Rockefeller – Controlling the Game (14 page)

1. G8, the Group of Eight (1998–2014) included G7 + Russia until the invasion of Crimea.
   

1. G20, the Group of Twenty (founded in 1999), is a wider international forum for governments and central bank governors from the world’s leading economies: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States + invited international organisations and Focus Groups.
   

1. G30, the Group of Thirty (founded in 1978 by Geoffrey Bell on the initiative of Rockefeller Foundation) focuses on economic issues and comprises 30 members from more than a dozen countries, representing central banks, private banks, international institutions, and academia.
   

The Dept Trap

Before the Oil Crisis, many of the developing nations had high growth rates which increased their spending and imports (especially Argentina, Brazil and Mexico). They were slowly starting to catching up with the economies of the West. The oil crisis price shock, however, forced them to borrow money in an effort to sustain their economies. They turned to commercial banks and private lenders to obtain funds for their increased payments, while the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (part of the World Bank Group) and IMF offered loans for infrastructure projects that would “help” their economies. That initiated a debt bubble that would be growing during the coming decade, resulting in a severe debt crisis as higher interest rates made it harder to make payments on the loans.
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This would in the end make the South more willing to accept the demands for structural reforms from the moneylenders and open them up to the borderless neoliberal world order, such as:

1. cutbacks in government expenditures, especially in social spending;
   

1. rollback or containment of wages;
   

1. privatisation of state enterprises and deregulation of the economy;
   

1. elimination or reduction of protection for the domestic market and fewer restrictions on the operations of foreign investors;
   

1. successive devaluations of the local currency in the name of achieving export competitiveness.
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The reform programme was later named the Washington Consensus, consisting of ten neoliberal recommendations from the Washington-based World Bank Group, the International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. Treasury Department, by John Williamson, an economist from the Peterson Institute for International Economics (founded in 1981 by C. Fred Bergsten who co-wrote the TriCom reform program for international institutions).

The World Bank president Robert McNamara introduced the structural adjustment lending before he finished his term in 1981 and became a member of the Trilateral Commission. He was succeeded by original TriCommember Alden W. Clausen, former president of Bank of America, who continued a massive scaling up of the policies through the eighties before fellow Trilateral Barber B. Conable took over as president of the World Bank.

TriCom skilfully used the aims of Social Democratic internationalism to benefit corporate economic globalisation. These two ostensibly contrary political discourses would later be merged to form the basis for the desired technocratic world order (NIEO) where the nation states would be made obsolete.

Power Shift in the White House

After Spiro Agnew had to resign for tax evasion, November 10, 1973, Gerald Ford had been appointed as Nixon’s Vice President. Nine months later, August 9, 1974, Nixon also had to resign. To fill the vacancy, Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller as his new VP.

Both appointments were made possible through the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1967.
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When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, his Vice-President, Lyndon B. Johnson, was prevented by the constitution to appoint a successor because the VP must be nominated at an official nominating convention and be elected together with the president in the presidential election. In order to avoid such a situation occurring again, Nelson Rockefeller had worked hard to bring about a change in the constitution that would permit the incoming President to appoint a new Vice President himself.
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This new amendment now came in very timely for Nelson – whose highest ambition was to become President – and the nation found itself in the unique situation of being governed by two non-elected men. Nelson was finally only a heartbeat from the ultimate power in the United States. By his side he had his faithful henchman, Henry Kissinger, as Secretary of State. The Rockefeller family practically owned the White House. With Nixon out of the way, the Rockefeller population and environment agenda could now be taken to the highest political level.

Only two days after Nelson became Vice-President, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Executive Director of the Trilateral Commission, wrote to Nelson and recommended that Kissinger, as Secretary of State, continue to handle diplomatic and power relations while Ford focused on domestic problems.

I believe you can make the most singular and vital contribution in the area of focusing attention on, and developing required policy responses to, the emerging and increasingly urgent global problems, most of which do not fit traditional bureaucratic patterns or jurisdiction. (Zbigniew Brzezinski)
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These happened to be the same “urgent global problems” which had been highlighted by Nelson’s Commission on Critical Choices for Americans.

Gerald Ford, who in the previous year had been a panelist in Nelson’s commission, did approve the Nelson’s (Brzezinski’s) suggestion to focus on domestic policy, and to have domestic policymakers report to the president via the Vice-President. However, even though Nelson initially enjoyed some leeway in both domestic and foreign politics, he would soon find himself blocked especially by the Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, by the Senate, and by some of the presidential advisors, from getting the amount of influence he had aimed for.

Nelson complained that all he got to do was go to funerals and earthquakes and that the only real decision he was allowed to make was redesigning the vice-presidency seal. (He didn’t like the old one with drooping wings and a single arrow in its claws. He thought it looked like a “wounded quail”, and replaced it with a spread-winged eagle clutching multiple arrows.) Alas, Nelson never got to live up to the grandeur of his new seal. He was still only number two – something which he found hard to tolerate as he was “just not built for standby equipment.”
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As the president of the U.S. Senate, Nelson did, however, manage to get the crucial North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – which formed the basis of the neoliberal globalisation process – “fast-tracked” through the Senate through less-than-democratic means.
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The democratic model didn’t suit the Rockefellers brothers’ ambitions for the world. A new way of governing was required in order to realise their utopian vision of the future.

Aspen Workshop and Climate Consultation

In preparation for the third United Nations World Population Conference in August 1974 in Bucharest, Romania, a summer workshop was held at the Aspen Institute in 1973. Topics debated at the workshop included the planet's carrying capacity in relation to climate change, toxic substances, energy, soils and water, and how social and ecological problems could be controlled.
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The workshop resulted in the report
World Population and a Global Emergency
by Thomas W. Wilson, Jr., with persuasive arguments and action-oriented guidelines for curtailing population growth.
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When attending this workshop, Maurice Strong, in a conversation with Joseph E. Slater (CEO of Aspen) and Robert O. Anderson (board member and funder), had expressed a wish to meet leading scientists in a relaxed environment and more detailed information about the planetary boundaries, human impact, and triggering events that could cause irreversible damage. Inspired by this request, the Aspen Institute, under the supervision of
Walter Orr Roberts,
organised an experimental “consultative education" in August 1973, where Strong and his recent successor of
UNEP
,
Mostafa Tolba
, received private tuition from nineteen leading experts in various fields, including Nobel Laureate Sir
Peter Medawar
,
René Dubos
,
Carroll L. Wilson
(MIT),
B. R. Seschachar
from India,
F. Hoveyada
(Iran's ambassador to the UN) and the German meteorologist and climate pioneer,
Hermann Flohn
.

This unique private consultation resulted in a number of recommendations for UNEP’s continued operations.
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It would also turn out very useful in the 1980s and in the establishment of the IPCC in 1988.

The Aspen Institute Climate Programme

In 1974, Aspen also initiated the Project on Food, Climate and Environment, headed by Walter Orr Roberts (who had been supported by Laurance Rockefeller from early on in his career).

This was part of a larger international project, The Impact on Man of Climate Changes, drafted at the Meteorological Institute in Bonn (where Hermann Flohn worked) and was conducted in collaboration with Club of Rome-related IFIAS in Stockholm, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, and included sub-projects in Japan and the Soviet Union.
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The “international” project was, however, primarily an American project sponsored by Rockefeller Foundation, RBF, UNEP, Lilly Endowment, and John Deere & Co. (led by the Trilateral William A. Hewitt).
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The project resulted in a number of studies on the interaction between climate change and food production from different parts of the world. Drought had destroyed crops in the USSR and the U.S. Midwest; the United States had suffered an unusually cold winter 1971–72; the fishery had collapsed in Peru as result of an El Niño-related event; and Sahel in Africa had been threatened by famine due to persistent drought. The price of grain had soared. Taken together, these anomalies gave the impression of a global problem. These studies were then used as indication that climatic anomalies were occurring and increased public awareness that this might be a problem.

In a speech to the UN General Assembly (published in the
New York Times
on April 16, 1974) the U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, called for better ICSU/WMO research on climatic disasters, and indicated a willingness from the U.S. to lead this research.
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After a meeting at the Rockefeller Foundation in August 1974, with experts such as Walter Orr Roberts, Stephen Schneider, and Lester Brown, an international coordination of climate prognoses were recommended in order to manage the threat of climate change.
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In November 1974, Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden, predicted that by the end of the century, climate change would be the biggest threat. As a close friend of Bert Bolin’s (later chairman of the IPCC), he was well informed.
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The Rockefeller Foundation also predicted that the handling of crises such as population growth, energy shortages, environmental pollution, food scarcities, competition for natural resources, and the possibility of climate change would have “a decisive influence on the future of world order.”
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RF funded both IFIAS and the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia, Norwich, England. The following year, CRU and WMO organised the conference International Symposium on Long-term Climate Fluctuations, which lent more support to the theory of carbon dioxide as the main cause of rising temperatures.
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Avenues were now open for anchoring this theory more firmly within the scientific community.

RBF and Worldwatch Institute

In 1974, Rockefeller Brothers Fund launched its environmental programme. It was a natural progression from the basic focus on population and conservation issues in the previous decades.

Together with the Rockefeller Foundation, RBF also supported the creation of the Worldwatch Institute, founded by Lester Brown (member of CFR and World Future Society) to develop a warning system for global problems and social trends.
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It was based on the same futuristic ideology as the Club of Rome. (In 1984, the institute would start publishing their famous annual report,
State of the World
, where crucial issues such as global warming were identified.)

Meanwhile, funds were being channeled to the interest group Union of Concerned Scientists at MIT for spreading public awareness of environmental crises caused by the technological development. This group, too, would help spread climate change awareness in the following decades.

The RBF
Annual Report 1974
discussed how computer modelling could be used to research problems and propose alternative solutions for policy makers. Co-author of
Limits to Growth
, Donella H. Meadows from Dartmouth College, received a scholarship to further investigate this option.
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