How Big Money Controls the White House

Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters

by Andrew Kreig (Eagle View Books 2013)

Book Review

Presidential Puppetry is a comprehensive expose of the wealthy corporate interests who are the real power behind the federal government. Kreig orients his book around Obama and Romney, the major presidential candidates in the 2012 elections. However in discussing Mitt Romney’s hidden ties to the financial oligarchy, he also explores the Bush family’s Wall Street connections, the history and structure of the Mormon Church (especially as it relates to corporate America) and Karl Rove’s role in orchestrating Republican dirty tricks and voting fraud. Presidential Puppetry is meticulously researched and sourced, with a 17 page bibliography and 110 pages of footnotes and references.

Kreig, a lawyer and respected Washington DC journalist, takes the 2012 presidential debates as his point of departure, noting the deliberate secrecy of both candidates around their personal background. This deliberate secrecy should have been a campaign issue. Yet neither raised it in the debates – there seemed to be a gentleman’s agreement not to do so. Kreig is also scathingly critical of the mainstream media’s failure to challenge either the secrecy or corrupt corporate influences it concealed.

Obama Was Groomed

For his part, Obama refused to release any of his university transcripts, as well as having his passport records secretly scrubbed at the State Department. According to Kreig, this refusal to release educational records is unprecedented, especially for a candidate with virtually no public record of their political background or views. Kreig believes there are two reasons for Obama’s secrecy about his records from Occidental College, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. The first was to conceal his early links to the CIA, via a CIA front organization he worked for called Business International Corporation (BIC). The second was to hide his early “grooming” for political office by Zbigniew Brzesinski and possibly other members of Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission. All three are secretive round table groups that allow wealthy financial elites access to major public officials.

By tracing the background of the Bush, Carter, Clinton and Reagan presidencies, Kreig makes a very compelling case that the ruling elite selects and grooms individuals it offers up to us as presidential candidates. What’s more, of our past five presidents, only George W Bush has no documented history of working for US intelligence. Krieg alleges Reagan secretly passed information to the FBI about Hollywood leftists, Bush senior performed various services for the CIA as founder and director of Zapata Oil Company, and Clinton informed on anti-Vietnam War protestors as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

Romney’s Cayman Island Tax Shelters

Romney’s big secret was his tax returns. It’s standard for presidential candidates to release ten years of returns. What the Republican candidate sought to conceal, according to Kreig, was systematic tax avoidance that included a Swiss bank account and tax shelters in the Cayman Islands. Both the Democrats and the corporate media failed in their duty to the public by refusing to bring any of this to light.

Broken Campaign Promises and a Trail of Bodies

Kreig goes on to examine Obama’s first term in light of his hidden history. The American people thought they were voting for a progressive community organizer but ended up with someone even more pro-Wall Street and pro-war than his Republican predecessor.

The most disturbing aspect of the book relates to cases Kreig details in which both Republican and Democratic insiders have tried to expose corporate interference with specific federal office holders. Largely owing to the refusal of the corporate media to support these whistleblowers, many have ended up dead under suspicious circumstances or in prison on trumped up charges.

Kreig tries to finish on an optimistic note by reminding us of all the brave independent journalists (on whose work Presidential Puppetry is based) whose investigative work is beginning to give us a true picture of how our so-called democracy really works. He encourages people (I assume he means whistleblowers) to send him tips (i.e. leaks) via his Justice Integrity Project website.

A recent post there is a moving tribute to the late John Judge, past president of the Coalition on Political Assassinations. The latter archives and promotes scholarly research offering alternatives to official accounts of the JFK assassination and other high profile political deaths, including those of Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Originally published in Dissident Voice

How the CIA Promotes Nonviolence

(More from my research for A Rebel Comes of Age)

As Ward Churchill (in Pacifism as Pathology) and Peter Gelderloos (in How Nonviolence Protects the State) suggest, white middle class activists have very complex psychological reasons for their dogmatic attitude towards political violence. However it’s also important to look at the role played by the US government and the corporate elite in institutionalizing the nonviolent movement.

The International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC)

In 2007, Australian journalist and research Michael Barker published a fascinating expose in Green Left Weeklys regarding the role played by the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) and similar Left Gatekeeping Foundations* in promoting a de facto taboo against violent protest in North America.

The role the ICNC and sister foundations have played in galvanizing the “color” revolutions in the Eastern Europe, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Chile, Haiti (and more recently the Middle East and North Africa) was first identified in William I. Robinson’s groundbreaking 2006 Promoting Polyarchy. Robinson defines “polyarchy” as “low intensity democracy” – a form of government that replaces violent coercive control with the type of ideological control (i.e. brainwashing) that Noam Chomsky describes in Manufacturing Consent.

In Promoting Polyarchy, Robinson describes how Church Committee reforms of the late seventies forced the CIA to cut back on many of their more repressive covert activities (i.e. domestic spying and clandestine assassination). Their response, in 1984, was to create the National Endowment for Democracy. NED works closely with the CIA, the US Agency for International Development (USAID is another well-documented conduit for CIA funding), and other “democracy manipulating” foundations, such as US Institute for Peace, the Albert Einstein Institute, the Arlington Institute, Freedom House and the International Republican Institute.

Robinson also provides detailed outlines how these US-based “democracy manipulating organizations” orchestrated “non-violent” revolutions in the Philippines and Chile to prevent genuinely democratic governments from coming to power. As well as sabotaging democratically elected governments in Nicaragua and Haiti (where they caused the ouster of the Sandinista government and the populist priest Jean Bastion Aristide).

According to Robinson, the Left Gatekeepers deliberately infiltrate and “channel” (i.e. co-opt) the genuine mass movements that form naturally in countries dominated by repressive dictators. The goal is to make sure they don’t go too far in demanding economic rights (for example, labor rights or restrictions on foreign investment) that might hurt the interests of multinational corporations.

The ICNC’s PBS Documentary

Barker’s work goes even further than Robinson’s in examining the ICNC’s efforts to influence the US progressive movement. Specifically Barker points to the phenomenal influence of the 2000 book and PBS documentary (and now computer game) A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Change.

The ICNC is naturally defensive about research by Barker and others linking them to the NED and other “democracy manipulating” foundations. Their website devotes an entire page Setting the Record Straight to refuting these studies. Their argument, that they receive no NED or government funding, is totally factual. The ICNC receives all their funding from co-founder Peter Ackerman, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and his wife Joanne Leedom-Ackerman. Ackerman earned his fortune as a specialist in leveraged buyouts, the second highest paid in Wall Street history (Michael Milken made more but went to jail for it.)

Why Did the ICNC Seek to Oust Hugo Chavez?

Barker refers to the argument over the source of their funding as whitewashing, especially given the collaboration between the ICNC and the Albert Einstein Institution in training the conservative Venezuelan opposition who fronted the 2002 coup against democratically elected Hugo Chavez.

As Barker points out, both Ackerman and his wife and ICNC co-founder Jack Duvall have a long history of working for and with the other “democracy promoting” foundations. In addition many of the vice presidents and other officers involved in running the ICNC have links to US or foreign military/intelligence operations or other “democracy promoting” foundations.

This is clear from the following diagrams summarizing the Ackermans’ links to “democracy manipulating” and military intelligence entities:

Groups to which Peter Ackerman is connected (past and present) 

from http://quotha.net/node/1606)

Groups to which Joanne Ackerman is connected (past and present)

from http://quotha.net/node/1606):

Jack Duvall, the other ICNC co-founder, has similar intelligence and “democracy manipulating” links. According to Sourcewatch, he helped former CIA director James Woolsey co-founded the The Arlington Institute. The latter is a non-profit intelligence gathering think tank which boasts:

“We will be able to anticipate the future, thanks to the interconnection of all information to do with you. Tomorrow we shall know everything about you.” ^[link]

More on the background of other ICNC officers at the Nonviolent Military Industrial Complex and The Velvet Slipper and the Military-Peace Complex

*Left Gatekeeping Foundations oundations are non-profit foundations seeking to limit the acceptable range of leftist debate and political activity within the US and in client states. They usually receive most or all of their funding from the CIA, Pentagon, State Department and/or right wing think tanks and foundations. See Does the CIA Fund Both the Right and the Left and The Cointelpro Role of Left Gatekeeping Foundations

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In A Rebel Comes of Age, seventeen-year-old Angela Jones and four other homeless teenagers occupy a vacant commercial building owned by Bank of America. The adventure turns deadly serious when the bank obtains a court order evicting them. Ange faces the most serious crisis of her life when the other residents decide to use firearms against the police SWAT team.

$3.99 ebook available (in all formats) from Smashwords:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/361351