STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

The Council On Foreign Relations [CFR]: Transmuted Into The Center For Retirement of Crooks, Corporate Misdeeds and Intellectual Wastrels [CFRCCMIW]:

Thank God, I Finally Resigned!! No More Dues and Donations to Stodgy Panderers!!

  For over twenty or more years, I had been a member of what is known as the CFR, the nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization which most Americans know as, ‘the secret government’.

The real secret about the CFR is that there are no secrets.  Like the CIA, the US military, or the US State Department, they exist within the penumbra of a past mystique which had once defined the uniqueness of the American experience.
  It was an exclusive club to which, in my case, I had been grateful to have won a CFR Scholarship.  That allowed me to start my career in the State Department under the severe tutelage of the formidable Lawrence Eagleburger.

  But like all institutions, as well intentioned as they may have been, they transmute into an fossilized dyspeptic version of themselves.

  What was once a collective body of individuals with innovative ideas became through time (inertia and just the normal process of aging) a gargoyle of physical and intellectual vulgarity that at one and the same time was both repulsive and fascinating.

  I never thought very much about the CFR or my membership in it until I went on the Alex Jones Radio Show and he correctly identified me as a CFR member, making it sound as if I were a ‘leper’ or ‘an exclusive member of the some exceedingly top secret organization’. 

  To me the CFR was much like being a member of the Red Carpet Lounge Club on United, but somewhat more expensive and less utilized. 

  But after I had attended my first meeting in a very long time in New York City at the Harold Pratt House, I was literally shocked by what I saw and heard at the various meetings about the European Economic Crises, The US Elections and Syria. 

  After having heard the absurdities muttered by General Dempsey, General Abizaid, General McCrystal, Richard Hass, Peter Galbraith, CIA Operatives and many other so-called distinguished  speakers and honorees, I walked away certain that I had just attended one of Eugene Ionescu’s  Romanian Theater of The Absurd “Les Chaises”…Just trite, nonsensical palaver wafting from one chair to another without meaning or insight, just noise, endless, tedious,  self-aggrandizing noise. 

  For a long time, a dear friend of mine, who had been in many different White House administrations with me had asked me why I was still a member of this group that was so  ‘stodgy,  fuddy-duddy old crowd who meet  every other day and have nothing else to do’.  I told him I just paid my ridiculously high dues as a matter of habit. 

But boy, was I wrong. 

  I soon began to realize that my dues, in the thousands of dollars as well as my yearly donation, was really supporting a retirement home for those who were intellectually inert, disabled and enfeebled. But worse yet, I realized that I was supporting criminals both financial and civil who were being funded in part by my money.

  At the last meeting I attended, my favorite bête noire, Elliot Abrams was nowhere to be found.  He knew as well as I, that if he showed up it might have been a recapitulation of a scene in the State Department where I almost choked him to death for his cowardly, corrupt behavior.  But I had already written about him. So let’s not waste time on him.

Today, I started to look at the roster of members at the CFR.  Mind you, I had rarely if ever attended any actual meetings in NYC but I did hear some interesting teleconferencing. 

  As in all groups, there are the good, bad, and the ugly.  As I perused the current membership list in today’s CFR I noticed for the first time an unusual number of members on the Board of Directors who had at best sullied if not exceedingly tarnished reputations.
I guess that proves the old adage by Groucho Marx.. ‘any group that wanted me,  I did not want to belong to’. 

  Now back to the list of officers whom, in part,  I was supporting financially but certainly not intellectually.

  The first one in order of pitifulness is Peter Ackerman whom I had met once or twice in person on different occasions. He is one ‘reformed individual’ regurgitated through the ‘washing machine’ of ‘the pay-for-play’ CFR.   Give the CFR enough money and your vitriolic, shady financial background will be forgotten at worst and at best, one could reincarnate himself into “international scholar”.  The truth is far more simple. 

  I knew about Ackerman before he had ever met me. In one of my many professional incarnations, this time as a financial ‘gunslinger’,  I had been approached by the  father of Drexel Burnham,  Izzie Burnham.  He had informed me of the ‘serious malfeasance‘  that Drexel had found itself in with Michael Milken and the Junk Bond business.  Peter Ackerman was one of Milken’s cohorts and between 1978-1990  was Director of International Capital Markets at Drexel.  Ostensibly, he had made more than $300 million  [in those days millions were real millions] working with the criminal Michael Milken raising billions of dollars for junk-bond-fueled takeovers.  Ackerman paid $73million in a civil settlement for the privilege of not ‘being called a criminal’.

  Not easily satisfied,  Ackerman’s rapacious greed was involved in an illegal $1.7billion tax shelter ‘fraud’ which the US Tax Court ruled, “had no economic substance , it’s only purpose being to transfer built-in tax losses… passed through for the primary benefit of Mr [it should have read Dr. ] Ackerman..”

This Ackerman from a second tier college like Colgate was no slouch.  However, that is not the end of our Ackerman.

In 2012 , Ackerman along with Mayor Bloomberg funded the purchase of $1.75million in political advertising in the name of tax-exempt American Elect Organization supporting the Senate campaign of Maine governor Angus King.

  Charges were filed against Ackerman with the Federal Election Commission claiming that this constituted illegal coordinated spending practices.

  Anyway, you get the idea about Ackerman. You can’t keep a ‘good sociopath down’. He keeps taking and taking wherever he can and …. Tries to get away with it!!!

Welcome to America!!

Now we go to Stephen Friedman, an alumnus of my alma mater Cornell University but he was a wrestler while I was trying wrestle my way out of that school.

But what makes him particularly interesting to you and me? Listen to this doozy!

  Stephen Friedman was Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Board [which implements the Federal Reserve’s Wall Street policies] while at the SAME TIME SERVING GOLDMAN SACHS as a BOARD DIRECTOR. 

  The AIG bailout,  historically the largest controversial bailout in US financial history, directly BENEFITTED GOLDMAN SACHS which had one of the LARGEST COUNTERPARTY CLAIMS AGAINST AIG. 

So what does our good Cornell University wrestler do? 

Like any good athlete with a tainted performance,  he resigned on May 7, 2009, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in response to criticism of his December 2008 purchase of $3million of stock IN GOLDMAN SACHS. 

You can bet your life that Ackerman and Friedman would never serve one day in prison- unlike you and me. Oh yes, forgot to mention that Friedman was also the Chairman of the United States Presidents Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. . 

Who says crime does not pay? 

Come on! This is America where a financial crook can get to be on the boards of the CFR, the Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, and FIAB. 

WoW! As a self-starting entrepreneur with over 26 start-ups and no financial connections or cronyism, I really feel like a shmuck.  Who ever heard of creating your own companies on your own merit? 

Certainly not Ackerman and Friedman .

Wait! Just as you thought this was about over, I still have a few more financial miscreants who sit on the board of the CFR.  And quite frankly, it seems to read like a list of the top Jewish Mobsters of the 21^st century recalling the good old days of Meyer Lansky, Longie  Zwillman and Mickey Cohen.
 

Hey who says we jews are not ‘ballsy’?  This time we don’t even need a gun to hold up the American public---just ‘wheelin and dealin’.

Now let me introduce you to Ex-Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin—that sad-faced, ‘I don’t know what happened to the billions lost in the financial crises but give me my $126million consulting retainer—Rubin’. 

You remember this guy!

He was Bill Clinton’s man in treasury.

Guess what this Miami Beach High graduate did? 

  Yes, that’s right. He worked at Goldman Sachs for 26 years, earning an absolute fortune playing on the trading desk. He was not the brightest of the men, but he too was no slouch during the banking crises.  To be more precise, he received more than $126million in cash and stock during the Citigroup bailout by the US treasury.

Now doesn’t he make a Miami Beach Yiddish mother proud? 

And furthermore, he sits on the board of Harvard University, and on the board of trustees at Mount Sinai-NYU Health.

Oh, by the way, Rubin was a partner of Jon Corzine at Goldman Sachs---You know the one who did not know what happened to 1.4billion dollars at MF Global Financials [please tell my fellow Montana farmers where their money went]. 

Just to round up the Jewish Money Mob, I should include the following other names whom I have not met but do know by history:

  Henry Kravis, Co-Founder of Kohlberg, Kravis Roberts & Co. Kravis has an estimated net worth of $4billion dollars.  All I can say is that his father was a successful Tulsa Oil Engineer who had been a business partner of Joseph P. Kennedy, who had been the ‘a bootlegger’ and partner with Meyer Lansky and the Jewish Mob in the 1920’s.

Time changes nothing but just the titles and positions.

Let me give you one last name of CFR board member that is not well known to the American public and that is Penny Pritzker. The Penny part is completely irrelevant except that she is founder and current chair and CEO of PSP Capital and Pritzker Realty Group. Her net worth is about 1.7$billion. She happens to be the daughter of Donald Pritzker co-founder of the Hyatt Hotel Chain.  She is also a power house in Chicago politics and was to say the least extremely helpful in the election and re-election of President Obama.

Penny is not the interesting part of this story but her family is…

Penny’s grandfather,  Abe Pritzker, was a famous Chicago Jewish Mobster considered one of the key members of the ‘Supermob’ (see my previous post on a book by Gus Russo),  a group of Jewish mobsters as ruthless and vicious as the Cosa Nostra [in my humble opinion we jews were much tougher mobsters].   Abe and associates took Al Capone’s money and through their professional organization (lawyers, politicians, and businessmen) they invested into banks, entertainment, and hotels—thus the Hyatt hotel chain. 

I think by now, you get the drift of what I am saying about this ossified institution and how it has become a “tool” for the criminally rich to disinfect their reputations.  The CFR is not a place for statesmanship and new ideas but rather a laundry for scrubbing up bunglers who want to belong to something that used to be important.   Let’s face the truth of the matter….In order to develop truly innovative, successful foreign policy we need an organization where membership is earned based on merit and professional experience not granted for how much money you conned from the citizenry.