner in the Texas law firm Baker & McKenzie, where former secretary of state James Baker is another senior partner. Her sister, Hutham S. Olayan, operates the U.S. branch of the Olayan Group. She has become a U.S. citizen and became a member of the CFR in 2012.373
Khalid Ali Alturki of Saudi Arabia is the chairman of his family’s Trading and Development Company, with offices in Shanghai, China, and Riyadh. Another conglomerate, the company operates in a large number of fields, including consulting, investing, trading, manufacturing, construction, renewable energy, real estate, power, and telecommunications.
Council leaders consider Israel to be a key strategic geopolitical asset of the United States. So naturally Israel is among the nations with the largest number of individuals who have served in the IAB/GBA. Two examples are discussed here, and there is more discussion about the CFR’s connection to Israel in chapter 7.
Jacob A. Frenkel was born in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine in 1943. Following schooling in Israel, he attended the University of Chicago, receiving a master’s and PhD in economics. He was part of the faculty of this Rockefeller-connected university for nearly a decade and a half as the David Rockefeller Professor of International Economics. He then directed research at the International Monetary Fund for several years prior to beginning two terms as governor of the Bank of Israel. Serving in this position from 1991 to 2000, he successfully promoted a neoliberal program, including liberalizing Israel’s financial markets and integrating the Israel economy into the global financial system. He then returned to work in the United States, first as chair of Merrill Lynch International. Currently chair and CEO of the Group of Thirty, he has also been a vice chair of AIG and chair of JP Morgan Chase International. He has also been a member of the Trilateral Commission, and serves on the board of the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Idan Ofer has been called “Israel’s richest man, co-heir to a shipping fortune and majority owner of its largest listed company, Israel Corp.”374 The Financial Times tallies his net worth at $6.5 billion. Israel Corporation is a strategic investment company, with stakes in many global businesses, including shipping, chemicals, Chinese autos, energy in South America, and even Silicon Valley electric car charging stations. Ofer was recently involved in a controversy over his move to join other family members and live in London, where taxes are lower than in Israel.375
Nigeria is the only African nation that has had as many as three representatives on the IAB/GBA. It is not hard to see why, since Nigeria is the biggest oil producer in Africa and one of the largest in the world. This translates into a major source of wealth and power, as well as to the CFR desire for a connection. The first of these links is Obusegun Obasanjo, the military dictator of Nigeria from 1976 to 1979 and the elected president of the country from 1999 to 2007. A noble from the clan of Yorubaland, he has also chaired the Africa Leadership Forum.
The Council’s second connection is Hakeem Belo-Osagie, a Harvard Business School MBA and a trained petroleum economist. He set up an oil consultancy in Nigeria, worked as a presidential adviser, and took advantage of the country’s neoliberal privatization process to purchase a majority stake in United Bank of Africa from the Nigerian government, later selling it for a huge profit. He now chairs a telecommunications provider called Etisalat Nigeria. He is listed by Forbes as the 40th richest man in Africa.
Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon began his education in Mexico, completing it with a PhD in economics from Yale. Following service at the Mexican Central Bank and in the Mexican federal government, he was elected president of Mexico, serving from 1994 to 2000. He was president during the 1995 Mexican financial crisis and bailout by the IMF and United States. The terms imposed required the implantation of a number of pro-corporate neoliberal measures, including wage reductions for workers, cuts in government spending, and a speed-up of the privatization of state-owned enterprises. This increased foreign ownership and control of the Mexican economy, especially the banking sector. The Zedillo administration also socialized large amounts of bad banking debt, “saving” the banking system but vastly indebting and weakening the Mexican state.
Once out of office, Zedillo moved to the United States, became a professor and director of the Center for the Study of Globalization at Yale. He was also invited to join the boards of leading U.S. multinational corporations, apparently a kind of reward for neoliberal services rendered while president of Mexico. He has been a director or on the advisory board of Citigroup (a major bank owner in Mexico), Union Pacific, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Alcoa, Electronic Data Services, Rolls-Royce, the Gates Foundation, and the Albright Stonebridge Group. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty.
Jose Antonio Fernandez Carbajal is a Mexican businessman with close U.S. connections. He is the chair and CEO of FEMSA, the largest beverage company in Latin America and is on the board of Coca-Cola and Heineken International. He is also on the U.S.-Mexico Foundation board and co-chair of the advisory board of the Woodrow Wilson Center.
One of the Canadian representatives on the IAB/GBA has been Paul Desmarais Jr., current chair and co-CEO of Power Corporation of Canada. He is the eldest son of the French-Canadian financier Paul Desmarais Sr., the fourth-richest Canadian with an estimated net worth of $4.4 billion. Desmarais Sr. controlled Power Corporation of Canada, which grew into a giant conglomerate, with branches in energy, utilities, construction, minerals, wine and spirits, media, pulp and paper, and financial services. The corporation has holdings in Canada, France, Belgium, Germany, and the United States.
The Desmarais family and its economic empire represents a prime example of the evolving transnational capitalist class, connecting North America and Europe. They operate in an alliance with the Frère family of Belgium. Baron Albert Frère is Belgium’s richest man and, with the Desmarais family, controls Groupe Bruxelles Lambert as well as the Pargesa Group, both European-based conglomerates with major holdings in corporations like the French energy giant Total and the French multinational utility Suez.376 The two families also have economic ties to the Agnelli family of Italy.377 Paul Desmaris Jr. sits on the board of Suez, and both he and his father have been on the board of Total. The Desmarais family reportedly also works with the Carlyle Group, Dessault industries, and the Rothschilds. It has many political connections at the top of the Canadian political structure and has also been active in the Bilderberg Group and Trilateral Commission.378
A second Canadian on the IAB/GBA has been Brian Mulroney. Mulroney was a lawyer working for Paul Desmarais Sr., then became politically active as part of the Progressive Conservative Party. Elected to Parliament in 1983, he became prime minister the next year. The Progressive Conservative Party was a neoliberal party with privatization on its agenda; it merged with the Conservative Party in 2003. During Mulroney’s years in office, a large number of government-owned crown corporations, including Air Canada and Petro-Canada, were privatized. In 1993, during his last years as a member of Parliament, Mulroney accepted at least $225,000 in cash bribes from the German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber, who was trying to influence the Canadian government’s decisions on the purchase of aircraft and military vehicles. Mulroney initially denied that he had taken the bribes, and did not admit to the facts, declare the income, or pay taxes on it until many years later, when Schreiber’s activities were under investigation in Germany and his bribes to Mulroney were in danger of being exposed. After leaving public office, Mulroney was invited to become a corporate director, serving on a large number of transnational corporations like Barrick Gold, Archer Daniels Midland, and AOL Latin America, as well as on the International Advisory Board of leading financials like JPMorgan Chase and China International Trust and Investment Corporation.
Finally, the IAB and GBA have had two members that could be labeled international because of their importance to key international institutions. The first, Peter D. Sutherland, a former attorney general of Ireland, was the chair of GATT, then the Director-General of the WTO for many years, resulting in him being called the “father of globalization.” He was appointed by Kofi Annan to be the UN Special Representative for Migration. He has served as chair of British Petroleum, chair of Goldman Sachs International, and on the corporate boards of ABB, Koc Holding of Turkey, Allianz, B.W. Shipping, Royal Bank of Scotland, as well as Eli Lilly’s advisory board. He has been on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group, the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum (Davos), the vice chair of the European Round Table of Industrialists, and was the European chair of the TC for many years.
The second, Kofi Annan, was born in Ghana into an aristocratic family; both of his grandfathers and an uncle were tribal chiefs. He attended college in Ghana and the United States, eventually receiving a master’s degree from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He worked for the World Health Organization and in United Nations peacekeeping operations prior to serving as undersecretary general in the mid-1990s. He then became UN Secretary-General from 1997 to 2006. He was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2001.
The over thirty international corporate members of the Council include some of the world’s largest and most globally oriented multinational corporations. Although British and European multinational corporations are most numerous, Japan is also well represented. These include six giant foreign-based banks, five European and one Japanese, that are on the Financial Stability Board’s list of “Global Systematically Important Financial Institutions,” ones that could trigger a global financial crisis if they failed. These are Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Group Credit Agricole, UBS, and Mitsubishi.
Corporate members based in the United Kingdom include Anglo-American, one of the world’s largest mining corporations, Standard Charter Bank, British Petroleum, The Economist magazine, and Indus Capital Partners, a London-based hedge fund focused on Asia. Italian and French members include oil giants Total and Eni, as well as financial outfits like Banca d’ Italia, Intesa Sanpaolo, and Rothschild. DeBeers, the diamond monopolists, Airbus, Shell Oil, and the Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica round out the European list. The only German representation is Deutsche Bank, which is Germany’s largest and most powerful bank.
Japan’s corporate members of the Council include large conglomerates like Mitsui, banks like the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, such auto companies as Toyota, traders like Marubeni and ITOCHU, and tech giants Hitachi and Sony.
Two of India’s biggest corporate conglomerates are also CFR members: Reliance Industries (its leading executive, Mukesh D. Ambani, is discussed above) and the Tata Group. Tata, chaired by Ratan Tata for over two decades, became the first Indian corporate group to earn $100 billion in revenue. In late 2012 it was labeled “India’s most global business.”379
Within the Western Hemisphere, two Venezuelan corporations, Banco Mercantil and the Cisneros Group of Companies of Venezuela (Gustavo Cisneros was a member of the IAB) are Council corporate members, as is the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. A final notable corporate member is Aramco Services, a subsidiary of the giant Saudi Arabian Oil Company.380 Additional details on the IAB and GBA members can be found at laurenceshoup.com.
In 2012 the CFR convened what it calls the “Council of Councils” to forge cooperative responses to what they define as the world’s most pressing challenges and opportunities. For the inaugural meeting in Washington, the CFR called together representatives from many of the world’s leading think tank representatives from twenty key nations, roughly conforming to the Group of 20. The two main speakers were both former CFR directors, Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank Group, and Robert Hormats, former Goldman Sachs official and then U.S. Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment. Three main emerging trends were identified at this initial gathering. First, national governments alone cannot meet the challenges now facing the world. Second, domestic politics increasingly shape international conditions and determine the prospects for coordinating multilateral approaches to transnational issues. Third, emerging powers, with their economic strength, will fundamentally alter geoeconomics and geopolitics, making it necessary to revamp international institutions and initiatives.
The mission that the Council of Councils has since articulated is to work toward consensus—“common ground”—on global governance and multilateral cooperation and “inject remedies into the public debate and policymaking processes of member countries.”381 It was intended that practical ideas and solutions would be generated at an annual conference, as well as ongoing exchanges on research and policy collaboration. A comprehensive agenda was envisioned, dealing with a full range of issues: economic, energy, environmental, political, and security.
The nations and institutes that are a part of the Council of Councils network, which amounts to a partial who’s who of the world’s leading think tanks in international affairs, are:382
•Australia, Lowy Institute for International Policy
•Belgium, Center for European Policy Studies
•Brazil, Getulio Vargas Foundation
•Canada, Center for International Governance Innovation
•China, Shanghai Institute for International Studies
•France, French Institute of International Relations
•Germany, German Institute for International and Security Affairs
•India, Centre for Policy Research
•Indonesia, Center for Strategic and International Studies
•Israel, Institute for National Security Studies
•Italy, Institute of International Affairs
•Japan, Genron NPO
•Mexico, Mexican Council on Foreign Relations
•Poland, Polish Institute of International Affairs
•Russia, Institute of Contemporary Development
•Singapore, S. Rajaratnam School of International Affairs
•South Africa, South African Institute of International Affairs
•South Korea, East Asia Institute
•Turkey, Global Relations Forum
•United Kingdom, Royal Institute of International Affairs and the International Institute for Strategic Studies
•United States, Council on Foreign Relations383
By the summer of 2013 one additional think tank had been added, Egypt’s Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
The CFR has a number of relationships with these think tanks. It has long had “sister institute” relationships with the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the French Institute of International Relations, and the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations.384 Council directors have been involved in the Lowy Institute (Rita Hauser) and the Center for International Governance Innovation (Anne-Marie Slaughter). Members of the Council’s IAB are also leaders at China’s Shanghai Institute and Turkey’s Global Relations Forum. There are undoubtedly other important connections as well.
One apparent long-term goal of this effort is to promote ideological hegemony by influencing the development of economic and strategic thinking in these rising nations along neoliberal geopolitical lines. This aims to ensure that, as the relative weight of the United States in the world declines, these nations will be close allies of the United States and its world hegemony goals. Note that all of the top national economies and geopolitical players of our current world are included in the above list of countries, with especially heavy representation from Europe (seven of the twenty-two) and East/Southeast Asia (six). North America and the Middle East each have three nations on the list.
This chapter has demonstrated that the CFR is at the center of a large and very impressive network of national and transnational capitalist-class organizations and key individuals who participate in meetings to set agendas and study groups to seek consensus. The collective function of this effort, led by the Council and the United States, is to develop a climate of opinion and ideological hegemony about strategic directions for the world plutocracy. Its collective worldview is neoliberal geopolitics, a topic to which we now turn.