Trilateral Commission



The Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. It is a private organization consisting of about 300 members from the United States, Europe, and Asia. They discuss public policy and work toward greater economic cooperation among the three regions. It is largely an outgrowth of the Council on Foreign Relations and shares overlapping membership with them.

The Trilateral Commission became a campaign issue in the 1980 elections because Jimmy Carter, independent candidate John Anderson, and presumed Republican frontrunner George H.W. Bush (who was later defeated by Ronald Reagan in the primaries), were all members.

Conspiracies
Much of the early criticism of the group came from the left, with Holly Sklar's book Trilateralism remaining a notable primer on moonbat criticism of them. However, the Trilateral Commission also loomed large in the paranoid end times fantasies of some evangelical Christians who saw in them the potential laying the stage for a world government, a major bugaboo of the evangelical Christian world because they see it as leading to the rise of the Antichrist. Some of the wackier end-times gurus like Mary Stewart Relfe and Hal Lindsey also noted the Trilateral Commission logo looks like a stylized '666' (if you stare at it long enough and use your imagination). Another prominent early critic was Lyndon LaRouche, who as early as 1976 accused them of plotting to depopulate the third world using global thermonuclear war. Even Barry Goldwater and Noam Chomsky have screeched about Trilateral's supposed evil motives.

The group continues to be referenced in the context of New World Order conspiracy theories, and sometimes claimed by conspiracy theorists to be a modern incarnation of or front for the Illuminati.

was allowed to examine the Soviet archives following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in order to assess the criminality of the former communist party. According to Bukovsky, from his research in the archives, the impetus for the modern EU came from a conspiracy between members of the Politburo and elite of the Trilateral Commission — David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Yasuhiro Nakasone, and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who wished to integrate the Soviet Union into world financial institutions. He published documentation on this in EUSSR: The Soviet Roots of European Integration.

Criticism
The Trilaterial commission gained some fame in the 1970s for a report it commissioned, The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies. The report argued that the United States, Europe and Japan were suffering as too many people were demanding left-wing reforms, which the report argued were weakening these nations. The report advised that key parts of monetary, fiscal and trade policy needed to be removed from the direct control of the public and placed in the hands of more distant bodies, namely international organisations and 'independent' bodies separate from national governments. This report contributed to the independence of modern-day central banks, and to the EU's decision to pool their monetary sovereignty. This 'depoliticisation' of economic decision making has helped right-wing economists to keep enacting their ideas, despite the large-scale public discontent and demands for change.