Who Are "They?" A Shortlist

If you believe power exists and is used, and that its machinations are not always fully vetted on Fox News, you believe in conspiracies. They happen in your work, they happen in your home, they happen in the world. At work, it happens when the bosses get together to set bonuses, at home it happens when parents get together and agree on what information not to share with their children (especially around Christmastime!), and in the world it happens when people of influence set goals and coordinate to achieve them without putting out a detailed press release. So who are these people and what are their goals?
The classic organizations for the coordination of goals, strategies and tactics are the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, but there’s also the Royal Institute of International Affairs (a.k.a., the Chatham House), the Club of Rome, the Brookings Institution, the World Economic Forum and many, many more think tanks and foundations that bring prominent members of academia, government, the corporate world and media together in an overlapping web of influential organizations to discuss mutual goals and how to achieve them.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for example, called the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, “the mothership” and explained that this group tells her and her team what they should be doing and how they should be thinking about the world.

I have put the latest headlines from a few of these organizations along the right column of www.propagandareportdaily.com (at the bottom) so we can keep up on what they’re thinking, and I also took a look at the membership rosters of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations and jotted down all the names I recognized. There were certainly a few surprises! Here are the names I recognized. Do any of these surprise you? (I put in boldface some interesting names from media or related fields–I question whether they put objective reporting or their group’s agenda first.)

Trilateral Commission, Selected Members

http://trilateral.org/download/files/membership/TC_list_1_17.pdf
Martin Feldstein
Henry Kissinger
Michael Bloomberg
Madeline Albright
Mariano Rajoy
Austen Goolsby
David Gergen
John Negroponte
Adam Posen
David Rockefeller
Eric Schmidt
Gerald Seib
Olympia Snowe
Larry Summers
Strobe Talbot
Paul Volcker
Daniel Yergen
Mort Zuckerman
Robert Zoellick
Stanley Fischer

Council on Foreign Relations, Selected Members

http://i.cfr.org/content/about/annual_report/ar_2015/Sectional_PDFs/CFR_AR_2015_Membership_Roster.pdf
Abrams, Elliott
Albright, Madeleine K.
Baker, James
Barbour, Haley
Bartiromo, Maria S.
Bayh, Evan
Beatty, Warren
Bewkes, Jeffrey
Black, Leon D.
Blankfein, Lloyd C.
Blinder, Alan S.
Bloomberg, Michael R.
Blumenthal, Sidney S.
Bolton, John R.
Boorstin, Robert O.
Bowles, Erskine B.
Bradley, Bill
Breyer, Stephen G.
Brokaw, Tom
Bronfman, Edgar Jr.
Brzezinski, Mark F.
Brzezinski, Mika
Brzezinski, Zbigniew
Buffett, Howard Warren
Burch, Tory
Carlucci, Frank C.
Carter, Ashton B.
Carter, James Earl
Carter, James H.
Casper, Gerhard
Cheney, Richard B.
Clark, Wesley K.
Clinton, Chelsea
Clinton, William Jefferson
Clooney, George
Cohen, Abby Joseph
Crovitz, L. Gordon
Crowley, Monica Elizabeth
D’Amato, Alfonse M.
de Rothschild, Lynn
Forester
De Vos, Christian Michael
Didion, Joan
Dimon, Jamie
Dinkins, David N.
Dodd, Christopher J.
Dreyfuss, Richard S.
Eikenberry, Karl W.
Ellison, Keith
Feinstein, Dianne
Feith, Douglas J.
Feldstein, Martin S.
Fischer, Stanley
Foggo, James G. III
Fukuyama, Francis
Garcetti, Eric
Gates, Henry Louis Jr.
Gates, Robert M.
Geithner, Timothy F.
Gephardt, Richard A.
Gergen, David R.
Gill, Bates
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader
Gompert, David C.
Greenberg, Glenn H.
Greenspan, Alan
Haass, Richard N.
Hagel, Chuck
Ham, Carter F.
Hart, Gary
Heinz Kerry, Teresa
Helprin, Mark
Herbst, Jeffrey I.
Ikenberry, G. John
Isaacson, Walter S.
Jackson, Jesse L. Sr.
Jackson, Shirley Ann
Johnson, Jeh Charles
Jolie, Angelina
Jordan, Vernon E. Jr.
Kaminsky, Howard
Keene, Tom
Kerr, Ann Zwicker
Kerrey, Bob
Khrushcheva, Nina L.
Kissinger, Henry A.
Krauthammer, Charles
Kravis, Henry R.
Lehrer, Jim
Leverett, Flynt L.
Lew, Jacob J.
Lewis, Bernard
Lieberman, Joseph I.
Lipsky, Seth
Lodge, George Cabot
Lorimer, Linda Koch
Lu, Li
McCain, John S. III
McChrystal, Stanley A.
McGurn, William
McLaughlin, John E.
McNamer, Bruce W.
Mearsheimer, John J.
Meeker, Mary
Miller, Judith
Mitchell, Andrea
Mondale, Walter F.
Morris, Charles R.
Negroponte, John D.
Noonan, Peggy
Norquist, Grover Glenn
Nunn, Sam
Nye, Joseph S. Jr.
Oliver, John L. III
Orr, Robert C.
Orszag, Peter R.
Ovitz, Michael S.
Patricof, Alan Joel
Patterson, Richard North
Paulson, Henry M. Jr.
Paulson, John Alfred
Peña, Federico F.
Peterson, Peter G.
Petraeus, David H.
Podhoretz, John
Powell, Colin L.
Psaki, Jennifer R.†
Rather, Dan
Rattner, Steven L.
Reilly, William K.
Rice, Condoleezza
Rice, Susan E.
Richardson, William B.
Rockefeller, David
Rockefeller, David Jr.
Rockefeller, John D. IV
Rockefeller, Mark L.
Rockefeller, Nicholas
Rockefeller, Steven C.
Rogoff, Kenneth S.
Roosevelt, Theodore IV
Roubini, Nouriel
Rubin, Robert E.
Sachs, Jeffrey D.
Sandberg, Sheryl K.
Satcher, David
Satloff, Robert B.
Sawyer, Diane
Schieffer, Bob L.
Schmidt, Eric
Schramm, Carl J.
Scowcroft, Brent
Seib, Gerald F.
Shah, Raj
Shalala, Donna E.
Shultz, George P.
Snowe, Olympia J.
Soros, George
Soros, Jonathan
Spence, A. Michael
Stahl, Lesley R.
Stephanopoulos, George R.
Stern, David J.
Stern, Fritz
Summers, Lawrence H.
Sununu, John E.
Taft, William H. IV
Tagliabue, Paul
Talbott, Strobe
Tapper, Jake
Tenet, George J.
Volcker, Paul A.
Walters, Barbara
Weill, Sanford I.
Weld, William F.
White, Mary Jo
Whitman, Christine Todd
Wiesel, Elie
Willkie, Wendell Lewis II
Wolfensohn, James D.
Wolfowitz, Paul D.
Woodruff, Judy C.
Woolsey, R. James
Wright, Robin
Yellen, Janet Louise
Yergin, Daniel H.
Zahn, Paula A.
Zakaria, Fareed
Zelikow, Philip D.
Zoellick, Robert B.
Zogby, James J.