Sovereignty Losing Currency
Lew Rockwell | The New American
June 4, 1990
In an interventionist economy like ours, with big government and its special interest groups dedicated full-time to transferring money and power from the people to Washington and its friends, the political talk is inevitably of the public interest, the common good, the national security. But the real issues are always cash and control. In analyzing any government action, therefore, we should ask who's getting the money and the power, and at whose expense. Such analysis is painted as disreputable by the government and its kept intellectuals in the media and the universities. But it is the only way to see through the smokescreen that is generated to fool us in Washington.
"Why Don't They Trust Me?"
In an intriguing 1980 article published in Playboy, for example, leftist Robert Scheer noted that Ronald Reagan was "viewed with suspicion by the elite Northeastern wing of the Republican Party." They thought he might "actually believe in some of his proposals for dismantling the federal government, which, after all, does serve the interests of big corporations." Reagan's talk about the gold standard was "viewed as primitive" by the people associated with "David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank." Also worried were the "managers of multinational corporations" who have "done quite well" in the present system. "Those gentlemen are internationalists par excellence," more "interested in cutting deals with the Russians than in a holy crusade against them."
"Prior to the New Hampshire primary," wrote Scheer, "David Rockefeller convened a secret meeting" to stop "Reagan by supporting Bush and, failing that, getting Gerald Ford into the race." Upon hearing of the meeting, Reagan asked an aide: "What have they got against me? I support big oil, I support big business, why don't they trust me?" To ensure that trust, he appointed William Casey, a senior member of the CFR, as his campaign director. Casey, a CIA operative and Wall Street lawyer who later headed the CIA for Reagan, worried especially about one Reagan answer to a reporter's question: The Carter Administration, Reagan said, "beginning with the President and Vice-President," has had about "19 of its top appointees" from "the Trilateral Commission," which is "devoted to international banking, multinational corporations, and so forth." Reagan said that no "administration of the U.S. government should have the top 19 positions filled by people from any one group or organization representing one viewpoint." He added: "I would go in a different direction."
A few months later, under Casey's direction, Reagan had brought in a team of advisors from the CFR and the TC, and picked the ultimate Rockefeller Republican, George Bush, as his running mate. In his administration, he appointed such Trilateralists as Howard Baker and Alan Greenspan, and even hosted a meeting of the TC in the White House. Reagan would never have to ask again: "What do they have against me?"
Rockefeller vs. Morgan
A free market benefits consumers and the economy -- but not necessarily particular business interests. However, as John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and his Standard Oil associates learned early on, an interventionist government can provide special privileges for favored corporations at the expense of competitors and consumers. At first the Rockefeller family concentrated on America, but, as it soon began to operate overseas (it now has interests in 125 countries), it also sought to influence U.S. foreign policy. One key means to this end is the Council on Foreign Relations.
Created after World War I by J.P. Morgan and his associates, the CFR is a crucial part of that Establishment whose members dominate so much of high finance, elite universities, big foundations, the national media, and economic and foreign policy. From the administration of William McKinley through that of Franklin Roosevelt, government policy was a mighty battleground for the Rockefeller and the Morgan interests. For example, Teddy Roosevelt -- who was allied closely with the Morgan interests -- had a doctrine of good trusts and bad trusts, the latter of which should be broken up by the government. Upon examination, it's easy to see that Roosevelt was motivated by something other than liberal antitrust theory. The good trusts -- such as U.S. Steel -- were Morgan-owned, while the bad ones -- like Standard Oil -- were Rockefeller-owned, and TR succeeded in breaking up Standard Oil.
Sometimes both forces agreed, as on the monstrous scheming that led to U.S. entry into World War I, the destruction of Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia, and the opening of the way for Hitler and Lenin. But mostly they fought. Despite the breakup of Standard Oil, the Rockefellers gradually won more battles, especially as the railroads -- the basis of the Morgan empire -- became less important economically. Finally, FDR -- who was associated with the Rockefeller branch of the Roosevelts -- used the New Deal and especially its SEC "reforms" to defeat the Morgans, and they eventually became simply junior partners in a Rockefeller-dominated Establishment, an important part of which was the CFR.
"Constructive Accord"
John F. Campbell explained the facts of life in New York magazine in 1971: "Practically every lawyer, banker, professor, general, journalist, and bureaucrat who has had any influence on the foreign policy of the last six Presidents -- from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon -- has spent some time" in the CFR headquarters in New York. The members have "been pretty much running things in this country for the last 25 years," and "know it."
The CFR had announced in 1919 that it would be a "Board of Invention [to] cooperate with government and all existing international agencies to bring them into constructive accord" -- constructive from the standpoint of interests like the Morgans and the Rockefellers, that is. And it was very effective. It engineered FDR's domestic fascism and the entry of the U.S. into World War II, and planned such postwar internationalist schemes as the Marshall Plan, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund -- all of which benefited the power elite.
U.S. News & World Report recalled how, after World War I, "it was clear that the nation needed cosmopolitan statesmen" who could help guide America into the age of global politics. And "well-educated bluebloods like W. Averell Harriman" fit the bill. "Early internationalists at a time when the United States was, for the first time, looking beyond its own parochial interests, a network of like-minded men -- many of them lifelong friends and colleagues -- surfaced in the years leading up to World War II, stayed on through the conflagration, and became the architects of the post-war period. Their names -- Harriman, John J. McCloy, Robert A. Lovett, James Forrestal -- became internationally famous."
These were "the men who planned the reconstruction of Germany and Japan, who founded the United Nations and established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank -- and mulled it all over at the Council on Foreign Relations even when they held no formal government jobs." After one meeting at the CFR, "that celebrated Old Boy McCloy turned to the group [and asked] 'Which one of us is going to tell [Secretary of State Dean Acheson] what we decided?'"
The Trilateral Commission
The one drawback of the CFR, from the Establishment perspective, was that it was solely a U.S. group. But David Rockefeller remedied that defect in 1973 when he established the Trilateral Commission. Rockefeller founded the TC as an alliance of the ruling elites of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. The members include about 300 politicians, bankers, businessmen, and academics from the three geographic areas. An early and highly influential member was George Bush.
"The public and leaders of most countries," said a TC report in 1977, "continue to live in a mental universe which no longer exists -- a world of separate nations -- and have great difficulties thinking in terms of global perspective and interdependence." The idea of a "separation between the political and economic realm is obsolete: issues related to economics are at the heart of modern politics."
The TC selected the then-obscure Jimmy Carter as a member, and promoted him for president. He in turn filled his administration with Trilateralist appointees, including Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security advisor. A Commission document written by Brzezinski, its first executive director, noted that "every effective international system requires a custodian." Today's custodian must be a "transnational elite composed of international businessmen, scholars, and public officials" unhampered by "national concerns."
Samuel Huntington of Harvard -- another Trilateralist academic -- noted in another TC publication that "Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers." But this is no longer possible, since the people now question the "legitimacy of hierarchy, coercion, discipline, secrecy, and deception," the "attributes of the process of government." Unfortunately, the American people "no longer felt the compulsion to obey" those of "superior rank."
Rockefeller's Man
George Bush is, of course, a leading member of the Establishment. His father was Prescott Bush, a wealthy Wall Street investment banker and later a Senator from Connecticut, who helped steal the 1952 Republican presidential nomination from Senator Bob Taft. The Rockefeller family helped fund George Bush's 1980 and 1988 presidential efforts. As Rockefeller said in 1979, "He's my man!"
Because the TC and the CFR were controversial in conservative circles, Bush, to prepare for his 1980 campaign, ostensibly resigned from the CFR and the TC. However, as Rockefeller told the Washington Post, the President "has since spoken to the Council and the Trilateral and has been fully supportive." Bush was his candidate, said Rockefeller, because he was in a "better position than anyone else to pull together the people in the country who believe that we are in fact living in One World and have to act that way."
Two of the TC members who help Bush "act that way" are Lawrence S. Eagleburger, number two man in the State Department, and Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor. Before Bush was elected, they got rich at Kissinger Associates -- where each made about a million dollars a year supplying insider information to multinational firms. In an interview with the Washington Post, Scowcroft -- who was described by Kissinger, who ought to know, as "one of those rare men whose real ambition is to serve their country selflessly" -- was asked if he were "one of the Wise Men, a member of the mysterious brotherhood that we call 'the Establishment'?" "Yeah, I think so," answered Scowcroft, amazing the reporter, since "no member of the Establishment" is supposed to "admit either the existence of an Establishment or his membership in it."
Zbigniew Brzezinski was also candid in his comments at a recent editorial lunch at the Washington Times. "Zbig," began editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, "I've been getting a lot of flack because I belong to the Council on Foreign Relations. People think it's some sort of conspiracy. I imagine you get the same crazy letters about your membership in the Trilateral. Why don't you explain to us exactly what the Commission is." "Well, Arnaud," answered Brzezinski in his thick Polish accent, "it brings together the elites of the industrialized world to try to plan the future." Exactly.
(Recently, a prominent D.C.-based conservative leader, after being praised by a TC columnist in The Washington Post [always a bad sign], was invited to New York by David Rockefeller. "What do conservatives think of me?" asked Rockefeller. "They think you're pulling a lot of strings to make the government act in your interests," said the conservative. "They're right!" Rockefeller is reported to have answered with a laugh.)
New World Currency
The best way to learn what the Establishment has in mind for us is to read its own -- CFR, Trilateralist, and Wall Street -- documents. Recently, Shearson Lehman Hutton issued a wish list written by David Lipschitz: "The establishment of the new world currency, the 'monnet,' occurred in 1996," he wrote. "All national currencies were converted at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1996." The new currency was "backed by the debt of the World Bank," which had the power to tax Americans. "Five trillion monnets have helped finance the economic development of the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, and Third-World countries."
"Since the checkless, cashless society became a reality in 1998," Lipschitz continued in his grim financial fantasy, "the International Debit Card" has "virtually eliminated black market activities" and "tax fraud." "The computer system that drives the world's financial system is housed in Basle, Switzerland," in the former Bank for International Settlements, now called the "Bank for Global Settlements." According to the Lipschitzian vision, "Everyone has been given an International Debit Card, and their fingerprints are digitally encoded on the card. Universal Transaction Terminals automatically compare a card's digital fingerprint with the fingerprint of the individual making the transaction."
Note that the first priority in facilitating German reunification has been to make the West German mark the common currency. As the Washington Post put it: "The real point is that a common currency means one common country, and all else is details to be filled in later." That's why the Establishment is pushing for a world currency.
The Trilateralist World Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. recently filled in some of the details in an important article by Walter Russell Mead: "An international system" requires globalist intervention, he said. "Progress [is] almost inconceivable without an expansion in the numbers of international economic organizations, an extension of their mandates, and a proportionate increase in their resources." As a result of such progress, Mead noted, the United States will have much "less power."
Along with global trade and fiscal bureaucracies, Mead proposed a global central bank and a world currency, which he called the "bancor," Keynes's old term. "The International Bank would generate new bancors and distribute them where they would do good." Eventually, the bancor would "replace" the dollar, the yen, and the ecu (the coming common European currency) as "the preferred unit of account and settlement in international transactions."
According to Mead, "Nations would no longer take turns as the locomotive of world growth, but we would all pay a share of the international locomotive's fuel bill and we would all ride in the train." The New York Times calls all this "persuasive." But the banksters and politicians would be driving the train, and the American taxpayer would be strapped to the tracks.
Single Policy, Single Authority
Another Trilateralist outfit in D.C. is the Institute for International Economics (IIE), whose board even includes David Rockefeller himself. It is, says Business Week, "Washington's most influential think tank on the hot issues of world economics." The day after Trilateralist Bush won the White House, IIE published America in the World Economy: A Strategy for the 1990s by C. Fred Bergsten. Bergsten, the head of IIE, is a top Trilateral economist and former high government official under Carter. Bergsten says that "the globalization of markets has outrun the ability of governments to cope." His answer? World government.
The key ingredient is a world central bank and currency, starting with the "creation of a European central bank and a common currency," plus a big increase in government spending; new consumption taxes; and $200 billion a year more in foreign aid from the West to the "15 heavily indebted countries of the Third World."
In the appropriate year of 1984, Richard Cooper described in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the CFR, "A Monetary System for the Future." Cooper -- professor of international economics at Harvard, former high government official, and member of the CFR and the TC -- also urged "the creation of a common currency for all the industrial countries, with a common monetary policy and a joint Bank of Issue to determine that monetary policy." The first step is for "the United States, Japan, and the members of the European Community to unite." Before that can happen, Western Europe must be united in one government with one currency and central bank. This is the much publicized "1992." A key part of the plan is the new European currency, the ecu.
Monetary Union of Europe
The European Currency Unit (ecu) is a weighted mix of ten currencies: the German deutsche mark, the Belgian franc, the Dutch guilder, the British pound, the Italian lira, the French franc, the Irish punt, the Danish krone, the Luxembourg franc, and the Greek drachma. Plans to make the ecu the only European currency went into high gear in November 1987, just after the stock-market crash. The planners were seizing the moment because crises are always prime time for governments and central bankers to increase their control. Socialist French President François Mitterrand called for the creation of a European central bank to manage a common European currency. "The logic of developments would demand that the European currency takes over from the national ones," he said. When asked about details and explanations, he insisted that no one should worry. "Discussions among experts" will solve all problems.
Mitterrand's announcement wasn't an isolated event. Bankers and government officials from all over Europe joined in, and leaders in the European Community formed a Trilateral subgroup to spearhead the move toward the European central bank and the monopoly ecu. The TC subsidiary pushing the ecu is the Action Committee for Europe, founded by Jean Monnet, also the founder of the EC, and directed by Max Kohnstamm, a member of the TC. Trilateralists from all over Europe comprise the rest of the Action Committee membership.
Just as with the Federal Reserve in 1913, the people promoting the European central bank want to create the appearance of an independent institution for what will in reality be a cartel of elite bankers working in collusion with government at the expense of the public. The new European central bank will have a board of governors chosen by the twelve central banks of the European Community. These former national central banks will become like the local Federal Reserve branches in the U.S.
Another Trilateralist subgroup also sprang into action, the Association for the Monetary Union of Europe. Not only did it call for the ecu to replace existing national currencies and for all European central banks to combine into one; it urged corporate, banking, and government leaders to promote a world currency issued by a world central bank. Leaders in both these groups include such top TC members as Giovanni Agnelli of Fiat and Gaston Thorn of the European Movement.
The Joy of Inflation
There are three reasons why these corporate statists want the ecu and the European central bank: 1) to cut their accounting and transaction costs; 2) to reduce the competitive risk to their established position; and 3) to get preferred borrowing rates from the new central bank, and the first access to new rounds of ecu inflationary money. When the new European central bank begins to issue ecus, whoever gets them first benefits -- as in any inflation -- at the expense of those who get them last. The ecu is now traded officially in all the financial centers of Europe, and it is quoted on the front pages of all the major financial publications in Europe. U.S. investors can trade ecu options on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, European banks offer ecu checking accounts, and American Express offers ecu-denominated credit cards.
After the U.S. financial panic of 1907, the banking elite was united on the goal of having the government cartelize the industry, so they could all inflate together and profit from the inflation, as well as bar future competition. It took six more years to accomplish because they had to develop a strategy for selling the idea to the public, which included phony grass-roots lobbying efforts and academic journals filled with Rockefeller-funded scholarship about the need for centralization. In 1913, the big banks got what they wanted: the Federal Reserve System.
In Europe, the big banks still have to deal with 12 different national monetary policies. How much easier it would be if they operated as one big conglomerate, inflating the ecu to the hilt, and transferring the cost to the entire public of Western Europe. That is why bankers from London, Paris, Bonn, and other European financial centers have made the establishment of a European central bank their top priority. Financial Executive reports that, "through the Association's evolving network, financial executives in Europe, Japan, and the United States are feeling the impact of the ecu -- and are learning how to utilize the currency to their own advantage."
Premeditated Merger
In a few years, if all goes according to plan, three central banks and their respective currencies will dominate the world economy: the Federal Reserve and the dollar, the European central bank and the ecu, and the Bank of Japan and the yen. That's when the plan to merge all three into one world central bank to issue a single world currency will go into high gear. The real goal of the TC goes beyond this, of course. It wants to merge the U.S., Japan, and Europe into a world state.
Edouard Balladur, finance minister of France, proposed in the Wall Street Journal in 1988 "that the international community entrust a small group of distinguished people of unquestionable moral authority -- who have proven their economic, monetary and financial competence -- with the task of lighting the way." We must have "a world order accepted by all and binding on all." Added TC member and former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt: "Nobody is in charge, and this is very dangerous."
The influential British weekly The Economist has run a cover story on the coming one-world currency, which they named the phoenix: "Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same currency. Prices will be quoted not in dollars, yen or D-marks but in, let's say, the phoenix."
Ever since John Maynard Keynes and communist Harry Dexter White plotted it at the post-World War II Bretton Woods monetary conference, a world central bank -- under the firm control of the power elite -- has been a statist dream. Such a bank could coordinate worldwide inflation to benefit the Establishment and serve as a way station on the road to world government. The Establishment won't be happy until it saddles Europe and the U.S. with this monstrosity. The only defense is for us to attack directly the existence of the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, showing how much damage it does -- and, by extension, how bad a global equivalent would be.
Lew Rockwell | The New American
June 4, 1990
In an interventionist economy like ours, with big government and its special interest groups dedicated full-time to transferring money and power from the people to Washington and its friends, the political talk is inevitably of the public interest, the common good, the national security. But the real issues are always cash and control. In analyzing any government action, therefore, we should ask who's getting the money and the power, and at whose expense. Such analysis is painted as disreputable by the government and its kept intellectuals in the media and the universities. But it is the only way to see through the smokescreen that is generated to fool us in Washington.
"Why Don't They Trust Me?"
In an intriguing 1980 article published in Playboy, for example, leftist Robert Scheer noted that Ronald Reagan was "viewed with suspicion by the elite Northeastern wing of the Republican Party." They thought he might "actually believe in some of his proposals for dismantling the federal government, which, after all, does serve the interests of big corporations." Reagan's talk about the gold standard was "viewed as primitive" by the people associated with "David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank." Also worried were the "managers of multinational corporations" who have "done quite well" in the present system. "Those gentlemen are internationalists par excellence," more "interested in cutting deals with the Russians than in a holy crusade against them."
"Prior to the New Hampshire primary," wrote Scheer, "David Rockefeller convened a secret meeting" to stop "Reagan by supporting Bush and, failing that, getting Gerald Ford into the race." Upon hearing of the meeting, Reagan asked an aide: "What have they got against me? I support big oil, I support big business, why don't they trust me?" To ensure that trust, he appointed William Casey, a senior member of the CFR, as his campaign director. Casey, a CIA operative and Wall Street lawyer who later headed the CIA for Reagan, worried especially about one Reagan answer to a reporter's question: The Carter Administration, Reagan said, "beginning with the President and Vice-President," has had about "19 of its top appointees" from "the Trilateral Commission," which is "devoted to international banking, multinational corporations, and so forth." Reagan said that no "administration of the U.S. government should have the top 19 positions filled by people from any one group or organization representing one viewpoint." He added: "I would go in a different direction."
A few months later, under Casey's direction, Reagan had brought in a team of advisors from the CFR and the TC, and picked the ultimate Rockefeller Republican, George Bush, as his running mate. In his administration, he appointed such Trilateralists as Howard Baker and Alan Greenspan, and even hosted a meeting of the TC in the White House. Reagan would never have to ask again: "What do they have against me?"
Rockefeller vs. Morgan
A free market benefits consumers and the economy -- but not necessarily particular business interests. However, as John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and his Standard Oil associates learned early on, an interventionist government can provide special privileges for favored corporations at the expense of competitors and consumers. At first the Rockefeller family concentrated on America, but, as it soon began to operate overseas (it now has interests in 125 countries), it also sought to influence U.S. foreign policy. One key means to this end is the Council on Foreign Relations.
Created after World War I by J.P. Morgan and his associates, the CFR is a crucial part of that Establishment whose members dominate so much of high finance, elite universities, big foundations, the national media, and economic and foreign policy. From the administration of William McKinley through that of Franklin Roosevelt, government policy was a mighty battleground for the Rockefeller and the Morgan interests. For example, Teddy Roosevelt -- who was allied closely with the Morgan interests -- had a doctrine of good trusts and bad trusts, the latter of which should be broken up by the government. Upon examination, it's easy to see that Roosevelt was motivated by something other than liberal antitrust theory. The good trusts -- such as U.S. Steel -- were Morgan-owned, while the bad ones -- like Standard Oil -- were Rockefeller-owned, and TR succeeded in breaking up Standard Oil.
Sometimes both forces agreed, as on the monstrous scheming that led to U.S. entry into World War I, the destruction of Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia, and the opening of the way for Hitler and Lenin. But mostly they fought. Despite the breakup of Standard Oil, the Rockefellers gradually won more battles, especially as the railroads -- the basis of the Morgan empire -- became less important economically. Finally, FDR -- who was associated with the Rockefeller branch of the Roosevelts -- used the New Deal and especially its SEC "reforms" to defeat the Morgans, and they eventually became simply junior partners in a Rockefeller-dominated Establishment, an important part of which was the CFR.
"Constructive Accord"
John F. Campbell explained the facts of life in New York magazine in 1971: "Practically every lawyer, banker, professor, general, journalist, and bureaucrat who has had any influence on the foreign policy of the last six Presidents -- from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon -- has spent some time" in the CFR headquarters in New York. The members have "been pretty much running things in this country for the last 25 years," and "know it."
The CFR had announced in 1919 that it would be a "Board of Invention [to] cooperate with government and all existing international agencies to bring them into constructive accord" -- constructive from the standpoint of interests like the Morgans and the Rockefellers, that is. And it was very effective. It engineered FDR's domestic fascism and the entry of the U.S. into World War II, and planned such postwar internationalist schemes as the Marshall Plan, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund -- all of which benefited the power elite.
U.S. News & World Report recalled how, after World War I, "it was clear that the nation needed cosmopolitan statesmen" who could help guide America into the age of global politics. And "well-educated bluebloods like W. Averell Harriman" fit the bill. "Early internationalists at a time when the United States was, for the first time, looking beyond its own parochial interests, a network of like-minded men -- many of them lifelong friends and colleagues -- surfaced in the years leading up to World War II, stayed on through the conflagration, and became the architects of the post-war period. Their names -- Harriman, John J. McCloy, Robert A. Lovett, James Forrestal -- became internationally famous."
These were "the men who planned the reconstruction of Germany and Japan, who founded the United Nations and established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank -- and mulled it all over at the Council on Foreign Relations even when they held no formal government jobs." After one meeting at the CFR, "that celebrated Old Boy McCloy turned to the group [and asked] 'Which one of us is going to tell [Secretary of State Dean Acheson] what we decided?'"
The Trilateral Commission
The one drawback of the CFR, from the Establishment perspective, was that it was solely a U.S. group. But David Rockefeller remedied that defect in 1973 when he established the Trilateral Commission. Rockefeller founded the TC as an alliance of the ruling elites of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. The members include about 300 politicians, bankers, businessmen, and academics from the three geographic areas. An early and highly influential member was George Bush.
"The public and leaders of most countries," said a TC report in 1977, "continue to live in a mental universe which no longer exists -- a world of separate nations -- and have great difficulties thinking in terms of global perspective and interdependence." The idea of a "separation between the political and economic realm is obsolete: issues related to economics are at the heart of modern politics."
The TC selected the then-obscure Jimmy Carter as a member, and promoted him for president. He in turn filled his administration with Trilateralist appointees, including Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security advisor. A Commission document written by Brzezinski, its first executive director, noted that "every effective international system requires a custodian." Today's custodian must be a "transnational elite composed of international businessmen, scholars, and public officials" unhampered by "national concerns."
Samuel Huntington of Harvard -- another Trilateralist academic -- noted in another TC publication that "Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers." But this is no longer possible, since the people now question the "legitimacy of hierarchy, coercion, discipline, secrecy, and deception," the "attributes of the process of government." Unfortunately, the American people "no longer felt the compulsion to obey" those of "superior rank."
Rockefeller's Man
George Bush is, of course, a leading member of the Establishment. His father was Prescott Bush, a wealthy Wall Street investment banker and later a Senator from Connecticut, who helped steal the 1952 Republican presidential nomination from Senator Bob Taft. The Rockefeller family helped fund George Bush's 1980 and 1988 presidential efforts. As Rockefeller said in 1979, "He's my man!"
Because the TC and the CFR were controversial in conservative circles, Bush, to prepare for his 1980 campaign, ostensibly resigned from the CFR and the TC. However, as Rockefeller told the Washington Post, the President "has since spoken to the Council and the Trilateral and has been fully supportive." Bush was his candidate, said Rockefeller, because he was in a "better position than anyone else to pull together the people in the country who believe that we are in fact living in One World and have to act that way."
Two of the TC members who help Bush "act that way" are Lawrence S. Eagleburger, number two man in the State Department, and Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor. Before Bush was elected, they got rich at Kissinger Associates -- where each made about a million dollars a year supplying insider information to multinational firms. In an interview with the Washington Post, Scowcroft -- who was described by Kissinger, who ought to know, as "one of those rare men whose real ambition is to serve their country selflessly" -- was asked if he were "one of the Wise Men, a member of the mysterious brotherhood that we call 'the Establishment'?" "Yeah, I think so," answered Scowcroft, amazing the reporter, since "no member of the Establishment" is supposed to "admit either the existence of an Establishment or his membership in it."
Zbigniew Brzezinski was also candid in his comments at a recent editorial lunch at the Washington Times. "Zbig," began editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, "I've been getting a lot of flack because I belong to the Council on Foreign Relations. People think it's some sort of conspiracy. I imagine you get the same crazy letters about your membership in the Trilateral. Why don't you explain to us exactly what the Commission is." "Well, Arnaud," answered Brzezinski in his thick Polish accent, "it brings together the elites of the industrialized world to try to plan the future." Exactly.
(Recently, a prominent D.C.-based conservative leader, after being praised by a TC columnist in The Washington Post [always a bad sign], was invited to New York by David Rockefeller. "What do conservatives think of me?" asked Rockefeller. "They think you're pulling a lot of strings to make the government act in your interests," said the conservative. "They're right!" Rockefeller is reported to have answered with a laugh.)
New World Currency
The best way to learn what the Establishment has in mind for us is to read its own -- CFR, Trilateralist, and Wall Street -- documents. Recently, Shearson Lehman Hutton issued a wish list written by David Lipschitz: "The establishment of the new world currency, the 'monnet,' occurred in 1996," he wrote. "All national currencies were converted at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1996." The new currency was "backed by the debt of the World Bank," which had the power to tax Americans. "Five trillion monnets have helped finance the economic development of the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, and Third-World countries."
"Since the checkless, cashless society became a reality in 1998," Lipschitz continued in his grim financial fantasy, "the International Debit Card" has "virtually eliminated black market activities" and "tax fraud." "The computer system that drives the world's financial system is housed in Basle, Switzerland," in the former Bank for International Settlements, now called the "Bank for Global Settlements." According to the Lipschitzian vision, "Everyone has been given an International Debit Card, and their fingerprints are digitally encoded on the card. Universal Transaction Terminals automatically compare a card's digital fingerprint with the fingerprint of the individual making the transaction."
Note that the first priority in facilitating German reunification has been to make the West German mark the common currency. As the Washington Post put it: "The real point is that a common currency means one common country, and all else is details to be filled in later." That's why the Establishment is pushing for a world currency.
The Trilateralist World Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. recently filled in some of the details in an important article by Walter Russell Mead: "An international system" requires globalist intervention, he said. "Progress [is] almost inconceivable without an expansion in the numbers of international economic organizations, an extension of their mandates, and a proportionate increase in their resources." As a result of such progress, Mead noted, the United States will have much "less power."
Along with global trade and fiscal bureaucracies, Mead proposed a global central bank and a world currency, which he called the "bancor," Keynes's old term. "The International Bank would generate new bancors and distribute them where they would do good." Eventually, the bancor would "replace" the dollar, the yen, and the ecu (the coming common European currency) as "the preferred unit of account and settlement in international transactions."
According to Mead, "Nations would no longer take turns as the locomotive of world growth, but we would all pay a share of the international locomotive's fuel bill and we would all ride in the train." The New York Times calls all this "persuasive." But the banksters and politicians would be driving the train, and the American taxpayer would be strapped to the tracks.
Single Policy, Single Authority
Another Trilateralist outfit in D.C. is the Institute for International Economics (IIE), whose board even includes David Rockefeller himself. It is, says Business Week, "Washington's most influential think tank on the hot issues of world economics." The day after Trilateralist Bush won the White House, IIE published America in the World Economy: A Strategy for the 1990s by C. Fred Bergsten. Bergsten, the head of IIE, is a top Trilateral economist and former high government official under Carter. Bergsten says that "the globalization of markets has outrun the ability of governments to cope." His answer? World government.
The key ingredient is a world central bank and currency, starting with the "creation of a European central bank and a common currency," plus a big increase in government spending; new consumption taxes; and $200 billion a year more in foreign aid from the West to the "15 heavily indebted countries of the Third World."
In the appropriate year of 1984, Richard Cooper described in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the CFR, "A Monetary System for the Future." Cooper -- professor of international economics at Harvard, former high government official, and member of the CFR and the TC -- also urged "the creation of a common currency for all the industrial countries, with a common monetary policy and a joint Bank of Issue to determine that monetary policy." The first step is for "the United States, Japan, and the members of the European Community to unite." Before that can happen, Western Europe must be united in one government with one currency and central bank. This is the much publicized "1992." A key part of the plan is the new European currency, the ecu.
Monetary Union of Europe
The European Currency Unit (ecu) is a weighted mix of ten currencies: the German deutsche mark, the Belgian franc, the Dutch guilder, the British pound, the Italian lira, the French franc, the Irish punt, the Danish krone, the Luxembourg franc, and the Greek drachma. Plans to make the ecu the only European currency went into high gear in November 1987, just after the stock-market crash. The planners were seizing the moment because crises are always prime time for governments and central bankers to increase their control. Socialist French President François Mitterrand called for the creation of a European central bank to manage a common European currency. "The logic of developments would demand that the European currency takes over from the national ones," he said. When asked about details and explanations, he insisted that no one should worry. "Discussions among experts" will solve all problems.
Mitterrand's announcement wasn't an isolated event. Bankers and government officials from all over Europe joined in, and leaders in the European Community formed a Trilateral subgroup to spearhead the move toward the European central bank and the monopoly ecu. The TC subsidiary pushing the ecu is the Action Committee for Europe, founded by Jean Monnet, also the founder of the EC, and directed by Max Kohnstamm, a member of the TC. Trilateralists from all over Europe comprise the rest of the Action Committee membership.
Just as with the Federal Reserve in 1913, the people promoting the European central bank want to create the appearance of an independent institution for what will in reality be a cartel of elite bankers working in collusion with government at the expense of the public. The new European central bank will have a board of governors chosen by the twelve central banks of the European Community. These former national central banks will become like the local Federal Reserve branches in the U.S.
Another Trilateralist subgroup also sprang into action, the Association for the Monetary Union of Europe. Not only did it call for the ecu to replace existing national currencies and for all European central banks to combine into one; it urged corporate, banking, and government leaders to promote a world currency issued by a world central bank. Leaders in both these groups include such top TC members as Giovanni Agnelli of Fiat and Gaston Thorn of the European Movement.
The Joy of Inflation
There are three reasons why these corporate statists want the ecu and the European central bank: 1) to cut their accounting and transaction costs; 2) to reduce the competitive risk to their established position; and 3) to get preferred borrowing rates from the new central bank, and the first access to new rounds of ecu inflationary money. When the new European central bank begins to issue ecus, whoever gets them first benefits -- as in any inflation -- at the expense of those who get them last. The ecu is now traded officially in all the financial centers of Europe, and it is quoted on the front pages of all the major financial publications in Europe. U.S. investors can trade ecu options on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, European banks offer ecu checking accounts, and American Express offers ecu-denominated credit cards.
After the U.S. financial panic of 1907, the banking elite was united on the goal of having the government cartelize the industry, so they could all inflate together and profit from the inflation, as well as bar future competition. It took six more years to accomplish because they had to develop a strategy for selling the idea to the public, which included phony grass-roots lobbying efforts and academic journals filled with Rockefeller-funded scholarship about the need for centralization. In 1913, the big banks got what they wanted: the Federal Reserve System.
In Europe, the big banks still have to deal with 12 different national monetary policies. How much easier it would be if they operated as one big conglomerate, inflating the ecu to the hilt, and transferring the cost to the entire public of Western Europe. That is why bankers from London, Paris, Bonn, and other European financial centers have made the establishment of a European central bank their top priority. Financial Executive reports that, "through the Association's evolving network, financial executives in Europe, Japan, and the United States are feeling the impact of the ecu -- and are learning how to utilize the currency to their own advantage."
Premeditated Merger
In a few years, if all goes according to plan, three central banks and their respective currencies will dominate the world economy: the Federal Reserve and the dollar, the European central bank and the ecu, and the Bank of Japan and the yen. That's when the plan to merge all three into one world central bank to issue a single world currency will go into high gear. The real goal of the TC goes beyond this, of course. It wants to merge the U.S., Japan, and Europe into a world state.
Edouard Balladur, finance minister of France, proposed in the Wall Street Journal in 1988 "that the international community entrust a small group of distinguished people of unquestionable moral authority -- who have proven their economic, monetary and financial competence -- with the task of lighting the way." We must have "a world order accepted by all and binding on all." Added TC member and former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt: "Nobody is in charge, and this is very dangerous."
The influential British weekly The Economist has run a cover story on the coming one-world currency, which they named the phoenix: "Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same currency. Prices will be quoted not in dollars, yen or D-marks but in, let's say, the phoenix."
Ever since John Maynard Keynes and communist Harry Dexter White plotted it at the post-World War II Bretton Woods monetary conference, a world central bank -- under the firm control of the power elite -- has been a statist dream. Such a bank could coordinate worldwide inflation to benefit the Establishment and serve as a way station on the road to world government. The Establishment won't be happy until it saddles Europe and the U.S. with this monstrosity. The only defense is for us to attack directly the existence of the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve, showing how much damage it does -- and, by extension, how bad a global equivalent would be.
