Business-Managed Democracy

“Business-managed democracies are those in which the political and cultural arrangements are managed in the interests of business.”
Sharon Beder, 2009.

 

 

 

For more on this subject see Suiting Themselves: How Corporations Drive the Global Agenda, Earthscan, London, 2006.

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pointer Business-Managed Democracy » Government » International Coercion » Lobby Groups » Trilateral Commission

Business-Managed Government

The Trilateral Commission

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Reference: Nelson, Joyce, 1993, 'Great Global Greenwash: Burson-Marsteller, Pax Trilateral, and the Brundtland Gang Vs. The Environment', CovertAction(44), pp. 26-33, 57-8; 'About the Organization', Trilateral Commission, 2009.

David Rockefeller The Trilateral Commission is a top level international think tank founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller (pictured), chair of Chase Manhattan Bank, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Carter. It has 390 elite members made up of former and future national leaders, including George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and corporation heads, bankers and politicians. It meets annually as well as holding regional meetings.

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Reference: 'About the Organization', Trilateral Commission, 2009.

The Commission claims it drew together 'the highest-level unofficial group possible' so as 'to foster closer cooperation among these core democratic industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system'. Originally members were from Japan, Europe and North America but it has since widened its membership to include Chinese, Indian, Mexican and Asian members.

The Trilateral Commission has been funded by David Rockefeller, the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Although members hold high level positions in business and academia, or have held such positions in government, they attend meetings as private individuals and therefore are free from the constraints of having to represent their orgnaisations.

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Reference: Holly Sklar, Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, Boston, MA, South End Press, 1980.

Holy Sklar in her book on Trilateralism, says the purpose of Trilateralism is to protect the power of the international ruling class “whose locus of power is the global corporation”; to co-opt the Third World; and to reintegrate communist countries:

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Reference: Holly Sklar, Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, Boston, MA, South End Press, 1980, p. 2.

The Commission's purpose is to engineer an enduring partnership among the ruling classes of North America, Western Europe, and Japan—hence the term "trilateral"—in order to safe-guard the interests of Western capitalism in an explosive world.

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Against Democracy

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Reference: Quoted in Buzz Hargrove, ‘Corporate Success, Social Failure, Corporate Credibility’, Context Newsletter, 15 March 1998.

According to David Rockefeller: "We [the transnational corporations] are now in the driver's seat of the global economic engine. We are setting government policies instead of watching from the sidelines."

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Reference: David Rockefeller,'New Rules of the Game: Looking for New Leadership', Newsweek, 1 February 1999, p. 41.

Rockefeller wrote in Newsweek that business people favour lessening the role of government but that this means that “somebody has to take government’s place, and business seems to me to be a logical entity to do it.”

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Reference: Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy:Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, New York University Press, 1975.

Crisis of Democracy cover In a report entitled The Crisis of Democracy, the Commission argues that there is need for 'a greater degree of moderation in democracy' and that the 'effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups':

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Reference: Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy:Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, New York University Press, 1975.

The vulnerability of democratic government in the United States (thus) comes not primarily from external threats, though such threats are real, nor from internal subversion from the left or the right, although both possibilities could exist, but rather from the internal dynamics of democracy itself in a highly educated, mobilized, and participant society.

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Reference: David Miller and William Dinan, A Century of Spin: How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of Corporate Power, Pluto Press, London, 2008, p. 95

The Commission has promoted the deregulation of labour markets and reduction of welfare as part of its efforts to protect capitalism from the potential power of the working class.

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Membership

Noam Chomsky noted in 1981 of the Carter Administration:

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Reference: Noam Chomsky, Radical Priorities, Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1981.

All of the top positions in the government — the office of President, Vice-President, Secretary of State, Defense and Treasury — are held by members of the Trilateral Commission, and the National Security Advisor was its director. Many lesser officials also came from this group. It is rare for such an easily identified private group to play such a prominent role in an American Administration.

Other members of the Trilateral Commission have included:

  • Paul Adams, Chief Executive, British American Tobacco
  • Urban Ahlin, Member of the Swedish Parliament
  • Richard L. Armitage, President, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State
  • Antonio Borges, former Managing Director and Vice Chairman, Goldman Sachs International
  • James E. Burke, former CEO of Johnson & Johnson
  • Richard Burrows, Governor, Bank of Ireland
  • George W. Bush, former president of the United States
  • Frank Carlucci, President of Carlyle Group; former U.S. Secretary of Defense
  • Carme Chacon Piqueras, Minister for Defence; former Minister of Housing; former First Vice-President of the Spanish Parliament, Madrid
  • Joe Clark, former prime minister of Canada
  • Bill Clinton, former president of the U.S.
  • Hillary Rodham Clinton, US Secretary of State
  • Luc Coene, Minister of State; Deputy Governor, National Bank of Belgium, Brussels
  • Richard B. Cheney, former Vice President of the United States
  • Fujio Cho, Chairman, Toyota Motor Corporation
  • E. Gerald Corrigan, Managing Director, Goldman, Sachs; former President, Federal Reserve Bank of New York
  • Jamie Dimon, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, JPMorgan Chase
  • Robert Eckert, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mattel
  • Gaston Eyskens, former prime minister of Belgium
  • Dianne Feinstein, Member (D-CA), U.S. Senate
  • Stanley Fischer, Governor of the Bank of Israel; former President, Citigroup International; former First Deputy Managing Director, International Monetary Fund
  • Hugh Fletcher, CEO of Fletcher Challenge.
  • Francis Fukuyama, Professor International Political Economy
  • Lord Garel-Jones, Managing Director, UBS Investment Bank; Member of the House of Lords; former Minister of State at the Foreign Office (European Affairs)
  • Lord Gilbert, Member of the House of Lords; former Minister for Defence, London
  • Donald E. Graham, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The Washington Post Company
  • Elisabeth Guigou, Member of the French National Assembly; former Minister for European Affairs, Paris
  • Richard N. Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations; former Director, Policy Planning, U. S. Department of State; former Director of Foreign Policy Studies, The Brookings Institution
  • Edward Heath, former British Prime Minister
  • Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of the Republic of Estonia, Tallinn
  • Henry A. Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State
  • Horst Köhler, former president of Germany
  • Enrico Letta, Under State Secretary, Office of the Prime Minister, Italy; former Minister of European Affairs, Industry, and of Industry and International Trade, Rome
  • Peter Mandelson, Member of the European Commission (Trade), Brussels; former Member of the British Parliament; former Secretary of State to Northern Ireland and for Trade and Industry
  • Mike Moore, former Director-General, World Trade Organization, Geneva; former Prime Minister of New Zealand
  • Brian Mulroney, former Canadian Prime Minister
  • Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo
  • Lucas Papademos, Vice President, European Central Bank, Frankfurt-am-Main; former Governor of the Bank of Greece
  • Lee Raymond, former CEO and Chairman, ExxonMobil
  • Pedro Solbes, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economy and Finances, Spain
  • Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive Officer, WPP Group
  • Peter Sutherland, Chairman, BP; Chairman, Goldman Sachs International; Chairman of the London School of Economics; former Director General, GATT/WTO; former Attorney General of Ireland
  • Paul Wolfowitz, former President of the World Bank; former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense
  • Robert B. Zoellick, President, World Bank; former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, former U.S. Trade Representative
  • Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, U.S. News & World Report

Barak Obama appointed 11 Trilateral Commission members (out of a total 87 US members) to high level positions in his administration in its early days.

Members of the Trilateral Commission may not hold current government positions and must give up their membership if appointed to office.

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Sustainable Development

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Reference: Joyce Nelson, ‘Great Global Greenwash: Burson-Marsteller, Pax Trilateral, and the Brundtland Gang vs. the Environment’, CovertAction, No. 44, 1993, pp. 30-2.

The Trilateral Commission had at least four members in common with the Brundtland Commission on sustainable development, including Maurice Strong, Earth Summit organiser, and Jim MacNeill, the principal author of Our Common Future, the Brundtland Commission’s report on sustainable development. Many transnational corporations that are members of the Business Council for Sustainable Development are also represented on the Trilateral Commission, including Dow, Du Pont, Royal Dutch Shell, Browning-Ferris Industries, Mitsubishi, Nippon Steel, Nissan Motor, and 3M.

The interest of the Trilateral Commission in sustainable development and the Earth Summit becomes more apparent in a book published by the Trilateral Commission and written by Jim MacNeill of the Brundtland Commission. In it MacNeill explains how most urban/industrial regions depend on environmental resources in other places, such as developing countries.

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Reference: Quoted in Joyce Nelson, ‘Great Global Greenwash: Burson-Marsteller, Pax Trilateral, and the Brundtland Gang vs. the Environment’, CovertAction, No. 44, 1993, p. 31.

In essence, the ecological shadow of a country is the environmental resources it draws from other countries and the global commons. If a nation without much geographical resilience had to do without its shadow ecology, even for a short period, its people and economy would suffocate... Western nations heavily engaged in global sourcing should be aware of their shadow ecologies and the need to pursue policies that will sustain them.

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See also: World Economic Forum | TransAtlantic Business Dialogue | Business and Industry Advisory Committee

© 2011 Sharon Beder
http://www.herinst.org/BusinessManagedDemocracy/government/international/trilateral.html