Obama Picks Come From Same Old CFR Roster

Not surprisingly, both Summers and Geithner are veteran members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), as have been most of their predecessors, who have led our nation’s economy into the present debacle. Both men have been involved in massive government bailouts, manipulation, and intervention in domestic and foreign markets over the past two decades. Here’s an excerpt of a biographical sketch of Geithner from the Council on Foreign Relations’ website:

Geithner was closely involved in recent talks surrounding the failure of investment bank Lehman Brothers and the bailout of the insurance giant AIG….

Geithner had a previous thirteen-year stint at the Treasury Department, starting in 1988 when he joined the international affairs division. He became undersecretary for international affairs at Treasury during the later years of the Clinton administration.

In 2001, Geithner left Treasury to become a senior fellow in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as director of a CFR Task Force on trade policy that recommended the United States expand free trade. A report published by that task force called on Congress to grant Trade Promotion Authority to President George W. Bush, which he was given by a narrow vote margin.

From 2001 to 2003, Geithner was director of the Policy Development and Review Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). There, he helped craft the IMF’s $30.4 billion bailout of the Brazilian economy in September 2002. He also worked on bailouts of the Indonesian, Mexican, and South Korean economies.

As the chart at the end of this article shows, 17 of Mr. Geithner’s predecessors at Treasury (including the Treasury’s current head, Henry Paulson, and before him, Lawrence Summers) are/were fellow CFR members.

Here’s another kudo for Geithner from the same USA Today  article cited above:

"It’s hard for me to imagine a better team than this one," said Pete Peterson, co-founder of the Blackstone Group, who chaired the search committee that chose Geithner for the New York Fed. Peterson, a veteran of the Nixon administration, said Geithner, 47, "has everything that anyone could ask for" in a Treasury chief.

USA Today doesn’t mention it, but Peterson is chairman emeritus of the CFR. Also not mentioned in the article (or anywhere else in the CFR-dominated major media) is the fact that the recently bailed-out insurance giant AIG was run for decades by billionaire CEO Maurice Greenberg, a prominent force in the CFR. Greenberg and AIG poured considerable funding into the CFR, and the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the CFR is named in his honor.

It is not the intellectual capabilities of these folks that is in question; they may be as "brilliant" as their admirers allege. The question is toward what ends are they (and have they been) applying this alleged brilliance? They have been consistently, "brilliantly" wrong – with catastrophic results for our economy (though they seem to keep getting richer and richer). More important is their judgment, their moral convictions, and their ideological leanings. Unfortunately, CFR membership seems to require a globalist world view that embraces a politically managed world economy (socialism, though they won’t use that term) and the piecemeal destruction of national sovereignty (world government).

As John F. McManus notes in "Behind the Obama Agenda," (written just prior to Obama’s Geithner-Summers announcement):

The council has gained a virtual lock-hold on the U.S. government, regardless of which party is in office. No other organization comes close to boasting the kind of clout that the CFR members have held: eight presidents of the U.S.; seven vice presidents; 17 secretaries of state; 20 secretaries of war/defense; 18 secretaries of the Treasury; 15 directors of the CIA. And on it has gone throughout the Cabinets, in seriatim — through Democrat and Republican administrations — with hundreds of deputy secretaries, assistant secretaries, etc.

The Obama Cabinet will be no different…. Other names being mentioned by the media for federal posts starting January 20 read like a membership list of the CFR. (All the individuals whose names follow hold CFR membership.) Will octogenarian former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker actually be tapped? Will he be assisted by New York Fed official Timothy Geithner? Educated guesses for jobs in the new administration include former Cabinet officials Federico Peña, Bill Daley, Lawrence Summers, and Colin Powell.

As McManus notes, based on the experience of the past several administrations, we can expect another 400-plus CFR globalists to be appointed to the Obama administration. Some change!
 

 *John F. Kennedy was never listed on any of the CFR’s official membership lists. However, he confirmed in a letter in 1960 [PDF Download] that he was at that time a member of the Council, as well as a "longtime subscriber" to the CFR journal, Foreign Affairs.

** Donald Rumsfeld was counted twice, as he served as Defense Secretary in two separate administrations.