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The National Research Commission on Elections and Voting was created by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in October of 2004 allegedly as a non-partisan independent initiative intended to bring scholarly research, knowledge and perspective to bear on improving the integrity of the electoral process, regardless of the outcome of the November 2nd election. http://election04.ssrc.org/pressrelease/October2004.pdfHowever in my mind this is very unlikely since the SSRC itself appears to be a tool of the corporate elite as of the 16 members of the SSCR Board of Directors, I¡¯ve been able to identify at least five including the Chair of the Board as being members of the Council of Foreign Relations simply from checking the SSCR¡¯s own biographies or the Board members own Curriculum Vitae. http://www.ssrc.org/inside/about/board_of_directors.page Lisa Anderson - Chair of the Board
One of the world's leading experts on the Middle East and North Africa, Professor Anderson was named Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University in 1996. She has served as chair of Columbia's political science department and director of Columbia's Middle East Institute. The author of several books and 35 scholarly articles on the subjects of state formation and regime change, Anderson most recently has served as a member of the editorial committee of Comparative Politics, as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and as a board member of Human Rights Watch.
Barry Eichengreen
Barry Eichengreen is the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London, England). In 1997-8 he was Senior Policy Advisor at the International Monetary Fund. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (class of 1997). He is a member of the Bellagio Group of academics and economic officials. Professor Eichengreen has published widely on the history and current operation of the international monetary and financial system. His books include Toward a New International Financial Architecture (Institute for International Economics, 1999), Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton University Press, 1997), European Monetary Unification (MIT Press, 1997), and Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939 (Oxford University Press, 1992).
http://www.cfr.org/pub5373/press_release/council_on_foreign_relations_establishes_commission_on_future_international_financial_architecture.php
CFR Commission on the Future International Financial Architecture
Barry Eichengreen is John L. Simpson Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. Dr. Eichengreen was Senior Policy Advisor at the International Monetary Fund from 1997-98.
Stanley N. Katz
Stanley Katz is President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, the leading organization in humanistic scholarship and education in the United States. He is a noted authority on American legal and constitutional history and has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Society for Legal History, and as vice president of the American Historical Association. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Faculty, the Newberry Library, the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage, and is the president of the Center for Jewish Life and the director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton University.
http://www.nhalliance.org/testimony/1994/94testimony-skatz.html
I (Stanley N. Katz) am, for instance, a trustee of the National Humanities Alliance, Southern Methodist University, the Newberry Library (Chicago), the Supreme Court Historical Society, the British-American Arts Association, Independent Sector, and the Institute of European and Asian Studies (Chicago) I serve as chairman of the boards of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the Papers of the Founding Fathers, Inc. I am an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Council on Foreign Relations. My life is pretty much devoted to working for the humanities.
Orville Schell
Professor Schell is Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research associate at the university's Center for Chinese Studies. He serves on the boards of the Yale-China Association and Human Rights Watch, and is a member of the Pacific Council and the Council on Foreign Relations. Schell was a founding editor of the Pacific News Service. He has written 14 books, many of them about China; the most recent, Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood, appeared in 2000. Mr. Schell is a long-time contributor to the New Yorker, as well as to such magazines as the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the Nation and the New York Review of Books.
Kathryn Sikkink
Kathryn Sikkink is Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her publications include Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina, The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (co-edited with Thomas Risse and Stephen Ropp) and Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (co-authored with Margaret Keck), which won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order (1999). She is also the recipient of the International Studies Association's Chadwick Alger Award for best work in the area of international organization (1999). Sikkink is currently researching the influence of international law on domestic politics, focusing on human rights, transnational social movements and networks, and on the role of ideas and norms in international relations and foreign policy. She is on the international advisory board of the International Studies Review.
http://www2.cla.umn.edu/faculty/cv%5C487%5Csikkink.pdf
Professional Activities listed on Professor Sikkink¡¯s Curriculum Vitae:
Grants, Awards, and Fellowships:
Distinguished Teaching Award: Award for Outstanding Contributions to Postbaccalaureate, Graduate, and Professional Education, 2003
Member, Council on Foreign Relations, 2002-
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2001-
Member, Society for Comparative Research, 2001-
Fulbright Scholar Award (Argentina) 2001-2002 (Visiting Professor at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires)
Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order, 2000
International Studies Association Chadwick Alger Award for Best Book in the area of International Organizations, 2000 (Awarded to Activists Beyond Borders).
Twentieth Century Fund Grant for book on the Origins and Effectiveness of U.S. Human Rights Policy, 1994-1995.
Social Science Research Council, Research Fellowship in Foreign Policy Studies, 1991-1993
Scholar of the College, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, 2000-2002
McKnight-Land Grant Professorship, University of Minnesota, 1991-1993.
Social Science Research Council, Latin American and Caribbean Program, International Doctoral Research Fellowship, 1984-1985.
Doherty Foundation, Princeton University, Doherty Fellowship for Advanced Study in Latin America, 1984-1985
Institute for the Study of World Politics, Fellowship, 1984.
While I have not done any research as yet on the members of the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting, I will tell you I reject out of hand an allegedly independent research group that¡¯s so directly connected to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the corporate elite¡¯s most famous behind the scenes apparatus of political policy control. To get a basic understanding of how the CFR operates, please read Behind the Bipartisan Drive Toward War by Laurence H. Shoup. (Laurence H. Shoup wrote one of the most academically respected analyses of the CFR in 1997. In fact in the For Further Reading section of the Council on Foreign Relation¡¯s own website, Peter Grosse, managing editor and then executive editor of Foreign Affairs from 1984 to 1993, writes: The most important critical analysis of the Council is: Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977) http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Mar2003/shoup0303.htmlAlthough not a well-known organization, and only occasionally mentioned in the media, the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has been prominent in behind-the-scenes foreign policy formation in the U.S. for over three quarters of a century. The CFR is the publisher of Foreign Affairs, which calls itself ¡°the most influential periodical in print.¡± But the Council is much more important than that. In the words of Council members Marvin and Bernard Kalb, the CFR is ¡°an extremely influential private group that is sometimes called the real State Department.¡± Richard J. Barnet, another Council member, stated that membership in the organization could be considered ¡°a rite of passage for an aspiring national security manager.¡±
The importance of the Council stems from its role as the central link that binds the capitalist upper class and its most important financial and multinational corporations, think tanks, and foundations to academic experts in leading (mainly eastern) universities, and government policy formulation and execution. The CFR¡¯s goals are to continuously work out the general framework for American foreign policy and to keep public debate within ¡°respectable¡± bounds, that is, acceptable to the corporate power structure and the wealthy upper class it serves.
Through its financing, leadership, and membership, the Council is close to the largest multinational and blue chip corporations, including big oil companies, industrials, life insurance companies, law firms, and investment and commercial banks. In recent years, for example, leading corporate benefactors of the Council have included ABC, AOL Time Warner, American Express, Aramco, ATT, British Petroleum, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Chevron Texaco, Citigroup, Corning, Deutsche Bank AG, Exxon Mobil, Federal Express, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Metropolitan Life Insurance, Morgan Stanley, Nike, Pfizer, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Prudential Financial, Shell Oil, Sony, Toyota, UBS PaineWebber, Verizon Communications, and Xerox. So, please excuse me, a common working man, if I don¡¯t accept this ¡®independent research group¡¯ of the corporate elite any more than I accept the less than transparent control of the electronic voting and tabulation machines that are owned and operated by the corporate elite nor the selective eyesight of the media that reports on the less than transparent elections which is also owned and operated by the corporate elite nor do I accept the rational for the Iraqi War which benefits noone but the corporate elite but is being paid for with the hard earned money of the American working person as well as with the blood of our children and with a mortgage on their future. But I do think this answers one question that¡¯s been perplexing many of us regarding who exactly the Democrats were so concerned of offending by challenging the electoral vote on January 6th. As Shoup points out once the CFR makes it¡¯s position known it fully expects all ambitious Democrats and Republicans to fall in line behind it. This, of course, leaves us, the vast majority of America, without a political party to represent our interests. The purpose of these studies is to influence both government and wider publics. The studies program is scholarship at the service of corporate interests, bringing together business and government leaders with leading academics, as well as a smaller representation from foundations, think tanks, and leading media. After extensive study and discussion, a consensus is usually reached and an article for Foreign Affairs or a full length Council on Foreign Relations book is produced. The article or book represents the views of the author, but it is widely and correctly understood to result largely from the efforts and thinking of the entire group.Given the close interlocks of personnel between the CFR and the U.S. government and the bipartisan nature of the Council, it should come as no surprise that CFR views are clearly reflected both in the Bush administration¡¯s foreign policies and the policy positions taken by leading Democrats in Congress. Democratic Party leaders in the House and Senate, a number of them also members of the Council (for example Gephardt, Kerry, Graham, Lieber- man, Dodd), have generally supported the Republican foreign policy agenda and most Democratic Senators voted for authorizing President Bush to go to war preemptively against Iraq at his own discretion. As of early January 2003, the current Democratic presidential candidates are almost all pro-war. As mentioned above, key members of Bush¡¯s own foreign policy team (Powell, Rice, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Tenet, Negroponte) are also members of the CFR and are actively planning the military and diplomatic aspects of a war on Iraq.For further readings on the CFR, Laurence Shoup¡¯s 1977 book Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy has been reissued and is available at Amazon. Also Shoup published a second article on the CFR in the October 2004 edition of Z Magazine entitled Bush, Kerry, and the CFR that is available online to subscibers at http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Oct2004/shoup1004.html. (I¡¯ll be happy to email a text copy to anyone that sends me their email address Finally a google of "Social Science Research Council " "Council on Foreign Relations" shows 4,440 results. http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&hl=en&q=%22Social+Science+Research+Council+%22+%22Council+on+Foreign+Relations%22+&btnG=Google+Search |
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