Power and Privilege in the American Experience:
Has a New World Order Taken Charge?

Edward J. Dodson

[November 2014]

One of the great written histories of the modern era was provided to us by Professor Carroll Quigley in his controversial work, Tragedy and Hope, A History of The World in Our Time, published in 1966. His objective, he explained, was to provide "an interpretation of the present as well as the immediate past and the near future, which is free from the accepted clichés, slogans, and self-justifications which mar so much of 'contemporary history'."[1] He accomplished this and much more. He confirmed the suspicions of many thoughtful people that the invisible hand described by Adam Smith had been and continued to be subverted by a level of societal and global control few seriously considered possible. Class interest and self-interest had been mobilized into very powerful economic, financial and political forces:

"We could indicate this by pointing out that capitalism, because it seeks profits as its primary goal, is never primarily seeking to achieve prosperity, high production, high consumption, political power, patriotic improvement, or moral uplift. Any of these may be achieved under capitalism, and any (or all) of them may be sacrificed and lost under capitalism, depending on this relationship to the primary goal of capitalist activity - the pursuit of profits."[2]

The pursuit of profit is, like the modern discipline of economics, free of any concern for moral principles or ethical behavior. These concerns may exist but only insofar as individuals are directed by their own moral compass. In the United States, owners and managers of businesses expend an enormous amount of individual and organizational resources on ways to reduce the obligation to contribute to public revenue as well as avoid compliance with all manner of regulations and restrictions on their activities.

Less insightful, Professor Quigley joins almost all other historians and writers in the use of the term capitalism to describe a system that failed to fully develop. Dramatic increases in the production of wealth occurred because of the inventiveness of people working to solve practical problems and to shift the burden of wealth production to labor-saving devices (i.e., to capital goods). His discussion of the conditions in the industrializing societies of Western Civilization ignores the fundamental issue of who controlled the land and natural resources from which all material wealth comes. Rather, he simply explains to the reader that the introduction of industrial methods to agriculture resulted in a massive out-migration of people following a "demographic explosion" that also greatly expanded the number of military-age young men. "The result," Quigley concluded, "was to create the greatest social problem of the twentieth-century world."[3] That social problem was two-fold: what to do with surplus people and how to prevent wars now that leaders could put huge standing armies in the field.

What also escapes the attention of Carroll Quigley is the changing role of the rentier elite who dominated every society by the nineteenth century, even those societies to which the surplus people of Europe had migrated to in a quest for access to the land denied to them at home, or employment where labor was relatively scarce. The system of agrarian landlordism had evolved, to be sure, but landlordism remained at the heart of socio-political arrangements and institutions. Only the small group of political malcontents surrounding the political economist and journalist Henry George recognized the continuing presence and central importance of the land question. Added to the system of law that sanctioned and protected the monopolization of nature came laws eventually achieving the same outcome where other forms of property, including paper assets, were concerned. This did not occur right away, however, because there continued to be places around the globe where land remained relatively inexpensive. These were locations where businesses could be profitably established and where people could afford to acquire a residential property or family-owned farm.

We learn from Carroll Quigley that within this environment there were many forces pulling the peoples of the world toward an interdependent but fragile global system. Political and economic elites maneuvered against and with one another to direct the future. Others sought to challenge the course of history by means both peaceful and violent, by organized protest, by public relations campaigns and by riot. As all of these forces converged during the first decade of the twentieth century, the First World War erupted to bring down much of the Old Order. However, this outcome was understood by only a minority of surviving leaders:

"The war brought nothing really new into the world; rather it sped up processes of change which had been going on for a considerable period and would have continued anyway. …Also, the changes were much greater in objective facts and in the organization of society than they were in men's ideas of these facts or organization."[4]

There was no going back. The process of societal integration had been disrupted at great cost, but now a New World Order emerged out of meetings held to settle the issues of "reparations, economic reconstruction, and acute political problems."[5] And, it is here, during this period, that the fuel was provided to those who interpreted the outcome as a conspiracy of the powerful to achieve even greater control over political and economic institutions:

"At all of these meetings, as at the Peace Conference itself, the political leaders were assisted by groups of experts and interested persons, sometimes self-appointed. Many of these 'experts' were members or associates of the international-banking fraternity."[6]

History reveals that wars are rarely paid for by the direct taxation of those who have the most to gain or lose in the conflict. Governments issue bonds at interest, sold to those who have the financial reserves to lend. When this proves insufficient, as is consistently the case, paper currency is issued and declared legal tender that must be accepted in payment for goods and services. Specie is hoarded and removed from circulation, and the paper currency is eventually discounted almost beyond any usefulness. The most vulnerable are those who own no land or other material assets, who must rely only on the demand for their labor to earn any sort of income. Thus, in the wake of the damage caused during the First World War, we should not be surprised by efforts to re-establish monetary arrangements based on the value of gold. No less a figure than John Maynard Keynes warned of the consequences that would otherwise result:

"There is no subtler, no surer, means of overturning the existing bases of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction and does it in a manner not one man in a million is able to diagnose."[7]

Was Keynes being disingenuous here, or did he simply not fully appreciate the extent to which the currency had already been debauched by the laws that permitted banks to issue paper currency not fully redeemable in specie. As a later critic of the modern monetary system wrote:

"Modern governments … have become more astute, more subtle, more sophisticated, and, unfortunately, more efficient in their monetary malpractices. …[T]he ever increasing debts and welfare activities of modern governments seem to have induced an almost continuous devaluation or outright repudiation."[8]

Much of the subtlety and sophistication is rightly credited to the efforts by Keynes, Harry Dexter White and other economists of the era to bring the currencies of all major trading nations under the control of a new International Monetary Fund. At the end of the Second World War, the United States held huge quantities of gold in reserve, and bank notes issued by the Federal Reserve System served as the currency of international commerce. However, Keynes had in mind that in the not too distant future just one currency would circulate, a currency issued by a new world bank.

A Second World War ostensibly fought - by the United States and its allies -- to defend individual liberty had the actual outcome of greatly accelerating the expansion of government's jurisdiction over matters involving individuals and their private interests. The new threat to Western Civilization served to cement the gains achieved by the State during the war. As Joseph Stalin's armies established control over the territory and people who survived the genocide of retreating Germans, the opportunity for any sort of peace dividend quickly disappeared. New "forces of irrationality" (to borrow the term Carroll Quigley used to describe Fascism) arose to challenge a renewed advance of Western Civilization.

At the same time, scientific and technological advances had suddenly created a situation where direct, intense confrontation became a dangerous game with mutual total destruction the inevitable consequence. Russian scientists, greatly assisted by scientific and technological information passed on by communist sympathizers and others who believed in the free sharing of the fruits of scientific investigation, provided the means for an arms race that siphoned off natural resources and capital goods needed for the development of physical and social infrastructure. Another outcome was the shift from "temporarily drafted citizen-soldiers" to "the use of highly trained, professional, mercenary fighting men."[9] What this change in the structure of the military would yield, Carroll Quigley argued, was a new and far less rational hierarchical societal structure:

"[I]t is increasingly clear that … the expert will replace the industrial tycoon in control of the economic system even as he will replace the democratic voter in control of the political system. This is because planning will inevitably replace laissez faire in the relationships between the two systems. This planning may not be single or unified, but it will be planning, in which the main framework and operational forces of the system will be established and limited by the experts on the governmental side; then the experts within the big units on the economic side will do their planning within these established institutions."[10]

Thus, within a very chaotic and rapidly changing economic and political climate, the fundamental conflict was far less ideological than one between those who fought against the expanding role of the State and those who accepted this expanding role as both inevitable and necessary. For the citizens of the United States entering the post-Second World War era, the challenge seemed to be to find a way to embrace the middle ground between individualism and social democracy. Former editor of the Washington Post, Felix Morley put it this way in 1949:

"We pay a great deal to government to provide what F.D.R. called freedom from fear and freedom from want. In so doing, we find our capacity to make personal contributions curtailed, even with the generous tax exemption for educational and charitable gifts. Individual freedom for is limited by collective freedom from. And the widespread belief that this is as it should be marks a very pronounced shift in American political thought."[11]

At the time, then, only a small minority actively championed a return to what they viewed was the proper laissez faire,/i> relationship between the individual and government. Some, such as the individualist intellectual Frank Chodorov, understood that the ancient land question had never been resolved. Yet, Chodorov also expressed a deep concern that all that is good was in jeopardy of being lost under the heavy hand of a potent State:

"The only 'constructive' idea that I can in all conscience advance … is that the individual put his trust in himself, not in power; that he seek to better his understanding and lift his values to a higher and still higher level; that he assume responsibility for his behavior and not transfer his personality to committees, organizations or, above all, to a super-personal State. Such reforms as are necessary will come of themselves when, or if, men act as intelligent and responsible human beings. There cannot be a 'good' society until there are 'good' people."[12]

Understanding why we behave as we do is an ongoing challenge for behavioral psychologists, sociologists and the planning community. Privilege does not always result in personal success. Poverty does not always result in personal failure. There is no way to predict who will be a good person or a person who exhibits a total absence of a moral sense of right and wrong. Which is the more powerful influence - nature or nurture? We still do not have a definitive answer.

Many in the United States looked back nostalgically to find their good society. They believed this was only possible by once again withdrawing from the global stage. Unfortunately, Stalin's aggressive stance and the expansion of state-socialism into an increasing number of newly-independent, former colonies of the European states made this a practical impossibility. To be sure, astute analysts in the West fully recognized the systemic problems faced by the people living under Stalin's thumb. Central planning certainly allocated scarce resources, but without the price signals delivered by competitive markets. Time would reveal even more serious weaknesses characteristic of state-socialism.

Despite a huge land mass with extensive natural resources, the Soviet system had great difficulty maintaining its military strength and also providing basic goods and services to its citizens. In all likelihood, the more optimistic analysts concluded, the period of global instability would last but a few decades, until the Soviet regime self-destructed. The gamble was that a war between the West and the Soviet bloc could be avoided and a state of détente reached. In the meantime, there was a good deal of work to do before the people in the Western nations could be maneuvered to relinquish national sovereignty to some sort of world government. A new system of international law had to be introduced to replace the system that "had regarded the state as the embodiment of sovereignty, an organization of political power on a territorial basis."[13] Many of the newly-established countries were nations in name only, divided internally on the basis of ancient tribal rivalries, ethnic or religious intolerance.

Conditions had also changed dramatically within the United States as a result of the mobilization for the Second World War. Carroll Quigley concluded that the very character of society in the United States had irreversibly been changed by a combination of factors:

"The sincere effort, by aristocrats and democrats alike, to make the social ladder in America a ladder of opportunity rather than a ladder of privilege has opened the way to a surge of petty-bourgeois recruits over the faltering bodies of the disintegrating middle class.

"The petty bourgeois are rising in American society along the channels established in the great American hierarchies of business, the armed forces, academic life, the professions, finance, and politics. They are doing this not because they have imagination, broad vision, judgment, moderation, versatility, or group loyalties but because they have neurotic drives of personal ambition and competitiveness, great insecurities and resentments, narrow specializations, and fanatical application to the task before each of them."[14]

This did not mean that the old aristocracy was relinquishing power and privilege. Their world had been changing for some time, and a leadership cadre had been working for over a century to undermine the operation and fundamental principles of social democracy while leaving institutions essentially intact. To those who were paying close attention, the subtle changes in societal norms and values seemed to be deliberately orchestrated, and they did their best to follow the money to the sources of influence. Some combination of shared interest and coordinated activism was employed to deepen the concentration of power and privilege already enjoyed. After examining the literature on the subject, Professor Lance deHaven-Smith expresses his dismay that so few historians or other members of academia have bothered to undertake serious investigations into what he describes as "State Crime against Democracy."[15] In his opinion:

"Many … political crimes in which involvement by high officials is reasonably suspected have gone uninvestigated or have been investigated only superficially. …The nature of the subject matter is such that official inquiries, if they are conducted at all, are usually compromised by conflicts of interest."[16]

One result is that such investigations have been left to individuals whose own objectivity is subject to question because of their ideological bias or a failure to support their assertions with verifiable evidence. A good example is the examination of the origins and operation of the world's monetary system by G. Edward Griffin. The research by Griffin is exhaustive and supported by an extensive bibliography of sources, but has been criticized by the few mainstream academics who have taken the time to review the book. His is a detailed story of secret meetings and intrigues going back to the nineteenth century and the dream of an Anglo-imperial union held by Cecil Rhodes.

A subject of investigation for historians is to shed light on the extent to which the politics and economics of the modern era are dominated by those who have shared the vision and objectives that motivated Cecil Rhodes. Some of the details we know.

With funds initially provided by Rhodes before his death in 1902 and afterward by the Rhodes Trust, former British secretary of state, Lord Milner, established a network of Round Table Groups in the British Dominions and in the United States. Although Milner embraced the principles of democratic socialism, his deeper passion was for unification of all British dominions. Yet, the time had long past when the citizens of Canada, South Africa, Australia or New Zealand moved in lock-step with their English cousins. Proposals for unification were rejected by each Commonwealth member during the1920s and finally put to rest in 1926 with the Balfour Declaration, which established autonomy to the dominions over matters of both domestic and foreign policy. A new strategy was then needed, one that would rely upon the growing global presence of the United States.

After the First World War ended, Isaiah Bowman, trained as a geographer and assigned the task of helping to establish borders for the New Europe, became one of the founding members of the Council on Foreign Relations. Established in New York City during the war, the CFR was chaired by Elihu Root, a Wall Street lawyer and former Secretary of State and Secretary of War. The membership was dominated by other lawyers, banking executives and other corporate officers. Elihu Root was a prominent Republican. The CFR's President, John W. Davis, was Woodrow Wilson's ambassador to Great Britain. They were also joined by the economic historian Edwin F. Gay, the first dean of the Harvard Business School and, after the war, editor of the New York Evening Post. What brought Isaiah Bowman into this group was a state of the world he and others believed was on a very destructive path. In 1921, he explained:

"The world is not new in the sense that war has ceased, that all political and social problems will be promptly settled, that present international boundaries and economic arrangements will forever remain unchanged. The qualities of selfish ambition and envy are deep-seated; they will pass away only when human life itself is extinguished. So long as they exist there will be war, with its revolutionary effects upon political, social, and economic life."[17]

These negative forces associated with human beings had to be countered by coordinated, transnational effort. The CFR was at the very least a small step in the right direction. The new reality that had to be faced by Americans, was conveyed by Edwin Gay in a 1932 Foreign Affairs article:

"A time must come when the United States as a powerful world state and a great creditor nation, hence vitally interested in world trade and world prosperity, will face the realities of its new position. It will realize that a policy of self-sufficiency is not only impossible, but that a policy which presupposes it to be possible is stultifying and impoverishing. …The World War affirmed the international political responsibilities of the United States; the World Depression demonstrates the economic interdependence of the United States with other states. It cannot be a hermit nation."[18]

To author G. Edward Griffin, establishment of the CFR set the stage for a combined concentration of control over the nation's political and economic institutions and a narrowing of ideology in favor of world government. In order to support his conclusion all he had to do was repeat the public statement made in 1939 by CFR member John Foster Dulles:

"Some dilution or leveling off of the sovereignty system as it prevails in the world today must take place … to the immediate disadvantage of those nations which now possess the preponderance of power. …The establishment of a common money … would deprive our government of exclusive control over a national money. …The United States must be prepared to make sacrifices in setting up a world politico-economic order which would level off inequalities of economic opportunity with respect to nations."[19]

His words aside, John Foster Dulles was a lifelong defender of the American System of property law and taxation that critics identified as the cause of generational poverty and an economy prone to periods of speculation-driven boom followed by prolonged recessions.

It was also during the 1930s that John Foster Dulles became friends with Hjalmar Schacht, president of Germany's Reichsbank and minister of economics. His law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, floated bonds issued by German arms manufacturers. However, as the activities of the Nazi regime became clear, his brother Allen saw to it that the Sullivan & Cromwell office was closed. Allen Dulles had been a CFR director since 1927. During the Second World War, he headed the American intelligence operation in Switzerland, allowing him to keep in contact with many of the financial and business leaders continuing to do business with Nazi Germany. Eisenhower would later appoint him to head the Central Intelligence Agency. A long list of covert interferences in the affairs of other nations followed.

In 1933, John Foster Dulles had chaired a CFR discussion group debating the desirability of working toward national self-sufficiency. Many high level officials and executives participated, as well as the journalist Walter Lippmann, who later summarized in Foreign Affairs what he learned by the experience:

"From fear of military and economic aggression men pass gradually to a general sense that the more they are entangled in an international economy the less they are masters of their fate.

"The essence of the argument is that the decisions of markets as expressed in rising and falling prices are better regulators of human energy than any centralized planning authority could be.

"It seems to me reasonably clear that in the United States the movement toward a closed and controlled economy derives its main impetus not from a new social gospel but from the necessity of overcoming the consequences of agrarian and industrial dislocation. There has been no mass conversion from individualism to collectivism."[20]

Affecting the broader societal debate was, of course, the increasing infusion of money to foundations, think tanks and other policy institutes. Colleges and universities continued to receive financial support from wealthy financiers, industrialists and other alumni. However, establishment of these independent, tax-exempt entities allowed for a greater degree of influence over grant recipients, the scope of research and other writing and support by a hand-picked board for whatever mission the founder embraced.

The struggle by university faculty members to secure academic freedom had achieved an important victory in 1900, when the presidents of Harvard, Columbia and Chicago established a policy that donor's could no longer have decision-making authority over the hiring of faculty. The American Association of University Professors successfully gained the goal of tenure for its members, formalized after the Second World War to help rebuild faculties in order to meet the dramatic increase in demand for higher education. Still, institutions competing for donors and trying to build a secure financial future were more often than not willing to impose a degree of self-censorship.

In 1911, on the advice of Elihu Root, Andrew Carnegie established a trust to which he could transfer the bulk of his remaining fortune. John D. Rockefeller followed Carnegie's lead two years later. Economics professor Mason Gaffney offered evidence in 1994 to support his view that the very development of economics as a discipline was heavily influenced by the interests of powerful men such as John D. Rockefeller:

"This was a period of secularization of US colleges. Businessmen were replacing clergymen on boards. …They were replaced by others more exclusively attuned to the Gospel of Wealth. Academic tenure was a distant dream: top administrators hired and dismissed with few checks and balances. They only needed to dismiss a radical occasionally: others got the message. …Pressures on academics were extreme: it was placate or perish."[21]

In 2008, a foundation supported by Charles G. Koch pledged $1.5 million to support new faculty positions in Florida State University's economics department. This donation was contingent upon authorizing foundation representatives the opportunity to interview and have final approval for new hires. The new faculty members were to teach in a new program promoting "political economy and free enterprise." The result was that only two candidates were approved to be hired during 2009. The expectation of objective research and academic freedom, at least under such a program, must be seriously questioned. This is certainly true whether the donor holds strong collectivist or individualist views.

In a very direct sense, the influence of the CFR and similar organizations grew because the number of academics, government officials and business executives was growing rapidly during the post-Second World War period. The old elite still existed, but they were becoming overwhelmed by a new generation of professionals groomed for leading roles in all segments of society. But, not quite yet. Grey-haired men still held the reigns of power. John Foster Dulles was sixty-four years old when appointed Secretary of State by Dwight Eisenhower. Both men were members of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Eisenhower had chaired the CFR's Study Group on Aid to Europe from 1948-1951. Here, Eisenhower developed many of his perspectives on how to best respond to the Soviet and Chinese communists:

"The group examined the Marshal Plan, which Eisenhower called 'a program in the foreign field without precedent in our peacetime history', and considered suggestions 'that in addition to economic aid we should make certain political commitments in Western Europe and also provide the countries there with military assistance'."[22]

John Foster Dulles was also very close to the French statesman, Jean Monnet, the prime mover in the first steps toward creation of a "United States of Europe." Monnet's assessment of Dulles reveals the complicated nature of the political beliefs and objectives pursued by these powerful statesmen:

"Foster was a simple man to understand, not a Machiavellian. He was a man of one simple principle, the importance of liberty.

"I do not say that Foster was without ambition. I do not say that. But that was not a basic element in his make-up. I am quite convinced that he would not have sought the Secretaryship if he had not had his deep convictions regarding liberty. He sought it in order to be able to advance his libertarian views."[23]

We might reasonably ask how Dulles reconciled his libertarian principles with the dramatic increase in the centralizing power of the national government.

By the time of Eisenhower's election to the U.S. Presidency, trust in the nation's leadership was already eroding. Americans were frustrated by the unresolved war in Korea, and there was growing concern over discoveries of corruption at the federal level. Many Republican Party leaders clamored for scaling back the nation's global presence. Dulles warned Eisenhower against backing away from existing foreign policy commitments. Moreover, Dulles was convinced that rapprochement with the Soviets was not possible given their doctrinaire adherence to Leninism. He anticipated a prolonged era of conflict. Many European leaders regarded John Foster Dulles as the main obstacle to a lessening of tensions between their countries and the Soviet Union, now joined by China as societies ostensibly collectivist but in reality dominated by a privileged elite supported by a vast network of secret police suppressing all dissent and opposition to government actions.

In 1959, illness forced Dulles to resign his position as Secretary of State. Leaving office, he attempted to explain himself to the nation:

"I was brought up in the belief that this nation of ours was not merely a self-serving society but founded with a mission to help build a world where liberty and justice would prevail. Today that concept faces a formidable and ruthless challenge from international communism. This has made it manifestly difficult to adhere steadfastly to our national idealism and national mission and at the same time avoid the awful catastrophe of war."[24]

The national mission, as identified by Dulles, was actually being subverted by the support of oppressive regimes in countries where access to important natural resources was the primary concern. Another layer of subversion could be found in the failure of government to secure for minorities their civil rights. And, of course, there was the deep paranoia over the degree to which the U.S. government employed communists and communist sympathizers in positions of authority and responsibility.

The actions of each successive administration generated even greater distrust, as explained by Lance deHaven-Smith:

"In the post-World War II era, Americans have learned that the government has misled them about provoking wars, assassinating foreign leaders, wiretapping American citizens, stealing elections, collaborating with organized crime, and much more. …Certainly there is no reason to assume that all of the government's significant deceptions, domestic intrigue, international crimes, and other wrongdoings have been exposed."[25]

What is even more disturbing to some is that what was thought of as the American System has been dismantled. Even into the mid-1980s this was not yet clear to many people, even those highly critical of policies and practices adopted by agencies of the United States government. Here, for example, is Jonathan Kwitny's introductory statement to his deeply-critical history of U.S. intervention in the affairs of other sovereign nations:

"The American people have built a great country. Its prosperity is based in large part on the extraordinary ability of individual Americans to determine their own economic course, and this is in turn rooted in an extraordinary concept of liberty. However imperfectly at times, the United States still clings to the ideal that liberty requires the diffusion of power. Maybe nowhere, certainly not on such a scale, is there so much freedom to inquire, to speak, and to publish, coupled with so much genuine popular control of institutions."[26]

Kwitny then goes on to describe each of the cases where U.S. government agents funded and supported the overthrow of foreign governments - in the guise of anti-communist initiatives -- that threatened American corporate monopolistic interests. What was and is still true about Americans is our ignorance of how to distinguish between liberty and privilege. The best definition of liberty I have encountered was offered by the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, who wrote that "liberty is freedom constrained by justice." Our continued challenge is coming to consensus over a definition of justice.

In any event, no one in the Reagan administration, and only a few serving in the United States Congress, paid attention to his warning:

"We constantly overlook the distinction between what a country's government says, and what the people of the country do. …By viewing the world as a chessboard, on which all pieces are either black or white, either our friend or the Soviets', our leaders are ignoring the principles of which genuine friendship, and partnerships, are made.

"Only out of such principles can come true national security."[27]

Kwitny urged the political establishment in the United States to objectively examine the actual accomplishments and failures of our approach to dealing with other nations. He reminded readers that no nation had attacked the United States in the post-Second World War era. Yet, United States military forces had been dispatched whenever "American interests" were even potentially at risk. As Kwitny concluded:

"[U]sing force according to the standard we have used for the past nearly forty years simply hasn't given us a successful foreign policy. …We have not produced a friendly world, or even a mostly friendly world, to do business in. We have produced enemies, in endless supply."[28]

As Jonathan Kwitny was finishing his manuscript for publication in 1984, the American System was undergoing a renewed domestic confrontation between internationalists and those who sought to strengthen national sovereignty. These were not the only areas of societal conflict. To racial and gender inequality was added the accelerating division of the population by social and economic class. In 1992, two journalists at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Donald Barlett and James Steele, won a Pulitzer Prize for their penetrating study titled America: What Went Wrong? The put a basic question to their readers:

"Worried that the people who represent you in Congress are taking care of themselves and their friends at your expense?

Their answer filled the pages of the book:

"You are right. Keep worrying.

"For those people in Washington who write the complex tangle of rules by which the economy operates have, over the last twenty years, rigged the game - by design and default - to favor the privileged, the powerful and the influential. At the expense of everyone else."[29]

Bartlett and Steele became whistle blowers on the new American establishment:

"Why would the United States government rig the game in that way? In part because of the influence exercised by special interests in Congress and in federal agencies. In part because of good intentions gone awry.

"One of the consequences: American companies and companies worldwide are now conducting a replay on a global scale of a business practice that became common in the 1960s. That was the decade when United States companies began playing off one region of the United States against another, one state against another, one city against another. The objective was to locate a new plant or relocate an existing one in whatever area would offer the greatest tax incentives - so the company would have to pay the smallest amount of local and state taxes - and where employee wages and fringe benefits could be held down the most.

"Now that practice has gone global, as corporations and financiers play off one country against another, one national tax system against another, one country against its possessions."[30]

Of course, the behind the scenes orchestration of these outcomes is even more troubling. At all levels of government, the general belief is that the overwhelming majority of our elected representatives have sold their votes in return for campaign contributions and lucrative positions in the private sector or as lobbyists once they are no longer public servants. The degree to which these arrangements have undermined the very concept of governance is made clear by John Perkins, whose 2004 book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, deserves to be studied by every thinking person and discussed broadly. The best end to this paper I can provide comes from John Perkins:

"Some would blame our current problems on an organized conspiracy. I wish it were so simple. Members of a conspiracy can be rooted out and brought to justice. This system, however, is fueled by something far more dangerous than conspiracy. It is driven not by a small band of men but by a concept that has become accepted as gospel: the idea that with all economic growth, the more widespread the benefits. This belief also has a corollary: that those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born at the fringes are available for exploitation.

"The concept is, of course, erroneous. We know that in many countries economic growth benefits only a small portion of the population and may in fact result in increasingly desperate circumstances for the majority. This effect is reinforced by the corollary belief that the captains of industry who drive this system should enjoy a special status, a belief that is the root of many of our current problems and is perhaps also the reason why conspiracy theories abound. When men and women are rewarded for greed, greed becomes a corrupting motivator. When we equate gluttonous consumption of the earth's resources with a status approaching sainthood, when we teach our children to emulate people who live unbalanced lives, and when we define huge sections of the population as subservient to an elite minority, we ask for trouble. And we get it.

"In their drive to advance the global empire, corporations, banks and governments … use their financial and political muscle to ensure that our schools, businesses, and media support both the fallacious concept and its corollary. They have brought us to a point where our global culture is a monstrous machine that requires exponentially increasing amounts of fuel and maintenance, so much so that in the end it will have consumed everything in sight and will be left with no choice but to devour itself.

"The corporatocracy is not a conspiracy, but its members do endorse common values and goals. One of corporatocracy's most important functions is to perpetuate and continually expand and strengthen the system."[31]

FOOTNOTES

1. Carroll Quigley. Tragedy and Hope, A History of The World in Our Time (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966) Preface, ix.
2. Ibid., p. 43.
3. Ibid., p. 19.
4. Ibid., p. 256.
5. Ibid., p. 271.
6. Ibid., p. 271.
7. John Maynard Keynes. The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London, 1919), p.220.
8. Arthur Kemp. "The Monetary Basis of a Free Society," in The Necessary Conditions for A Free Society, edited by Felix Morley (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1949), p.42.
9. Carroll Quigley, p. 865.
10. Ibid., p. 866.
11. Felix Morley. "Political Conditions for a Free Society," in The Necessary Conditions for a Free Society, edited by Felx Morley (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1949), p.14.
12. Frank Chodorov. "Envoi," in One Is A Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist (New York: The Devin-Adair Company, 1952), p.176.
13. Carroll Quigley, p. 1092.
14. Carroll Quigley, p. 1272.
15. Lance deHaven-Smith. Conspiracy Theory In America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2013), p.9.
16. Ibid., p. 12.
17. Isaiah Bowman. The New World: Problems in Political Geography (Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Company, 1921), p. 1.
18. Edward F. Gay, "The Great Depression," Foreign Affairs (July 1932), p. 540.
19. "Dulles Outlines World Peace Plan," New York Times, 28 October 1939.
20. Walter Lippmann. "Self-Sufficiency, Some Random Selections," Foreign Affairs, January 1934.
21. Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison. The Corruption of Economics (London: Shepheard-Walwyn Ltd., 1994), pp. 50-51.
22. Eben Kaplan. "American Presidents at the Council on Foreign Relations" (Council on Foreign Relations, 7 December 2005).
23. Quoted in: Roscoe Drummond and Gaston Coglentz. Duel At The Brink: John Foster Dulles' Command of American Power (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1960), p.55.
24. Quoted in: Drummond and Coglentz, p. 228.
25. Lance deHaven-Smith, p. 173.
26. Jonathan Kwitny. Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World (New York: Congdon & Weed, 1984), p.4.
27. Jonathan Kwitny, p. 403.
28. Jonathan Kwitny, p. 406.
29. Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele. America: What Went Wrong? (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1992), p. 2.
30. Bartlett and Steele, p. 89.
31. John Perkins. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (New York: Penguin Group, 2006), Preface xiv-xv.