So, who runs
the world? It’s a question that people have struggled with since
people began to struggle. It’s certainly a question with many interpretations,
and incites answers of many varied perspectives.
Often, it is
relegated to the realm of “conspiracy theory,” in that, those who
discuss this question or propose answers to it, are purveyors of
a conspiratorial view of the world. However, it is my intention
to discard the labels, which seek to disprove a position without
actually proving anything to the contrary. One of these labels –
“conspiracy theorist” – does just that: it’s very application to
a particular perspective or viewpoint has the intention of “disproving
without proof;” all that is needed is to simply apply the label.
What I intend
to do is analyse the social structure of the transnational ruling
class, the international elite, who together run the world. This
is not a conspiratorial opinion piece, but is an examination of
the socially constructed elite class of people; what is the nature
of power, how does it get used, and who holds it?
A Historical Understanding of Power
In answering
the question “Who Runs the World?” we must understand what positions
within society hold the most power, and thus, the answer becomes
clear. If we simply understand this as heads of state, the answer
will be flawed and inaccurate. We must examine the globe as a whole,
and the power structures of the global political economy.
The greatest
position of power within the global capitalist system lies in the
authority of money-creation: the central banking system. The central
banking system, originating in 1694 in England, consists of an international
network of central banks that are privately owned by wealthy shareholders
and are granted governmental authority to print and issue a nation’s
currency, and set interest rates, collecting revenue and making
profit through the interest charged. Central banks give loans to
both governments and industries, controlling both simultaneously.
The ultimate centre of power in the central banking system is at
the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), in Basle, Switzerland;
which is the central bank to the world’s central banks, and is also
a private bank owned by the world’s central banks.
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As Georgetown
University history professor Carroll Quigley wrote:
[T]he
powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing
less than to create a world system of financial control in private
hands able to dominate the political system of each country and
the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled
in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting
in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private
meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank
for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank
owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves
private corporations.1
The central
banks, and thus the central banking system as a whole, is a privately
owned system in which the major shareholders are powerful international
banking houses. These international banking houses emerged in tandem
with the evolution of the central banking system. The central banking
system first emerged in London, and expanded across Europe with
time. With that expansion, the European banking houses also rose
and expanded across the continent.
The French
Revolution resulted with Napoleon coming to power, who granted the
French bankers a central bank of France, which they privately controlled.2
It was also out of the French Revolution that one of the major banking
houses of the world emerged, the Rothschilds. Emerging out of a
European Jewish ghetto, the Rothschilds quickly rose to the forefront
in banking, and established banking houses in London, Paris, Frankfurt,
Vienna and Naples, allowing them to profit off of all sides in the
Napoleonic wars.3
As Carroll
Quigley wrote in his monumental Tragedy
and Hope, “The merchant bankers of London had already at
hand in 1810-1850 the Stock Exchange, the Bank of England, and the
London money market,” and that:
In
time they brought into their financial network the provincial banking
centres, organised as commercial banks and savings banks, as well
as insurance companies, to form all of these into a single financial
system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity
and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control,
governments on one side and industries on the other.4
At the same
time, in the United States, we saw the emergence of a powerful group
of bankers and industrialists, such as the Morgans, Astors, Vanderbilts,
Rockefellers, and Carnegies, and they created massive industrial
monopolies and oligopolies throughout the 19th century.5
These banking interests were very close to and allied with the powerful
European banking houses.
The European,
and particularly the British elites of the time, were beginning
to organise their power in an effort to properly exert their influence
internationally. At this time, European empires were engaging in
the Scramble for Africa, in which nearly the entire continent of
Africa, save Ethiopia, was colonised and carved up by European nations.
One notable imperialist was Cecil Rhodes who made his fortune from
diamond and gold mining in Africa with financial support from the
Rothschilds,6 and “at that time [had] the biggest concentration
of financial capital in the world.”7
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Cecil Rhodes
was also known for his radical views regarding America, particularly
in that he would “talk with total seriousness of ‘the ultimate recovery
of the United States of America as an integral part of the British
Empire’.”8 Rhodes saw himself not simply as a moneymaker,
but primarily as an “empire builder.”
As Carroll
Quigley explained, in 1891 three British elites met with the intent
to create a secret society. The three men were Cecil Rhodes, William
T. Stead, a prominent journalist of the day, and Reginald Baliol
Brett, a “friend and confidant of Queen Victoria, and later to be
the most influential adviser of King Edward VII and King George
V.” Within this secret society, “real power was to be exercised
by the leader, and a ‘Junta of Three.’ The leader was to be Rhodes,
and the Junta was to be Stead, Brett, and Alfred Milner.”9
The purpose
of this secret society, which was later headed by Alfred Milner,
was: “The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting
of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonisation
by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood
are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise… [with]
the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral
part of a British Empire.” [Emphasis added]10 Essentially,
it outlined a British-led cosmopolitical world order, one global
system of governance under British hegemony. Among key players within
this group were the Rothschilds and other banking interests.11
After the 1907
banking panic in the US, instigated by JP Morgan, pressure was placed
upon the American political establishment to create a “stable” banking
system. In 1910, a secret meeting of financiers was held on Jekyll
Island, where they planned for the “creation of a National Reserve
Association with fifteen major regions, controlled by a board of
commercial bankers but empowered by the federal government to act
like a central bank – creating money and lending reserves to private
banks.”12
It was largely
Paul M. Warburg, a Wall Street investment banker, who “had come
up with a design for a single central bank [in 1910]. He called
it the United Reserve Bank. From this and his later service on the
first Federal Reserve Board, Warburg has, with some justice, been
called the father of the System.”13 President Woodrow Wilson
followed the plan almost exactly as outlined by the Wall Street
financiers, and added to it the creation of a Federal Reserve Board
in Washington, which the President would appoint.14
Thus, true
power in the world order was held by international banking houses,
which privately owned the global central banking system, allowing
them to control the credit of nations, and finance and control governments
and industry.
However, though
the economic system was firmly in their control, allowing them to
establish influence over finance, they needed to shape elite ideology
accordingly. In effect, what was required was to socially construct
a ruling class, internationally, which would serve their interests.
To do this, these bankers set out to undertake a project of establishing
think tanks to organise elites from politics, economics, academia,
media, and the military into a generally cohesive and controllable
ideology.
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Constructing a Ruling Class: Rise of the Think Tanks
During World
War I, a group of American scholars were tasked with briefing “Woodrow
Wilson about options for the postwar world once the Kaiser and imperial
Germany fell to defeat.” This group was called, “The Inquiry.” The
group advised Wilson mostly through his trusted aide, Col. Edward
M. House, who was Wilson’s “unofficial envoy to Europe during the
period between the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the intervention
by the United States in 1917,” and was the prime driving force in
the Wilson administration behind the establishment of the Federal
Reserve System.15
“The Inquiry”
laid the foundations for the creation of the Council on Foreign
Relations (CFR), the most powerful think tank in the US and, “The
scholars of the Inquiry helped draw the borders of post World War
I central Europe.” On May 30, 1919, a group of scholars and diplomats
from Britain and the US met at the Hotel Majestic, where they “proposed
a permanent Anglo-American Institute of International Affairs, with
one branch in London, the other in New York.” When the scholars
returned from Paris, they were met with open arms by New York lawyers
and financiers, and together they formed the Council on Foreign
Relations in 1921. The “British diplomats returning from Paris had
made great headway in founding their Royal Institute of International
Affairs.” The Anglo-American Institute envisioned in Paris, with
two branches and combined membership was not feasible, so both the
British and American branches retained national membership, however,
they would cooperate closely with one another.16 They were
referred to, and still are, as “Sister Institutes.”17
The Milner
Group, the secret society formed by Cecil Rhodes, “dominated the
British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great
deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations
and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of
International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it.”18
There were
other groups founded in many countries representing the same interests
of the secret Milner Group, and they came to be known as the Round
Table Groups, preeminent among them were the Royal Institute of
International Affairs (Chatham House), the Council on Foreign Relations
in the United States, and parallel groups were set up in Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India.19
These were,
in effect, the first international think tanks, which remain today,
and are in their respective nations, among the top, if not the most
prominent think tanks.
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In 2008, a
major study was done by the University of Philadelphia’s International
Relations Program – the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program
– which sought to analyse and examine the most powerful
and influential think tanks in the world. While it is a useful resource
to understanding the influence of think tanks, there is a flaw in
its analysis. It failed to take into account the international origins
of the Round Table Group think tanks, particularly the Council on
Foreign Relations in the United States; Chatham House or the Royal
Institute of International Affairs in London; the Canadian Institute
of International Affairs, now renamed the Canadian International
Council; and their respective sister organisations in India, South
Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Further nations have since added
to this group of related think tanks, including Germany, and a recently
established European Council on Foreign Relations. The report, while
putting focus on the international nature of think tanks, analysed
these ones as separate institutions without being related or affiliated.
This has, in effect, skewed the results of the study. However, it
is still useful to examine.
The top think
tanks in the United States include the Council on Foreign Relations,
(which was put at number 2, however, should be placed at the number
1 spot), the Brookings Institution, (which was inaccurately given
the position of number one), the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, RAND Corporation, Heritage Foundation, Woodrow Wilson International
Centre for Scholars, the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, and the American Enterprise Institute, among others.
The top think
tanks in the world, outside of the United States, are Chatham House
(sitting at number one), the International Institute for Strategic
Studies in the UK, the German Council on Foreign Relations, the
French Institute of International Relations, the Adam Smith Institute
in the UK, the Fraser Institute in Canada, the European Council
on Foreign Relations, the International Crisis Group in Belgium,
and the Canadian Institute of International Affairs.20
In 1954, the
Bilderberg Group was founded in the Netherlands. Every year since
then the group holds a secretive meeting, drawing roughly 130 of
the political-financial-military-academic-media elites from North
America and Western Europe as “an informal network of influential
people who could consult each other privately and confidentially.”21
Regular participants
include the CEOs or Chairmen of some of the largest corporations
in the world, oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum,
and Total SA, as well as various European monarchs, international
bankers such as David Rockefeller, major politicians, presidents,
prime ministers, and central bankers of the world.22 The
Bilderberg Group acts as a “secretive global think-tank,” with an
original intent “to link governments and economies in Europe and
North America amid the Cold War.”23
In 1970, David
Rockefeller became Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations,
while also being Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan. In 1970, an
academic who joined the Council on Foreign Relations in 1965 wrote
a book called Between
Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. The author,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, called for the formation of “A Community of
the Developed Nations,” consisting of Western Europe, the United
States and Japan. Brzezinski wrote about how “the traditional sovereignty
of nation states is becoming increasingly unglued as transnational
forces such as multinational corporations, banks, and international
organisations play a larger and larger role in shaping global politics.”
So, in 1972,
David Rockefeller and Brzezinski “presented the idea of a trilateral
grouping at the annual Bilderberg meeting.” In July of 1972, seventeen
powerful people met at David Rockefeller’s estate in New York to
plan for the creation of another grouping. Also at the meeting was
Brzezinski, McGeorge Bundy, the President of the Ford Foundation,
(brother of William Bundy, editor of Foreign Affairs) and
Bayless Manning, President of the Council on Foreign Relations.24
In 1973, these people formed the Trilateral Commission, which acted
as a sister organisation to Bilderberg, linking the elites of Western
Europe, North America, and Japan into a transnational ruling class.
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These think
tanks have effectively socially constructed an ideologically cohesive
ruling class in each nation and fostered the expansion of international
ideological alignment among national elites, allowing for the development
of a transnational ruling class sharing a dominant ideology.
These same
interests, controlled by the international banking houses, had to
socially construct society itself. To do this, they created a massive
network of tax-exempt foundations and non-profit organisations,
which shaped civil society according to their designs. Among the
most prominent of these are the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation,
and the Rockefeller Foundation.
The “Foundations” of Civil Society
These foundations
shaped civil society by financing research projects and initiatives
into major social projects, creating both a dominant world-view
for the elite classes, as well as managing the other classes.
These foundations,
since their establishment, played a large part in the funding and
organising of the eugenics movement, which helped facilitate this
racist, elitist ideology to having enormous growth and influence,
ultimately culminating in the Nazi Holocaust. From then, the word
“eugenics” had to be dropped from the ideology and philanthropy
of elites, and was replaced with new forms of eugenics policies
and concepts. Among them, genetics, population control and environmentalism.
These foundations
also funded seemingly progressive and alternative media sources
in an effort to control the opposition, and manage the resistance
to their world order, essentially making it ineffective and misguided.
The Rockefeller
Foundation was established in 1912, and immediately began giving
money to eugenics research organisations.25 Eugenics was
a pseudo-scientific and social science movement that emerged in
the late 19th century, and gained significant traction
in the first half of the 20th century. One of the founding
ideologues of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist and
cousin to Charles Darwin, wrote that eugenics “is the study of all
agencies under social control which can improve or impair the racial
quality of future generations.”26 Ultimately, it was about
the “sound” breeding of people and maintaining “purity” and “superiority”
of the blood. It was an inherently racist ideology, which saw all
non-white racial categories of people as inherently and naturally
inferior, and sought to ground these racist theories in “science.”
The vast wealth
and fortunes of the major industrialists and bankers in the United
States flowed heavily into the eugenics organisations, promoting
and expanding this racist and elitist ideology. Money from the Harriman
railroad fortune, with millions given by the Rockefeller and Carnegie
family fortunes were subsequently “devoted to sterilisation of several
hundred thousands of American ‘defectives’ annually, as a matter
of eugenics.”27
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In the United
States, 27 states passed eugenics based sterilisation laws of the
“unfit,” which ultimately led to the sterilisation of over 60,000
people. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the Carnegie and especially
the Rockefeller Foundation, funded eugenics research in Germany,
directly financing the Nazi scientists who perpetrated some of the
greatest crimes of the Holocaust.28
Following the
Holocaust, the word “eugenics” was highly discredited. Thus, these
elites who wanted to continue with the implementation of their racist
and elitist ideology desperately needed a new name for it. In 1939,
the Eugenics Records Office became known as the Genetics Record
Office.29 However, tens of thousands of Americans continued
to be sterilised throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s, the majority of
which were women.30
Edwin Black
analysed how the pseudoscience of eugenics transformed into what
we know as the science of genetics. In a 1943 edition of Eugenical
News, an article titled “Eugenics After the War,” cited Charles
Davenport, a major founder of eugenics, in his vision of “a new
mankind of biological castes with master races in control and slave
races serving them.”31
A 1946 article
in Eugenical News stated that, “Population, genetics, [and]
psychology, are the three sciences to which the eugenicist must
look for the factual material on which to build an acceptable philosophy
of eugenics and to develop and defend practical eugenics proposals.”
As Black explained, “the incremental effort to transform eugenics
into human genetics forged an entire worldwide infrastructure,”
with the founding of the Institute for Human Genetics in Copenhagen
in 1938, led by Tage Kemp, a Rockefeller Foundation eugenicist,
and was financed with money from the Rockefeller Foundation.32
Today, much
of civil society and major social projects are a product of these
foundations, and align with various new forms of eugenics. The areas
of population control and environmentalism are closely aligned and
span a broad range of intellectual avenues. The major population
control organisations emerged with funding from these various foundations,
particularly the Rockefeller foundations and philanthropies.
These organisations,
such as the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, funded major civil
society movements, such as the Civil Rights movement, in an effort
to “create a wedge between social movement activists and their unpaid
grassroots constituents, thereby facilitating professionalisation
and institutionalisation within the movement,” ultimately facilitating
a “narrowing and taming of the potential for broad dissent,” with
an aim of limiting goals to “ameliorative rather than radical change.”33
Two major organisations
in the development of the environmental movement were the Conservation
Foundation and Resources for the Future, which were founded and
funded with money from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and
helped “launch an explicitly pro-corporate approach to resource
conservation.”34 Even the World Wildlife Fund was founded
in the early 1960s by the former president of the British Eugenics
Society, and its first President was Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands,
a founding member of the Bilderberg Group.
While the environmental
movement positions people as the major problem for the earth, relating
humanity to a cancer, population control becomes a significant factor
in proposing environmental solutions.
In May of 2009,
a secret meeting of billionaire philanthropists took place in which
they sought to coordinate how to “address” the world’s environmental,
social, and industrial threats. Each billionaire at the meeting
was given 15 minutes to discuss their “preferred” cause, and then
they deliberated to create an “umbrella” cause to harness all their
interests. The end result was that the umbrella cause for which
the billionaires would aim to “give to” was population control,
which “would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental,
social and industrial threat.” Among those present at the meeting
were David Rockefeller, Jr., George Soros, Warren Buffet, Michael
Bloomberg, Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and even Oprah Winfrey.35
Conclusion
At the top
of the list of those who run the world, we have the major international
banking houses, which control the global central banking system.
From there, these dynastic banking families created an international
network of think tanks, which socialised the ruling elites of each
nation and the international community as a whole, into a cohesive
transnational elite class. The foundations they established helped
shape civil society both nationally and internationally, playing
a major part in the funding – and thus coordinating and co-opting
– of major social-political movements.
An excellent
example of one member of the top of the hierarchy of the global
elite is David Rockefeller, patriarch of the Rockefeller family.
Long serving as Chairman and CEO of Chase Manhattan bank, he revolutionised
the notion of building a truly global bank. He was also Chairman
of the Council on Foreign Relations, a founding member of Bilderberg
and the Trilateral Commission, heavily involved in the family philanthropies,
and sits atop a vast number of boards and foundations. Even Alan
Greenspan, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, said
that David Rockefeller and the CFR have, “in many respects, formulated
the foreign policy of this country.”36
In another
speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, then World Bank President
James Wolfesohn, said in 2005, in honour of David Rockefeller’s
90th birthday, that, “the person who had perhaps the
greatest influence on my life professionally in this country, and
I’m very happy to say personally there afterwards, is David Rockefeller.”
He then said, “In fact, it’s fair to say that there has been no
other single family influence greater than the Rockefeller’s in
the whole issue of globalisation and in the whole issue of addressing
the questions which, in some ways, are still before us today. And
for that David, we’re deeply grateful to you and for your own contribution
in carrying these forward in the way that you did.”37
David Rockefeller,
himself, wrote, “For more than a century ideological extremists
at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicised
incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller
family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American
political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part
of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United
States, characterising my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and
of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated
global political and economic structure – one world, if you will.
If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”38
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