Manufacturing Neoliberalism: How the Council of Foreign Relations Marketed Global Capitalism

Posted By Joan Roelofs

There are conspiracies! Some are secret and others overt. The most important of them usually have a public and a private aspect. Yet even those with plenty of data in the full light of day are secret in one sense: they are barely known by the general public and mostly ignored by those who are supposed to be telling us what is going on and what makes things happen: scholars, journalists, and pundits. Thus the obscurity of the Council on Foreign Relations. It may surface as a tagline for the wise men and women of NPR and PBS forums, but its workings and impact remain largely unexamined.

Wall Street’s Think Tank by historian Laurence Shoup is a much awaited sequel to Imperial Brain Trust (Shoup and William Minter, Monthly Review Press, 1977). This is how he describes the CFR:

The think tank of monopoly-finance capital, the Council on Foreign Relations, is the world’s most powerful private organization. The CFR is the ultimate networking, socializing, strategic-planning, and consensus-forming institution of the U.S. capitalist class. It is the central “high command” organization of the plutocracy that runs the country and much of the world. (p. 7)