The Power-Elites´ Talking Shops.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was originally founded in 1921, and has been nurtured ever since by generations of what William Domhoff calls the most sophisticated group of corporate capitalists.
In the 1930s and 1940s the CFR was used to persuade successive US governments to pursue an aggressive and expansionist foreign policy. By the 1960s, the CFR and its house magazine, Foreign Affairs, had become the most influential forum for extra-governmental policy-making in the USA, and was beginning to extend its influence to domestic issues.
Before going any further, I must say once again that I am indebted to William Domhoff´s meticulous research and his extended essays on www.whorulesamerica.com for much of the information on which I have based my view of why the power-elites have been so effective in pursuing their political agendas.
From its foundation, the USA has always followed corporate-friendly foreign policies regardless of who occupies the White House and sits in the Congress. Remember that George Washington was the richest landowner in all the thirteen colonies. Since the first World War, (1914-1918) however, those policies have been particularly influenced by an endless series of policy-forums that the CFR may have modelled on the Round Tables that played a similar role in the British Empire from the late 1890s onwards.
Developed by Arnold Toynbee and his disciples Cecil Rhodes, Lionel Curtis and Alfred Milner, the Round Table process combines well-researched and skilfully-presented ideas and information with absolute confidentiality and a rigorous but well-mannered debate. The format is now enshrined in what are called The Chatham House Rules.
The CFR´s talking shops, its policy-forums..
… bring together wealthy individuals, corporate executives, experts, and government officials. New ideas are tried out in weekly or monthly discussion groups, and differences of opinion are aired and compromised.
The talking-shops usually have 15 to 25 members and after a presentation by invited experts, there are questions and a discussion involving all participants. Today there are similar forums at federal, state and city levels in the USA. There are also their transnational equivalents: the Trilateral Commission, the Davos and Bilderberg Meetings, and lesser-known but very influential bodies such as the Atlantic Business Council. Through these relaxed but carefully-structured policy-forums at the CFR and at its many sister organisations, wealthy individuals and corporate leaders can hone their understanding of policy options from outside experts and from their more politically street-wise elders. CFR members who control much of the USA’s mass media provide platforms to discuss the notionally non-partisan products of the forums. Through such friendly exposure, business executives can work under the umbrella of the CFR to influence public opinion, shape the political agenda and build their public profile.
The process also allows senior members of the upper class and the corporate community to pick out new leaders and media-friendly personalities to serve their various political agendas. Equally, the give and take of the discussion groups, reveals who has the best ideas, can facilitate discussions, and handle complex issues skilfully. The forums thus serve as a sorting and screening mechanisms for the emergence of new blood among the power-elites´ leadership, advisory and operational groups.
Through their contribution to these so-called ´non-partisan´ policy-forums, wealthy individuals and corporate executives can also be presented as concerned citizens, above petty politics, and in the fullness of time, as “national leaders” and “elder statesmen.“
The policy-forums also provide a mutually beneficial space wherein members of the power-elites get to know policy experts, who, in turn, can advance their own careers by impressing their hosts.
The policy-forums do not follow a strict party line, but the range of permissible differences is not wide. Outside experts will encounter well-informed audiences representing a spectrum of views that range from the moderately-conservative to the ultra-conservative. The debates are often sharp but the aim of the process is to achieve a workable agreement, and since the 1970s, these have tended to favour the ultras, of course.
Through the expertise on social and ‘political issues that they gain from the policy-forums, leading members of the power-elites prepare themselves for top cabinet positions in both Republican and Democratic administrations. Without that background, their wealth and/or family connections would not be enough to justify their appointments. Later, after they leave government, they return to the private sector or to head up a major foundation or a key international agency, with invaluable personal contacts and a wealth of inside information. And then, with a new President in the White House, they may be back in the Cabinet once again. And, so the power-elites´ revolving doors spin merrily along.
Domhoff stresses the value of the face-to-face, small-scale nature of the processes. People may go from
a board of directors meeting at a corporation in the morning, to a meeting of a policy discussion group in the afternoon, and on for a drink with some buddies at an exclusive club in the evening.The literature of small-group research or small-group dynamics in social psychology..shows that people who meet in relaxed settings, and see their group as exclusive, become even tighter with each other than people in ordinary groups. … people in exclusive groups are more likely to listen to each other and come to a compromise if they have the task of figuring out what to do about some policy issue…..
Domhoff concludes that,
from a social-psychological point of view, the upper class is made up of constantly shifting face-to-face small groups —
All well and good, provided that the majority of citizens are happy that their policy-options, cabinet appointments, and `non-partisan´ policy-experts cover a spectrum that runs all the way from Moderate to Ultra-Conservative, and that their lives, their governments, the mass-media and what ´passes for political debate and difference is held fast in the grip of a highly-partisan and dysfunctional form of group-think.
Moreover, while…
Their self-confidence and social polish are useful in dealing with people from other social classes, who often admire them and defer to their judgements, …, members of the upper class (and their chosen associates) usually come to think of themselves as “special” or “superior.” They think they are better than other people, and certainly better able to lead and govern.
Since the 1960s US power-elites have included in their policy-planning processes two new kinds of ultra-conservative activists.
Firstly, there were the post-Keynesian, monetarist and neo-liberal economists, who insisted that governments had to return to pre-New Deal policies based on Adam Smith´s free-market fundamentals. Frederick von Hayek´s protegé, Professor Milton Friedman was the most publicly active and notorious for his role in the counter-revolution, but he was but the most flamboyant of a small army of hard-line neo-liberal economists who have effectively expunged any new or even alternative economic ideas from academic and public discourse in the USA.
Secondly there were the neo-conservatives whose quasi-theological passions and social-psychological nous came to dominate the Republican Party after the Goldwater debacle of 1968 and the Nixon implosion of 1974.
Together, they set the USA on a course of restoring to corporate capitalism the robber-baron freedoms that it had lost from the 1930s to the 1960s. The totalitarian tendencies of such a relentless, multi-pronged process of economic, ideological and social reinforcement have become increasingly clear since the elections of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 with his ultra-conservative Cabinets’ drive for global military and economic dominance on behalf of the US corporatocracy.
In those circumstances, it may seem perverse to argue that enemies of US imperialism have much to learn from the power-elite´s talking shops. Nonetheless that will be the theme of my next posting.
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