In the post-World War II period, the Republican-Democratic rivalry for the Oval Office has been little more than a spectacle of competing summer blockbuster performances long on high-budget, crowd-pleasing special effects and short on differentiating ideology and moral principle. By all indications, this season’s edition of electoral commedia dell’arte promises to be little different.
This year, many conservatives have put their trust in George W. Bush, apparently hoping that this “compassionate conservative” will muzzle special interests, rein in government spending, and put an end to the interventionist foreign policies of the Clinton administration. In truth, it is difficult to conceive of any administration that wouldn’t be an improvement over Clinton’s sordid pageant of sellout and scandal. Yet, as we shall show, Bush is unlikely to pose any serious challenge to the ongoing bipartisan effort to railroad us into socialism and world government.
CFR Surroundings
On May 23, George W. Bush gave a press conference in Washington, D.C., where he spoke at length on contemplated foreign policy measures during his administration. Accompanying him was an entourage of advisors from America’s foreign policy establishment:
• Condoleezza Rice, the head of George W. Bush’s foreign policy team and a former member of President Bush’s National Security Council;
• Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisor to President Bush;
• Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense under President Ford;
• Colin Powell, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Presidents Bush and Clinton;
• Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford; and
• George Shultz, former secretary of state under President Reagan.
All of these political heavyweights, except Rumsfeld, are members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the New York-based organization that is the most visible exponent of America’s Insider establishment. Regular readers of The New American know that this establishment has worked for decades to submerge the United States in a one-world government ruled by (you guessed it!) the elite.
A revealing article in the December 23, 1999 issue of the New York Times listed 10 members of Bush’s foreign policy brain trust. In addition to Rice and Shultz, this list included:
• Richard Armitage, former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration;
• Robert Blackwill, a former member of President Bush’s National Security Council;
• Richard Cheney, former secretary of defense under President Bush;
• Stephen Hadley, former assistant secretary of defense under Cheney;
• Richard Perle, former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration;
• Paul Wolfowitz, former assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration and former under secretary of defense in the Bush administration
• Dov Zakheim, former under secretary of defense in the Reagan administration; and
• Robert Zoellick, former under secretary of state in the Bush administration.
The Times portrayed the team of foreign policy experts as “conservative” and “hawkish,” thereby casting Governor Bush as a hard-line conservative on foreign policy in contrast to President Clinton and his liberal-left foreign policy team. But the Times failed to point out that nine of the ten Bush advisors it cited are CFR members (the lone exception being Armitage), and that internationalist-minded CFR members have shaped U.S. foreign policy for decades, regardless of whether the president in power happened to be a Republican or a Democrat. Bush’s own connections with this same Insider-Establishment club means that it would not be realistic to hope for a radical change in policy under a Bush administration.
Put simply, in the arena of presidential politics at least, America’s power elite has been very successful in controlling both sides of the street while creating the appearance of competition between opposing political parties. The late history Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University — whom Bill Clinton praised in his acceptance speech at the 1992 Democratic National Convention — outlined the game plan in his monumental work Tragedy and Hope (1966): “The two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy…. But either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will have none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.”
In this same book, Quigley described the CFR as an American front for an “international Anglophile network” dedicated to establishing a world government. Quigley said that he had “no aversion” to this network or to “most of its aims” and had, for much of his life, “been close to it and to many of its instruments.” But he disagreed, he said, with this network’s “wishes to remain unknown” in spite of the fact that “its role in history is significant enough to be known.”
History of Control
Insider control of Republican “opposition” is the fundamental reason why no president in a half-century, Republican or Democrat, has tried to return this country to limited, constitutional government. Yet, election after election, the conservative rank and file in Main Street America troop to the polls to vote for a Republican white-horse candidate. Surely this time around, they reason, we will get a president who will stare down the big spenders in Congress and corral Big Government. But it never happens. From Eisenhower to Bush, every supposedly conservative Republican president, including the revered Ronald Reagan, has encouraged growth of the federal leviathan and the erosion of our Constitution.
Regarding this inexorable march toward the new world order from one administration to the next, John Birch Society President John F. McManus observed in 1990:
It was CFR members Owen Lattimore and Dean Acheson who engineered the betrayal of Chiang Kai-shek and the takeover of China by communists.
CFR members Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk arranged for the no-win, undeclared war in Korea, the removal of General MacArthur, and the establishment of Red China as the military power in Asia.
CFR members John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, serving in top posts in the administration of CFR member Dwight Eisenhower, betrayed the Hungarian Freedom Fighters and knowingly brought communist Fidel Castro to power in Cuba.
CFR members McGeorge Bundy, Adlai Stevenson, and John J. McCoy saw to it that the Bay of Pigs invasion was a miserable failure, a huge boost for Castro, and a tremendous embarrassment for the United States.
CFR members Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and Henry Cabot Lodge pushed the U.S. into Vietnam and then drew up rules making victory impossible. And CFR veterans Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger continued the disastrous policies that led both to our nation’s defeat and to the communist takeovers of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
It was CFR stalwarts Henry Kissinger, Ellsworth Bunker, and Sol Linowitz who arranged (with Senate approval) to give away the U.S. canal in Panama, and to pay the Marxist dictatorship in that country $400 million to take it.
Under the leadership of CFR members Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cyrus Vance, and Warren Christopher, the Carter administration undermined strong allies in Nicaragua and Iran.
During the Reagan years, CFR members George Shultz, William J. Casey, and Malcolm Baldrige saw to it that U.S. aid went to communist Poland, communist Romania, communist China, even communist USSR. At the same time, these same individuals did all they could to impede anti-communists in El Salvador … and after years of forcing the Nicaraguan Contras to fight with “no win” restrictions, they capitulated to CFR members of Congress who have all but dissolved this anti-communist force.
George W. Bush’s father had hundreds of CFR members in his administration, as does Democratic President Bill Clinton. According to the most recent CFR Annual Report, in fact, 492 of the group’s 3,605 members are U.S. government officials.
In October 1993, Washington Post ombudsman Richard Harwood, who depicted the CFR membership as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States,” described the Clinton administration as a warren of CFR activity:
The President is a member. So is his secretary of state, the deputy secretary of state, all five of the undersecretaries, several of the assistant secretaries and the department’s legal adviser. The president’s national security advisor and his deputy are members. The director of Central Intelligence (like all previous directors) and the chairman of the Foreign Advisory Board are members. The secretary of defense, three undersecretaries and at least four assistant secretaries are members. The secretaries of the departments of housing and urban development, interior, health and human services and the chief White House public relations man … along with the speaker of the House [are members]….
This is not a retinue of people who “look like America,” as the president once put it, but they very definitely look like the people who, for more than half a century, have managed our international affairs and our military-industrial complex.
Hobson’s Choice
Indeed, President Clinton is himself a member. In addition to his CFR membership, he is a “former member in government service” of the Trilateral Commission, another Establishment club greasing the skids for global governance. Clinton’s crass immorality and personal corruption, as well as his flagrant abuses of power and treasonous sellout to Communist China, all of which have been met with but feeble challenges by the congressional “opposition,” have set critically damaging precedents for future Executive abuse. Clinton has also worked openly and diligently to destroy U.S. sovereignty, involving the U.S. in one war after another, all in the name of “world order” under the UN or its NATO surrogate. He has been a courtier to the globalists in the world of international finance and business — using taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street interests in Mexico and, with the complicity of congressional Republicans, foisting a series of sovereignty-compromising “free-trade” agreements on the American people. All of this the Insiders have watched and approved of. Because of Clinton’s consummate skills in advancing their agenda, they have stood by him and his unsavory myrmidons through scandal after scandal.
But wait, say the Republican faithful. Surely conservative George W. Bush, if elected, will head them off at the pass. Won’t a Bush administration, especially in combination with a Republican Congress, finally shake off the fetters of those nasty special interests, insufferable liberal Democrats, and sovereignty-sapping internationalists, and restore America to the small-government, patriotic bliss of yesteryear?
Such notions are likely to prove illusory. George the Younger, like several recent presidents, including Ronald Reagan, is not himself a member of the CFR. But like Reagan, his conservative public posturing has been paralleled by a build-up of Establishment ties. Most of the CFR gnats in Bush’s cloud of advisors will likely end up with prominent posts in any Bush administration, free to continue CFR-sponsored subversion under an innocuous “conservative” banner.
Moreover, Bush has already signaled, in a number of policy speeches, that his “compassionate conservatism” is barely distinguishable from the liberal “centrism” of the Clinton administration. George W., it must be remembered, has spent a lifetime in the nimbus of a father who was not only president, but a consummate Insider as well. Before becoming Reagan’s running mate, George the Elder held membership in both the CFR and the Trilateral Commission. As president, George Bush openly prosecuted the Gulf War in the name of “a new world order,” and hoped that the UN would follow the Gulf War precedent in continuing to play “the role dreamed of by its founders.” Under such a guiding influence, it would be very surprising if George W. were not completely indoctrinated in Establishment ways of thinking.
Internationalist View
In keeping with his Establishment pedigree, George W. Bush is a staunch internationalist. He has, for instance, been supportive of trade measures like NAFTA and GATT. “Bush,” observed The Nation in May 1999, “has been a relentless supporter of NAFTA. Even as the needle-trade industry all but disappeared in Texas, with a final wave of Levis plant closings in January and February … the governor had neither a program nor a word of consolation for displaced workers. ‘NAFTA is good for Texas and good for Mexico,’ Bush said in his January State of the State speech.” Like the rest of the one-world crowd, George W. wants to expand the NAFTA “free trade” zone to include the entire Western Hemisphere. And like Bill Clinton, Bush wants presidential “fast-track” negotiating authority, the easier to foist sovereignty-eroding trade agreements on a suspicious citizenry and a recalcitrant Congress.
The Texas governor has also been one of the most vocal supporters of the recently passed bill in the House granting permanent normal trade status to China. In a May 17 speech at Boeing Corporation in Everett, Washington, Bush explained his “vision of distinctly American internationalism,” in which the Red Chinese will receive the benefit of full, normal trade relations with the United States. The selling point, of course, was the familiar rationalization that access to Western markets will “democratize” China. In short, we may anticipate that, under Bush, the coddling of Chinese Communists will continue apace.
Bush also appears ready to follow Clinton’s lead in further degrading American military capabilities, despite rhetoric to the contrary. In his May 23 speech, while flanked by his CFR puppeteers, Bush startled his audience of journalists by calling for reductions in the American nuclear arsenal to “the lowest possible number consistent with our national security,” and even below levels required by the START II treaty. When queried about whether he would reduce our arsenal unilaterally, Bush affirmed that he was willing to do so, and followed with flaccid assurances to “work closely with the Russians to convince them to do the same.”
On the domestic policy front, Bush has shown no evidence of constitutionalist leanings. To the contrary, he has indicated support for many of the same anti-Constitution, pro-big government agenda items favored by the Clintons. Bush has indicated support for many new pieces of gun legislation, for example; he supports mandatory trigger locks and gun-show registration, and will not push for repeal of the “assault weapons” ban. He favors raising the legal age for handgun ownership from 18 to 21, and supports a ban on the import of high-capacity ammunition clips.
In the area of healthcare, Bush favors a “compassionate conservative” version of socialized medicine. Bush has proposed yet another Fedgov national healthcare boondoggle, the Health Community Innovation Fund, which is intended to be “an extra source of federal support for health care in underserved communities.” On the abortion front, George W. has expressed little interest in restoring protection for the rights of the unborn, though he professes to be pro-life. Signaling clearly that he intends not to make a priority of outlawing infanticide, Bush has conceded that “the United States Supreme Court has settled the abortion issue … the best public policy is to encourage fewer abortions through strong adoption laws and by sending a clear abstinence message to our children.” Moreover, Bush refuses to impose an abortion “litmus test” on Supreme Court nominees or a vice-presidential running mate.
George W. also has ambitious plans, albeit with “conservative” valences, to expand the federal role in education. As Kenneth Cooper of the Washington Post reported:
The centerpiece of Bush’s education plan has become a $5 billion reading program — the most costly of his school proposals, though campaign aides say more are coming. It takes as its model a state program, now in its second year, that Bush created as Texas governor. As a federal program, it would provide school aid in the same way that Democrats traditionally have despite Republican objections. It is narrowly targeted, not just to disadvantaged students, but to children in kindergarten through second grade who have trouble learning to read. And it includes federal mandates: States that accept the grants must give diagnostic reading tests in those grades, must provide tutoring to students having difficulty, must use a “balanced” curriculum that combines phonics and literature, and must train teachers how to teach reading.
On issue after issue, George W. Bush, like almost every Republican presidential nominee before him within living memory, promises less of the same in comparison with a more aggressively liberal Democratic opponent. As his Establishment ties and socialist-lite views both attest, George W. is yet another tiresome entry in a long line of Republican presidential nominees fronting for the “controlled opposition” recommended by Quigley.
Congress Is the Key
What, then, is the remedy? Electing a “conservative” president to right every wrong has all the seductive appeal of a quick fix, which is why the Insiders, using this very ploy, have played the American electorate like a fiddle election after election.
Because the American presidential elections are focused on a handful of individuals, they are easily manipulated by the Insiders, making the election of a constitutionalist reformer to the White House practically impossible. Nor would it be desirable, even if it were possible, to elect and repose all our trust in a single presidential Mr. Fixit. For one man to use executive authority to “clean house” would require expansion of presidential authority that would set a gloomy precedent for eventual dictatorship. No, the solution lies in electing responsible congressmen, especially House members, to rein in executive abuse of power and curb unconstitutional government. The Congress is the most powerful of the three branches of the federal government, since it possesses sole legislative authority and can rein in a corrupt president (through impeachment if necessary).
A constitutionalist majority in the House could wrest back from the Executive branch such congressional prerogatives as declaring war and could use the power of the public purse to defund all unconstitutional federal government appendages. The House of Representatives possesses extraordinary control of the public purse strings since it must originate all bills for raising revenues; and, by virtue of the fact that every representative must face reelection every two years, the House is more accountable to the voting public than the president or the senators. Moreover, because of the sheer number of representatives, CFR Insiders cannot exert over the House the electoral control they enjoy over the president and, to a lesser degree, the Senate.
This prescription is tough medicine, because it means that, in the end, Americans will have to get the job done by informing themselves and others about the Constitution and the conspiracy — yes, conspiracy — that threatens it, and then apply informed pressure on Congress. Regarding the latter step, The New American’s “Freedom Index” is intended to enable the discerning constitutionalist to determine whether his congressmen are honoring their oath to uphold the Constitution, regardless of their party affiliation or claims of conservatism. To rout the conspiracy that threatens our freedoms, we will have to labor with patience, determination, and faith, and stop expecting a “conservative” presidential candidate to save the day. In time, when a constitutional majority has been restored to Congress, there will be opportunity enough to win back the Executive Branch.
