The great American quadrennial political charade is in full sail. The managers for Team Obama and Team Romney are firing broadsides at the opposing candidate, while the passionate partisans for each side try to explain why only Commodore Mitt or Captain Barack can be trusted to steer our foundering ship of state through the stormy seas and perilous shoals ahead.
But, as our article “Romney v. Obama: Their Core Beliefs” by Thomas R. Eddlem should make painfully clear, the substantive differences, on many key issues, between the current White House incumbent and his challenger are slim to nil. By their own words, records, and campaign proposals, both Obama and Romney confirm that they would continue the suicidal massive government spending and intervention that would send our country off the same fiscal cliff that Greece and other spendthrift nations are now stampeding over. Each also believes that, as president, he may start wars at will and may shred the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches, perpetual surveillance, torture, and indefinite detention. On these and other crucial issues, there is frighteningly little difference between the two candidates.
This Tweedledum-Tweedledee dilemma is not a new phenomenon, of course; it seems to be a perpetual lamentation that when the presidential contest gets down to the wire, voters are stuck with a “choice” between two unappealing hybrids: either a Republicrat or a Demopub.
This has not happened by accident, as historian Carroll Quigley explained in his 1966 magnum opus, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. In this massive 1,348-page tome, Quigley, a distinguished professor who taught at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown, and was a mentor to Bill Clinton, provides detailed information about a secret network in Britain and the United States that, over the past century, has gained control over the financial and political life of much of the world. The primary front group for this secret power elite is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), often referred to as the Eastern Establishment. Professor Quigley moved in these circles, was given access to their secret records, and claimed to agree with their goals. The financial goals, according to Quigley, include “nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.”
The insiders of this secret network have already succeeded in putting nearly all of their “world system of financial control” into place. Key milestones in their successful march include creation of the Federal Reserve System (1913); the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank (1945); and, the euro currency and European Central Bank (1999).
To accomplish these aims, it was essential to gain control of both major U.S. political parties. Quigley describes the “problem,” as viewed by the power elites:
The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two political parties more national and international…. The two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method.
“As a result,” wrote Quigley, “the National parties and their presidential candidates, with the Eastern Establishment assiduously fostering the process behind the scenes, moved closer together and nearly met in the center with almost identical candidates and platforms, although the process was concealed, as much as possible, by … meaningless war cries and slogans.”
Unlike any other organization, the CFR has exercised a dominant (and decidedly malignant) influence in successive administrations, whether Republican or Democratic. James Perloff noted in this magazine in 2009: “Since the council’s founding in 1921, 21 secretaries of defense or war, 19 secretaries of the treasury, 17 secretaries of state, and 15 CIA directors have hailed from the Council on Foreign Relations.”
Among the hundreds of CFR members in the Obama administration are Timothy Geithner, Robert Gates, Lawrence Summers, Michele Flournoy, Susan Rice, Todd Stern, Janet Napolitano, Juliette Kayyem, Alan Bersin, Mona Sutphen, Paul Volcker, Peter Cowhey, and Eric Shinseki. Among the dozens of CFR members Mitt Romney has already named to his team are Michael Hayden, Paula Dobriansky, Eliot Cohen, Robert Kagan, Mitchell Reiss, Dov Zakheim, and Vin Weber.
With a CFR-backed, Big Government “rascal” set to win the Whitehouse in November regardless of the outcome, electing constitutionalists to the House of Representatives and the Senate is more important than ever.
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