The great Italian-Jewish writer, Primo Levi, put forth the notion of a “Grey Zone,” of morality. This is the zone or moral ambiguity, which is somewhere between evil and good.
The Trilateral Commission might be an example of an organization in Levi’s “Grey Zone.” (David Rockefeller and others formed The Trilateral Commission, in 1973 to “foster closer cooperation among these (Europe, North America, and Japan) core democratic industrialized areas. This commission now includes participants from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, The People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. )
Many people on America’s political right and the left believed that the Trilateral Commission is immoral because it has had undue influence upon the American government. From 1976-2008, either the President (Carter, G.W.H. Bush, and Clinton) or the Vice-President (G.W.H Bush and Cheney) have been members of this Commission.
Members of this commission have held other very influential jobs in the U. S. Government and other world agencies. The two most influential Chiefs of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board (Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan) have been members of this commission; so have the last two Presidents of the World Bank—Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Zoellick.
Twenty-six former members of the Trilateral Commission served in high-level governmental positions in the Carter administration. These positions included the National Security Advisor (Zbigniew Brzezinski) and the Ambassador to the United Nations (Andrew Young).
During Carter’s watch, the Trade Agreement Act of 1979 became law. The stated Congressional purpose of this Act was “to foster the growth and maintenance of an open world trading system.” Sounds like free trade agreements to me. (For more on President Carter’s love of free trade, click CAFTR-DR). By the way, President Carter was also a big advocate of deregulation (as are most members of the Commission), but that is another column.
Nobody would say that President Carter or the other members in the Trilateral Commission are evil people. Nobody (except the John Birch Society) would say that this Commission wants world domination by destroying existing governments.
A few of their members have advocated the use of soft power (capacity to persuade others without force) in international affairs. Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (chair of the Trilateral Commission’s, North American Group and former National Security Advisor to John Kerry) wrote a seminal paper in Foreign Affairs about the use of soft power in fighting terrorism.
So then, (to me) the Trilateral Commission is in the Grey Zone of morality, with both good and bad ideas coming from its members. Yet, it is group with way too much influence on U.S. and world economic affairs.
This influence continues in the Obama administration. Nine former members of the Trilateral Commission have important positions in this administration (see the next column).
So does the beat of Free-Trade and dergulation continue? Or can President Obama use these fine minds to insittute an econmic sea change of global proportions?
An interesting foonote to this column, President Rooselvelt used the free market people and stock manipulators(like Joseph Kennedy) to initiate major changes to the American and world economies.
