nourishing obscurity

Part 2 here.  Part 3 here.

Let this series of three posts walk you through one thread in what the hell is going on right now and why people are suffering.  As each new screenshot goes up, the question is, “So what?”  Be patient because it is leading somewhere.

There are so many organizations out there – the WB, TLC, CFR, BIS, CBs, IMF and so on and so on.   Let’s take just one of these for now, the Trilateral Commission:

The last line was what they have written into their mandate.  Immediately, we get the first question – there are so many focus groups and think tanks out there that it can be bewildering.  As the deputy leader of LPUK and Norman Tebbit said recently – it’s a matter of “traction”, i.e. how influential are you?

Anyone can come out with policies, even written up in important words and professionally presented but unless they’re heeded by the mechanisms of state, they’re nowhere.  this is where marginalization comes in, as Guido found some time back when he tried to get some traction on the corruption in parliament.

You can judge for yourself, in this series of screenshots, how much traction the TLC has.  Richard N. Gardner, former US Ambassador to Spain and Italy and law professor,  founding member of the TLC, wrote, shortly after the setting up of the TLC:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, founder member of the TLC, wrote Between Two Ages, in which he supplied the ideas for the TLC whilst Rockefeller supplied the money.  Brzezinski had already concluded, by 1972, that the:

Governments never go it alone – they set up commissions [not the TLC], inquiries, they have permanent heads of departments and they refer to the leading thinktanks for their policy.  Leading thinktanks means those with the traction, i.e. money and influence, to be taken seriously.  Members of governments themselves are usually concerned only with the getting of and maintenance of power, e.g. David Cameron, for without the power, you get nowhere.  many of these are former lawyers or other professionals and bring that into the mix as well.

Brzezinski would be no more than a mad professor … unless he was listened to by someone in power.  One such person was a peanut farmer named James Earl Carter:

Thus the TLC found their initial traction.  Here is part of a list of members they got in:

So, we’re not talking any minor league players here, any regional office heads but TLC people at the very reins of policy making.  And in case you are still in doubt about their stated policies, not as a conspiracy theory but in their own words, Barry Goldwater wrote:

They then expanded.  Take a look at this list of World Bank Presidents:

… and have a considered guess as to how many are TLC members.  OK, here they are in red:

Not a bad percentage, eh?  Pure fluke?  Sheer luck?  Here is a list of US Trade Representatives [with the President of the time on the right] and TLC members in red:

Traction?  Here are some more members and remember that the wife of the last one was a fully-fledged member in her own right:

So we’re probably talking serious traction here for the ideas expressed by the TLC.  All right, even if we establish that the TLC largely influences government policy, it still has to pass Congress and the Senate, doesn’t it?  It’s a simple fact that any treaties negotiated by the Senate require a 2/3 vote for.  Now this is a hell of a lot of people and not all those are going to be TLC members.

So how do the TLC attempt to get legislation through?  That fascinating process is in Part 2.

H/T  Xxxl via Patrick Wood, August Review dot com

Part 2 here.  Part 3 here.

Filed under: Politics & economics, Society & human issues