Shining Light on the Shadows of Power: An Interview with James Perloff

I just submitted this piece to The Lincoln Eagle in Kingston, NY. 

Shining Light on the Shadows of Power: An Interview with James Perlofff

 Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

James Perloff has written four books on the elite governing America, on Darwinism, and on the relationships among institutions that dominate American politics from behind the scenes. In The Shadows of Power Perloff traces the history of the Council on Foreign Relations. In his most recent book, Truth Is a Lonely Warrior, Perloff analyzes how history and current events are leading us toward a world government dictatorship. Perloff’s website is http://jamesperloff.com/. The Lincoln Eagle (TLE) interviewed Perloff by email.

TLE: In your work you refer to the Establishment. What does that mean? Who controls America?

Perloff: In America’s Sixty Families Ferdinand Lundberg wrote: “The United States is owned and dominated by a hierarchy of its sixty richest families…” He was talking about names like the Rockefellers, Morgans, Mellons, Vanderbilts, Du Ponts, Astors and Warburgs, and he showed their control was such that they preselected the presidential candidates before the nominating conventions took place. Things haven’t changed today. Voting gives us the illusion that power belongs to the people, but it really belongs to the rich and the few.

TLE: The media contributes to that process. Whose views does the media reflect?
 
Perloff: That of the media’s ownership. Lundberg documented in 1937 that a plutocracy owned nearly all of the major media organs. We have diverse outlets but not diverse ownership. Today, Time Warner owns CNN, AOL, Time magazine, People, Money, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, New Line Cinema – the list goes on and on. Similar with News Corp. You have maybe a dozen giant multinationals owning all the major media.

TLE: How can Americans obtain information about current events given that their media, such as ABC, MSNBC, The New York Times, and Time are controlled by banking-and-corporate interests?

Perloff: People should investigate alternative media: magazines like The New American, radio shows like Deanna Spingola’s, websites like henrymakow.com, and books like my own Truth Is a Lonely Warrior, published in Kindle and paperbound last year.

TLE: What is the biggest problem facing Americans today?

Perloff: Of course the problems are innumerable: political, economic, and social. If they were boiled down to one, I would say it is a self-serving shadow government that runs the country from behind the scenes of our democratic trappings.

TLE: A related issue is that of education, which works in tandem with the media to indoctrinate rather than inform or educate. How can parents eliminate indoctrination from their children’s education?

Perloff: The best alternative is home schooling; if not home schooling, private religious schooling; where these alternatives are not possible, give them information resources as an antidote to media indoctrination. Truth is more powerful than lies.

TLE: Why is there a trend toward increasing centralization and government authority?

Perloff: That is a means of consolidating power. The Founding Fathers understood that centralized power leads to tyranny, which is why they gave us limited government with numerous checks and balances.

TLE: What is the link between the Federal Reserve Bank and the money center banking interests, the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Warburgs, and more recently Henry Paulson, Goldman Sachs, George Soros, and other bailout beneficiaries?

Perloff: The Rockefeller, Morgan and Warburg interests were all represented at the secret 1910 meeting on Jekyll Island where the Fed was planned. Paul Warburg was the Fed’s first vice chairman. Henry Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs immediately before he became treasury secretary and then oversaw, with Bernanke, the 2008 $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, which included billions for Goldman Sachs. The Fed is a golden goose for the private banks.

TLE: What has been the role of the Council on Foreign Relations with respect to the relationships in the prior question?

Perloff: The role of the Council is to formulate foreign policy, but that policy is cohesive with the wishes of bankers and the Fed. The Council was founded by the very same people who founded the Fed; the Council’s first president was J. P. Morgan’s personal attorney; David Rockefeller was the Council’s chairman for many years.

TLE: What has been the link between the Council and the presidents?

Perloff: The Council dominates the cabinets of presidents whether Democratic or Republican. When my book went to press last year, the count was 21 Secretaries of Defense, 19 Treasury Secretaries, 18 Secretaries of State, and 16 CIA directors have been members of the Council. This is why foreign policy changes very little, if at all, from one president to the next. In the meantime, how many Americans have even heard of the Council?

TLE: Do the Council and the Establishment favor one-world government? Why?

Perloff: The Council on Foreign Relations was founded in 1921 for the express purpose of creating a one-world government. In the immediate context, it was founded as a reaction to the U.S. Senate’s rejection of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, which would have entangled us with the League of Nations. The plans for the UN were drawn up by Council members. The EU and NAFTA are regional stepping stones. World government would be the consolidation of all power on the planet and thus invoke tyranny on a global scale. This is predicted in the Bible, by the way, in the book of Revelation.

TLE: What is the link, if any, among Agenda 21 and the trends that you describe in your books?

Perloff: Environmentalism, as expressed in Agenda 21 and other programs, is a pretext for controlling people. Up until the 1960s, war was considered the best means of controlling populations, but with the advent of nuclear weapons, the Establishment was concerned that war might no longer be a viable option, so the environment was chosen to succeed war as the new primary threat to survival. Global warming and other false scares have been dreamed up and promoted in order give government the excuse to micro-regulate our lives. Now they’re even talking about giving the government remote control of home thermostats. 

TLE: What has been the role of the US government in financing its own enemies, including Stalin, Mao, al Qaeda, and the Ayatollah Khomeini?

Perloff: It is well documented that Stalin’s predecessors, Lenin and Trotsky, were financed by the Rothschilds and US banking firms like Kuhn, Loeb. During World War II, When Stalin was threatened with destruction by the Axis powers, he was rescued with billions of dollars’ worth of American Lend-Lease. Mao would not have risen to power without the help of the U.S. State Department: Google my article “China Betrayed.” Regarding the Ayatollah, google my article “Iran and the Shah: What Really Happened.” Of course, there’s quite a bit on the Internet on al Qaeda being a creation of Western intelligence services.

TLE: Will the future bring a one-world government with a violent dictator at its head?

Perloff: From the Bible, from Orwell, from the trend of events and from the internal documents of the plutocracy we are talking about, that appears to be the case, but for the sake of righteousness, which is obedience to God, we should resolutely oppose it.

Thank you, Mr. Perloff. I hope that readers will buy your books and wean themselves from the mass media.

John McCain's War Powers Act of 2014

H/t Constitutional Clayton and Mike Marnell

Dear Senator McCain:

Although I don't live in Arizona, I contributed $500 to your 2008 presidential campaign. I was surprised to hear you propose a revision to the War Powers Resolution, the War Powers Act of 2014.

Giving the authority to declare war to the executive branch is unconstitutional; it is also a mistake from a political standpoint. Presidents have been  stupid about declaring unnecessary wars.  Some examples are the the Vietnam War and the War in Iraq. The errors have been declaring too many wars, not declaring an insufficient number of wars.

American foreign policy since 1918, when the Council on Foreign Relations began, has been badly conducted.  Quacks dominate foreign policy to an even greater degree than they dominate economics.  Experts who might counsel a president to conduct a  war are likely to be specialists in the arrogation of power; it is unlikely that they know more about foreign policy than the average American. Foreign affairs is a junk science, a field without findings, laws, general rules, or knowledge beyond the common sense accessible to anyone schooled in nations' cultures and political systems.

 I oppose the War Powers Act, and I can no longer support you or a Republican Party that produces a scam like this.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Canadian Radio Discusses Agenda 21

http://johnconner1984.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/city-planning-and-the-un/

Mike Marnell sent me the above-linked radio show concerning Agenda 

21. The hosts, Ron Stephens and John Conner, and their guest, 

Jessica Lauren Annis, are knowledgeable. Annis is a trained city 

planner who blanched at the indoctrination in her education in 

Canadian universites. She heads a group called Operation Pushback. 

Be patient with the tape's quality. I listened to the whole show. It is well 

worth your time. 

Mike Marnell, publisher of The Lincoln Eagle, asked me to listen to it. 

I had just written the following introduction to Agenda 21 for The Eagle: 

Introduction to Agenda 21

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Agenda 21 celebrated its 20th birthday this month.  It is an environmentalist plan of action that aims to reduce your standard of living.  It is not a fantasy or theory.  It was signed under the administration of a Republican president, George H.W. Bush.   According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs' Division for Sustainable Development's website (http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/):

Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment…

The United States has agreed to be subsumed under the "United Nations System" without public debate.  According to an informal straw poll that The Lincoln Eagle has conducted, no politician in Kingston has heard of Agenda 21; Mayor Gallo and his colleagues cannot assess the degree to which the proposed city plan reflects it. 

The text of UN Agenda 21 is posted on the aforementioned website.   It combines environmental extremism with economic illiteracy.  It advocates globalization and concentration of corporate economic power.  It claims that because Americans have a high standard of living other countries are poor.  This claim is incorrect. Human capital, entrepreneurship, and technological innovation create wealth.  In the 1940s Henry Hazlitt wrote an excellent book, Economics in One Lesson, which anticipated and refuted the fallacies that the UN now perpetuates through Agenda 21.  

UN Agenda 21 serves as a coordinating document for numerous initiatives, including town and city plans that have been proposed by politically connected consultants in Olive, Woodstock, and other towns in Ulster County and around the country.  The initiatives tend to reduce or attack small landholders' property rights while facilitating land grabs by banks and large developers.   Using terms like smart growth, cluster housing, and green development, the plans combine a pretense of environmentalism with intended subsidization of well-connected banks and developers.  The US Green Building Council's Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED) is linked to Agenda 21.  I interviewed LEED's sponsors; they told me that they have designed a building code that they would like to see implemented everywhere in the country.  The code would coerce new building standards; some proponents advocate making it retroactive, which would force moderate-income homeowners who cannot afford tens of thousands of dollars in retrofitting costs into city projects.   President Obama's failed Cap and Trade bill would have enforced expensive regulations on individual homeowners and initially called for retrofitting.   The Olive Town Plan mentioned, but did not insist on, refitting.

Under Agenda 21, commercial banks benefit by lending for city projects; developers profit from sweetheart deals; politicians like Senator Bonacic and Congressman Hinchey benefit from campaign contributions; environmentalists empty the rural regions of human population;  special interests celebrate while the average homeowner's life is diminished.  

Ron Paul as Spiderman

For this week's GOP primary, The Lincoln Eagle, Mike Marnell's edgy, pro-Ron Paul newspaper based in Kingston, NY,  features a cover drawing of Ron Paul as Spiderman.  The drawing is by Joe Sinnott, the 86-year old inker for Marvel Comics whom Stan Lee called Marvel's best. Wikopedia says that Sinnott has worked for Marvel for 60 years, including 16 on Fantastic Four as well as The Avengers, The Defenders and Thor.  Sinnott lives in nearby Saugerties, NY.

Celebrating Indepedence Day

I just returned from my good friend Mike Marnell's Marnell Family Fourth of July barbecue. Mike lives in Kingston across the street from his mom and dad. They throw a great July fourth barbecue. The Marnell family is huge; I guess there were about 80 people there, and they're all doing great. Mike's dad, Bob, is suffering from heart problems but he is in good spirits.  The food is always awesome at the Marnell parties. Mike made the BEST Buffalo wings I ever had. I brought  bottle of single malt scotch which Mike and I worked on all day.

Fireworks, family and barbecues are what the Founding Fathers envisioned for the Fourth. Upon recovering from the party and driving home I took a minute to watch my favorite scene from HBO's John Adams television series. I love when Abigail Adams (Laura Linney) reads the Declaration to her children who are recovering from an epidemic--they are America's future and one of them is to become the sixth president:

From Brooklyn to Kingston and Back: Welcome to The Lincoln Eagle

I ran into Bob Marnell at Steve Marnell's Woodstock Music Trade Show at the Holiday Inn in Kingston, NY.  Bob, an IBM employee who moved to South Carolina from Kingston, told me that he is hard at work creating the online version of his brother's, Mike Marnell's, Lincoln Eagle.  A beta site is up at: http://thelincolneagle.com/.

The story that the Marnell brothers chose to put up as the first article is the history of their ancestors' founding of The Brooklyn Eagle in the 1840s, its rise into becoming the largest newspaper in the world, its decline, and its closing in the 1950s.  A big part of the article is about the links between Brooklyn and Kingston. What a coincidence: I teach at Brooklyn College and am heading there tomorrow am!

Lei Isaacs writes in The Lincoln Eagle:

There are many links connecting Brooklyn and The Brooklyn Eagle to Kingston. Perhaps the most visible is an enormous, quirky house with a blue awning located at 58 St. James Street. Isaac Van Anden had a sister, who had two sons, William and Charles Hester, who eventually took the paper over from Isaac Van Anden, who died on August 4, 1875.

Around 1884, Charles Hester was one of the many tourists who have been drawn to the Kingston area over the decades by the combination of fresh air, access to transportation, and proximity to The City which, in 1884, was not New York City but Brooklyn. Brooklyn had become a city in 1834, and had annexed the surrounding five towns of New Amersfoort, Midwout, New Utrecht, Boswisk and Gravesend. Referring to itself as “The city of homes and churches,” Brooklyn contrasted itself to New York City, “the home of Crime Government.”

There had been several Hester families in what is now uptown Kingston for many decades, including several on Fair Street. In 1883 the Kingston City Directory listed the establishment of the domicile of Charles W. Hester at “58 St. James Street at the corner of Clinton. “ (The building that now stands between 58 St. James Street and the corner of Clinton was an outbuilding for the original grand house.) Marnell recalls that Charles Hester “Built the house for his wife and never worked another day in his life.” The building is still a quirky monument to the best in the excesses of Victorian architecture, embellished with dormers, balconies, lacework and the exquisite wrap-around porch, now enhanced with the modern blue awning.

According to available records, Charles W. Hester retired to 58 St. James Street in about 1896. It was a pivotal time for Brooklyn and for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In 1890 the cornerstone for the new Brooklyn Daily Eagle building was laid at the corner of Johnson and Washington Avenues across the street form Borough Hall. Until then, the paper had been published on Fulton Street.

The Brooklyn Eagle Then: Now, it's the Brooklyn Supreme Court.

The Eagle moved into its new building in 1892. In 1894, a popular vote was cast to consolidate Brooklyn with the City of New York. The Brooklyn Eagle passionately and vociferously opposed the annexation. In 1897, when Charles Hester was enjoying the view of St. James Street from one of his balconies, Brooklyn was the fourth largest city in the United States. In spite of the warnings in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that annexation would cause real estate values to plummet and would have a disastrous effect on the quality of life, Brooklyn became a borough of New York City in early 1898. Neither Brooklyn nor its daily newspaper would ever be quite as grand again.

Sometime in 1903, Charles V. Hester died, having not lived to enjoy retirement to his mansion for even a decade. His widow, Mary F. Hester, and children Natalie and Arthur, continued to live in the mansion briefly, but they had moved out by 1906. Later, the splendid house became the home of Reverend Hillman, and for decades it has been a quiet apartment house, its exciting history largely unknown by its residents.

The Lincoln Eagle to Go Online

I am delighted to announce that Mike Marnell, owner of The Lincoln Eagle, will take his Kingston, NY monthly paper online within the next few weeks. The Lincoln Eagle is written by its readers; he dispenses with America's failed journalism profession.  All a reader needs to do is submit a photo and write what he thinks. Who needs stuffed shirt elitists who know less than their readers?

The Lincoln Eagle is written by the people, of the people, and for the people. It is a credit to Marnell that he has made a success of a small scale print newspaper at a time when most newspapers are having problems at best. Mike's approach fits the Internet beautifully. His aim is have a Lincoln Eagle in every American city.

It is not a question whether The Lincoln Eagle will be a success. Rather, the question is how quickly Mike will succeed.

Gerald Celente Sees Major Crash Coming

Mike Marnell, publisher of the Lincoln Eagle in Kingston, NY, forwarded this  Alex Jones interview of Gerald Celente.  Gerald is Mike's friend and lives in Kingston, NY.  He references neighboring Rhinebeck during the talk. I don't agree with Celente on every point (I'm not a fan of Ralph Nader, for instance) but found this interview to be quite interesting.  Maybe Mike can take us out to Le Canard Enchaine.

Taking Ideology out of Your Child's Education

The following article "Taking Ideology Out of Your Child's Education" appears in the Memorial Day issue of the Lincoln Eagle, a Kingston, NY penny saver.  Mike Marnell, the Eagle's crusading editor, does an excellent job in putting it together. It is the only freedom oriented paper in the area, as far as I know.  It does not have a website but it reaches at least several thousand people. 

Taking Ideology Out of Your Child’s Education

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.*

When I attended high school in New York City, my class was required to read Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto."  But we were not assigned to read any alternative view, such as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or Friedrich A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.  Communism was extolled, freedom disparaged.  I was recently speaking to a friend whose son graduated from a high school in this region and she told me that the emphasis on Marxism has not changed one bit.  Her son had not been assigned any book that describes free market economics or how and why free markets work better than government-controlled ones.  However, he had been assigned to read Marx and his teacher repeatedly preached in favor of socialism. 

The debate between people who believe in government control and those who believe in freedom is not new.  However, there are many myths not only about the subject but about its history.  The myths come from relentless efforts by advocates of government control to spin the debate. This has led to a takeover of the educational system by left-wing ideologues.  Thus, what students learn in public schools is often socialist propaganda and more often than not ignorant nonsense.

For example, the claim that adding layers of government or regulation is "progressive" is not historically true.  Yet, the students are told that it is.  In fact, the Roman Empire was based on a state-controlled, mixed economy like that advocated by today’s "progressives." What happened to Rome?   

In modern times, the idea of free markets originated out of a debate that had been initiated by advocates of government authority and regulation.  The mercantilists, such as Lord Shaftesbury and David Hume, advocated the use of government force to open markets, print money and regulate trade. Adam Smith responded to the mercantilists' "progressive", state-based ideas later in the 18th century.  Free markets are progressive, not socialism.  Advocates of monetary expansion to stimulate growth, such as David Hume, wrote before the advocates of the gold standard and zero inflation.

This was true in American history.  The first socialist in the history of US government was the first man to conceive of our Constitution, Alexander Hamilton.  Hamilton favored the use of paper money to expand the economy; government owned manufacturing; a central bank, the ancestor to today's Federal Reserve Bank; the use of subsidies to stimulate shipping; and taxes to fund government debt.  The problem with Hamilton's ideas was in part that they had led to hyper-inflation during the earlier Revolutionary War.  The central bank led to the earliest examples of corrupt speculation, and the stock of Hamilton's First Bank was the object of among the earliest financial bubbles in American history.  The government owned manufacturing firm he tried to start was associated with the corrupt bank stock speculation.  Hamilton’s Keynesian ideas (140 years before Keynes) failed.

In reaction to Hamilton's big government, "progressive" ideas, Jefferson, winning Hamilton's former ally, James Madison, formed the Democratic Republican Party.   The response to the big government ideas of Hamilton and his Federalist Party was to emphasize freedom.  This reached a crescendo in the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson founded the Democratic Party and abolished central banking, putting the US on a gold standard.  The most rapid growth in American history occurred during the 80 years that there was no central bank and money was based on the bi-metallic and then the gold standard.  Establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank in the 20^th century has led to slowed growth and stagnant real hourly wages.  You are poorer as a result of increasing government involvement in the economy. Much poorer.

The problem with government intervention is that it didn't work. But that’s not what students are taught in school.  

The examples of government failure get worse, though, when you fast forward in time to the early twentieth century.  The hyper-expansion of communism in Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea and elsewhere led to economic retardation and mass murder.  State-dominated economies were utter failures, and repeatedly so.  They failed so frequently and so thoroughly that one would think that anyone seriously studying them in universities would have tried to understand why they failed.  Yet, university professors throughout the communist era, until the 1980s, uniformly claimed that the performance of the Soviet economy exceeded that of the United States.  In other words, virtually 100% of university economic and social science departments ignored reality; preached ideological propaganda in favor of socialism; and excluded anyone who disagreed. 

When the Soviet Union fell in the late 1980s for the very reasons that the critics of socialism such as Ludwig von Mises and Frierich von Hayek had predicted in the 1920s to 1940s, you might think that university social scientists might have reconsidered their dogmatic, religious commitment to socialism. But that is not so.  The intolerance of anyone who disagrees with now obviously failed socialist and big government dogma has become even more extreme in universities.  Any academic who disagrees with the left is slandered and drummed out of universities.

Thus, it is not surprising that the local high schools are purveyors of ideological dogma. Having been educated by ignorant ideologues in universities, the teachers have been trained to be ideologues.

Parents have serious reason to be concerned about their children’s’ education.  The schools today are preaching socialism more aggressively than ever, even though historically socialist policies have repeatedly failed.  In order to counteract this tendency parents might consider taking the following steps:

1. Tell your school board that if the students are reading Karl Marx, they should also be reading Adam Smith.  If they are not reading Karl Marx, they should be reading Adam Smith anyway.

2. Ask you children for feedback about the claims being made by social studies teachers.  If the teachers are advocating socialism, they are incompetent.  If the school is encouraging the teachers to do so, the school board needs to be replaced.

3. Read your children’s social studies text books.  One parent told me that their child’s textbook’s discussion of the Second World War consisted of five pages on the internment of the Japanese (a terrible misdeed) and only one page on the war itself.  That is propaganda. It is not education.

Are your children being told of the advantages of freedom, or are they being propagandized as to the advantages of socialism?  I have worked in higher education for nearly twenty years.  I have repeatedly seen students who have been indoctrinated into failed, socialistic ideas in their primary educations.  I can undo some of the damage done by elementary and high school teachers, who in turn have been brainwashed by ideologues in universities.  You can undo some as well.

*Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D. is a member of the Town of Olive Republican Committee and is associate professor of business at Brooklyn College, CUNY.  He blogs at http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com.