The Anti-Social Socialist: What was the Trilateral Commission?

Image by Anirvan via Flickr

by The Anti-Social Socialist
Writer, Dandelion Salad
February 16, 2021

The Bewildered Herd on Feb 15, 2021

The Trilateral Commission is responsible for today’s globalist economy. Here are its origins and effects.

Transcript

“The Trilateral Commission apparently saw itself as helping to create the necessary international links for the new multinational economy. Its media in Western Europe, Japan, and the United States. They were from Chase Manhattan, Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, Baque de Paris, Lloyd’s of London, Bank of Tokyo, oil, steel auto, aeronautic, and electrical industries were represented.” — Howard Zinn

The Trilateral Commission was founded at the behest of David Rockefeller in 1973 and can be viewed as the liberal counterpart to the right-wing Powell Memorandum issued two years earlier. These two initiatives were a reaction to the democratizing tendencies of the 1960s that were threatening, not only to American business interests but, to the entire global capitalist ruling class.

Both liberals and conservatives were worried too much freedom had been won by segments of the population that were previously passive regarding the governing of their own affairs; people like workers, women, minorities, gays, students, and the anti-war movement among others. In short, all those not part of the business class or the technocrats that served them.

From the U.S. perspective, the Commission’s main goal was to indoctrinate the domestic population and force them back into obedience. In their estimation, the normal institutions like schools, churches, and the media were not serving business leaders well enough. The commission said…

“Private Enterprise is losing by default — in many schools, in much of the communications media and in the proportion of public consciousness.”

Their most famous publication, titled ‘The Crisis of Democracy’ addressed the concerns that actual democracy was occurring and that this was a problem. This new political participation by people was seen as a crisis that must be overcome. The American author of the Trilateral Commission, Samuel Huntington, wanted to get the U.S. back to the good old days where…

“Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall St. Lawyers and bankers.” — Samuel P. Huntington

To accomplish this, more subtle techniques of discipline and control had to be developed. Since opposition to the Vietnam War essentially put an end to the draft, the government and its corporate masters needed to find a way to continue their global hegemony. But with a dwindling military, such a feat would prove impossible.

So the Commission thought that if college degrees were essential to enter the workforce and the price of tuition was raised, they could entice poor and working-class Americans into military service by offering to pay for their college, thus maintaining a strong military and the U.S.’s role as a global super-power.

Such a strategy worked as an even broader mechanism of control. People who are trapped by debt can’t get jobs that change the status-quo because those jobs don’t provide enough income to pay off that debt. Say, for instance, you go to school for environmental law to save the planet, but when you get out you realize working for Greenpeace isn’t going to allow you to pay off your education.

So you get a job working for a corporation, helping them subvert the laws you studied to increase their profits, and by the time the debt is paid off you’ve been absorbed in the corporate culture. In other words, the price you pay for daring to get an education in America is a life of corporate servitude.

Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, a rabid anti-communist, knew the democrats would win the 1976 election due to public perception of the republican party in the post-Watergate era. They thought Carter was the ideal candidate to carry out this new assault by big business on the working class. But, on the international end, that would extend to the non-capitalist portions of the globe such as the Soviet sphere of influence, and the Third World.

On the global stage, the Commission’s members were drawn from the three components of the world capitalist democracies: the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, hence Trilateral. Internationally, it was to be a vehicle for the consolidation of commercial and banking interests in order to expand the power and influence of the capitalist class. George Ball, a former member of the Kennedy Administration and then the director at Lehman Brothers said…

“In these twenty postwar years, we have come to recognize in action, though not always in words, that the political boundaries of nation-states are too narrow and constricted to define the scope and activities of modern business.” — George Ball

So, to recap, the Trilateral Commissions’ goal in the U.S. was to suppress the gains made by Americans in the ’60s and force the general public back into obedience through business propaganda and techniques of social control. On the international front, it was to crush communism around the globe, which would free the capitalist countries to pillage the resources of the Third World and force markets on them, while at the same time setting up factories there to undercut wages at home. Rockefeller noted, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that it was the perfect time to strike saying…

“Everything is in place to build a true ‘new world’ in the Western Hemisphere… And what happens if we don’t pass NAFTA? I truly don’t think that ‘criminal’ would be too strong a word for rejecting NAFTA.” — David Rockefeller

The Commission was a wild success. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, global capitalists have coordinated the scientific exploitation of the working class and yet, no one in American can see it. Domestic business propaganda, as outlined by Samuel Huntington, has obscured the obvious fact that capitalists and their multi-national corporations are now in complete control of the world economy.

Those same corporations own and control the mainstream media and have blinded Americans to what is right in front of their eyes and instead, have the working class believing in crazy plots involving a global cabal of Satanic, pedophile, lizard Marxists who are conspiring against our freedom and democracy when in reality, it is simply the capitalist business model operating in broad daylight. Political author and dissident Noam Chomsky said,

“If you take a look across the country that’s what people are worried about and fighting against: aliens, the devil, the U.N. forces, the Federal Reserve, I mean, anything except what’s real. Namely private tyranny. Private corporate power. The guys who are listed in the Fortune 500. Well, that’s an achievement. That’s a propaganda achievement.” — Noam Chomsky

But after 50 years of being dormant, the working class is again beginning to organize against private, concentrated capital, and slowly, people are starting to see the world the way it is.

From the archives:

Plutocracy I-V (must-see)

The Anti-Social Socialist: What is the Connection Between Narcissism and Capitalism?

The Anti-Social Socialist: What is Wage Slavery?

How Capitalism Controls You by The Anti-Social Socialist

Peter Phillips: The Global Power Elite: A Transnational Class