Who’s in Charge? The Power Structure and Foreign Policy

Click here to access this book review by Martin Oppenheimer from New Politics.

Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics 1975-2014
By: Laurence H. Shoup
Monthly Review Press, 2015. 400 pp. Hardcover, $34, $36 Can.

In books like this, one can learn who really runs our government and in whose interests these "deciders" really serve. In short, one can learn about the "deep state" that pulls the strings of government puppets. Or would you rather be distracted by following websites that cover what's happening with the puppets?

The CFR was founded immediately after World War I and “has been pursuing a world-spanning hegemonic project” that is promoted through a foreign policy “suitable to the U.S. capitalist class” since that time (10-11). Shoup tells us that the consequences of this “neoliberal geopolitical empire” has been “the destruction of unions and working class communities, privatization, speculation, grotesque economic inequality, ecological destruction, and … war and conquest”. This is quite an indictment; the book is a carefully documented effort, largely successful, to provide the evidence for that description.