By Patrick Wood, Editor

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?

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!