The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Membership of the Trilateral Commission was limited to 300 (later expanded to 450), and early participants included Time, Inc. editor-in-chief Hedley Donovan, British politician Reginald Maudling, FIAT president Giovanni Agnelli, and former French premier Raymond Barre. Among the more recent members are Alan Greenspan of the American Federal Reserve, Dick Cheney, Enron’s Ken Lay, Paul Wolfowitz and George H. W. Bush … in other words, the Trilateral Commission is stuffed full of exactly the same sort of mondo politicians and businessmen who sit on the plush chairs at the Bilderberg Group and Council for Foreign Relations. Naturally, then, the Trilateral Commission comes in for the same critical fire as those two — that is, it’s attempting to covertly instal a shadow global government run by its members. They must be busy boys and girls, these Trilateralists, because they’ve also been accused by über-conservative Lyndon LaRouche of running the drugs trade, been denounced by black rappers Public Enemy for organizing Zionist plots, fingered as agents of the Illuminati by fundamentalist-conspiracist Texe Marrs, and marked by evangelist Pat Robertson for promoting Satanism.

For a supposed «secret society», the Trilateral Commission is disappointingly open: its membership can be viewed at its website, www.trilateral.org/. Meetings are held in camera, but it would be a wonder if globalism weren’t a frequent fixture on the agenda — after all, world order was the raison d’être for the creation of the Commission. Many Trilateralists represent big business — the likes of Exxon, Mobil, Goldman Sachs — which finds the nation state inimical to its interests and consequently seeks to extend the remit of transnational institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

So is the Trilateral Commission, as feared by the American far right, the executive board of the New World Order? The Commission does not have its hands on the surreptitious levers of global power for a simple reason: there aren’t any. International politics and economics are more complex than the instrumentalist philosophy of far-right conspiracists realize.

Indeed, focusing on the Trilateral Commission’s international agenda-setting carries the risk of blindness to its interesting role in the US. One early member of the Commission was a down-home Southern Democrat by the name of Jimmy Carter. According to former Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, the Trilateral Commission eased Carter into the White House in 1973 by mobilizing «the money power of the Wall Street bankers, the intellectual influence of the academic community … and the media controllers». With Mr Carter to Washington went fellow Trilateralists Walter Mondale as V.P. and old Zbigniew Brzezinski as National Security Advisor. Anthony C. Sutton and Patrick M. Wood, authors of Trilaterals Over Washington (1979), commented: «If you are trying to calculate the odds of three unknown men [Carter, Mondale and Brzezinski], out of 60 [Trilateral] Commissioners from the US, capturing the three most powerful positions in the land, don’t bother. Your calculations will be meaningless.»

Carter, Mondale and Brzezinski weren’t the only Trilateralists to get their feet in the door of the Carter administration: Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Director Paul Warnke of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Undersecretary of the Treasury Anthony Solomon, Undersecretary of Economic Affairs Richard Cooper and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke were among nearly 20 Trilateralists to hold prominent positions in the government. Then Carter selected banker Paul Volcker to head the American Federal Reserve; Volcker was the chair of the North American branch of the Trilateral Commission. So dominating were the Trilateralists that even the normally supine Beltway press took notice, with the Washington Post calling the Trilateralist influence «unsettling».

Being in power enabled pet projects of the Commission to come to pass. One will serve in evidence. A 1975 Commission task-force paper, The Crisis of Democracy, by Harvard academic Samuel P. Huntington, proposed that democracy was inadequate in the face of national emergencies; appointed to Carter’s National Security Council, Huntington prepared the Presidential Review Memorandum which created the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Of course, the Trilateral Commission can’t be all-powerful, since it was unable to stop Jimmy Carter from being electorally ejected from the White House. As consolation, the Commission found another good ol’ Southern Democrat to join their ranks. Few Americans then knew his name, but they would later.

Bill Clinton.

The Trilateral Commission is the board of directors of New World Order Inc.: ALERT LEVEL 4