The August Review

Trilateral Commission

Introduction

In 1978, Trilaterals Over Washington revealed the global strategy of the Trilateral Commission and it's co-founders David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski, in particular, provided the intellectual reasoning and political strategy for the "New International Economic Order".

Brzezinski was also an astute political operator. He is credited as the first person to take interest in Jimmy Carter, to mentor him in globalism starting in 1973 when Carter was chosen to be part of the Trilateral Commission. Upon Carter's election victory in 1976, Brzezinski was appointed National Security Advisor. By the end of 1976, Carter had appointed no less than 19 members of the Trilateral Commission to high-ranking government positions. These 19 members represented just under 20% of the entire U.S. delegation of the Trilateral Commission.

The stage was now set for their power to become permanently embedded. Each successive Administration has been disproportionally dominated by members of the Trilateral Commission: George H.W. Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, Richard B. Cheney. Each administration filled top posts from the Trilateral Commission. Think-tanks connected to the Trilateral Commission cranked out volumes of studies that droned on and on about the New International Economic Order and the need for political change.

Looking backward to Brzezinski, however, is necessary because he most clearly and lucidly embodied the heart and soul of the rush to globalism. He created the watershed that initiated the plundering of America and the buildup of the global corporate elite. This issue intends to quantify the extent of this plundering.

Brzezinski was interviewed in 1974 by the Brazilian newspaper Vega: "How would you define this new world order?" Brzezinski declared "...the reality of our times is that a modern society such as the U.S. needs a central coordinating and renovating organ which cannot be made up of six hundred people." In his 1969 book Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, he wrote that the "nation-state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state."

Indeed, members of the Trilateral Commission chosen from north America, Europe and Asia (mostly Japan), are all in agreement on this point -- the nation-state only gets in the way of so-called "free trade" and therefore must be closely manipulated for their own common good. Collectively, they have taken a self-induced quantum leap above national law, into an elevated position of making their own rules as they go. We see some direct evidence of such an attitude, for instance, when President Bill Clinton had no particular legal qualms (or consequences) of giving (free or for money) top-secret missile technology to Communist China.

The gathering of corporate elites in the Trilateral Commission started with names such as Coca Cola, Ford Motor, Deere & Co., Hewlett-Packard, Cargill, Chase Manhattan Bank, Cummins Engine, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Bechtel Corporation, Weyerhauser, General Motors, Boeing, and many others. Today, we see the same kind of makeup: Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), J.P. Morgan, Chase, Goldman, Sachs & Co., Pitney Bowes, GE, Citigroup, American International Group (AIF), Bank of America, Xerox and Halliburton, just to name a few.

To summarize then, the real plundering of America started with the founding of the Trilateral Commission in 1973 and the consolidation of power in 1976 with the dominance of the Carter Administration. When one begins to see the pattern emerging, many unanswered questions start to clear up. Why does President George Bush so pointedly want to eliminate the U.S./Mexican border? Why the stampede to outsource American jobs, even to the hurt of our own citizens? Why do people around the world intuitively hate the World Trade Organization, NAFTA and CAFTA? (The last question suggests that the U.S. is not the only nation-state being plundered these days.) Nations are financially disintegrating while global corporations grow fantastically richer.

One might protest that the scope of this operation is just too fantastic and huge to be real. This writer would remind the skeptic that U.S. history is littered with monopolistic tycoons who tried to get a lever on the societies they lived in. Monopolies are blind to politics, except when politics can be manipulated to establish or extend the monopoly. The vast majority of Americans are left completely in the dark because American mainstream media, collectively slanted toward globalism, has been dominated by the very same globalists who founded the Trilateral Commission in the first place: New York Times, Time-Warner, Chicago Sun-Times, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy Magazine, Comcast, CBS, Atlantic Media, The Rand Corporation, Washington Post, Dow Jones & Company, U.S. News and World Report all have direct representation on the Trilateral Commission.

The reader is encouraged to read Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II, to get a deeper sense of background on these issues. Both of these books are available in full-text versions on The August Review website.

The State of the Nation

This issue attempts to give the reader a background and perspective on the state of affairs of American business.

There are three factors to consider. First, there is the government itself. Second, there is private industry. Although they are very different types of entities, they both can adequately be described in terms of flows of income. Third, we will look at the transfer of ownership of U.S. based corporations to foreign ownership.

In the case of the government, there has been virtually no restraint on keeping its spending within its income. Whenever it spent outside of income-in-hand, borrowing whatever extra was needed was all too easy.

You can quickly see what the last 37 years look like from the chart to the left. Prior to 1975, budget deficits were very small. The upward trend started in earnest in 1975. A brief surplus was recorded between 1998 and 2001.

Presiding presidents are purposefully not mentioned because they are irrelevant to the big picture.

It should also stand out that there are three troughs: the first "peaked" in 1986, the second in 1992 and the third in 2005. The extremity cycle is approximately 6 years long.

The cumulative effect of these deficits on the U.S. national debt is quite dramatic. In 1970, the debt was well under the $1 trillion level. Today, it stands over $8 trillion, a 10-fold increase.

To put this in personal terms, every man, woman and child in America owes $28,500 each. A family of 4 collectively owes $114,000. You might say, "But, that's the government debt, not mine!" The fact is though, we are the government. Except that taxpayers pay taxes, the federal government would have no source of income whatever.

So, let's take a look at the business economy now.

A trade deficit occurs when we import more than we export. A surplus occurs when the reverse is true. Whether positive or negative, the figure is called the "current account".

Since 1981, America has been in the red every single year. The curve is similar in nature to the National Debt curve: very low deficits in the 70's and early 80's, then rising dramatically during the 90's into the current decade.

In the chart to the right, you can see that the gap between imports (orange line) and exports (purple line) is widening at an increasing rate every year. The bottom curve shows the negative balance on the current account as it accumulates more and more red ink. Currently, the annualized rate of the current trade deficit is easily $600 billion.

By contrast, there were only two years in the decade of the 1970's that had small trade deficits.

In March, the Business Telegraph in London reported that the March (2005) deficit of $55 billion was well below the $60 billion that was expected by the markets.

"It's a relief," said James Glassman, senior economist at JP Morgan Chase in New York. "It does dampen the fears that there was something bad going on in the US economy."

The psychology at play here is amazing. The fact that the trade deficit for a single month is $55 billion instead of $60 billion is a cause for reassurance that nothing bad is happening to the U.S. economy? On the other hand, note that Glassman is senior economist at JP Morgan Chase bank which has been at the very core of the New International Economic Order from the beginning.

The third area to look at is transfer of ownership. Corporate mergers are everywhere. It's so confusing that most people don't have a clue who owns what anymore.

Outlays for New Investment in the United States by Foreign Direct Investors, 1980-2003

(Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis)

During the 1960's, American business increased its ownership in the U.S. every year except one. During the 1970's, there were only 5 years that we increased our position. Since 1982, there has not been one single year where foreign investment did not outstrip our own... and dramatically so, to the tune of $3.8 trillion. You ask, "How can this happen?" Simple.

Mergers.

Consider a few mergers from recent history - do you recognize any of these "American" names?

American Company	Foreign Company	Country	Purchase Amount
Amoco Corp	British Petroleum Co PLC	United Kingdom	$48.17 Billion
ARCO	BP Amoco PLC	United Kingdom	$27.22 Billion
Texaco-US Refining & Marketing	Shell Oil-Western US Business	Netherlands	$3.964 Billion
AirTouch Communications Inc	Vodafone Group PLC	United Kingdom	$60.29 Billion
VoiceStream Wireless Corp	Deutsche Telekom AG	Germany	$29.40 Billion
Chrysler Corp	Daimler-Benz AG	Germany	$40.47 Billion
Harcourt General Inc	Reed Elsevier Group PLC	United Kingdom	$5.60 Billion
Simon & Schuster-Educ, Prof	Pearson PLC	United Kingdom	$4.60 Billion
Magma Copper Co	BHP	Australia	$2.432 Billion
John Hancock Finl Svcs Inc	Manulife Financial Corp	Canada	$11.06 Billion
TransAmerica Corp	Aegon NV	Netherlands	$9.691 Billion
SmithKline Beckman Corp	Beecham Group PLC	United Kingdom	$7.922 Billion

These few examples are listed only to give you a flavor of the depth of penetration of foreign purchases into the core of American industry. In order to get to an aggregate of $3.8 trillion, you can hardly imagine how many billion dollar deals there have been over 20 years. In short, America is literally being sold out from under us.

Let's summarize this now. In the past 35 years, the U.S. government has racked up over $8 trillion in debt. The current trade deficit for 2005 alone will likely exceed $600 billion (importing more than we export). The $3.8 trillion of showcase American companies have been sold to foreigners.

Is something wrong with this picture?

When this writer began to do research for Trilaterals Over Washington in the late 1970's, we focused on the Trilateral Commission because it was very apparent that it was laying the groundwork for -- in their own words -- a "New International Economic Order" The concept of the nation-state was outdated and we were moving into an era of "interdependence."

David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973. It has been composed of slightly over 300 members chosen from North America, Europe and Asia (primarily Japan). The members are literally the Who's Who of global elitists: top politicians, think-tank philosophers, industrialists and bankers.

We clearly documented in Trilaterals Over Washington (available in full text form to The August Review subscribers on this site) that the move toward global economic consolidation was well on its way. Twenty-five years later, we are standing under an avalanche of economic deterioration.

During these 25 years, America has literally "lost its shirt". We are technically quite bankrupt.

Corporate profits during this same time, however, have seen huge and consistent profits. Those global-minded companies in particular (e.g., corporate board members who belong to the Trilateral Commission) have profited even more.

According to the BEA, aggregate corporate profits totaled $874 billion in 2002, $1.02 trillion in 2003 and $1.2 trillion in 2004. Exxon increased its annual earnings from $21.5 billion in 2003 to $25.33 billion in 2004. This was not uncommon.

Is it possible that the U.S. can be stripped to the bone while multinational corporations get rich? Was it planned this way from the beginning (circa 1973)? Yes, and yes.

There is another aspect of national bankruptcy that needs to be mentioned, namely, the landslide loss of technological genius that made America great in the first place. Putting aside the legal and illegal transfers of technology to China during the Clinton administration, consider the case of IBM:

Lenovo, China's largest PC company, has completed a $1.25 billion acquisition of IBM's Personal Computing Division (PCD). Lenovo, which already has a third of the Chinese PC market and shares in enterprise PC markets around the world, says this deal makes it a new international IT competitor and the world's third-largest personal computing company. The PCD acquisition, first announced in December, means, according to newly named Lenovo CEO Stephen Ward, that the company will have combined annual PC revenue of about $13 billion and volume of about 14 million units. Ward says Lenovo expects immediate synergies through complementary customer bases, product offerings and geographic coverage, among other things. (SA Computer Magazine, 5-3-2005)

That is, the very company that invented the PC and literally revolutionized the world has now sold 100% of their Personal Computing Division to a Communist nation who have sworn many times that they will bury us. Chinese engineers will soon be moving into IBM's Armonk, NY headquarters to take over.

Another example is that Steven Chen, a Taiwanese-born American citizen and one of America's most brilliant and top supercomputer designers, quit his post with Silicon Graphics and is moving to mainland China. He is choosing to build his next generation supercomputer in China

According to IDC, the premier intelligence resource and forecaster in the computer world,

Attracting a leading supercomputer designer like Chen is good news for the growing Chinese computer industry. China has recently been primarily focusing its high-performance technical computer designs on commodity component clusters. In general, clusters provide very attractive price-performance but lack some of the high-end capabilities provided by traditional supercomputers. Chen plans to bridge the gap by building high-performance blade-based clusters in China and offering them for sale around the world.

If America's technology prowess is a national treasure, then people like Steven Chen are national treasures also. How is it that we cannot offer enough enticement to keep such a talent in the United States? In an age where sports figures can command million of dollars per season for pure entertainment, this seems rather odd. It's not just that Chen isn't helping the U.S. but that he is helping a Communist government develop technology that can be used against us -- commercially and militarily.

Example of a "Blind Eye"

The New York Times carried an article on May 17, 2005, "Bush's Choice: Anger China or Congress Over Currency." China bought more than $200 billion in Treasuries last year, bringing their total ownership of U.S. debt to a whopping $650 billion. These purchases essentially finance a comparable trade deficit with China. Because China's currency, the yuan, is pegged to the U.S. dollar, China is in a position to manipulate the system (undervaluing its currency) and gain a whopping trade advantage over America.

U.S. Businesses have filed volumes of complaints with the U.S. Trade Representative, Rob Portman, about issues ranging from China's dumping of products at prices below cost of manufacturing, to widespread copyright and patent violations. Congress is somewhat sensitive to this issue and, bucking the president, is pushing for tariffs and quotas against China to punish them for milking the system.

Bush must now be critical of China (and infuriate China) or give China a clean bill of health and say that everything is fine (and infuriate Congress and the American people).

So, what do you do when you've invited an 800 pound gorilla into your living room? You pray he doesn't get mad when you ask him to leave.

Treasury Secretary John Snow is on the spot. In the past, he has refused to criticize China openly, but rather seeks to rely on "financial diplomacy" instead. He believes that China can be persuaded that flexible exchange rates ought to be in its own interest.

Mr. Snow, in an interview on Monday with CNBC, reiterated his optimism that China would change policy on its own. "I'm convinced they will move," Mr. Snow said. "Now is the time. We're anxious to see them move. It's time."

What evidence does Snow have that China will voluntarily pull back from an opportunity to plunder the U.S.? His wishful thinking that they might compliantly respond to our being "anxious" to see them move?

It is easier to understand the conflict of interest if you look back a few years at John Snow's career. From 1994-1996, Snow was chairman of the Business Roundtable, an association of 250 chief executive officers of the largest corporations, representing over $3.7 trillion in combined revenues. During that time, he was a key player in supporting the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

He recently received the Marco Polo Award (2001), awarded by the U.S.-China Foundation for International Exchanges as the highest honor that can be given to a foreign business leader. He is a director of CarMax, U.S. Steel, Johnson & Johnson, Verizon Communications, sits on the boards of Johns Hopkins University, is chairman of the Kennedy Center Corporate Fund Board, and is a member of the Business Council and Business Roundtable.

In short, Snow has been at the corporate center of promoting globalism and in particular, building China's trade for many years. As Treasury Secretary, he is in an influential position of trust to protect the American people from economic harm. But, will he?

To understand more completely, ask yourself this question. Who invested money in, and built up, this 800 pound gorilla?

Take Bechtel for instance, one of the largest construction and engineering companies in the world. In 1994, Bechtel was the first U.S. company to receive a construction license in China. It has completed 80 major projects in China and has permanent offices located in Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei and Hong Kong. Its latest project is a $4.3 billion petrochemical complex in Daya Bay that will produce 2.3 million tons of products annually. It's being touted as one of the largest Sino-foreign investments to date, and is 50% owned by a subsidiary of Royal Dutch/Shell.

If we say, "China is really profiting from the U.S.", to whom are we really referring? It's true that the Chinese government is getting an advantage from the increase in economic activity, but who are the front-line collectors of revenue and aggregators of profit in China? That's right, it's the same multinational corporations.

So, as noted above, when John Snow reiterates his optimism that China will change policy on its own, you can see just how selective his vision is. As long as China's policy remains as it is, America gets plundered and the global corporations in China rack up record profits.

This issue contends that America is For Sale. The sale is "under the table" in that the American people don't have a clue that it's being slowly sold out from under their feet, one piece at a time. The sale is deceptive because as the red ink grows larger and larger, we are told by these same globalists that trade and budget deficits don't really matter that much. The sale is dishonest because it was planned from the beginning by elitist groups like the Trilateral Commission, to twist and manipulate the system to their own benefit.

The fact that America's downward financial spiral started in earnest shortly after the Trilateral Commission was founded by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, is not incidental. The very policies that brought us the "New International Economic Order" (their own phrase) have wrecked our country. This is not an anecdotal observation, as will be demonstrated over and over in future issues of The August Review.

America is in a very grievous and trepid situation. Any number of isolated incidents could touch off a financial firestorm that burns our house to the ground. When a company goes bankrupt, it is seldom advertised in advance. Its customers, shareholders and debtors are invariably in a state of shock when the bankruptcy occurs, even though hind site shows that there were ample evidences of impending bankruptcy. So it is with America: There is evidence everywhere of what is happening to us, but there are few eyes to see it nor ears to hear it.

In 30-40 short years, America has gone from the strongest and most stable nation in the world, to one of the weakest and unstable. Poor Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall and had a great fall, but few people will see the real truth that Humpty was actually pushed!

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