This state of affairs did not develop overnight. This much should be clear. What is behind it?

Within any society, there appears to be a minority that thinks in terms of power and measures the worth of all actions in terms of whether they increase the personal reach of the actors and increase their capacity for control. This is why practically every society of any size is hierarchical, and why hierarchy is never eliminated, only replaced by a different hierarchy—the same wine in a new bottle.

Where to begin the story is a tough question. Some would cite the Bavarian Illuminati, started by a renegade Jesuit priest named Adam Weishaupt in 1776, the same year our Declaration of Independence was written. Weishaupt, however, found financial support through the Rothschild banking empire. The European bankers had discovered fractional reserve banking, and the fine art of creating "wealth" out of thin air. They had learned they could exercise control over governments by loaning them money at interest and then extending the loans—attaching conditions to the extensions.

The Rothschilds were the first internationalists of the incipient industrial era. They had established banks in five centers of influence: London (England), Paris (France), Frankfurt (Germany), Vienna (Austria), and Naples (Italy). These banks cooperated closely with one another, and they doubtless wielded enormous influence on the course European history took during the 1800s. J.P. Morgan became the American equivalent, eventually followed by the Rockefeller clan. John D. Rockefeller Sr. had made a fortune running Standard Oil. His children soon learned that there were even larger fortunes to be made in banking, and in socking as much money as possible into tax-exempt foundations created in the wake of the founding of the Internal Revenue Service in 1913. But alas, I get ahead of myself.

There are people who believe that the group Weishaupt founded still exists, and is still orchestrating all the more recent secret, or semi-secret organizations from behind the scenes. Others would hold out for the Freemasons, with which Weishaupt had been involved. I have not been able to produce any original documentation supporting such theses (Weishaupt's group was, in fact, outlawed in his own country in 1785). But, secrecy was around, in the form of the Skull and Bones organization founded at Yale in 1832. Numerous members of this group became prominent bankers, businessmen, ambassadors, other government officials, and so on, down through the ages. Antony Sutton argues in America's Secret Establishment that Skull and Bones has been at the center of it all since its being brought to this country from Europe (specifically and interestingly: Germany). Skull and Bones still exists, of course. Both George W. Bush and John Kerry are members.

We know that a man named John Ruskin came to Oxford University to teach fine arts in 1870, and that he had a social philosophy of reform that took English upper-class youth by storm. Ruskin taught that English upper-class values needed to be extended to the masses and spread worldwide. The English upper classes would need to redistribute at least some of their wealth, or face the overwhelming of English civilization by an uncontrollable "crabble." Karl Marx had preached that the violent overthrowing of capitalism was historically inevitable. Ruskin's response: Marxian upheavals were preventable, but only by undertaking the immense project of extending English upper-class wealth and values, as a means of remaining in control. In other words, create a global empire with Great Britain at its helm.

Ruskin's most famous pupil was Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes kept the notes he'd taken on certain of Ruskin's lectures with him for the rest of his life. Other students of Ruskin's were Alfred Milner and Arnold Toynbee. Rhodes became a multibillionaire mining gold and diamonds in South Africa (he received support, interestingly, from Lord Rothschild, and later from Alfred Beit, an immensely wealthy German-born financier who became his partner in De Beers Consolidated Mines). We know that prior to his death, Rhodes willed a substantial portion of his fortune to the creation of the Rhodes Scholarship program mentioned above. Less-well-known is that in five previous wills he wrote of setting up a secret society; the long-term goal of which was to create world government: "the extension of British rule throughout the world" including "the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire…"

Rhodes's secret society was in fact organized in 1891 (Lord Rothschild was one of its members, as were Milner and Toynbee). Rhodes and those he recruited for his project believed that furthering this kind of plan was the only means of putting an end to war, and extending the British Empire worldwide. Thus were the Round Table Groups that Carroll Quigley mentioned begun. Milner took over, following Rhodes's death in 1902. According to Quigley (Tragedy and Hope, p. 132), these groups "still function in eight countries." Quigley pursues in vivid detail the careers of the major players in The Anglo-American Establishment. With the reputations made possible by Oxford educations and enormous financial resources at their disposal, the men running the Round Table Groups literally became "the establishment"—despite the fact that, except for Rhodes and Toynbee, their names remained almost unknown. The anonymity did not bother them. They did not want fame. They wanted power.

A banking and industrial elite had already established itself in America (it is likely that Rothchild money had helped out here as well). Starting with banking titan J.P. Morgan, then the Rockefellers, and finally steel-magnate-turned-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (among the first to float the idea of a "league of nations"), a globalist mindset with enormous resources to back it up also developed here. G. Edward Griffin, in his classic The Creature From Jekyll Island, recounts the creation of the Federal Reserve system in 1913. This gave them control over essentially the entire banking apparatus of the country—driving smaller, independent banks out of business. That same year, of course, saw the rise of the Internal Revenue Service. For the first time in U.S. history, every working individual's personal income was taxed, and every individual would soon have to report his earnings to the federal government. It is fair to say that by the time these efforts were complete, wealth and power were flowing to the center. The ordinary citizen was losing control, and he didn't even know it!

The super-elite was able to gain control of what became the mainstream media. In another of those rare moments of total candor and lucidity by a professional politician, U.S. Congressman Oscar Calloway, stated in 1917:

"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world, and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States, and a sufficient number of them, to control generally the policy of the daily press….They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers.

An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper, to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature, considered vital to the interests of the purchasers."

G. Edward Griffin describes the equivalent hijacking of academic history, alluded to above:

"They selected twenty candidates at the university level who were seeking doctorates in American History. Then they went to the Guggenheim Foundation and said, "Would you grant fellowships to candidates selected by us, who are of the right frame of mind, those who see the value of collectivism as we do? Would you help them obtain their doctorates, so we can then propel them into positions of prominence and leadership in the academic world?" And the answer was "Yes."

So they gathered a list of young men who were seeking their doctoral degrees. They interviewed them, analyzed their attitudes, and chose the twenty they thought were best suited for their purpose. They sent them to London for a briefing….At this meeting, they were told what would be expected, if and when, they won the doctorates they were seeking. They were told they would have to view history, write history, and teach history from the perspective that collectivism was a positive force in the world, and was the wave of the future."

Now let's go to the words of Mr. Dodd, himself [then principal investigator for the Congressional Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations] as he described this event before our cameras in 1982. He said:

"This group of twenty historians eventually formed the nucleus of the American Historical Association. Then, toward the end of the 1920s, the Endowment grants to the American Historical Association $400,000 [a huge amount of money in those days] for a study of history in a manner that points to what this country can look forward to in the future…."

With the media and academic disciplines undergoing transformation by these monied interests, and infiltrated by the Round Table Groups, organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie financial empire began to pursue the globalist agenda (see The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 183). The Carnegie Endowment for Peace, in true Orwellian fashion, three decades before Orwell would pen 1984, would maneuver the U.S. into the latest European war—on the side of the British, of course. The super-elite's man in the Wilson Administration was "Colonel" Edward Mandell House. Some would later say that House was the real president during those years. Wilson himself referred to House as his "second personality." House had anonymously published a book entitled Philip Dru: Administrator, a blueprint for the adoption of totalitarian socialism in America, thinly disguised as fiction. Staying by Wilson's side, he convinced Wilson to abandon a 1916 campaign pledge, and enter the conflict going on in Europe. What ensued became known first as the Great War, and later as World War I.

The super-elite had created the conditions for world war. It followed a pattern familiar to students of the highly influential German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Create conditions for a major disruption (thesis); allow the disruption to provoke a distraught reaction (antithesis); then, with a major crisis at hand, step in with the solution (synthesis). The super-elite's solutions to the crises it engineered, invariably, involved a power grab. Its members have always liked wars. Wars destabilize nations. They leave behind ruined lives and economies, as well as frightened populations, who will turn to anyone who promises to put an end to their suffering.

The super-elite's promise was an end to the threat of world war through an incipient world government, to be called the League of Nations. Wilson became a strong proponent of the League of Nations. European nations began joining. Efforts to pull the U.S. into its orbit were torpedoed in the Senate. Lack of U.S. support would sink the League of Nations. Such an entity could not survive without U.S. participation. It would be noticed, nevertheless, that the whole tenor of U.S. foreign policy had changed. Our first president, George Washington, had warned famously in his Farewell Address, against the "foreign entanglements" that would become inevitable under an interventionist foreign policy. Until the Wilsonian era, the U.S. had stayed out of foreign conflicts, and refrained from interfering in the internal affairs of other nations. No more. The goal of the new interventionism, in a phrase current during the time, was "to make the world safe for democracy."

Their first attempt at an incipient world government scuttled, the super-elite regrouped, and in 1921, founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in England, and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) here, as front organizations for the promotion of globalism and world government. Quigley tells us:

"Through Lord Milner's influence, these men were able to win influential posts in government, in international finance, and become the dominant influence in British imperial affairs and foreign affairs up to 1939. In 1909 through 1913, they organized semi-secret groups, known as Round Table Groups, in the chief British dependencies and the United States. These still function in eight countries….

Once again, the task was given to Lionel Curtis who established, in England and each dominion, a front organization for the local Round Table Group. This front organization, called the Royal Institute of International Affairs, had as its nucleus in each area the existing, submerged Round Table Group. In New York, it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a front for J.P. Morgan and Company" (Tragedy and Hope, p. 132, pp. 951-52).

One cannot overstress the CFR's importance in directing the course of American policy, domestic as well as foreign. It went almost unnoticed for decades, even as its leading members (financed by Rockefeller dollars) created their next attempt at a world government: the United Nations. This time, the U.S. signed onboard. That was the early 1940s. We had fought and won a second world war, even more destructive than the first, and created the basic infrastructure of the welfare state. The Cold War had started. What is variously called the "military-industrial complex" or the "welfare-warfare state" became the dominant force in this hemisphere.

In 1961, a man named Dan Smoot would write a book about the CFR entitled The Invisible Government. The book was ignored. Smoot was an outsider—a radio broadcaster with a strong independent streak. Then Quigley came along. He was one of the insiders.

CFR influence permeates the mainstream media. Leading media personalities who are, or were CFR members include, David Brinkley, Tom Brokaw, William Buckley, Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, and Barbara Walters. Members of the CFR hold controlling management positions at major newspapers, leading news services, publications, and publishing houses. A sampling: The Army Times, American Publishers, American Spectator, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Associated Press, Association of American Publishers, Boston Globe, BusinessWeek, Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News, Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, Forbes, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Dow Jones News Service, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, New York Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, Times Mirror, Random House, W.W. Norton & Co., Warner Books, Atlantic, Harper's, Industry Week, Naval War College Review, Farm Journal, Financial World, Insight, Washington Times, Medical Tribune, National Geographic, National Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Newsday, NewsMax, Newsweek, Political Science Quarterly, The Progressive, Public Interest, Reader's Digest, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, Time-Warner, Time, U.S. News & World Report, Washington Post, The Washingtonian, Weekly Standard, World Policy Journal, Worldwatch, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC, PBS, RCA, and Walt Disney.

Tax-exempt foundations and think tanks with CFR members in controlling positions include: The Sloan and Kettering Foundations, Aspen Institute, Atlantic Council, Bilderburg Group, Brookings Institute, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Foundation, Ford Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Hudson Institute, John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, RAND Corp., Rhodes Scholarship Selection Committee, Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Trust Fund, the Trilateral Commission, and the U.N. Association.

The number of past or present university presidents, administrators, professors, and departmental chairs, or members of boards of trustees who are, or were CFR members is around 563. This is greater than the number of CFR members in financial institutions, including banks, the Federal Reserve system, stock exchanges, and brokerage houses: around 284. Many corporations, finally, have been controlled by past or present CFR members: Atlantic Richfield, AT&T, Avon, Bechtel, Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Chevron, Coca Cola, Consolidated Edison, Exxon, Dow Chemical, du Pont, Eastman Kodak, Enron, Estee Lauder, Ford Motor, General Electric, General Foods, Hewlett-Packard, Hughes Aircraft, IBM, International Paper, Johnson & Johnson, Levi Strauss & Co., Lockheed, Lucent Technologies, Mobil Oil, Monsanto, Northrup, Pacific Gas & Electric, Phillips Petroleum, Proctor & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Yahoo, Shell Oil, Smith Kline Beecham (a pharmaceutical giant), Sprint, Texaco, Santa Fe Southern Pacific Railroad, Teledyne, TRW, Southern California Edison, Unocal, United Technologies, Verizon Communications, Warner-Lambert, Weyerhauser, Xerox.

Labor unions have also had CFR members in dominant roles: the AFL-CIO, United Steel Workers of America, United Auto Workers, American Federation of Teachers, Bricklayers and Allied Craft, Communications Workers of America, Union of Needletrades, and Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan is a CFR member. So were 14 of his predecessors.

This is just a sampling. What it shows is that something like 80 percent of the power centers in American political and economic life have people in controlling positions who are members of the same organization—an organization with around 4,000 members total. Isn't this curious, in and of itself? And shouldn't one be even more curious that most of the rest of the population of this country has never heard of the organization? Many of those who have, would respond that the CFR is no more than a job-finding service for the well-connected. While it is very doubtful that all 4,000 of its members are involved in directing the machinations discussed here, there is, doubtless, an inner circle, the Round Table Group at its center, and here we will find the "secret government" Smoot wrote about, and which Quigley documented in detail.

James Madison warned in the Federalist Paper #47, "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." As a society, we desperately need to "take the red pill," and unplug, before it is too late! But how did we get to be so complacent?