Post by eurisko14d/Thumper13b on Oct 9, 2009 23:18:28 GMT -5
THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION
AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER
by Gene Berkman
In a speech to Congress and the American people on September 11, 1990, President George Bush outlined the goals his government was pursuing through military intervention in the Middle East. He had in previous statements put forth four goals, including an immediate, unconditional and complete withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait; the restoration of the Emir of Kuwait to his throne;a permanent commitment to the security and stability of the Persian gulf; and protection of American citizens living abroad.
On September 11, President Bush added a fifth objective. He said, and I quote:
"Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective - a new world order - can emerge...We are now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders."
On October 1, 1990, President Bush told the General Assembly of the United Nations, again I quote:
"The United Nations can help bring about a new day...a new world order, and a long era of peace."
One is tempted to downplay the rhetorical flourishes of George Bush. This is, after all, the same man who in 1988 told us to read his lips, and promised "No New Taxes." In looking at George Bush's political career from the early 1960's to the present, it might charitably be said that he does not have a principle to his name. Anyway, George Bush is now out of office office, repudiated by 63% of the voters in the last election.
Many of us would probably agree that no politician more richly deserved retirement that George Bush. Even millions who voted Republican to keep Bill Clinton out of the White House would be inclined to share such a sentiment. But a few facts about the winners might cause us to hold down our celebration.
Bi-Partisan Support for New World Order
Governor Clinton, among the various Democrats competing for the Presidential nomination, was strongest in his support for President Bush's Gulf War. Senator Gore voted in the Senate for the resolution authorizing U.S. troops to use force against the government of Iraq.
More recently President Bush has sent American troops to Somalia to "help guarantee that supplies reach the starving." The troops acted under authority of the United Nations and, according to the Times, the Somali intervention signalled a "dramatic enlargement and overhaul of the operation - perhaps putting the United Nations in the unusual role of enforcing the peace rather than just trying to keep it."
In other words, the UN forces acted as domestic police within Somalia.
President Clinton supported and continued the intervention in Somalia. President Clinton has since then called for sending U.S. and Nato military forces, under U.N. supervision - into war-torn Bosnia.
During the transition period after the election, the Bush administration pushed for U.N. authorization of military action against Serbia. In this he has had the full support of Clinton and Defense Secretary nominee Les Aspin.
Perhaps Americans are very fortunate that partisan bickering has not stopped the leaders of the two major parties from coming to an agreement on important policy matters. That is one view.
Another view is that the tens of millions of Americans who question the wisdom of sending Americans all over the world to straighten out other peoples quarrels are not represented by the bipartisan political establishment. Indeed, we might wonder whether the two party system is working at all when the two parties fail to offer policy alternatives to the American people.
Clinton's Trilateral Connection
There may be more than coincidence to the shared views of President Bush and President-elect Clinton. Both are associated with two influential organizations based in New York City - the Council On Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
George Bush was a member of the Council On Foreign Relations in the 1970's, when he served in a succession of appointed positions under President Nixon and President Ford. He was director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Chairman of the Republican National Committee; head of the Liaison Office in the Peoples Republic of China; and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Bush remained in the Council even after leaving public office. He ended his membership during his campaign for the Republican nomination for President in 1980, when his CFR connection started to become an issue among conservatives.
George Bush was among the founding members of the Tri-lateral Commission, retaining his connections even while officially "on leave of absence in government service."
Bill Clinton is a late-comer to both organizations, being invited to join only in the past couple of years. Nonetheless, he is the third member of the Trilateral Commission to be elected President since the Commission was founded in 1973.
George Bush and Bill Clinton are not alone among high public officials in their CFR/Trilateral connections. Outgoing Secretary of State James Baker is a long-time member of the Council On Foreign Relations, as is Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. Secretary Baker's predecessors at the State Department have included George Shultz and Cyrus Vance, members of the Council On Foreign Relations; and Alexander Haig as well as Henry Kissinger, both CFR members and founding members of the Trilateral Commission. Clinton's Secretary of State is Warren Christopher, Vice-Chairman of the Council On Foreign Relations, and a long-time member of the Trilateral Commission.
Harold Brown and Caspar Weinberger, Secretaries of Defense under President Carter and President Reagan, respectively, are both CFR members and again, founding members of the Trilateral Commission. Outgoing Defense Secretary Richard Cheney is a CFR member, as is the new Defense Secretary, Les Aspin.
Other founding members of the Trilateral Commission include Paul Volcker, former head of the Federal Reserve System, and Alan Greenspan, current Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Both are also CFR members.
We don't have the space to list the literally hundreds of additional CFR members and dozens of Trilateralists who have held policy positions in just the recent administrations. Such a record would be impressive for any organization, let alone a Council with only 2500 members, and a Commission with fewer than 100 members from the United States.
By contrast, the National Taxpayers Union has over 200,000 members nation-wide, including Republicans, Democrats and Independents. Yet since its founding in 1971, it has not had a single member appointed to the Cabinet. Perhaps this would change if the National Taxpayers Union were to give up its commitment to lower taxes and less government.
President-elect Clinton in late December announced his choices for the Cabinet and other top administration positions. Senator Lloyd Bentsen, his choice for Secretary of the Treasury, as well as Bruce Babbit, Interior Secretary nominee, are members of both the Trilateral Commission and the Council On Foreign Relations. Other CFR members headed for positions in the new administration include Anthony Lake, named as National Security Advisor; Andrea Tyson, who will head the Council of Economic Advisors. Clinton has announced that he will appoint CFR member Madeleine Albright as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and and that he will make the U.N. Ambassador a full member of the Cabinet.
Origins of the CFR
To get an idea of what the power of these two organizations means for America, we might want to take a look at the origins of each one.
When President Washington left office, he urged upon America a foreign policy based on "friendship and commerce will all nations, entangling alliances with none." Washington and succeeding Presidents recognized that the many conflicts which divided Europe were not over matters of principle, but disputes over territories and peoples that different countries sought to subjugate.
In the Twentieth Century, a succession of Presidents have worked to increase the involvement of the federal government in international affairs, while seeking to expand the power of the government in domestic matters as well. Woodrow Wilson, elected President in 1912, was a pioneer in this regard.
In 1913, the Congress established the Federal Reserve System. The 16th Amendment was passed, establishing the Federal Income Tax. In 1914, the Harrison Federal Narcotics Act was passed, granting the federal government vast new police powers in an area previously dealt with successfully as a medical problem. And in 1917, America entered World War I on the side of Britain and France, despite Wilson's 1916 campaign slogan "He Kept Us Out of War."
President Wilson spoke of a "War to make the World safe for Democracy." But the main allies, Britain and France, maintained colonial empires in Africa and Asia in which native aspirations for independence were often brutally suppressed. Britain, France and, after 1917, America were also allied with an autocratic regime in Russia.
President Wilson also called the conflict "The War to end all Wars." To carry out this goal, Wilson joined with the British and French governments in creating a League of Nations as one product of the Versailles Treaty. The League might be considered an embryonic version of world government; much more it was a collective security alliance of the victorious powers, who controlled the League through its Council. The victorious powers, Britain and France, retained their colonial empires, and under the League Trusteeship system, took control of German colonies in East Africa and South-West Africa.
The United States Senate rejected membership in the League of Nations, fearing it would subordinate America to the British Empire. It was in response to this rejection of an "entangling alliance" that the Council On Foreign Relations was formed.
The Council was incorporated in New York on July 21, 1921. Among the founders were John Foster Dulles, later Secretary of State; Allen Dulles, later head of the OSS and The CIA; Edward Mandell House, a top assistant to President Wilson; and John W Davis, who became the first President of the Council. Davis was personal attorney for J.P. Morgan, head of Morgan Guaranty Trust, and in 1924 received the Democrat nomination for President, despite never having been elected to any lower office.
From the beginning, the Council urged that the United States cooperate with the League of Nations. Beginning in 1927, the Rockefeller family began funding the Council, in 1929 buying the Harold Pratt House on East 68th Street in New York to serve as its headquarters.
World War II and the Founding of the United Nations
The League of Nations did not end war for all time. Indeed, the unwillingness of the League to peacefully revise the onerous war guilt provisions of the Versailles Treaty are widely acknowledged as the cause of Adolf Hitler's political victory in Germany.
As European leaders began to realize in the late 1930's that war was inevitable, Americans remained committed to staying out of war. As late as October 1941, opinion polls showed 88% of the American people opposed to entering the European war.
On the other hand, the Council On Foreign Relations began doing research for the State Department in 1939, with the work financed by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation. By 1942, after America entered the War, the State Department established an Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy, which included no less than 7 CFR members.
Dan Smoot, in his pioneering study, The Invisible Government notes that the "crowning moment of achievement for the Council came at San Francisco in 1945, when over forty members of the United States Delegation to the organizational meeting of the United Nations...were members of the Council." These included the Secretary of State, Edward R Stettinius, John Foster Dulles, John J McCloy, Nelson Rockefeller, Adlai Stevenson, and Alger Hiss.
Victors' Alliance
The United Nations Organization was formed after World War II by the victorious powers. Indeed, during the war, the alliance involving the US, Britain, the Soviet Union and China was called the United Nations. The San Francisco conference established this alliance of the victors as a permanent organization. Despite the fact that the legal government of France, located at Vichy, had cooperated with the Third Reich during the war, the post-war French government was brought in as a founding member, with a permanent seat on the Security Council.
The development of the United Nations into an international power was predicated on the continuance of the wartime alliance of the U.S., the British Empire and the Soviet Union. The purpose of the Yalta Agreement, which recognized Soviet dominance in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, as well as the annexation of the Baltic states, was to maintain this alliance.
The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the imposition in Poland of a Communist dictatorship in place of a neutralist Coalition government undermined the U.S./Soviet alliance. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed as an anti-Communist military and political alliance. As Americans came to learn of the brutalities inflicted by the Communist occupation forces in Eastern Europe, it was hard to oppose U.S. participation in NATO.
The formation of the United Nations in 1945 and NATO in 1949 has permanently entangled America in international politics.
Trilateral Commission Formed
The Trilateral Commission was formed in 1973, and it is widely perceived as an off-shoot of the Council On Foreign Relations. According to Christopher Lydon, writing in the July 1977 Atlantic, "The Trilateral Commission was David Rockefeller's brainchild." At the time, David Rockefeller was Chairman of the Council On Foreign Relations, having been elected to that post in 1970. David Rockefeller became the founding Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, which consists of leaders in business, banking, government and mass media from North America, Europe, and Japan invited to join by Rockefeller himself.
The word "Trilateral" means "three-sided" - the three sides in this case being North America, Europe,and Japan. North America, Europe and Japan have several things in common. Most important is their wealth, which is derived primarily from industrial production. Even agriculture is industrialized in the sense that farmers in the Trilateral countries use large amounts of machinery.
The industrially-generated wealth of the Trilateral countries is a product of their technological advance over the rest of the world. Kenichi Ohmae, in his book Triad Power notes that as of 1981, the Trilateral countries produce about 90% of the airplanes manufactured world-wide; about 80% of the computers;over 70% of the cars and similar proportions of other high-technology products.
Perhaps more telling, Ohmae notes that "...the vast majority of new patents registered and exchanged among Free World countries are concentrated within five nations: Japan, the United States, West Germany, France and the United Kingdom. During 1982, these five nations represented 85 percent of the 10,000 patents registered in the world." (page 126)
The industries of Europe and Japan are very dependent on imported raw materials and imported oil, as is, to a lesser degree, the United States.
As noted, the Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973, in the midst of the Middle East oil crisis. The ostensible cause of the oil crisis was a decision by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to dramatically raise the posted price for oil, with the price hike enforced by limited production quotas for each member country.
The fact of the matter is that OPEC had never before been able to enforce either its posted price for oil, or production limits on its member countries. In 1971, President Nixon, trying to deal with inflation, imposed price controls on oil and gasoline produced in American wells and sold in the United States.
The natural result was that the multinational oil companies increased their imports of oil for the U.S. market, since imported oil was not subject to price controls. At the time price controls were imposed, the United States was importing 15% of the oil used in this country; within two years, imports accounted for 50% of U.S. oil needs.
The increase in demand for oil in the world's largest market enabled OPEC to allocate generous production quotas to member countries while enforcing a succession of price hikes.
The sales of increasing quantities of oil at increasingly higher prices generated tens of billions of dollars in income for the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and for state-owned oil companies in Iran, Iraq, Algeria and other countries. This money ended up largely in American and European banks.
The other side of the coin is that developing countries in Asia and Latin America which lacked domestic oil deposits had to borrow large amounts of money to finance oil imports. The same banks that were taking in billions of petro-dollars from OPEC countries were lending out the same billions to other countries to finance imports.
While the international bankers were quite happy to take in tens of billions in petro-dollars, the shaky financial situation in the oil-dependent countries was unnerving. Jeremiah Novak made this observation in the July 1977 Atlantic:
"The Trilaterists' emphasis on international economics is not entirely disinterested, for the oil crisis forced many developing nations, with doubtful repayment abilities, to borrow excessively. All told, private multinational banks, particularly Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan, have loaned nearly $52 billion to developing countries. An overhauled IMF would provide another source of credit for these nations, and would take the big private banks off the hook.This proposal is the cornerstone of the Trilateral plan."
Confronting the Afro-Asian Bloc
A related purpose of the Trilateral Commission was to promote cooperation among the industrialized countries in the face of an emerging bloc of Arab, African and Asian states which had come to dominate the General Assembly of the United Nations.
The emergence of the Afro-Asian bloc was not foreseen by the founders of the United Nations. In 1945, when the UN was founded, most of Africa and much of Asia remained in subjugation to British and French imperialism. As colonies, these countries were not even considered for UN membership.
As the countries of Asia and Africa gained political independence, it was expected that continuing economic dependence would cause the former colonies to align politically with the former colonial masters. Instead, nationalist pride, along with a heavy dose of Marxism imbibed at British and French universities, caused the new leaders in Africa and Asia to line up against America and Europe.
In the case of the Arab countries, the U.S. alliance with Israel provided additional encouragement for their anti-Americanism.
The voting majority held by the radical Arab, African and Asian states in the UN General Assembly did not in reality threaten America or Europe. America, Europe and Japan provide the bulk of funding for the UN and its agencies. A cut-off of funds from the Trilateral countries would render the UN an empty shell.
Organizing the World
But the Trilateralists did not want to give up on the United Nations. The economic and political elites of America and Europe seek international political power in order to provide a stable investment climate, including protection against nationalization of their assets.
At the same time, the international bankers and multi- national corporations have gained much of their wealth through partnership with government. The corporate elite look to governments for lucrative contracts; taxpayer subsidized financing; and protection from competition.
The international bankers and multinational corporations have exploited two UN financial agencies in particular - the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But they have relied on their own national governments to attempt to protect their foreign investments.
The politicians have looked to a strengthened United Nations for a different reason. Politicians seek power. Control over their own government is all too often only a beginning to their ambition. History is littered with corpses who mutely testify to the imperial ambitions and arrogance of politicians.
In 1973, the U.S. was winding down its involvement in Vietnam. The Vietnam War had proved to be a costly mistake, and had turned a majority of the American people against the idea of military intervention in other countries.
Despite this, the Democrats in 1976 nominated Jimmy Carter, who had supported the Vietnam War, and who, upon election included pro-war advisors in his inner circle. His National Security Advisor was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been a founder of the Trilateral Commission. Jimmy Carter himself had been recruited into the Trilateral Commission in the summer of 1973.
Richard Barnet, an analyst with the Institute for Policy Studies, observed that "The Trilateral Commission was barely mentioned in the 1976 campaign. When the Carter cabinet was announced, a few columnists noted the coincidence that so many of them belonged to Mr Rockefeller's new organization. By the time Jimmy Carter ran for a second term, however, the Trilateral Commission was a major campaign issue..."
And so it was. Supporters of Ronald Reagan attacked both President Carter and Republican hopeful George Bush for their Trilateral Connection.
The Subornation of Ronald Reagan
Millions of Americans put their trust in Ronald Reagan to cut taxes, cut back the power of the federal government, and end the domination of the federal government by the Eastern Establishment. Yet the American people, in voting for Ronald Reagan, got Trilateralist George Bush as Vice-President, and an administration filled with CFR and Trilateral Commission members.
Ronald Reagan was distinguished by his use of anti-Communist rhetoric to defend an interventionist foreign policy. Yet the first loan approved by the Export-Import Bank after Reagan took office was for $120 million to pay for two nuclear reactors for Communist Romania.
In early 1981, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger offered a $20 billion line of credit to Red China for the purpose of selling them military equipment.
President Reagan carried out a policy in the Middle East of increasingly close friendship with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt. During the Iran/Iraq war, the Reagan administration openly supported the government of Saddam Hussein.
According to a report by the Financial Times of London and ABC News Nightline, President Reagan authorized military aid to Iraq in a 1983 Presidential Finding. Between 1983 and 1989, the United States government supplied one planeload of weapons every week to Iraq, free of charge. That was your tax dollars at work.
At the same time, Iraq received large amounts of weapons from the Soviet Union, France and Red China; Britain, Germany, Austria, Chile and South Africa supplied military technology. And Iraq received tens of billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to pay for these weapons.
Ronald Reagan left one additional legacy to us, and to our children and our grandchildren. He ran up the National Debt from $980 billion when he took office to about $2.6 trillion when he left office.
The Deficit and Dependence
Ronald Reagan did not invent deficit spending. Indeed, the National Debt was close to a trillion dollars when he took office. But the size of the deficits run up by the Reagan administration seriously compromised America's financial independence. American financial institutions are not capable of funding deficits which exceeded $200 billion a year.
For some reason, banks and corporations in Japan, Germany and Saudi Arabia had enough confidence in President Reagan to help fund the deficit. According to the recently published book Bankruptcy 1995, banks, corporations and individual investors in Japan, Germany and Saudi Arabia currently hold approximately $453 billion in U.S. Savings Bonds and Treasury Bills.
George Bush and the New World Order
When George Bush took over, he faced a massive national debt and continuing budget deficits, financed in growing part by foreign investors. At the same time, Saddam Hussein faced his own debt to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Hussein also suffered from one of the things Ronald Reagan did right.
Shortly after taking office, President Reagan ended price controls on U.S. oil. The newly free market in oil led to a massive increase in U.S. production, declining U.S. dependence on Middle East oil, and a steady decline in world market prices.
Declining world market prices for oil destroyed OPEC discipline, as members pumped more oil to try to maintain their income. Low oil prices put Iraq in a bind, as it faced the costs of reconstruction as well as demands by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to repay its war debt.
When OPEC oil ministers met in late July, 1990, Hussein demanded that other OPEC members cut production to drive the price of oil back up. Hussein also demanded that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait cancel Iraq's debt. None of Hussein's demands were met, and he responded by invading Kuwait.
The response of President Bush is the defining moment of the New World Order.
President Bush and Secretary of State Baker pushed a series of resolutions through the United Nations Security Council condemning Iraq; demanding Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait; and authorizing the use of force to eject Iraq from Kuwait.
On the basis of these UN resolutions, 661 through 665, President Bush sent 450,000 U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia - without authorization from Congress.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States gives Congress the power to declare war. Yet Congress did not even debate the issue until two days before the start of hostilities. During the debate, pro-war speakers stressed that the UN had already authorized the use of force; Congress was urged to back the United Nations, and told that American troops could be used to implement the UN resolutions even if Congress did not give its approval.
The United States has never had a defense treaty, ratified by the Senate, with either Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. An Executive Order by President Carter -the Carter Doctrine - had placed the entire Persian Gulf within the United States Defense Perimeter. Now, still without a treaty or any form of Congressional authorization, the U.S. has permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Oil and Money - The Trilateral Connection
Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole and others justified the U.S. intervention against Iraq by stating that it would guarantee access to Persian Gulf oil supplies. At the time of the conflict, the United States received less than 7% of its annual oil supplies from Middle Eastern countries.
Europe and Japan are heavily dependent on oil from the Middle East. Trilateralism may require that young Americans are put in danger to secure the oil supplies for the other industrial countries. Such a view presumes that if Hussein were to get control of the oil reserves of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, that he would refuse to sell to willing customers in Europe and Japan - he has never in the past refused to sell to them. Nor have the Europeans and the Japanese ever refused to buy oil from Hussein, even when he was shooting missiles at the civilian populations in Iranian cities, or bombing Kurdish villages with poison gas.
There was another factor which may have pushed President Bush into a show of American military strength.
Before 1913, the U.S. dollar was as good as gold. Gold coins circulated, along with silver dollars and paper money which could be redeemed at full value in gold coins. With the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, the Federal Reserve Banks were authorized to print four paper dollars for every dollar in gold that they held. Federal Reserve Notes were made legal tender, despite this fractional reserve basis.
In 1933, President Roosevelt withdrew gold coins from circulation, and ended the redemption of paper money in gold. But the 25% gold reserve requirement for Federal Reserve Notes was maintained until 1971, when President Nixon totally removed the dollar from any gold basis. Since 1971, the value of the dollar has been strictly based on supply and demand.
If Germans want to buy American products, or invest in American securities, they buy dollars with their Deutsche Marks. If Americans want to buy German products, or invest in German securities, they buy Deutsche Marks with their dollars. Similarly for Frenchmen, Swedes or other foreigners who trade with or invest in America. The value of the dollar in relation to the Mark, the Franc, the Pound Sterling or the Yen is based on the demand for dollars, or the dollar demand for Marks, Francs, Pounds or Yen.
Demand for dollars is enhanced by the fact that many people in many countries will accept dollars in payment, often in preference to their own national currencies.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries sets its posted price for oil in U.S. dollars. This means that if Germans, Swiss or Japanese companies want to buy oil from OPEC member countries, they must first buy dollars with which to pay for the oil. This has caused a tremendous continuing demand for dollars, and has helped to maintain the international value of the dollar even in the face of continuing government and trade deficits. In late July of 1990, the Wall Street Journal carried a report that OPEC members were losing confidence in the U.S. dollar; the Journal reported that at its meeting in Vienna - the meeting which immediately preceded Iraq's invasion of Kuwait - OPEC established a committee to look into the feasibility of setting the posted price for oil in multiple currencies, including the Deutsche Mark, the Swiss Franc and the Japanese Yen along with the dollar.
If OPEC is able to adopt a posted price for oil in Marks and Yen, this will cause a massive drop in international demand for dollars, as Germany and Japan will be able to pay for their massive oil imports in their own currencies.
This story was overshadowed by the Gulf War. In gratitude for American intervention, it is likely that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are committed to defending the preeminent role of the dollar in the oil trade.
Limiting National Sovereignty
The UN role in the Gulf War was so central that even left-wing opponents of the war have begun to speak of the UN "becoming in effect a world government." Supporters of world government, including World Federalist Association President John Anderson, are pointing to the Gulf War as a United Nations success. Anderson, who ran for President in 1980, is a founding member of the Trilateral Commission.
World Federalists have long advocated "limitations on national sovereignty" as necessary for world peace. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines "Sovereignty" as the "supreme and independent power or authority in government as possessed or claimed by a state or community."
By this definition, it is hard to see any current limitation on the sovereignty of the U.S. government, which seems to be adding to its power and authority every day. The fact is that the sovereign power of the federal government over individual Americans has grown steadily as our international commitments have grown.
The United States government was founded on the basis of limited sovereignty. The Bills of Rights limits the sovereign power of the federal government over all who reside within its boundaries. The Constitution itself is a limited grant of power to the federal government. As stated by the Ninth Amendment:
"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
The founders envisioned a government of limited sovereignty, with that sovereignty in the possession of the American people. In fact, the affiliations of the federal government with the United Nations, NATO and other treaty arrangements have not limited the sovereign power of the government, but they have limited sovereign control of the government by the American people.
The Congressional debate over the use of force against Iraq was in reality a public relations exercise, rather than an assertion of control over foreign policy by the peoples' representatives. Pro-war leaders in Congress told their colleagues that the UN Security Council had already decided the issue. All that remained was to get on board behind the President and support the UN.
The First Requisite of Empire
The Security Council resolutions which led to the war against Iraq were not altogether spontaneous. Secretary of State James Baker introduced them on behalf of President Bush. President Bush and Secretary Baker lobbied other council members to support them. Representative Henry Gonzalez of Texas has charged that Bush and Baker bought the votes of several Security Council members with our tax dollars.
Representative Gonzalez charges that President Bush promised $7 billion in aid and credits to the Soviet government to get the support of Soviet President Gorbachev. Also, according to Gonzalez, Bush promised $300 million in credits to the Chinese government to ensure that China would abstain, rather than veto the Security Council resolution on force against Iraq. U.S. government aid was also offered to Romania and other governments represented on the Security Council at the time of the vote.
The President and his backers have used the United Nations to arrogate to the executive branch a control over foreign policy which is nowhere authorized in the Constitution.
In his 1952 essay, The Rise of Empire, Garet Garrett observed that "The first requisite of empire is: The executive power of government shall be dominant."
The trend toward Presidential dominance, already well advanced 40 years ago, has continued, increasingly under the guise of living up to our international commitments.
New Role for Germany and Japan
The United Nations has been sold to the idealistic as "mankind's last, best hope for peace." Yet, since 1950, literally hundreds of thousands of people have died in wars fought under UN auspices, in Korea, the Congo and Iraq. Nor have UN efforts been able to stop scores of military conflicts in Asia, Africa and the Middle East over the last 40 years.
A more successful approach to ending war would be for each nation to adopt a constitutional prohibition on sending military forces outside their own borders.
Reflecting on the tragic results of militarism for their countries, the post World War II leaders of Germany and Japan placed provisions in their constitutions embodying just such a prohibition on sending troops outside their borders.
During the run-up to the Gulf War, U.S. Congressional leaders criticized the German and Japanese governments for their unwillingness to supply military contingents for the allied forces. Providing such contingents would have violated the previously mentioned constitutional provisions.
Since then, both countries have acted on this issue.
The Japanese Diet on June 15 of this year enacted laws authorizing the dispatch of Self-Defense Forces to Cambodia, to assist the United Nations Transitional Authority in that country.
The governing Liberal Democratic Party has established a committee to explore Japan's international role, headed by Ichiro Ozawa.
According to the June 22, 1992 issue of Japan Access, "Ozawa has been an outspoken advocate of stretching the interpretation of Japan's war-renouncing Constitution in a way that would justify having SDF troops take part in obviously military missions, as outlined in Chapter 7 of the United Nations charter."
In this re-interpretation, Ozawa has the support of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, a member of the Trilateral Commission "on leave of absence in government service."
Germany appears to be on the verge of changing its constitution.
The Los Angeles Times on November 18 reported that:
"The main opposition Social Democrats concluded a two-day special party conference by voting to back a constitutional change to allow German military forces to participate in "Blue Helmet" U.N. peacekeeping forces.
Check the link out. www.antiwar.com/berkman/trilat.html
AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER
by Gene Berkman
In a speech to Congress and the American people on September 11, 1990, President George Bush outlined the goals his government was pursuing through military intervention in the Middle East. He had in previous statements put forth four goals, including an immediate, unconditional and complete withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait; the restoration of the Emir of Kuwait to his throne;a permanent commitment to the security and stability of the Persian gulf; and protection of American citizens living abroad.
On September 11, President Bush added a fifth objective. He said, and I quote:
"Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective - a new world order - can emerge...We are now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders."
On October 1, 1990, President Bush told the General Assembly of the United Nations, again I quote:
"The United Nations can help bring about a new day...a new world order, and a long era of peace."
One is tempted to downplay the rhetorical flourishes of George Bush. This is, after all, the same man who in 1988 told us to read his lips, and promised "No New Taxes." In looking at George Bush's political career from the early 1960's to the present, it might charitably be said that he does not have a principle to his name. Anyway, George Bush is now out of office office, repudiated by 63% of the voters in the last election.
Many of us would probably agree that no politician more richly deserved retirement that George Bush. Even millions who voted Republican to keep Bill Clinton out of the White House would be inclined to share such a sentiment. But a few facts about the winners might cause us to hold down our celebration.
Bi-Partisan Support for New World Order
Governor Clinton, among the various Democrats competing for the Presidential nomination, was strongest in his support for President Bush's Gulf War. Senator Gore voted in the Senate for the resolution authorizing U.S. troops to use force against the government of Iraq.
More recently President Bush has sent American troops to Somalia to "help guarantee that supplies reach the starving." The troops acted under authority of the United Nations and, according to the Times, the Somali intervention signalled a "dramatic enlargement and overhaul of the operation - perhaps putting the United Nations in the unusual role of enforcing the peace rather than just trying to keep it."
In other words, the UN forces acted as domestic police within Somalia.
President Clinton supported and continued the intervention in Somalia. President Clinton has since then called for sending U.S. and Nato military forces, under U.N. supervision - into war-torn Bosnia.
During the transition period after the election, the Bush administration pushed for U.N. authorization of military action against Serbia. In this he has had the full support of Clinton and Defense Secretary nominee Les Aspin.
Perhaps Americans are very fortunate that partisan bickering has not stopped the leaders of the two major parties from coming to an agreement on important policy matters. That is one view.
Another view is that the tens of millions of Americans who question the wisdom of sending Americans all over the world to straighten out other peoples quarrels are not represented by the bipartisan political establishment. Indeed, we might wonder whether the two party system is working at all when the two parties fail to offer policy alternatives to the American people.
Clinton's Trilateral Connection
There may be more than coincidence to the shared views of President Bush and President-elect Clinton. Both are associated with two influential organizations based in New York City - the Council On Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
George Bush was a member of the Council On Foreign Relations in the 1970's, when he served in a succession of appointed positions under President Nixon and President Ford. He was director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Chairman of the Republican National Committee; head of the Liaison Office in the Peoples Republic of China; and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Bush remained in the Council even after leaving public office. He ended his membership during his campaign for the Republican nomination for President in 1980, when his CFR connection started to become an issue among conservatives.
George Bush was among the founding members of the Tri-lateral Commission, retaining his connections even while officially "on leave of absence in government service."
Bill Clinton is a late-comer to both organizations, being invited to join only in the past couple of years. Nonetheless, he is the third member of the Trilateral Commission to be elected President since the Commission was founded in 1973.
George Bush and Bill Clinton are not alone among high public officials in their CFR/Trilateral connections. Outgoing Secretary of State James Baker is a long-time member of the Council On Foreign Relations, as is Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. Secretary Baker's predecessors at the State Department have included George Shultz and Cyrus Vance, members of the Council On Foreign Relations; and Alexander Haig as well as Henry Kissinger, both CFR members and founding members of the Trilateral Commission. Clinton's Secretary of State is Warren Christopher, Vice-Chairman of the Council On Foreign Relations, and a long-time member of the Trilateral Commission.
Harold Brown and Caspar Weinberger, Secretaries of Defense under President Carter and President Reagan, respectively, are both CFR members and again, founding members of the Trilateral Commission. Outgoing Defense Secretary Richard Cheney is a CFR member, as is the new Defense Secretary, Les Aspin.
Other founding members of the Trilateral Commission include Paul Volcker, former head of the Federal Reserve System, and Alan Greenspan, current Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Both are also CFR members.
We don't have the space to list the literally hundreds of additional CFR members and dozens of Trilateralists who have held policy positions in just the recent administrations. Such a record would be impressive for any organization, let alone a Council with only 2500 members, and a Commission with fewer than 100 members from the United States.
By contrast, the National Taxpayers Union has over 200,000 members nation-wide, including Republicans, Democrats and Independents. Yet since its founding in 1971, it has not had a single member appointed to the Cabinet. Perhaps this would change if the National Taxpayers Union were to give up its commitment to lower taxes and less government.
President-elect Clinton in late December announced his choices for the Cabinet and other top administration positions. Senator Lloyd Bentsen, his choice for Secretary of the Treasury, as well as Bruce Babbit, Interior Secretary nominee, are members of both the Trilateral Commission and the Council On Foreign Relations. Other CFR members headed for positions in the new administration include Anthony Lake, named as National Security Advisor; Andrea Tyson, who will head the Council of Economic Advisors. Clinton has announced that he will appoint CFR member Madeleine Albright as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and and that he will make the U.N. Ambassador a full member of the Cabinet.
Origins of the CFR
To get an idea of what the power of these two organizations means for America, we might want to take a look at the origins of each one.
When President Washington left office, he urged upon America a foreign policy based on "friendship and commerce will all nations, entangling alliances with none." Washington and succeeding Presidents recognized that the many conflicts which divided Europe were not over matters of principle, but disputes over territories and peoples that different countries sought to subjugate.
In the Twentieth Century, a succession of Presidents have worked to increase the involvement of the federal government in international affairs, while seeking to expand the power of the government in domestic matters as well. Woodrow Wilson, elected President in 1912, was a pioneer in this regard.
In 1913, the Congress established the Federal Reserve System. The 16th Amendment was passed, establishing the Federal Income Tax. In 1914, the Harrison Federal Narcotics Act was passed, granting the federal government vast new police powers in an area previously dealt with successfully as a medical problem. And in 1917, America entered World War I on the side of Britain and France, despite Wilson's 1916 campaign slogan "He Kept Us Out of War."
President Wilson spoke of a "War to make the World safe for Democracy." But the main allies, Britain and France, maintained colonial empires in Africa and Asia in which native aspirations for independence were often brutally suppressed. Britain, France and, after 1917, America were also allied with an autocratic regime in Russia.
President Wilson also called the conflict "The War to end all Wars." To carry out this goal, Wilson joined with the British and French governments in creating a League of Nations as one product of the Versailles Treaty. The League might be considered an embryonic version of world government; much more it was a collective security alliance of the victorious powers, who controlled the League through its Council. The victorious powers, Britain and France, retained their colonial empires, and under the League Trusteeship system, took control of German colonies in East Africa and South-West Africa.
The United States Senate rejected membership in the League of Nations, fearing it would subordinate America to the British Empire. It was in response to this rejection of an "entangling alliance" that the Council On Foreign Relations was formed.
The Council was incorporated in New York on July 21, 1921. Among the founders were John Foster Dulles, later Secretary of State; Allen Dulles, later head of the OSS and The CIA; Edward Mandell House, a top assistant to President Wilson; and John W Davis, who became the first President of the Council. Davis was personal attorney for J.P. Morgan, head of Morgan Guaranty Trust, and in 1924 received the Democrat nomination for President, despite never having been elected to any lower office.
From the beginning, the Council urged that the United States cooperate with the League of Nations. Beginning in 1927, the Rockefeller family began funding the Council, in 1929 buying the Harold Pratt House on East 68th Street in New York to serve as its headquarters.
World War II and the Founding of the United Nations
The League of Nations did not end war for all time. Indeed, the unwillingness of the League to peacefully revise the onerous war guilt provisions of the Versailles Treaty are widely acknowledged as the cause of Adolf Hitler's political victory in Germany.
As European leaders began to realize in the late 1930's that war was inevitable, Americans remained committed to staying out of war. As late as October 1941, opinion polls showed 88% of the American people opposed to entering the European war.
On the other hand, the Council On Foreign Relations began doing research for the State Department in 1939, with the work financed by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation. By 1942, after America entered the War, the State Department established an Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy, which included no less than 7 CFR members.
Dan Smoot, in his pioneering study, The Invisible Government notes that the "crowning moment of achievement for the Council came at San Francisco in 1945, when over forty members of the United States Delegation to the organizational meeting of the United Nations...were members of the Council." These included the Secretary of State, Edward R Stettinius, John Foster Dulles, John J McCloy, Nelson Rockefeller, Adlai Stevenson, and Alger Hiss.
Victors' Alliance
The United Nations Organization was formed after World War II by the victorious powers. Indeed, during the war, the alliance involving the US, Britain, the Soviet Union and China was called the United Nations. The San Francisco conference established this alliance of the victors as a permanent organization. Despite the fact that the legal government of France, located at Vichy, had cooperated with the Third Reich during the war, the post-war French government was brought in as a founding member, with a permanent seat on the Security Council.
The development of the United Nations into an international power was predicated on the continuance of the wartime alliance of the U.S., the British Empire and the Soviet Union. The purpose of the Yalta Agreement, which recognized Soviet dominance in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, as well as the annexation of the Baltic states, was to maintain this alliance.
The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the imposition in Poland of a Communist dictatorship in place of a neutralist Coalition government undermined the U.S./Soviet alliance. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed as an anti-Communist military and political alliance. As Americans came to learn of the brutalities inflicted by the Communist occupation forces in Eastern Europe, it was hard to oppose U.S. participation in NATO.
The formation of the United Nations in 1945 and NATO in 1949 has permanently entangled America in international politics.
Trilateral Commission Formed
The Trilateral Commission was formed in 1973, and it is widely perceived as an off-shoot of the Council On Foreign Relations. According to Christopher Lydon, writing in the July 1977 Atlantic, "The Trilateral Commission was David Rockefeller's brainchild." At the time, David Rockefeller was Chairman of the Council On Foreign Relations, having been elected to that post in 1970. David Rockefeller became the founding Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, which consists of leaders in business, banking, government and mass media from North America, Europe, and Japan invited to join by Rockefeller himself.
The word "Trilateral" means "three-sided" - the three sides in this case being North America, Europe,and Japan. North America, Europe and Japan have several things in common. Most important is their wealth, which is derived primarily from industrial production. Even agriculture is industrialized in the sense that farmers in the Trilateral countries use large amounts of machinery.
The industrially-generated wealth of the Trilateral countries is a product of their technological advance over the rest of the world. Kenichi Ohmae, in his book Triad Power notes that as of 1981, the Trilateral countries produce about 90% of the airplanes manufactured world-wide; about 80% of the computers;over 70% of the cars and similar proportions of other high-technology products.
Perhaps more telling, Ohmae notes that "...the vast majority of new patents registered and exchanged among Free World countries are concentrated within five nations: Japan, the United States, West Germany, France and the United Kingdom. During 1982, these five nations represented 85 percent of the 10,000 patents registered in the world." (page 126)
The industries of Europe and Japan are very dependent on imported raw materials and imported oil, as is, to a lesser degree, the United States.
As noted, the Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973, in the midst of the Middle East oil crisis. The ostensible cause of the oil crisis was a decision by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to dramatically raise the posted price for oil, with the price hike enforced by limited production quotas for each member country.
The fact of the matter is that OPEC had never before been able to enforce either its posted price for oil, or production limits on its member countries. In 1971, President Nixon, trying to deal with inflation, imposed price controls on oil and gasoline produced in American wells and sold in the United States.
The natural result was that the multinational oil companies increased their imports of oil for the U.S. market, since imported oil was not subject to price controls. At the time price controls were imposed, the United States was importing 15% of the oil used in this country; within two years, imports accounted for 50% of U.S. oil needs.
The increase in demand for oil in the world's largest market enabled OPEC to allocate generous production quotas to member countries while enforcing a succession of price hikes.
The sales of increasing quantities of oil at increasingly higher prices generated tens of billions of dollars in income for the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and for state-owned oil companies in Iran, Iraq, Algeria and other countries. This money ended up largely in American and European banks.
The other side of the coin is that developing countries in Asia and Latin America which lacked domestic oil deposits had to borrow large amounts of money to finance oil imports. The same banks that were taking in billions of petro-dollars from OPEC countries were lending out the same billions to other countries to finance imports.
While the international bankers were quite happy to take in tens of billions in petro-dollars, the shaky financial situation in the oil-dependent countries was unnerving. Jeremiah Novak made this observation in the July 1977 Atlantic:
"The Trilaterists' emphasis on international economics is not entirely disinterested, for the oil crisis forced many developing nations, with doubtful repayment abilities, to borrow excessively. All told, private multinational banks, particularly Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan, have loaned nearly $52 billion to developing countries. An overhauled IMF would provide another source of credit for these nations, and would take the big private banks off the hook.This proposal is the cornerstone of the Trilateral plan."
Confronting the Afro-Asian Bloc
A related purpose of the Trilateral Commission was to promote cooperation among the industrialized countries in the face of an emerging bloc of Arab, African and Asian states which had come to dominate the General Assembly of the United Nations.
The emergence of the Afro-Asian bloc was not foreseen by the founders of the United Nations. In 1945, when the UN was founded, most of Africa and much of Asia remained in subjugation to British and French imperialism. As colonies, these countries were not even considered for UN membership.
As the countries of Asia and Africa gained political independence, it was expected that continuing economic dependence would cause the former colonies to align politically with the former colonial masters. Instead, nationalist pride, along with a heavy dose of Marxism imbibed at British and French universities, caused the new leaders in Africa and Asia to line up against America and Europe.
In the case of the Arab countries, the U.S. alliance with Israel provided additional encouragement for their anti-Americanism.
The voting majority held by the radical Arab, African and Asian states in the UN General Assembly did not in reality threaten America or Europe. America, Europe and Japan provide the bulk of funding for the UN and its agencies. A cut-off of funds from the Trilateral countries would render the UN an empty shell.
Organizing the World
But the Trilateralists did not want to give up on the United Nations. The economic and political elites of America and Europe seek international political power in order to provide a stable investment climate, including protection against nationalization of their assets.
At the same time, the international bankers and multi- national corporations have gained much of their wealth through partnership with government. The corporate elite look to governments for lucrative contracts; taxpayer subsidized financing; and protection from competition.
The international bankers and multinational corporations have exploited two UN financial agencies in particular - the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But they have relied on their own national governments to attempt to protect their foreign investments.
The politicians have looked to a strengthened United Nations for a different reason. Politicians seek power. Control over their own government is all too often only a beginning to their ambition. History is littered with corpses who mutely testify to the imperial ambitions and arrogance of politicians.
In 1973, the U.S. was winding down its involvement in Vietnam. The Vietnam War had proved to be a costly mistake, and had turned a majority of the American people against the idea of military intervention in other countries.
Despite this, the Democrats in 1976 nominated Jimmy Carter, who had supported the Vietnam War, and who, upon election included pro-war advisors in his inner circle. His National Security Advisor was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been a founder of the Trilateral Commission. Jimmy Carter himself had been recruited into the Trilateral Commission in the summer of 1973.
Richard Barnet, an analyst with the Institute for Policy Studies, observed that "The Trilateral Commission was barely mentioned in the 1976 campaign. When the Carter cabinet was announced, a few columnists noted the coincidence that so many of them belonged to Mr Rockefeller's new organization. By the time Jimmy Carter ran for a second term, however, the Trilateral Commission was a major campaign issue..."
And so it was. Supporters of Ronald Reagan attacked both President Carter and Republican hopeful George Bush for their Trilateral Connection.
The Subornation of Ronald Reagan
Millions of Americans put their trust in Ronald Reagan to cut taxes, cut back the power of the federal government, and end the domination of the federal government by the Eastern Establishment. Yet the American people, in voting for Ronald Reagan, got Trilateralist George Bush as Vice-President, and an administration filled with CFR and Trilateral Commission members.
Ronald Reagan was distinguished by his use of anti-Communist rhetoric to defend an interventionist foreign policy. Yet the first loan approved by the Export-Import Bank after Reagan took office was for $120 million to pay for two nuclear reactors for Communist Romania.
In early 1981, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger offered a $20 billion line of credit to Red China for the purpose of selling them military equipment.
President Reagan carried out a policy in the Middle East of increasingly close friendship with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt. During the Iran/Iraq war, the Reagan administration openly supported the government of Saddam Hussein.
According to a report by the Financial Times of London and ABC News Nightline, President Reagan authorized military aid to Iraq in a 1983 Presidential Finding. Between 1983 and 1989, the United States government supplied one planeload of weapons every week to Iraq, free of charge. That was your tax dollars at work.
At the same time, Iraq received large amounts of weapons from the Soviet Union, France and Red China; Britain, Germany, Austria, Chile and South Africa supplied military technology. And Iraq received tens of billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to pay for these weapons.
Ronald Reagan left one additional legacy to us, and to our children and our grandchildren. He ran up the National Debt from $980 billion when he took office to about $2.6 trillion when he left office.
The Deficit and Dependence
Ronald Reagan did not invent deficit spending. Indeed, the National Debt was close to a trillion dollars when he took office. But the size of the deficits run up by the Reagan administration seriously compromised America's financial independence. American financial institutions are not capable of funding deficits which exceeded $200 billion a year.
For some reason, banks and corporations in Japan, Germany and Saudi Arabia had enough confidence in President Reagan to help fund the deficit. According to the recently published book Bankruptcy 1995, banks, corporations and individual investors in Japan, Germany and Saudi Arabia currently hold approximately $453 billion in U.S. Savings Bonds and Treasury Bills.
George Bush and the New World Order
When George Bush took over, he faced a massive national debt and continuing budget deficits, financed in growing part by foreign investors. At the same time, Saddam Hussein faced his own debt to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Hussein also suffered from one of the things Ronald Reagan did right.
Shortly after taking office, President Reagan ended price controls on U.S. oil. The newly free market in oil led to a massive increase in U.S. production, declining U.S. dependence on Middle East oil, and a steady decline in world market prices.
Declining world market prices for oil destroyed OPEC discipline, as members pumped more oil to try to maintain their income. Low oil prices put Iraq in a bind, as it faced the costs of reconstruction as well as demands by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to repay its war debt.
When OPEC oil ministers met in late July, 1990, Hussein demanded that other OPEC members cut production to drive the price of oil back up. Hussein also demanded that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait cancel Iraq's debt. None of Hussein's demands were met, and he responded by invading Kuwait.
The response of President Bush is the defining moment of the New World Order.
President Bush and Secretary of State Baker pushed a series of resolutions through the United Nations Security Council condemning Iraq; demanding Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait; and authorizing the use of force to eject Iraq from Kuwait.
On the basis of these UN resolutions, 661 through 665, President Bush sent 450,000 U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia - without authorization from Congress.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States gives Congress the power to declare war. Yet Congress did not even debate the issue until two days before the start of hostilities. During the debate, pro-war speakers stressed that the UN had already authorized the use of force; Congress was urged to back the United Nations, and told that American troops could be used to implement the UN resolutions even if Congress did not give its approval.
The United States has never had a defense treaty, ratified by the Senate, with either Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. An Executive Order by President Carter -the Carter Doctrine - had placed the entire Persian Gulf within the United States Defense Perimeter. Now, still without a treaty or any form of Congressional authorization, the U.S. has permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Oil and Money - The Trilateral Connection
Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole and others justified the U.S. intervention against Iraq by stating that it would guarantee access to Persian Gulf oil supplies. At the time of the conflict, the United States received less than 7% of its annual oil supplies from Middle Eastern countries.
Europe and Japan are heavily dependent on oil from the Middle East. Trilateralism may require that young Americans are put in danger to secure the oil supplies for the other industrial countries. Such a view presumes that if Hussein were to get control of the oil reserves of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, that he would refuse to sell to willing customers in Europe and Japan - he has never in the past refused to sell to them. Nor have the Europeans and the Japanese ever refused to buy oil from Hussein, even when he was shooting missiles at the civilian populations in Iranian cities, or bombing Kurdish villages with poison gas.
There was another factor which may have pushed President Bush into a show of American military strength.
Before 1913, the U.S. dollar was as good as gold. Gold coins circulated, along with silver dollars and paper money which could be redeemed at full value in gold coins. With the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, the Federal Reserve Banks were authorized to print four paper dollars for every dollar in gold that they held. Federal Reserve Notes were made legal tender, despite this fractional reserve basis.
In 1933, President Roosevelt withdrew gold coins from circulation, and ended the redemption of paper money in gold. But the 25% gold reserve requirement for Federal Reserve Notes was maintained until 1971, when President Nixon totally removed the dollar from any gold basis. Since 1971, the value of the dollar has been strictly based on supply and demand.
If Germans want to buy American products, or invest in American securities, they buy dollars with their Deutsche Marks. If Americans want to buy German products, or invest in German securities, they buy Deutsche Marks with their dollars. Similarly for Frenchmen, Swedes or other foreigners who trade with or invest in America. The value of the dollar in relation to the Mark, the Franc, the Pound Sterling or the Yen is based on the demand for dollars, or the dollar demand for Marks, Francs, Pounds or Yen.
Demand for dollars is enhanced by the fact that many people in many countries will accept dollars in payment, often in preference to their own national currencies.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries sets its posted price for oil in U.S. dollars. This means that if Germans, Swiss or Japanese companies want to buy oil from OPEC member countries, they must first buy dollars with which to pay for the oil. This has caused a tremendous continuing demand for dollars, and has helped to maintain the international value of the dollar even in the face of continuing government and trade deficits. In late July of 1990, the Wall Street Journal carried a report that OPEC members were losing confidence in the U.S. dollar; the Journal reported that at its meeting in Vienna - the meeting which immediately preceded Iraq's invasion of Kuwait - OPEC established a committee to look into the feasibility of setting the posted price for oil in multiple currencies, including the Deutsche Mark, the Swiss Franc and the Japanese Yen along with the dollar.
If OPEC is able to adopt a posted price for oil in Marks and Yen, this will cause a massive drop in international demand for dollars, as Germany and Japan will be able to pay for their massive oil imports in their own currencies.
This story was overshadowed by the Gulf War. In gratitude for American intervention, it is likely that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are committed to defending the preeminent role of the dollar in the oil trade.
Limiting National Sovereignty
The UN role in the Gulf War was so central that even left-wing opponents of the war have begun to speak of the UN "becoming in effect a world government." Supporters of world government, including World Federalist Association President John Anderson, are pointing to the Gulf War as a United Nations success. Anderson, who ran for President in 1980, is a founding member of the Trilateral Commission.
World Federalists have long advocated "limitations on national sovereignty" as necessary for world peace. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines "Sovereignty" as the "supreme and independent power or authority in government as possessed or claimed by a state or community."
By this definition, it is hard to see any current limitation on the sovereignty of the U.S. government, which seems to be adding to its power and authority every day. The fact is that the sovereign power of the federal government over individual Americans has grown steadily as our international commitments have grown.
The United States government was founded on the basis of limited sovereignty. The Bills of Rights limits the sovereign power of the federal government over all who reside within its boundaries. The Constitution itself is a limited grant of power to the federal government. As stated by the Ninth Amendment:
"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
The founders envisioned a government of limited sovereignty, with that sovereignty in the possession of the American people. In fact, the affiliations of the federal government with the United Nations, NATO and other treaty arrangements have not limited the sovereign power of the government, but they have limited sovereign control of the government by the American people.
The Congressional debate over the use of force against Iraq was in reality a public relations exercise, rather than an assertion of control over foreign policy by the peoples' representatives. Pro-war leaders in Congress told their colleagues that the UN Security Council had already decided the issue. All that remained was to get on board behind the President and support the UN.
The First Requisite of Empire
The Security Council resolutions which led to the war against Iraq were not altogether spontaneous. Secretary of State James Baker introduced them on behalf of President Bush. President Bush and Secretary Baker lobbied other council members to support them. Representative Henry Gonzalez of Texas has charged that Bush and Baker bought the votes of several Security Council members with our tax dollars.
Representative Gonzalez charges that President Bush promised $7 billion in aid and credits to the Soviet government to get the support of Soviet President Gorbachev. Also, according to Gonzalez, Bush promised $300 million in credits to the Chinese government to ensure that China would abstain, rather than veto the Security Council resolution on force against Iraq. U.S. government aid was also offered to Romania and other governments represented on the Security Council at the time of the vote.
The President and his backers have used the United Nations to arrogate to the executive branch a control over foreign policy which is nowhere authorized in the Constitution.
In his 1952 essay, The Rise of Empire, Garet Garrett observed that "The first requisite of empire is: The executive power of government shall be dominant."
The trend toward Presidential dominance, already well advanced 40 years ago, has continued, increasingly under the guise of living up to our international commitments.
New Role for Germany and Japan
The United Nations has been sold to the idealistic as "mankind's last, best hope for peace." Yet, since 1950, literally hundreds of thousands of people have died in wars fought under UN auspices, in Korea, the Congo and Iraq. Nor have UN efforts been able to stop scores of military conflicts in Asia, Africa and the Middle East over the last 40 years.
A more successful approach to ending war would be for each nation to adopt a constitutional prohibition on sending military forces outside their own borders.
Reflecting on the tragic results of militarism for their countries, the post World War II leaders of Germany and Japan placed provisions in their constitutions embodying just such a prohibition on sending troops outside their borders.
During the run-up to the Gulf War, U.S. Congressional leaders criticized the German and Japanese governments for their unwillingness to supply military contingents for the allied forces. Providing such contingents would have violated the previously mentioned constitutional provisions.
Since then, both countries have acted on this issue.
The Japanese Diet on June 15 of this year enacted laws authorizing the dispatch of Self-Defense Forces to Cambodia, to assist the United Nations Transitional Authority in that country.
The governing Liberal Democratic Party has established a committee to explore Japan's international role, headed by Ichiro Ozawa.
According to the June 22, 1992 issue of Japan Access, "Ozawa has been an outspoken advocate of stretching the interpretation of Japan's war-renouncing Constitution in a way that would justify having SDF troops take part in obviously military missions, as outlined in Chapter 7 of the United Nations charter."
In this re-interpretation, Ozawa has the support of Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, a member of the Trilateral Commission "on leave of absence in government service."
Germany appears to be on the verge of changing its constitution.
The Los Angeles Times on November 18 reported that:
"The main opposition Social Democrats concluded a two-day special party conference by voting to back a constitutional change to allow German military forces to participate in "Blue Helmet" U.N. peacekeeping forces.
Check the link out. www.antiwar.com/berkman/trilat.html
